Fuchs’ views are challenging hundreds of studies who consistently find that inclusive educational environments have significant benefits for the cognitive and social development of children with disabilities. That research was instrumental in convincing lawmakers to increase funding to help schools accommodate students with disabilities, in some cases hiring additional special education teachers for each grade level. roughly after 15 minutest of US public school students are diagnosed with a disability and receive services, according to the most recent data, so this debate over special education accommodations affects not only the academic prospects of students with disabilities, but also the cost and structure of all education system.
The paper, Reframing the Most Important Special Education Policy Debate in Fifty Years: how vs Where on Teaching Students with Disabilities in America’s Schools,” is co-authored by Alison Gilmore, a special education researcher at the American Research Institutes, and Jeanne Wanzek, a professor of special education at Vanderbilt. Fuchs provided me with a draft before publication and gave me permission to discuss it with other experts.
The core of Fuchs’ criticism is that previous researchers have failed to distinguish between students with disabilities who are sent to segregated special education classrooms and students with disabilities who are included in general education classrooms. They are radically different. Children who are segregated for a significant portion or most of the day tend to have more severe disabilities and academic struggles. It should come as no surprise to anyone that higher-scoring students with milder disabilities end up with higher test scores than students who initially had lower test scores and more severe disabilities. This is not proof that a child with a disability learns more in a general education classroom. Ideally, from a research perspective, you would want to randomly assign students with disabilities to the two types of classrooms and see where they learn more. But this is unethical and impractical.
Researchers call this problem “selection bias” and have tried to overcome it with statistical techniques. For example, they compared students with disabilities who had similar demographic characteristics, such as the same race or ethnicity, similar family income, and the same type of disability. Inclusion still comes first. However, Fuchs points out that many of these studies still fail to account for the two most important factors: how the student was doing academically before the disability was diagnosed and the severity of the disability.
Beginning in the late 1980s, the federal government began collecting data on these two important, confounding factors—prediagnosis academic achievement and disability severity—so policymakers could see how well students were doing under federal law of 1975, which mandates educational support for students with disabilities. Fuchs and his coauthors reviewed a 1991 analysis of this data called National Longitudinal Transition Studyand noted that high school students with disabilities were initially reported to learn more when they studied alongside their general education peers. But the application of the report revealed that the special education inclusion advantage disappeared when academic achievement was adjusted for prior academic achievement and measures of students’ functional skills. Fuchs said there were no differences in outcomes between the two settings when researchers compared students who started out with the same test scores and had the same severity of disability.
Some recent studies with statistical sophistication still show that inclusion prevails. For example, in two studies of students with disabilities from Indiana, published in 2021 and 2023researchers found that the more time students spent in an inclusive environment, the better they did. However, Fuchs and his co-authors pointed out that more than half of the students were dropped from the 2021 study. due to missing data and study design. They say the studies only compared the two extremes of students who spent 80 percent of the time or more in general education versus 80 percent of the time or more in separate classrooms, which is a very small group of students (only 75 in math and 63 in English Language Arts). Even with statistical adjustments for prior academic achievement, it is difficult to compare these two groups. Fuchs and his co-authors concluded that the validity of the two studies was “problematic.”
This isn’t the first time Fuchs has questioned the gospel that inclusion is best. In an article published 30 years agoFuchs criticizes the wisdom of always teaching children with disabilities in the general education classroom. In 2023 Fuchs published study showing that even states with the highest rates of special education inclusion have not had consistent improvement in test scores for children with disabilities. Scores are down in some states.
Fuchs and his colleagues’ sharp criticism of the strength of the evidence for inclusion is controversial, but they are not alone. In December 2022 The Campbell Collaboration, a widely respected international not-for-profit organization that reviews research evidence for public policy, also concluded that the benefits of inclusion are inconsistent and inconclusive. Campbell’s reviewers threw out 99 percent of the 2,000 studies they found because of poor study quality and design, for reasons similar to those Fuchs describes. Only 15 studies survive. They found that math and reading scores, along with psychological, emotional, and behavioral measures, were not higher on average for children with disabilities who studied in general education classrooms compared to children who studied in segregated classrooms. special education rooms. Advocates for children with disabilities disputed the findings.
Lynn Newman, a researcher at SRI, a California-based research organization, has worked on multi-year studies of students with disabilities for the federal government. She said there were some good points in Fuchs’ paper, but she said his argument also had some “holes” because it excluded some well-designed studies of more recent data in which inclusion appears to be beneficial, particularly among high school students with disabilities.
Newman explained to me that there was very little support for students with disabilities in mainstream classrooms in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, inclusion has improved, she said. She cites four studies (one, two, three, four), published between 2009 and 2021 showing that students have done better with inclusion.
I showed this research to Fuchs, who agreed that the methodology and quality were good, but noted that these studies do not analyze whether students learn more in one place than another. Instead, studies have focused on other outcomes such as employment after high school. “The articles Newman identified are barking up a different tree,” he said by email.
Fuchs concentrated on academic performance. He acknowledges that there may be other psychological or social benefits to learning with peers in general education classes. He didn’t teach them. But these benefits can be even more important for parents and for lifelong success. (Fuchs also did not review the evidence on how nondisabled students are affected by peers with disabilities in their classrooms. This is different corpus of research.)
Measuring academic performance for students with disabilities is difficult. Students with disabilities are more likely to fail in a general education class. Assessments between the two settings—special education and general education—cannot be directly compared. Test scores are often missing, especially before and after changes in special education placements.
Other scientists I spoke to said Fuchs was lumping all disabilities together. Two specialists in children with the most severe disabilities who need extensive support showed me recently studies which point to superior training when these students are included in the general classroom, although they rarely are. However, these students represent only 1 percent of the student population with disabilities.
In many ways, this debate shows how science responds to changing conditions. Decades ago, there weren’t many ways to help children with disabilities. Today, there is a growing body of research on the best ways to teach children, especially elementary school children, who struggle with reading and math. Some of these interventions require daily instruction outside of the general education classroom.
Fuchs doesn’t think his argument will result in all children with disabilities being segregated into separate classrooms. It envisions schools where students would be pulled out of the general education classroom each day to receive the reading and math instruction they need in a separate classroom. Some children with mild dyslexia, he said, may need only one hour a day of intensive reading instruction. Meanwhile, some well-functioning children with Down syndrome may remain in the regular general education classroom during reading time.
And just as the quality of individual special education can evolve, so can the quality of inclusion in the general education classroom. Schools are getting better at supporting and accommodating students with disabilities. Clearly, a good version of inclusion will trump a bad version of a separate classroom. And a good version of intensive, specialized instruction will outperform a bad version of an inclusive classroom where the general education teacher overworked and lacking training. Too often students don’t get the support they need.
School leaders are in a difficult position when they have to decide whether to invest in improving the common classroom to accommodate everyone or to create and refine interventions that happen outside the classroom. And right now, research can’t really tell them what works best.
