What Happens to Special Education Students as Adults?
Each year, more than 6 million schoolchildren—roughly 13 percent of all public school students—receive special education services in the U.S. under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Since the inception of the program in 1975, researchers have debated how to assess its effectiveness, and the program itself has evolved over time, making it even more challenging to evaluate. Much of the research on special education has looked at short-term outcomes for some groups of special education students. However, little to no research has examined special education as a whole and its links to long-term adulthood outcomes.
Much of education research is short-term. This is understandable, given the extraordinary cost of a highly intensive intervention or program and the long-term follow up of such a program. Recently, however, Tyler Watts, Drew Bailey, and Chen Li have suggested, in a new paper in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, that education research should aim further than short-term evaluations of interventions, and the authors lay out how such longitudinal follow-ups of carefully implemented interventions might be incentivized broadly in education research.
Though ideally one would first conduct a randomized controlled trial and follow up with groups of both treated and untreated individuals well into adulthood, this ideal is not possible with special education due to the specific parameters outlined in IDEA. In "Exploring the links between receiving special education services and adulthood outcomes,” a new paper in the journal Frontiers in Education: Special Educational Needs, Tomoe Kanaya, Brenda Miranda, and I linked up publicly available large-scale datasets which allowed us to use a one-to-one propensity score matching technique alongside a unique research design. This helped us figure out CONTINUE READING: What Happens to Special Education Students as Adults? | Psychology Today
