Best Practices for Improving Special Education

Improving the special education sector is a major challenge, as all educational institutions wish to close the academic achievement gap and improve outcomes for students with special needs, but the practices of these institutions are not always aligned to achieve this goal most effectively.

Nevertheless, there are several reasons for optimism. For instance, when best practices are implemented well and using a systems-thinking approach, they can help educational institutions, regardless of their size and type, achieve significant gains in achievement, inclusion, and increased access to services for students with special needs. In more detail, we share here the top 10 practices for improving special education in this article, based on scientific research.

1. Focus on student outcomes, not inputs

For many educational institutions, if the past year's efforts did not bear fruit, the alternative solution is to hire more workforce, increase co-teaching, or increase working hours, and these changes rarely help students, while costing more. Over the past decade, some educational institutions increased the number of teachers, yet achievement levels did not significantly improve.

If the current approach does not achieve great results, current practices must be reviewed and adjusted. Institutions that have succeeded in raising achievement levels for students with special needs or those experiencing learning difficulties are the institutions that focused on outcomes.

2. Effective general education is key

Effective general education is considered essential: high performance of general education students is linked to high performance of students with special needs. Students with special needs spend most of their day in the general education classroom. Therefore, the core instruction provided by the classroom teacher must meet most of their needs. In some educational institutions, a culture has emerged in which special education staff take the lead in serving students with special needs. In many of them, elementary school children who struggle with reading are pulled out from the core reading group to be taught by a teacher of special education.

Despite good intentions, these common practices are not the best for students with special needs. Students are best served academically when the general education teacher takes primary responsibility for their instruction. In addition to core instruction, interventions are often best delivered by general education teachers, which is the hallmark of response to intervention.

3. Ensure all students can read

Most of the time, the majority of referrals to special education are due to reading difficulties, and referral rates increase in grades three through six when reading problems make it difficult to learn mathematics, science, and social studies. The vast majority of students who have not mastered reading by the end of the third grade will continue to struggle throughout high school and beyond. These students tend to have increased rates of behavioral problems in later grades and are less likely to graduate from high school.

In order to raise achievement levels for all students, educational institutions need to faithfully implement best practices for teaching reading and ensure that students with mild to moderate special needs benefit from these best practices.

Adapted and translated...

Originally published in Arabic. This English version was produced with AI-assisted translation; the Arabic original remains the reference.