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School districts often find themselves short of special education teachers, even as they lay off other educators. The Special Education Faculty Needs Assessment project found that part of the shortage is because of an ongoing dearth of special education faculty that may grow worse in the near future. Concern over the shortage of faculty in the special education field led to creation of SEFNA with grant money from the U.S. Department of Education's office of special education programs. The work builds on a 2001 report that also found a shortage of special education faculty.

I'm a more than a little late to the punch on GAO's recent report on special education and charter schools, but I wanted to comment briefly because I continue to be totally flummoxed by some folks in the charter community's reaction to what was, essentially, a very even handed reporting of data on special education enrollment in charter schools. As my colleague Andy Rotherham noted last week, this report was hardly the "slam" on charter schools that some folks are characterizing it as, and the GAO went out of its way to describe the number of factors that might contribute to lowered rates of special education enrollment in some charter schools, even if no one is doing anything wrong. I'm particularly troubled, though, by an argument I've seen some folks in the charter movement take up lately that it's somehow unfair or unreasonable to compare charter special education enrollments to district special ed enrollments because, while school districts or systems are required to serve all students, individual public schools are not required to serve every child with special needs. This argument is problematic for a host of reasons

This paper contributes importantly to the growing literature on the training of special education teachers and how it translates into classroom practice and student achievement. The authors examine the impact of pre-service preparation and in-service formal and informal training on the ability of teachers to promote academic achievement among students with disabilities. Using student-level longitudinal data from Florida over a five-year span the authors estimate value-added models of student achievement. There is little support for the efficacy of in-service professional development courses focusing on special education. However, teachers with advanced degrees are more effective in boosting the math achievement of students with disabilities than are those with only a baccalaureate degree. Also pre-service preparation in special education has statistically significant and quantitatively substantial effects on the ability of teachers of special education courses to promote gains in achievement for students with disabilities, especially in reading. Certification in special education, an undergraduate major in special education, and the amount of special education coursework in college are all positively correlated with the performance of teachers in special education reading courses.

This study found that schools fail to make AYP most often because of the students with disabilities subgroup. The failure of the special education subgroup to make AYP occurs mainly because the students with disabilities subgroup is expected to maintain the exact same proficiency levels as their general education peers-a standard that has proved to be problematic because special education students often start out with lower average test scores than general education students. In addition, the students with disabilities subgroup is the only subgroup in which actual limitations on ability to learn might come into play. The existence of these limitations calls into question the wisdom of trying to close the general education-special education "achievement gap" at the same pace as the race- or class-based achievement gaps. In addition to quantitative methods, this study also used legal research techniques to examine the legal impact that the two laws are having on students with disabilities.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the federal Department of Education has given school districts rather broad permission to cut special education spending and never restore it. The move alarmed some in the special education community. But one group of objectors broke the new guidance from the Education Department down into the simplest terms I've read on this somewhat complex topic.

"Several recent reports, including one from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, have found that charter schools generally under-enroll special education students when compared to conventional public schools. A new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, however, asserts that charter schools' special education rates are much closer to those of district public schools than is described by these other recent reports. A review of that new report concludes that, even though it was touted as reaching different conclusions - more favorable to charter schools - than past research, in fact the results are very much consistent. It confirms that charter schools are systematically under-enrolling students with special needs."

The National Center for Special Education Research now has its second director. Deborah Speece, a 27-year special education professor at the College of Education at the University of Maryland, was named to the post this week.

Some parents at a top middle school are fighting to stop special education students from "taking seats" from students whose test scores may be higher. The parents at Brooklyn's IS 187/Christa McAuliffe, where students must ace standardized exams to be admitted, fear that combining special and general education students in the same classrooms will reduce the level of education. "No parent is going to want their kid in those classes," said IS 187 PTA co-vice president Virginia Cantone. "The truth of the matter is that the wide spectrum of challenges is too great for any of the children to learn, it's too great of a difference."

Eva Moskowitz, a charter founder in New York City, says in the article that the reason the numbers of special education students are low is because her schools are able to move students out of special education because of her schools'  superior methods. But this claim demonstrates that her schools take students with the mildest disabilities, and leaves those with high needs to the public schools, a complaint often lodged against charters.

The type of clothing worn in a family's home, the language spoken and other cultural markers could influence whether special-education students receive taxpayer-funded private-school tuition, under a bill passed last month by the New York state Legislature. Education officials would have to consider a student's "home environment and family background" when deciding the best setting for special-education children under the bill. Currently, decisions about private-school placement have generally been based on academics and the child's disability.

"One of the most common claims against charter schools is that they "push out" special education students. The basic idea is that charter operators, who are obsessed with being able to show strong test results and thus bolster their reputations and enrollment, subtlety or not-so-subtlety "counsel out" students with special education plans (or somehow discourage their enrollment). This is, of course, a serious issue, one that is addressed directly in a recent report from the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), which presents an analysis of data from a sample of New York City charter elementary schools (and compares them to regular public schools in the city)."

Children with autism accounted for almost one third of a comprehensive sample of published court decisions concerning the core concepts of free appropriate public education (FAPE) and least restrictive environment (LRE) under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. The other major, and more significant, finding was that when comparing this litigation percentage with the autism percentage in the special education population for the period 1993 to 2006, the ratio was approximately 10 : 1. The reasons for this disproportionality, or overrepresentation of children with autism in FAPE/LRE litigation, are complex. Special education leaders need to pay particular attention to establishing effective communications and trust building with parents of students with autism and to optimize the use of various approaches of alternative dispute resolution.

Special education has become the new wedge for advocates of school choice-private school vouchers, charter schools, and other options for public school students. Some school-choice proponents told me that students with disabilities inspire sympathy, and state lawmakers wouldn't stand in the way of their getting these additional opportunities. The big risk for parents who choose vouchers is that they'll lose their federal rights to be involved in their child's education as provided by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

The U.S. Department of Education won't cut South Carolina's share of federal special education dollars by $36 million-at least not yet-prompting questions about whether such penalties for states that cut education spending without federal approval are meaningful.

The U.S. Department of Education today announced the award of more than $5 million in grants to operate 19 special education Parent Training and Information (PTI) Centers in 13 states and Puerto Rico.

"Jonathan Alter and Diane Ravitch our special guests to debate education reform. In a Bloomberg column, Alter called out Diane as one of the obstructionists to education reform. Jonathan Alter is a journalist and author who was a columnist and senior editor for Newsweek magazine from 1983 until 2011. Alter is currently a lead columnist for Bloomberg Review. Diane Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education."

The GAO report's authors are very careful to note that their findings merely describe what you might call the "service gap" - i.e., the proportion of special education students served by charters versus regular public schools - but that they do not indicate the reasons for this disparity. This is an important point, but I would take the warning a step further:  The national- and state-level gaps themselves should be interpreted with the most extreme caution. Although there are plenty of interesting data contained in the report, and its authors do point out many of the limitations of their analyses, the GAO's approach (and virtually all the press coverage) seems to gloss over the fact that charter schools are disproportionately located in urban, lower-income areas, where special education rates of all schools tend to be higher. To understand why this matters, consider an analogous example: On average, U.S. charter schools serve a considerably larger proportion of minority students than regular public schools. Does this mean that minority students are underrepresented in regular public schools?

I am a special education teacher. My students have learning disabilities ranging from autism and attention-deficit disorder to cerebral palsy and emotional disturbances. I love these kids, but they can be a handful. Almost without exception, they struggle on standardized tests, frustrate their teachers and find it hard to connect with their peers. What's more, these are high school students, so their disabilities are compounded by raging hormones and social pressure. As you might imagine, my job can be extremely difficult. Beyond the challenges posed by my students, budget cuts and changes to special-education policy have increased my workload drastically even over just the past 18 months. While my class sizes have grown, support staff members have been laid off. Students with increasingly severe disabilities are being pushed into more mainstream classrooms like mine, where they receive less individual attention and struggle to adapt to a curriculum driven by state-designed high-stakes tests. On top of all that, I'm a bad teacher. That's not my opinion; it's how I'm labeled by the city's Education Department.

Elmore's edited text illuminates a rarely discussed yet important aspect of school reform efforts: the critical reflective analysis of one's perspective (personal bias), or the connection between our experiences and our interpretations of those experiences. The volume's title and theme draw from a professional development exercise requiring conscious reflection on old points of view drawn from the experiences of educational reformers, theorists, leaders, researchers, and policy makers who have been on the front line of K-12 school reform. Contributors include Howard Gardner, Rudy Crew, Larry Cuban, Jeff Henig, Deb Meier, and Mike Smith, among others. This collection offers an insightful examination of some challenging educational issues of our time, including standardized testing; the role of special education; performance pay; the relationship between social theory and practice; teacher unionism; program development, implementation, and evaluation; the social role of education; and community involvement. The result is timely, as present educational policy is being reassessed on state and national levels.

Special-education kids who would have been segregated in the past will be shifted into classrooms with general-education students under an ambitious program being launched in city public schools this fall. The move is intended to boost the students' performance by giving them more exposure to their peers - while keeping them closer to home by requiring for the first time that all schools accept them. But some educators say the push is financial rather than educationally driven - and will likely deprive students of services and cause havoc in the classrooms.