Inferring Program Effects for Special Populations: Does Special Education Raise Achievement for Students with Disabilities?
通过追踪学生进出特殊教育项目的变化，发现特殊教育显著提高了残疾学生的数学成绩，尤其是学习障碍或情绪障碍学生，且不影响普通学生。
Most discussion of special education has centered on the costs of providing mandated programs for children with disabilities and not on their effectiveness. As in many other policy areas, inferring program effectiveness is difficult because students not in special education do not provide a good comparison group. By following students who move in and out of targeted programs, however, we are able to identify program effectiveness from changes over time in individual performance. We find that the average special education program significantly boosts mathematics achievement of special-education students, particularly those classified as learning-disabled or emotionally disturbed, while not detracting from regular-education students. These results are estimated quite precisely from models of students and school-by-grade-by-year fixed effects in achievement gains, and they are robust to a series of specification tests. © 2002 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.