Deborah Speece, Commissioner of the the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), will resign effective 1 July 2013 and become associate dean for research of the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond (VA, US). Speece told Spedpro that the decision was official as of Friday (5 April).
IES Commissioner John Q. Easton appointed Speece as commissioner of NCSER in August of 2011. During her tenure, she has overseen the research agenda for special education in the US, stabilizing what had been a drifting program and implementing valuable new initiatives despite serious fiscal challenges.
Speece’s move to VCU will strengthen both the overall research program in the school of education and the special education program itself. She not only—obviously—knows how research grants work, but she has a substantial reputation for conducting and reporting research as well as other aspects of the scholarly process (e.g., editing journal articles).
Context for decline in special education
Percentages of students 6-21 yrs
identified in categories of LD, ED, or ID
for US schools
Ever wonder why the number of students identified as having learning disabilities (LD), emotional or behavior disorders (ED), or intellectual disabilities (ID) in the US is declining? The numbers are not declining, you say? Hmmmm. Well, as the table here shows, they are, indeed, declining. I drew these data from the child counts mandated under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. I used the data for percentage of students ages 6 through 21 served under IDEA, Part B, as a percentage of population, by disability, and state. (I used 6-21, because those are reported consistently across the years; therefore these percentages are lower than one might expect for school-age students.) As indicated, one can check my work by referring to the data tables for US Office of Special Education Programs’ state-reported data. And, as the data show, it’s not just LD that’s decreasing.
Some of our colleagues will argue that the reason for the decline is improvement in preventative services, especially as represented by response to intervention or instruction methods that have been touted extensively in the time represented in the table here. Continue reading ‘Context for decline in special education’