Exploring the Truth of Michael Yudin’s Claim: The More Time Students With Disabilities Spend in General Classrooms, the Better They Do Academically

Abstract

Many K–Grade 12 students with disabilities (SWDs) in the United States spend a large portion of their school day in general classrooms because of a prevailing view that they are more appropriately challenging and beneficial than other educational placements. We questioned this belief by exploring a “dosage” hypothesis: The more time SWD are in general classrooms the better they do academically. We assembled a database spanning 1998 to 2015, inclusive. For 9 of these years, we found both Office of Special Education Program’s placement data and National Center for Education Statistics’ reading data. We ran multilevel growth models to describe trends across time for the placement and reading data. Findings indicated a steadily increasing trend for general class placement and a positive but decelerating trend for reading performance, which together produced a widening placement–performance gap after 2007. Among 10 states/jurisdictions with the strongest positive trends for general class placement, there was no uniform pattern of reading performance across years. In short, we found little corroboration of a dosage hypothesis.