In the United States today, there is a growing issue surrounding the field of special education. More and more it is seen that once a student has been placed in special education, their likelihood of being successful in their adult life significantly decrease, especially for those in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas. Whether these two factors have any real relationship or not was taken up and studied by Ashley chesmore Suh-Ruu Ou, and Arthur J. Reynolds. Their goal was to answer two research questions. First, Is childhood placement in special education associated with educational attainment, incarceration, substance misuse and depression in adulthood? Second if there is an association between childhood placement in special education and adult outcomes is it mediated by academic achievement?

To answers these questions, They took a sample of 1,377 low-income minority children, 16 percent of which had some sort of special education between grades 1 through 8. They collected their data through surveys from the child, parent and teacher, school records and other available data. They wanted to test to see if special education had any relationship with depression, incarceration, and substance abuse. They cataloged data on all of those topics, also adding demographic factors of the children and their special education placement and educational attainment. They coded a majority of the data dichotomously using 0 and 1 for each individual answer. Once they collected all of their data they used logistic regression to analyze the dichotomous outcomes and multiple linear regressions to analyze the continuous outcomes.

The conclusions produced from the data did show very strong relationships between special education and the factors in questions. For example children who were placed in special education between grades 4 and 8 were 100% more likely to be incarcerated than those not placed in special education. Similarly, special education students between grades 1 and 8 were 69% more likely to abuse substances during their adult life. But the relationship I found most shocking was that students placed in special education between grades 4 and 8 were 133% more likely to end up depressed in their adult life. All of these are rather disturbing numbers that might make us reconsider how our system of special education is structured.

This research was over all well done, my only critique being the size of their sample. They included such a small sample that it is hard to say that these numbers reflect the entire population of special education students. I would be interested to see what the numbers would look like if the study were to be done and included more school districts of different socioeconomic and racial populations.

Chesmore, A. A., Ou, S., & Reynolds, A. J. (2016). Childhood Placement in Special Education and Adult Well-Being. The Journal of Special Education, 50(2), 109-120. doi:10.1177/0022466915624413

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022466915624413