The Delta Issue #101
The Special Education Questions We Should Be Asking
Hi all, Kunjan here.
Across virtually every state and every assessment, the gap between students with disabilities and their peers is staggering. It’s one of the largest and most persistent gaps in education.
Many people equate special education with serving students with significant cognitive disabilities, when in reality these students make up only a small part of the picture. Nationally, students with intellectual disabilities account for just 5.7% of the more than 7.3 million students receiving IDEA services. More than 81% of students receiving special education services fall into just four disability categories: specific learning disabilities, which affect how students learn skills like reading, writing, or math; speech or language impairments; other health impairments; and autism.
Yet despite the wide range of students served through special education, the data shows dramatically lower academic outcomes across the board.
That raises important questions: If a specific learning disability, by definition, doesn’t diminish a student’s underlying capacity to learn, why are these students performing this far below grade level? And why does the gap widen rather than close as they move through school?
Disability alone cannot explain the size of the achievement gap. If we want to improve outcomes, we have to be willing to examine what else is happening inside our education system.
A Deeper Look at the Numbers
Let’s take a closer look at the NAEP data to understand the scale of the achievement gap.
On the 2024 NAEP, more than 96% of fourth- and eighth-grade students with a specific learning disability were not proficient in reading, and more than 92% were not proficient in mathematics.
We know declining NAEP performance isn’t just a special education story–we’ve seen a universal and troubling decline in scores for all students in recent years. But students with disabilities are falling even further behind their peers, and in many cases, the gap continues to grow. Alarmingly, we still don’t have a clear understanding of why.
For example, in 2024, the average score gap between students with and without disabilities ranged from 31 to 40 points across all four NAEP assessments. As a rough rule of thumb, researchers often interpret 10 NAEP points as about a year’s worth of learning. That’s the equivalent of students with disabilities finishing fourth grade, on average, more than a grade level behind their peers.
If you think about what this looks like in practice: A student identified with a speech or language impairment—someone who may simply struggle to pronounce certain sounds or roll their R’s—is, according to the data, far less likely to be proficient in mathematics than a peer without a disability.
Those outcomes are difficult to reconcile with the nature of many of the disabilities represented in special education.
Where Should States Be Looking?
The data don’t tell us exactly why these outcomes exist, but they give us every reason to pop the hood and take a closer look at what’s happening inside our system.
One place to start is access to instruction. Special education is built around the principle of the least restrictive environment, and the good news is that more students with disabilities are spending time in general education classrooms today than they were a decade ago.
But access alone isn’t enough. If placing more students in general education classrooms solved the problem, we’d expect achievement gaps to be shrinking. Instead, they’re still enormous.
That suggests we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the first half of the equation—access—and not enough time on the second: making sure students are actually engaging in rigorous, grade-level learning every day.
Another place to look is our expectations and whether unconscious belief gaps are limiting opportunities for students who are capable of much more. Our expectations of students—whether implicit or explicit—influence who has access to grade-level curriculum, who is pulled from core instruction, and who is expected to master the same standards as their peers. Most of these decisions are made by educators who are deeply committed to serving students well, but good intentions alone don’t guarantee the system is producing the outcomes we want.
Finally, there’s a good chance our pursuit of compliance with special education law has, in some cases, come at the expense of the educational experience students receive. The legal protections built into IDEA are absolutely essential. They protect students’ rights and ensure families have a voice in their education. But anyone who has worked in schools knows how much time is devoted to meetings, paperwork, documentation, timelines, and procedural requirements. Compliance matters, but it was never meant to be the goal, and there’s a good chance we’ve lost the forest for the trees here.
None of this is about assigning blame or pretending to have all the answers—because we don’t. This is our first Delta on special education, and each of the ideas above deserves much deeper exploration. The goal here is to start by asking better questions, challenging long-held assumptions, and focusing relentlessly on what matters most: whether students are learning. This is a solvable problem, and the first step is being willing to look honestly at what the data is telling us.
Let’s Get Muddy
What’s your theory for why the special education gap exists? We’d love to hear from you in the comments and can keep this conversation going in future pieces.
Come join us on July 20th at 2:00pm ET for our webinar with @Rebecca Kockler, where we’ll unpack another assumption that’s worth challenging: the “third grade reading myth” and what it means for supporting students long after elementary school.
Special thanks to Kristi-Jo P. and Stacey Labit-Moorehead for contributing to this issue.
