Program Announcement: Special Education Policy, Finance, and Systems CFDA 84.324A

Program Officer:
Dr. Shu Jing Yen
ShuJing.Yen@ed.gov
(202) 219-2126

Purpose

Through the research program on Special Education Policy, Finance, and Systems (Policy/Systems), the Institute intends to contribute to the improvement of education for students with disabilities or at risk for disabilities by: (1) exploring malleable factors¹ (e.g., procedures for allocating resources, education finance practices, school organization and structure) that are correlated with outcomes for students with or at risk for disabilities, as well as mediators or moderators of the relations between these factors and student outcomes, for the purpose of identifying potential targets of intervention; (2) developing innovative systems or policies that are intended to improve student outcomes either directly or indirectly by improving the education environment for students with or at risk for disabilities; (3) evaluating the efficacy of systemic practices or policies that are intended to improve student outcomes either directly or indirectly by improving the education environment for students with or at risk for disabilities; (4) evaluating the impact of systemic practices and polices that are implemented at scale and are intended to improve student outcomes either directly or indirectly by improving the education environment; and (5) developing assessments that can be used to evaluate organization, management, or implementation of systems-level programs or policies and validating these or existing assessments against student outcomes, as well as developing and validating accommodations for large-scale assessments (i.e., assessments used for accountability purposes) that would permit measurement of the proficiency and growth of students with disabilities.

The long-term outcome of this program will be an array of systems-level practices and policies that have been documented to be effective for improving the education or intervention environment and thereby improving outcomes for students with or at risk for disabilities from kindergarten through Grade 12.

Background

Intervention and education for students with disabilities typically requires the coordination of a variety of programs and services. Little rigorous research has examined either a direct causal relation or indirect associations between student outcomes and various systemic or organizational strategies. Through the Policy/Systems program, the Institute supports research to improve outcomes for students with disabilities or at risk for disabilities by identifying changes in the ways in which systemic processes, procedures, and programs are organized, managed, and operated that may be directly or indirectly linked to student outcomes. That is, rather than focusing on improving student outcomes by changing curricula or student-level intervention approaches, researchers will conduct research on systems-level procedures and policies that are intended to improve the management, coordination, and implementation of systemic programs and services in ways that directly enhance the overall intervention or education environment, and indirectly improve student outcomes. The types of projects that are appropriate for this program are illustrated by, but not limited to, the examples provided below.

The Institute encourages researchers to develop innovative interventions, modify existing interventions, or rigorously evaluate fully developed interventions. Interventions appropriate for research under this program are policies or systemic interventions that are intended to improve student outcomes either directly or indirectly by improving the intervention or education environment for students with high- or low-incidence disabilities or students at risk for disabilities from kindergarten through Grade 12. For example, the Institute encourages applications to improve the development, monitoring, and implementation of Individualized Education Programs (IEP) for students with high- or low-incidence disabilities. By way of illustration, an applicant might propose to develop a web-based program that (a) guides providers through a series of prompts related to a student's developmental goals, services, service delivery options, and assessments for measuring student progress and (b) links to additional resources to provide feedback and support for decision-making during the IEP development and implementation process. The web-based program might be developed to cover a broad range of disabilities (e.g., hearing impairments, significant intellectual disabilities, visual impairments, learning disabilities) and serve, in many ways, as a virtual expert consultant for IEP teams. If an applicant had a web-based program of this nature already developed, the applicant could propose to evaluate the effect of having access to this program on the quality of IEPs that are developed and its perceived value and utility for the IEP development process, along with its impact on student outcomes.

Also, appropriate under this topic is research on the implementation of Response to Intervention (RtI) approaches. For example, an applicant might propose to compare the efficacy of a school-wide, simultaneous RtI system in which students are placed into a secondary or tertiary intervention based on beginning of the year universal screening performance to a school-wide, sequential RtI system in which students are placed into a secondary or tertiary intervention only after they have demonstrated a lack of progress in the previous tier. Under the Systems/Policy research program, applicants interested in RtI research must focus on the design and implementation of RtI approaches and not on the development of the secondary or tertiary interventions themselves. Applicants who are interested in developing only secondary or tertiary interventions for RtI systems should apply under the applicable content topic (e.g., Reading, Writing, and Language Development or Mathematics and Science Education).

The Institute also encourages research to evaluate the effects of policies that are intended to improve special education services. For example, an applicant might propose to evaluate the effect of offering annual financial bonuses on the recruitment and retention of special education teachers in hard-to-staff schools. As another example, a researcher might propose to evaluate the effect of policies intended to promote collaboration among IEP team members and increase time and resources available for instruction of students with disabilities.

The Institute recognizes that applicants to the Policy/Systems research program typically propose models that involve multiple steps. For example, an applicant might choose to evaluate a program intended to facilitate inclusion of students with disabilities in middle school classrooms by having a master special education teacher serve as a consultant to and rotate through the classrooms of general education teachers who have students with disabilities in their classes. For the purpose of illustration, a simple model of change for this program might be:

Master special educator	General education teacher	Students with disabilities
Provides suggestions Models strategies Provides resources	*Modifies assignments to better match child's skills *Uses strategies that are better matched to child's skills *Provides more support to students with disabilities	*Increase time in general education classes *Increase engagement *Increase homework completion *Increase time on task	*Improve grades and test scores *Increase likelihood of promotion to next grade

In this model, improved academic outcomes are the most distal outcome that the intervention seeks to improve. The Institute requires applicants to obtain measures of student academic outcomes (e.g. grades, promotion). In this example, strong applications would include measures of moderators (e.g., class size, number of students with disabilities per class, type of course), as well as the mediators between the intervention strategy (i.e., master special educator provides support to general education teachers) and the target academic outcomes.

The Institute also welcomes research on outcome assessments used for large-scale accountability purposes. For example, an applicant might propose to develop and validate new regular or alternate assessments or to modify and validate existing regular or alternate assessments for students with disabilities. This work might include research on the reliability and validity of different test accommodations for students with disabilities, approaches for designing accountability assessments to be more accessible to students with disabilities, use of individual student growth models for accountability purposes with students with disabilities, and methods for integrating large-scale assessments with IEP development, instruction, progress monitoring, and other systemic elements in order to help students with disabilities achieve academic standards. Also appropriate for the Policy/Systems research program are applications to assess implementation of systemic practices or policies and validate such measures against student outcomes.

The Institute encourages research that explores meaningful links among special education financing, allocation of resources, and improvements in student outcomes. For example, a researcher might investigate the relationships among census-based or resource-based formulas, the allocation of resources and services as documented on students' Individualized Education Programs, and improvements in academic outcomes. The researcher might also explore other factors influencing the relationship among financing, resource allocation, and student outcomes, such as school- or district- size, or students' disability categories or degree of students' individual skills or needs.