First-Year Effectiveness on School Functioning of a Self-Contained ED Middle School

* Parents of students about to be classified with emotional disturbance (ED) will often ask special educators pertinent questions about the success achieved by their ED programs. Will their child's grades and failures improve? Will the parents still often be phoned at work about disciplinary referrals or to come pick up their child for out-of-school suspensions? Will the student graduate from high school? Educators from local school districts also have similar concerns. Such basic inquiries can prove awkward unless ED programs maintain their own longitudinal databases (likely not yet a common practice) or can cite a literature research base. Therefore, how should special educators respond to such socially valid inquiries from parents who are about to entrust children to their ED programs?The largest amount of research into outcome for students with ED has primarily focused on efficacy (i.e., the effects of shortterm interventions for specific behavioral, social, or academic problems delivered under experimental conditions in single-case/smallgroup studies). Such work has produced a body of interventions for ED teachers to use (Cook, Landrum, Tankersley, & Kauffman, 2003) that contributes to but does not as yet constitute an optimal evidence base (Forness, 2005). Thus, ED educators can comment to parents on the likelihood of success with their child's specific problems in school.However, answers to the aforementioned broader questions asked by parents depend on effectiveness research (i.e., investigation into outcome when best practices are delivered in real-world ED programs with typical mixes of students). The remaining research base for the outcome of students with ED, although not true effectiveness studies, provides some applicable data that can be quoted by educators for these general questions (Mattison, 2004a), whether they be asked by parents or local school districts. Prior to 1980, some research compared the efficacy of special versus regular class placement for special education students; a few of these studies could be considered quasi-effectiveness research because of their design. Carlberg and Kavale (1980) evaluated this work with a meta-analysis using the outcome measures of achievement and social/ personality variables. They found that special class placement showed the largest average effect size (ES) for students classified as learning disabled or as behaviorally or emotionally disturbed (mean ± standard deviation, .29 ± .54) compared with students classified as educable mentally retarded (-.14) or as slow learning (-.34). The authors noted that although the average ES for efficacy was not strong for the group that contained students with ED, the standard deviation indicated considerable variability in response among students. Little similar research for the ED category has been conducted since these earlier studies, so educators should cite this past work cautiously.Another small body of longitudinal outcome studies has demonstrated a persistently high dropout rate for students with ED. For example, data from two national longitudinal studies show that although dropout rates have improved for students with ED, the rate remains among the highest of the federal special education categories: 60.6% for a 1987 cohort versus 44.2% for a 2003 cohort (Wagner, Newman, Cameto, & Levine, 2005). This research and other longitudinal work for cohorts (Greenbaum et al., 1996; Mattison, Spitznagel, & Felix, 1 998) at first do not appear encouraging, indicating approximately a 5050 chance of educational success over the school career of a student with ED. However, when the serious, complex status of new students with ED is considered, these success rates appear more positive (Mattison, 2004a). Furthermore, some work has found long-term predictors that may allow ED special educators to be more encouraging to those parents enrolling students who are young, have good verbal IQs, and are characterized by anxiety or depressive disorders but not conduct or oppositional disorders (Mattison et al. …