• Over on Education Next, Marguerite Roza of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab published an article entitled “Some School Districts Won the MacKenzie Scott Jackpot. What Happened Next?.” It’s an interesting topic, but she didn’t report that any of the local education agencies did anything with special education nor for kids with disabilities. Maybe they did but it wasn’t significant enough to appear in her report? Her article appeared 6 January 2026, so maybe there’s other news to report. (Ms. Scott gave $millions to Access Living, a Chicago-area non-profit that aids and advocates for individuals with disabilities.)

• The Illinois chapter of the Division for Emotional and Behavior Health offered a free meeting for practitioners to discuss their concerns about the problems that teachers encounter in classroom teaching. The meeting is scheduled for Sunday 17 May 2026 at 6:00 PM Eastern time (10::00 PM GMT) and is free. There is more in the left-hand panel at https://www.ilccbd.org/general-7 (warning: the Web site may not display clearly depending on your browser).

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After playing basketball successfully at the highest level and earning tens of millions of dollars, Mr. Smith—Earl Joseph Smith, III—enrolled in college at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He surely wasn’t the typical undergraduate, but he took courses, got tutors, and even played on the school’s golf team. And, he received a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies. According to Mr. Jones’s article, he graduated “with a 4.0 grade-point average.”1

Mr. Smith candidly discussed his social and academic difficulties with Jemele Hill in a YouTube interview, “NBA Star J.R. Smith on Naivigating Life with a Learning Disability” that appeared 20 July 2023.

Mr. Smith’s story was a central feature in a television documentary series called “Redefined: J.R. Smith” (IMDB). According to the Wikipedia entry about the series, the four episodes aired in April 2023; most of the episodes appear to focus on his golf play. NCAT’s publicity office posted a story about the TV series in April 2023.

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Footnote

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Following lessons focused on learning fundamentals such as letter-sound relationships, teachers (and curricula) should emphasize sequential blending, simple sounding out, and so forth. Lessons not much later in the school year2 might have miniature activities in which the teachers helped children focus on words with conditional spelling patterns such as the vowel-consonant-e pattern.

The following video shows me (yep, it’s I, John; no joke3) teaching a bit about the cvc and cvce spelling patterns in early decoding. The following ~4-minute video shows a mini-lesson on words using those spelling patterns, and it emphasizes the discrimination that learners need to make to read words with those patterns correctly).

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This is a free post, so please share it with others!

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Photo

Pat and I took a trip to Claytor Lake State Park, which is about 2.5 hours south-southwest by high-speed highway. We got to spend time with 11 (not counting us) friends whom we’ve known ~50 years.

Here’s a view of one arm of Claytor Lake from the porch of the living facility where we stayed. Though nary a one is shown in the photo, there were lots of birds.

Status

There have been a few new and a few departed subscribers this week. Folks come. Folks go. But, wave these folks across the welcome mat: Kamel, Aline, Courtney E., Iam T. C., Gretchen E., Timothy M., Tricia, Jen D., Craig W., Christopher G., Opal, Appleberry, Inqa, Gerald D., and Janelle G. Sorry if you started a sub and I didn’t mention you here; sometimes new subs appear as anonymous and it’s dang hard to chase down identities. Also, subscribers sometimes do no give their real names, and I am forced to mention their “screen name” (perhaps twistedly?) and sometimes I simply have to omit them.

Special thanks to a batch of supporters who renewed their subscriptions, some of them quite recently: Ed. P.. Marina P., Clay K., Joel M., Jane N., Dan H., Christine T., Bill F., John U., Nancy M., Candace S., Bear A., Jim F., Alix H., Jenn L., & Jenn W., Thank you, one and all.

In addition, here is a wave to the Patrons of SET, the founding supporters: Anita A., Mike G., and Kathy M. Also, a thanks to Li-Yu Hung, Ana Paula Martins, Mandy Rispoli, John Romig, Mitch Yell, and David Bateman, the contributing authors for SET.

Spedlettes of the week

Here is the aforementioned catalog of posts (authors in brackets) from the week before Mothers’ Day here in the US. The first batch is the free posts; the second shows the paid post.

Free

1. Special Education Today Newsletter 5(44): Here’s the news and info for the week that began 27 April 2026

2. Vanderbilt University on festschrift for Lynn Fuchs: Here’s the institution’s account of the remembrance of a fabulous educator and human

3. Friday photos: Doug Cullinan: How about this blast from the past?

4. Friday catch-up notes—8 May 2026: What notes didn’t show up as full posts the past few day?

5. Course on analyzing education goals: What can teachers, clinicians, and others learn from a free mini behavior analysis program?

6. Happy Mothers’ Day: Shout out to all those mothers who are here, especially to mine!

For the faithful

1. Getting to X

Special Education Today will send notices about new posts to free and paid subscribers. To ensure that one can receive them, one ought to subscribe (preferably as a supporter!).

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Commentary

I have no editorial comments for this week. Actually, maybe it’s that I have too many? Either way, I’m calling this issue a wrap!

Still, please remember to get lots of rest, take care of yourselves and those around you, take inspiration from reports of others who are promoting advances and success of our kids, and keep on teaching our children well.

JohnL

John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D.

UVA Professor Emeritus

Founder & Editor, https://www.SpecialEducationToday.com/

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SET should not be confused with a product that uses essentially the same name and is published by the Council for Exceptional Children. SET predated CEC’s publication by decades; I wonder if CEC put “today” in all capitals to distinguish its product from SET. Despite my appreciation for CEC, this product is not designed to promote that organization nor should the views expressed here be considered to represent the views or policies of that organization. A membership in CEC does not get one a subscription to SET and vice versa!

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If one follows the QR code on the flyer, one can find the catalog description of the course. Here’s how it reads:

Categorizing Types of Learning to Facilitate the Design of Instruction

Teachers (and other skill builders) often receive instruction on how to identify education goals, but less instruction on how to program instruction to accomplish those goals. This may lead teachers to use inferior strategies for instruction that do not reliably produce the learning outcomes they desire, resulting in stressful trial and error filling the limited time they have for lesson planning or the continued use of less effective lessons. The first step to supporting teachers to use effective instruction for their students is teaching them to deconstruct and categorize their education goals in a way that will directly tell them how to measure and teach them. Ultimately, this categorization system improves upon other more commonly used approaches for learning taxonomies (e.g., Bloom’s Taxonomy). The approach taught through this micro-credential is uniquely useful because each category directly relates to specific instructional strategies. The purpose of this microcredential is to prepare teachers to use this categorization system to inform the instructional design of their courses.

I encourage SET readers to review the offering. Note that it is brief, offered on-line and asynchronously, and free. That sounds pretty attractive, no?

I have not yet had an opportunity to review the course itself. However, it not only sounds intriguing but other evidence leads me to believe that Professor Williams is working from very strong evidence in designing this course. She has published multiple studies in leading behavior analysis journals (Williams & Roop, 2025; Williams & St. Peter, 2020; Williams et al., 2024) that examine aspects of instructional design that I consider quite important such as not-examples.1

I also note that the course is offered through UNCW’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. There are OLLI programs at many institutions around the US. I am planning to offer a one-session class in the fall of 2026 through the University of Virginia’s OLLI.

References

Williams, C. L., & Roop, J. C. (2025). Instruction consisting of a rule and set of examples and nonexamples reliably teaches concepts. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 124(3), e70061.

Williams, C. L., & St. Peter, C. C. (2020). Resurgence of previously taught academic responses. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 113(1), 232-250.

Williams, C. L., St. Peter, C. C., & Murphy, M. J. (2024). Bridging the gap: Evaluating a fusion of procedures for conceptual learning. Experimental Analysis of Human Behavior: Bulletin, 35(Special Issue).

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• Over on Our Daily Bread‘s podcast called Raising Young Disciples, Professor Jason Le Shana of Baylor University spoke about Discipling Children with Disabilities. Our Daily Bread and Raising Young Disciples are Christian outreach efforts that invited Professor Le Shana—whose Ph.D. is in divinity, is a professor and Program Director for the Baylor Collaborative of Faith and Disability, and has a child with autism—to talk about behavior management on the podcast for 26 March 2026.

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Many readers of Special Education Today will recognize Doug’s name because of his outstanding academic work on the behavior disorders of children and youth. In the NIU days, Doug and I worked with our colleague—and pal—Michael Epstein on a couple of projects. One of the projects was a series of studies about cognitive tempo in children with disabilities (Epstein et al., 1977). Another was funded by a grant that Mike received to demonstrate applications of precision teaching and direct instruction with elementary students with learning disabilities (Lloyd et al., 1980). Another resulted in an introductory text book about behavior disorders (Cullinan et al., 1983) that Doug continued to update (e.g., Cullinan, 2007).

Mike and Doug continued to collaborate on many topics. In addition to conducting a host of studies about EBD (e.g., Cullinan et al., 1992, 2004), they developed the Scales for Assessing Emotional Disturbance (originally Epstein & Cullinan, 1998; Epstein et al., 2002) and co-founded and -edited the Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders. Doug also collaborated with other leaders in special education (readers will recognize the names of some of them, including Jim Kauffman, Susan Osborne, Ed Sabornie), publishing valuable studies about the characteristics of students with disabilities (e.g., Sabornie et al., 2005.

When Doug and I were young professors at NIU, we sometimes played basketball together in the NIU gym that was just across the street from Graham Hall. There were 12-20 guys from the faculty and the local community who routinely met for brief games (“skirmishes” might be a better word) on the hardwood floors in the gym. After about 40 minutes, we could use the gym’s showers and return to our offices in time to continue preparation of our afternoon and evening classes. At that time I was dang near as tall as Doug. Because of differences in how close we were to the camera’s lens, the accompanying photo exaggerates the difference in our heights at this time, but you can see that I have shrunk (or Doug has grown) since those long-ago days of hoops. I still look up to him, and not just because of the difference in heights.

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References

Cullinan, D. (2007). Students with emotional and behavioral disorders: An introduction for teachings and other helping professionals. Merrill.

Cullinan, D., Epstein, M. H., & Lloyd, J. W. (1983). Behavior disorders of children and adolescents. Prentice-Hall.

Cullinan, D., Epstein, M. H., & Sabornie, E. J. (1992). Selected characteristics of a national sample of seriously emotionally disturbed adolescents. Behavioral Disorders, 17(4), 273-280.

Cullinan, D., Osborne, S., & Epstein, M. H. (2004). Characteristics of emotional disturbance among female students. Remedial and Special Education, 25(5), 276-290.

Epstein, M. H., Cullinan, D., Pierce, C., Huscroft-D’Angelo, J., & Wery, J. (2020). Scales for assessing emotional disturbance. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.

Epstein, M. H., Kauffman, J. M., & Cullinan, D. (1985). Patterns of maladjustment among the behaviorally disordered. II: Boys aged 6-11, boys aged 12-18, girls aged 6-11, and girls aged 12-18. Behavioral Disorders, 10(2), 125-135.

Epstein, M. H., Cullinan, D., & Lloyd, J. (1977). Reliability of the Matching Familiar Figures Test with learning-disabled children. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 45, 56-60.

Kauffman, J. M., Cullinan, D., & Epstein, M. H. (1987). Characteristics of students placed in special programs for the seriously emotionally disturbed. Behavioral Disorders, 12(3), 175-184.

Lloyd, J., Cullinan, D., Heins, E. D., & Epstein, M. H. (1980). Direct instruction: Effects on oral and written language comprehension. Learning Disability Quarterly, 3(4), 70-77.

Sabornie, E. J., Cullinan, D., Osborne, S. S., & Brock, L. B. (2005). Intellectual, academic, and behavioral functioning of students with high-incidence disabilities: A cross-categorical meta-analysis. Exceptional Children, 72(1), 47-63.

Those of you who have taught probably understand the need to invent (ahem) “busy work” on the fly. You know…” idle hands are the Devil’s play ground.” So let’s get them engaged in something at least on the borders of educationally beneficial.

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Here is Ms. Kiilerich’s lede:

In Germany, a Festschrift—literally “festival writing”—is an academic tribute that honors a scholar through collected works and new research from peers. On April 16–17, Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development hosted a unique event based around this tradition.

The gathering honored the late Lynn Fuchs, Dunn Family Professor of Psychoeducational Assessment, Emerita. A preeminent figure in special education and the psychological sciences, Fuchs was widely recognized for her work in mathematical and reading disabilities. Forbes once named her one of 14 “revolutionary educators,” and her research has been cited more than 88,000 times.

Regular readers of Special Education Today will know that we held Lynn in high esteem. Pamela Seethaler and I posted “Festschrift for Lynn Fuchs” and they may also recall that SET noted her passing in May of 2025. We encourage readers to take the few minutes required to read Ms. Kiilerich’s account, “‘Festschrift’ honors lifelong scholarship of Lynn Fuchs, renowned special education and psychological sciences scholar.”

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Also, here’s to a happy few days for the week leading up to Mothers’ Day 2026. In years gone by, I have encouraged readers to read Heather Cox Richardson’s discussion of the history of Mothers’ Day (yes, plural possessive is correct). I’ll return to it later in this newsletter. In fact, after you review the regular secants—this week’s photo, status update, and list of spedlettes—you’ll find more about Mothers’ Day in the commentary.

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Photo

This week’s photo is another one of those that shows a bit of the local surroundings. It’s a view of a new planting in the part of the yard, which part we laughingly call, “the south 40.”

The reference to the “south 40” is a household joke about a part of our lot that is essentially left alone. 15 years ago our friend Ben created some swales there to help control the water run-off, and we planted a couple of plum trees and some berry vines, but one of the plums is the only survivor. In celebration of the 57th anniversary of our wedding, Pat and I gave each other an oak tree to plant.

It’s for the future. In coming years, I hope to provide additional photos of it as it grows. Ten years from now, should I live so long, it’ll probably be taller than I am; of course, it’s has the advantage not only of growing but also of me shrinking, so maybe 10 years is allowing too few growth periods.

It’s SET (teehee) in a pretty open area and, when it matures it should dominate that approximately 40-x-40 area of the yard. For securing the tiny oak and planting it properly, we are endebted to another friend, Phil, and an organization from the Beautyville area, the Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards.

Status update

Substack tells me that SET is edging up to 1200 subscribers, an increase of about 250 from 2025 at this time. About 8% of those folks provide monthly or annual donations to the cause s (i.e., “pay”). I thank them for helping to cover the costs associated with keeping SET going (licenses, fees, taxes, and such).

Part of the reason the community has grown is that SET pals interacted with the magazine over the past year. Y’all share posts, talk about SET with others, dropped comments, and more. I want to acknowledge some of the perpetrators of those actions.

• Flashes of the electrons to Jennifer H., Clay K., Betsy T., Susan O., Joel M., Nancy S., and Dan H., who all provided comments last week. Thank you each for the contibutions. I appreciate the effort to engage in dialogue with me and with the larger community.

• Appreciation to those who restacked posts and notes, including Kelly C.

• Thanks to a few dozen of y’all for dropping “likes” on posts recently. It’s wonderful that you found some of the content worthy of “liking,” and I appreciate the feedback.

• And a special flash to Betsy T., who shared repeatedly last week.

• And serious shout-outs to Joel M., Ed P., Stephanie A.-O., Mack B., Dan H. (of course), and all the rest of you who sent me back-channel notes recently. I hope I responded to everyone’s messages, but if I failed to do so, here’s the missing message of appreciation.

Thanks to y’all who have followed @speciadedtoday. Most of you may know of by aversion to Twitter (more recently known as “X”), Facebook, and other so-called “social media.” I used to push messages to them, but I’ve let that slip in the last year or so. Still, if you’re on one of those platforms, please do not hesitate to talk about SET there. (I’d prefer that you say nice things, but any publicity is good publicity, I guess….)

Spedlettes (AKA “table of contents”)

If your only connection with SET is reading this newsletter, you are missing the “breaking news” (teehee) that appears on the Web site throughout the week. This newsletter appears once a week. I post messages to the Web site [https://www.specialeducationtoday.com] multiple times during the week. Sometimes, I push one of those posts out via the email list, but you can see them all if you regularly visit the site.

I was a little slack this past week. Sigh. But, the table of posts for the past week follows:

1. Special Education Today newsletter 5(43): This is only another update and it covers the week that began 20 April 2026

2. PBS News Hour reported on splitting ASD by severity: What did the eminent journalist Judy Woodruff explain about the question of sub-categories of autism?

3. Over diagnosis of autism: What problems might come from the rise in diagnosis of ASD?

4. E. Hanford interviewed D. Owen: What did the author of the New Yorker story on dyslexia tell Ms. Hanford?

5. Large-scale community treatment for mental health: Would a public campaign of brochures, games, radio shows, and more reduce stigma?

6. Friday catch-up notes—1 May 2026: What did we notice but didn’t write about this week?

7. Promoting spelling interventions for autism: A parent’s pushback: What does a well-informed parent have to say about promoting facilitated communication?

Be sure to check the SET Web site to keep current. You’ll find an HTML-formated version of this newsletter (much prettier than this funky version that comes in the e-mail) as well as any newer posts (and a link to archived posts, with some available to free subscribers and all available to supporting subscribers).

Commentary

I alluded to “Mothers’ Day” at the top of this newsletter. Here’s part of the reason, drawn from a post of 9 May 2020 by noted historian, Heather Cox Richardson:

If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American women that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern society.

So, I want to deliver a shout out to all those mothers who, over the years, have sought to make changes to lead to a better world in which families can raise children and in which children can grow and learn in prosperous and peaceful environments.

And, I want also to provide a special shout out to the mothers of children with disabilities. Although there surely are some father-only families where children with disabilities grow and succeed, it most frequently the case that when we say, “children with disabilities and their families,” there’s a mother involved. Mothers of children with disabilities carry enormous burdens, often thanklessly.

Goodness knows, there are plenty of mothers among the readers of SET, including some who contribute to the commonweal through their own blogs. Some of those contributions are A Great Leap, Another Normal, Finding Cooper’s Voice, Lenore Eklund, Life Alongside Autism, Medical Motherhood, The Educated Parent, and other mothers' stacks. They provide a lot of insight into disability and special education, so I recommend them to readers of SET. And, let’s not forget the parent resources from Emily Oster and her team at Parent Data.

A few years ago, I published a post about one of my experiences as a teaching assistant. I remembered how Teddee Blumberg had the children in our make mothers’ day gifts for their own mothers. Here’s an excerpt from that post:

When I was a teaching assistant with Teddee Blumberg, I helped children to make gifts for their mothers. It was a sage and savvy activity. One year we had them make papier-mâché flowers; it was a multi-day project that required lots of fine motor activities—cutting the petals from newsprint; layering a few starch-soaked petals and then letting them dry overnight so that the flowers grew thicker every day; painting the three dimensional products; gluing a polished stone in the center once the flower had dried; affixing a pin assembly to a heavier weight piece of cardstock to serve as a stable backing and as a way to affix the product to clothing; and assembling the personally created flowers with the pin assembly. All the time we worked with the kids on making the parts of the Mother’s Day Pins (15-20 min a day), we promoted language development: We kept up a stream of questions for them about what they were doing and why they were doing it.

I hope those of you who are teachers can help your students to remember mothers for mothers’ day. And, of course, I hope that those readers who are mothers have a wonderful, joyous time with your children this coming mothers’ day.

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I end here with familiar recommendations mothers and others: Wear your seatbelts (and encourage other passengers in your vehicle wear them, too). Wash your hands frequently. Prefer gathering in safe spaces. Get vaccinated and help others to do so. And, of course, teach your children well.

JohnL
SET Editor guy
Charlottesville

SET should not be confused with a product with nearly the same name that is published by the Council for Exceptional Children. SET predated CEC’s publication by decades. Despite my appreciation for CEC, this product is not affiliated with that organization.

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The problem as Drs. Liao and Fombonne—they are affiliated with Montreal Children’s Hospital and Oregon Health & Science University, respectively—see it is that factors such as diagnostic substitution, expanded boundaries of what constitutes autism, misuse and misinterpretation of diagnostic tools, differing standards for classifying individuals as having autism, and other considerations have led to the oft-discussed increases in prevalence of autism spectrum disorder. This growth in prevalence has had harmful repercussions, especially in diverting important services from individuals (and their families) who are in greatest need of help; services become diluted, the diagnosis becomes trivial, and of more specific problems may be pushed aside in efforts to address autism.

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If you are a regular reader, then you likely can predict that this issue of the newsletter includes those things. I hope that knowing about the contents does not deter either new or regular readers from reading this week’s contents.

Photo

The accompanying mini-video is of a Great Crested Flycatcher in the SET neighborhood. Here’s a link to an earlier one May of 2024 and one from May of 2025. We have had them nesting in cavities on or near our porch for many years. My fantasy is that the mating pair returns to its previous nesting area year after year, so the one in this photo nested near our house in years gone by.

As we understand, in the spring the male of a pair arrives earlier than the female, scouts potential nesting spots, and then (using its distinctive call) invites a female to join him. They build a nest (often containing a snake skin) and raise young.

This year, the so-far-unaccompanied male has been spending a lot of time around our house. I have seen it repeatedly flying into at least five different windows around the house, as shown in this brief video. My supposition is that the bird, obeying messages from its genes, is flying at the windows to dispatch other male GVFs that it sees in the glass. It’s thinking that it has to get those potential rivals to leave the neighborhood, so he and his mate can have babies that survive (and carry on the genes that are sending him those messages).

Ain’t speculating on the causes of behavior fun? My hypothesis is reasonable (minus the “messaging” part?), but it would be a challenge to prove them scientifically. I mean…how does one do an FA when one of the hypotheses is that there’s a genetic cause? That’s a challenge, but if any of you, Dear Readers, have recommendations about how to conduct such an analysis, I would be glad to learn about those plans.

The side point here is important to me. It bugs me when people assert that they know why one of our kids does X, Y, or Z. How do they know? How does anyone know such things? We can, indeed, conduct FAs, and they provide pretty dang strong evidence about causes of behavior. However, I would prefer that people a little more honest: “I think she does X because of M.” Let’s admit that those are hypotheses about the causes of behavior.

What bugs me more? When the speculated cause of a behavior is unobservable-untestable belief about how behavior works. Sigh.

Meanwhile, let me not dwell on my predilections and perseverate on my personal irritants. Let’s get on to discussing what else has happened the past week in SET land.

Updates

Thanks to all you wonderful Dear Readers for your continuing readership. I am regularly encouraged when I open the administrative Web page for SET and see that 100s and 100s of y’all have taken a look at a recent post.

I’m happy to welcome Micki D. to the ranks of the contributing subscribers. She joins lots of people whom she probably knows (and some she probably doesn’t know). The gang of supporters includes Alexis F., Amanda H., Angelique W., Ann R., Anna O., Bear A., Bev J., Bob P., Callie O., Candace S., Carol W., Cheryl D., Cheryl Z., Christy A., Dan H., Ed P. Ed M., George S., Jane B., Jane N., Jean S., Jenni R., Jim P., Jim S., Judy V., Keith L., Kimy L., Kristen A., Kristin S., Larry M., Luann D., Meg. D., Nancy C.-W., Nancy M., Nancy S., Paige P., Pam S. (both of you), Riley M., & Tom Z. Some of these folks have been hanging with SET since the early going, which I noted in a post called “The early birds” this past week.

And, thanks to you Super-Dear Contributing Readers who have kept renewing your subscriptions. I appreciate you letting Substack (via Stripe) hit your credit card every year (or month) for the fee for SET. You can always (when logged in on the Substack Web site) check the status of your subscription by visiting https://substack.com/settings.

Also, it’s a good time to say “thank you” to the fine contributing authors of SET: Li-Yu Hung (National Taiwan Normal University), John Romig (Florida State University), Ana Paula Martins (University of Minho), Mitchell Yell (University of South Carolina), Mandy Rispoli (University of Virginia), and David Bateman (university of all over the place…I’m not sure where he is this week).

Where have I been this past week? As some Dear Readers know, I drop comments on other ‘stacks. If you follow my activity (i.e., “notes feed”), you’ll get notices when I drop a comment elsewhere (and tag it to go to the feed). Some of those notes are kinda-sorta frivolous (e.g., I reported the start of the parap-athletes at the Boston Marathon), but most are actually serious. Here’ are links to a few recent comments: On (a) P. Coyne’s report about DI implementations; (b) Doctor K. Panthagani’s post about logical arguments; (c) K. Vaites’s post about testifying to a school board; (d) G. Ashman’s observations about bogus views on math; (e) Dr. Bill Tozo’s notes on evidence; (f) K. Swenson’s post about hearing happy birthday from her son; and (f) K. Challen’s post about residential placements. Is it worthwhile to have these links in the newsletter?

A bit of good and big news for this week is that SET welcomes a new contributing author. Pamela M. Seethaler is among us now. Pamela is a fine researchers who hangs out at Vanderbilt University, and we are glad to have her in the house. You’ll see her initials in the list of stories for this week (in the next section).

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Spedlettes

Here’s the catalog of posts on SET for the last week. Look for the initials of Pamela Seethaler on one of these posts.

1. Special Education Today newsletter 5(42): This missive is the update for the week that began 13 April 2026 [JWL]

2. Featuring teaching: What does David Didau explain by describing different approaches to engaging children? [JWL]

3. P. Coyne examined DI implementations in the real world: What can we learn from the experiences of actual schools using Direct Instruction approaches? [JWL]

4. US autism identifications skew toward White boys: Who is and is not being identified as autistic? [JWL]

5. C. Ullmer interviewed a boy with multiple disabilities: What might it be like raise a child who has substantial, multiple disabilities? [JWL]

6. Festschrift for Lynn Fuchs: Isn’t this a wonderful remembrance of a wonderful peron’s contributions? [PMS & JWL]

7. Friday catch-up notes—24 April 2026: What should’ve-maybe appeared as a post this week? [JWL]

8. US agency approved gene therapy for deafness: The US FDA moved quickly when the research confirmed earlier international research [JWL]

9. The early birds: Whom am I celebrating at this time of year? [JWL—who else?]

There you have the corpus of posts for the week beginning 20 April 2026.

Notes & comments

I keep encountering articles, posts, and messages about the importance of evidence-based practice in education. Some of what I see is sometimes a bit misleading, as Wayne Cointelpro explained in listing some misrepresentations that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., promoted and Kristen Panthagani noted in her fine post about public health this past week. Sad-to-say, those things happen in special education, too. Sigh.

But I think we can continue to pursue evidence-based practices by employing what we find in the research literature. Now some of that research is more valuable than other research we might encounter. And we also need to be discerning users of the researcher literature. We should not make the rookie mistake of searching for research that supports our previously established beliefs (“Oh, Professor, can you help me me find research that proves that XYZ is the best method for kids with dysgraphia?”). We need to winnow the research for studies that actually tell us about effective practices. I’m working on a longer article that explains what research we need to seek.

But, using evidence-based practices goes beyond wisely selecting practice. Even when we find practices that have proven track records for success, that have been shown to be effective, we need to go a step farther. To be sure, we should employ those practices that have been shown to be effective, but in addition, knowing that our kids are pretty special, we need to recognize that those practices, procedures, and methods that have been shown to be effective in research may not be particularly helpful for some of our kids. Those practices are a good bet, but we need to make sure that they are working for our Jaimes and Marys.

That is one of the reasons that we should our students’ monitor progress. We should make dang sure that those generally effective methods do, in fact, benefit our kids. If they do, hooray! If they do not, get them the heck out of there, replace them with enhancements or even another method that has a track-record of success. And continue to monitor progress, in case the kiddos are still not making progress.

Our kids don’t have time to waste. They, nearly by definition, are behind and we need to be efficient in helping them learn…else they’ll just behinder and behinder. Ugh.

And, that, Dear Readers, is why it’s important to keep yourselves healthy and vigorous. Eat well (and good). Get that rest. Stay safe. Make sure you can be there to teach your children well.

JohnL

John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D.
Founder and Editor, Special Education Today

SET should not be confused with a product that uses the same name and is published by the Council for Exceptional Children. SET predated CEC’s publication by decades. Despite my appreciation for CEC, this product is not designed to promote that organization nor should the views expressed here be considered to represent the views or policies of that organization.

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