Special Education Today newsletter 5(15)
If you need a link to any posts for the week just passed, here's a list of them
Hello, Dear Readers, wherever your environs are. This is the newsletter for Special Education Today for 13 October 2025. This issue of the newsletter is the 1452 post for SET (all of which are available in the achieves).
If you’ve read a few score—or even just a few—of these newsletters, you’ll know what to expect. You’re going to find a photo, notes about the status of Special Education Today, links to the posts for the past week, some ramblings, and maybe a little other content, too (but not much, ‘cause I’m sickly and need some rest).
Anyhoo, please keep reading…!
Photo
Once upon a time, I had more hair, better eyesight, and thought I actually understood some stuff. I think this image is from Taipei in 2006.
Li-Yu Hung had about 100 smart students running around asking me excellent questions. It was a dang good thing that they spoke English, because my Mandarin was limited to 你好 and 谢谢.
That I’ve forgotten a lot of knowledge and skills in the last 20 years will not deter me for spouting off in these pages. You have been warned!
Status update
SET grew by a few more subscribers this past week. Although the total is still hovering just below 1000,1 this still feels like good news to me. Welcome to new subscribers, especially to those who recently joined the ranks for the paying readers—谢谢 to Alix!
Nearly 9% of these subscribers are people who are contributing to make SET available to all of us. Special thanks to those peeps. I greatly appreciate you spending just a bit over $1 a week on SET. In addition to helping subsidize the broader readership, those contributions are going to facilitate some new features in the coming weeks and months.
While I’m doling out the 谢谢s, here’s expressions of appreciation to Mike N. (5x!),2 Clay K., Michael G., Mary R., and Sally B. for contributing to the discussion this past week. It’s great that they are leaving comments for everyone to review.
The past week’s sped lets
Sometimes I think of SET as a source for learning about effective education of children with disabilities and their lives with their families. I think this past week reflects SET’s eclectic nature. (Write to me if you would like to see SET cover different “beats” than those one regularly sees…or skip some beats? Just reply to this newsletter and I’ll get your message.)
Here is the list. You’ll be unable to blame any of my co-contributors for the errors in the posts for this week, as I [JWL] wrote all of them.
Special Education Today Newsletter 5(14): How about a brief hop along memory lane for the past week? [JWL]
Ed Week on treatment of ADHD in schools: Would you believe that Elizabeth Heubeck’s popular press story reveals both problems and solutions? [JWL]
Oopsie!: What on Earth did I do wrongly yesterday? [JWL]
US funding of autism research projects: Where is $50 million going? [JWL]
Taking mothers off the hook for causing autism: Why have the mothers of children with autism been the target of blame so often? [JWL]
The Arc’s campaign videos for 2025: Who wouldn’t find this effort to support people with disabilities compelling? [JWL]
Orchids and onions for US funding of $50 million for autism research: What did reporters for The Washington Post learn for individuals interested in the research projects? [JWL]
Reforming teacher education?: Would it help kids with disabilities if schools and colleges of education were different? [JWL]
Four undersecretaries of education confirmed: Although none of them are directly responsible for special education, these people are assuming very influential positions in the US education world [JWL]
US federal special education workforce reduced: Should we be fretting about losing the entire enterprise? [JWL]
If any readers are interested in finding these and other posts, please point a browser at https://www.SpecialEducationToday.com and review the offerings. The first page will show relatively recent posts, but click the “archive” at the top (or, you may see a button at the bottom that permits one to see “more”—or something like that). In addition, it is possible to search for posts; just use the little “looking glass” at the top.
Of course, please be advised that not all of the posts are available to the general public. Some are reserved for readers with paid subscriptions.
Commentary
Teacher eduction has been a subject of interest for me ever since I was a teacher in the 1970s. I’ve sustained it for that long, but that interest came on strongly when I read a column by a famous authority on education policy (Robert Maranto) who criticized teacher education, and I responded to it…and Mike G. and Mike N. replied to the post with insightful comments. That experience encouraged me to write about what teacher education would look like if I ran it.
Then I read an insightful and informed post for 8 October 2025 by Tom Critchfield entitled “More on ABA’s 8th Dimension: Evidence That Implementation Breeds Interest, Not Vice Versa.” Tom’s column simply strengthened my resolve to write that vision. He suggested that explaining principles of behavior analysis and encouraging people to use them appears to have been less effective in transforming practice than having people use those principles day in and day out, such as experienced by people using behavior analytic procedures with children with autism. As a second example, Tom also pointed to the implementation of behavioral principles that are embedded in Positive Behavior Intervention and Support, which is in used in 1000s of schools and is becoming an entrenched part of ever more of them across the US.
One key to adoption, in Tom’s argument, is that the demand for behavior analytic services for autism and the growth of PBIS gets people to use them. Tom proposed what he called “Slime Theory” (he capitalized it).
Those examples illustrate success breeding success, and the triumph of experience over “information.” Implementation creates something that’s entirely unremarkable from a behavior-principles perspective but formidable in its practical implications: reinforcer sampling. Drawing upon the venerated scholarly treatise known as Slime Theory (inset3), we can predict that once people get a taste of what effective behavior technology can do for them, they usually want more.
So, II’m going to recommend a teacher development approach that draws on the old idea of learning by doing, but inverts the usual teacher education sequence of training.4 For most teacher education programs, student teaching (the doing) is saved for the end of a multi-year project. I want to have teachers start doing right from the get-go and keep doing throughout their programs.
Here are quick notes about what I mean.
Pre-service teacher education
Instead of pouring vacuous theories into pre-service students’ eager thinking, put them into actual—but highly controlled—teaching situations. Give them a week of very specific training and then have them teach small group lessons in a real school with honest-to-goodness children from a highly structured, scripted, curriculum. They would run three lessons every morning with close coaching.
One would have to make sure that these students were using highly effective instruction curricula and methods, of course. That will require the teacher educators to have agreements with the cooperating school sites about what would be happening during these lessons. But, the “sell” of the program would be eased by delivering effective instruction that would benefit the students in those schools.
I hypothesize that the pre-service teachers will see the effects of their teaching readily. Those who work with primary grade students will see their children reading full sentences fluently and with prosody by the winter holiday. Those who work with upper-elementary students on math will see their students succeeding at adding fractions with unlike denominators by Thanksgiving.
Once you have seen that you can be successful, it’s hard to give up doing that successful way. Of course, when students graduate, they may be hired by schools that don’t use the scripted programs they have learned. That’s OK. Give them a semester learning how to adapt Poopy Curricula so that they’ll be able to employ the skills they have learned during the previous two-three years of practicing doing effectively.
Behavior management? Sure. Make sure that the schools where these pre-service teachers are practicing their teaching skills are schools that have super-good implementations of PBIS. Make sure that the schools actively teach their students how to behave, that they have engrained good programs for teaching appropriate behavior and they have coaches who can help teachers to employ those programs.
And there will likely be demand for teachers with the sort of skills these pre-service teachers will have. As other schools see that these teachers can be successful, there will be opportunities. Of course, there would be those schools that use the very practices that the pre-service trainees learned to use—and would be glad to get new teachers who would be able to slip right into the culture. One might even envision bidding wars by schools seeking to secure these teachers.
Impossible? I’ve seen savvy professors do similar things. My former colleague Paige Pullen provided a one-year class on teaching reading that prepared special education students to enter the teaching the world with the skills and knowledge (and confidence) to teach beginning and remedial reading effectively. If she could have had the infrastructure to I’ve just described…watch out!
In-service teacher education
Instead of teaching “professional development” as an add-on to teaching, turn it into an internship in effective teaching. This proposal would require substantial external funding, but the way that donors throw 10s of millions of dollars at projects, that funding might be available.
Fund a program in which practicing teachers take a one-year sabbatical, all expenses paid, to become resident faculty members at a special school. Those special schools would have existing instructional systems (both academic and social-behavioral) that included effective practice. Curricula known to be effective. Instructional delivery practices shown to be effective. Behavior management practices demonstrated to be effective.
Much like the pre-service teachers, the in-service teachers would be immersed in an entire program of effective instruction. They would have coaches who know how to do it the right way and had shown that they could help others to do so, too. They would get to see kids acquiring reading, mathematics, writing, and social-behavioral competence…and contrast that with what they knew from their previous days.
They, too, could get advanced training in how to adapt Poopy Curricula. When they finished their Year Abroad, they would probably need to make changes at the schools to which they returned.
Summary
Build environments in which teachers can practice (and practice and practice) using effective instructional practices. Don’t require them to invent the lessons and procedures. Ensure that they can use those practices with fidelity. Anticipate the hiccups that they are likely to experience in “the real world” and help them to practice how to overcome them.
After they have demonstrated competence, then you can give them a mini-library of books about education. They can read all about Piaget, Gagne, Vygotsky, Frier, Skinner, Kozol, and other famous educators or education thinkers, and they can contrast that with what they know from experience about effective teaching. But, I wouldn’t distract them with such exercises during the time they are learning to teach.
Closing
Lest you think I might have forgotten, here are the usual recommendations: (a) Wear your seatbelts (and make sure your children’s seats are affixed properly). (b) Get the up-coming fall vaccinations as appropriate. (c) Maintain a focus on finding joy. And (d) please, teach your children (and your teachers!) well.
JohnL
SET Editor guy
Charlottesville
Footnote
Who knows? Maybe by the time this newsletter has been out in the wild for a day, the total number of subscribers will be 1000 or greater. (Of course, as I’ve explained previously, there are another ~300 followers. Maybe I am obsessing about the 1000 number?)
Five! Five comments…in one week. This has got to be a record. I’m not going to look. (Mike tells me he’s up a river on a vacation cruise. Sounds like he might be misspending his time?)
The reference to an inset is to an image in the blog. It shows a drawing of hands coated in semi-transparent green goop. You can go to Tom’s blog post to see the image.
Savvy readers will hear echoes of Kathy Madigan’s interview with Zach Groshell in my suggestions. She isn’t to blame for what I’m writing here, but I think she’d be supportive of it. Shoot, if someone wanted to do what I’m suggesting, I think she’s be among the best consultants for such projects. (No kickbacks accepted.)