Special education happiness metric
What could we learn from conducting a reputable survey regularly?
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The World Happiness Report provides annual metrics about how people around the world say that they are more or less happy. What about special ed?
Here's an idea: How about establishing a happiness report about special education? Suppose that parents, educators, and policy makers responded to a simple question: “On a scale of 0-10, how happy are you with support for children with disabilities in your neighborhood (zero is very dissatisfied)?”
Suppose, also, that the respondents are selected in accordance with the standards that are familiar to sociologists and public polling authorities. The sample is actually representative of the the population of people in the world.
Still with me?
There would be associated questions: (a) are you a parent? (b) are you a parent of a child with a disability? (c) do you know a child with a disability? (d) How old is any child you know who has a disability....
I'm thinking about getting a worldwide survey of people's (and especially parents') perspectives about services for children with debilities.
An important reason that I'm interested in this idea is that I would like to track changes over time. Does "happiness" increase over time? Does it change following governmental policy changes? Does happiness increase for some denizens of the world but decrease for others?
We speducators ought to be monitoring the social validity of our efforts. Do consumers find our efforts helpful?
I know when I lived in West Virginia, I heard a couple of presentations from their state department of education about a similar survey that was sent to the parents of children served under IDEIA across the state. The results were, unfortunately, overwhelmingly negative in that parents were not happy with the treatment of their children in the schools, were not happy with the services provided to their children, etc. The limitation to their data was that they had a very low response rate. So, that makes me question if parents who are happy with how their children are treated in schools don't feel like they need to make those positive comments? Or perhaps the parents who are unhappy are the ones with the loudest voices (albeit electronic)? I also don't have a breakdown of from where the responses came in terms of county. In West Virginia, there are certain counties where there is minimal (if any) internet connectivity and this was an electronic survey sent out to parents. I think the survey is a good idea but I think West Virginia might be the example of what not to do.
I think this is an interesting idea, John, though I'm not sure that the possible comparisons that might result from a one-size-fits-all survey would tell us much on their own given the contextual differences across countries that impact the education--sometimes special, sometimes inclusion, sometimes "just" general education, and sometimes, unfortunately, nothing--that could confound the results and their interpretations.
I wonder if your core idea of international comparisons of the social validity of educational services to children and youth with disabilities and their families, though, could be examined through existing information in the literature. I wouldn't be surprised if "consumer satisfaction" type studies have been conducted in a number of countries.
Here's an unpublished example from a consultancy project with which I'm involved in an African country. Learners with special educational needs--a variety of them, coming from all regions of the country--were surveyed about their education as one part of the effort. These are the results along with our interpretation of what they said about their teachers:
The large proportion of the respondents reported, though, that their teachers’ treatment of them was affirming; 85.6% felt that they were treated like any other child by their instructors. Small percentages thought they were treated with sympathy (6.5%), indifferently (2.9%), or badly (2.9%). Though only 12.3% of the sample when combined, this is a situation that needs to be addressed. Some students were not sure how their teachers were treating them (2.1%). There were no statistically significant differences between the responses of male and female learners to this item of the survey.
As this was a quantitatively analyzed survey, the possible responses were limited by the instrument. But I think this does say something about their education that could be related to a "happiness" consideration.
An integrative, international literature review could identify studies that investigated consumer satisfaction, doing so separately across different groups, such as students, parents, and teachers, and examine them despite their methodological differences to come up with some big picture results.