Special Education Today newsletter 5(39)
Here are the updates for the last week of March 2026
Welcome to this week’s issue of the Special Education Today newsletter. It’s the 39th issue of newsletter for 5th year of SET, and one interpretation of those numbers is that we are nearing the end volume year, about 75% of the way to starting the 6th volume. This issue of the newsletter is full-on free, so please feel empowered to share it far and wide!
Regular readers can accurately anticipate that this issue includes the usual sections: a photo, some status notes, a list of recent posts, and a bit of editorial comment.
Photo
For unrepeatable and unimportant reasons, I’m staying in the swing of spring with the image for this week, but it is a montage of four images, each one of which shows a flower around Pat’s yard. Three of them are pretty much “wildflowers,” but the daffodil is (obviously) cultivated—it’s in a planter.
It’s a wonderful treat to see the wild ones appearing where the Earth was terribly scarred from the construction in 2008-2009. To be sure, Pat imported the Bloodroot, but it is pretty much a native, wild-growing species. In the wooded areas near our house site, there are other examples of spring ephemeral that I have enjoyed in springtimes gone by.
Updates
Thanks to all you wonderful Dear Readers’ for your feedback and observations.
And here is a special thank you to Jennifer H. who mentioned SET in a post—Happy Belated Birthday, B.F. Skinner! Here’s Your Gift—over on her ‘stack, Everyday Behaviorist;
Lest I forget, thanks also to Shasta K. M. of Medical Motherhood for restocking my comment on her regular post from last week, “Cuts and Consequences: This Week Feels Different”;
And thanks to SoL in the Wild for restacking a comment that I made on his post, “Why Choice Fails Students: The Case for Integration Over Selection”; and
Yet one more thanks to Kyle C. who publishes Byson Education Service for sending a thank-you for my restack of his post, “You Are Still a Student.”
Spedlettes
As those who sacrificed part of their real lives know, SET published seven articles this past week. If you were too busy to monitor them as they were announced in e-mail, please content yourselves with the opportunity to review the posts listed here. This week, I wrote all of them, so there’s no need to add brackets about authorship.
For everyone
Special Education Today newsletter 5(38): What might we have missed over the week ending 22 March 2026?
Dan & Don push knowledge: What do these two eminent gentlemen have to say about the explosion of interest in knowledge-rich curricula?
P. Stetler on ICE’s detention of a man with Down syndrome: What if the “police” arrested and incarcerated an immigrant who had disabilities?
Oh my, oh my...autism+ABA fraud again: Distractions in the face of real need?
Friday catch-up notes—27 March 2026: What tidbits didn’t show up as a full post this week?
Dive in to DiveIn: What has been happening on the Division for Research podcast?
For the faithful
Won’t vs can’t, again...sigh: What is the cause of reading comprehension problems?
There you have the corpus of posts for the week that began 22 March 2026.
Even though their names don’t appear in this week’s catalog of posts, I want to say “thank you” to the fine contributing authors of SET: Li-Yu Hung (National Taiwan Normal University), John Romig (Florida State University), Paula Martins (University of Minho), Mitch Yell (University of South Carolina), Mandy Rispoli (University of Virginia), and David Bateman (university of all over the place…he’s always traveling somewhere).
Notes & comments
Dear Readers who have been out and about may have noted that in the last few years “evidence-based practice” has been having a day. Not since perhaps the turn of the millennium—when the phrase “scientifically based reading instruction” made its way into US laws and educational reform dialog—have educators seen so much emphasis on employing practices founded on research. Advocates who objected to the ideas at that time are objecting again these days, but (and you won’t be surprised) I’m pretty happy about the return of that emphasis.
However, in addition to joy or something like it, the return of that emphasis also gives me pause. I am fretful about what scientific evidence provides the bases for reform of instruction. I am fearful, in fact, that research findings might be used to promote yet another swing of the pendulum…and here I think of education as the prisoner in E. A. Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, but that metaphor is too complex—and probably inapplicable—to pursue in these notes.
Let’s just say that I fret about what counts as scientific evidence, what evidence is actually important for advancing reform of instruction, and what implications we draw from the evidence that is being bandied about in discussion of educational reform.
These frets lead me to writing about some meta-research matters. Those who have known me for a decade or two will recognize that I worried about these matters for most of my academic career. I mused about research methods in a paper on adapting instruction for individual differences (“learning styles”) in 1984, wrote research guiding teaching in 1992, collaborated with Russell Gersten and Scott Baker about designing trustworthy research in 2000, provided a detailed discussion of the connection between methods and instruction in a chapter with Paige Pullen, Melody Tankersley, and Pat Lloyd in 2006, and described efforts to encourage open science practices with colleagues (Bryan Cook, David Mellor, Brian Nosek, and Bill Therrien) in 2018.1 2
That is to say, musing about methods is not a new thing for me to do. And, I plan to provide some new musings right here in the pages of SET. I aim to explain what I think we ought to mean when we say, "The Scientific Basis of Teaching,” and how that overlaps with and differs from some much of the yack-yakk that one can read these day about “The Science of This-&-That.” These reflections will not be cast in the dense prose of academic discourse, but rather, in what I hope is accessible (and not too snarky) language.
You, Dear Readers, will have the first opportunity to read them…and while you wait patiently for the opportunity to read them, my Dear Fellow Travelers, I hope that you will remember how important it is (at least from my point of view) that you to take care of yourselves and each other. Please remind people to look both ways before crossing a street (and wait if there is traffic!), buckle their seatbelts, drive carefully, eat healthily, exercise (I’m hoping to be moving again regularly in a 6-8 months), and teach your students well.
And thanks to each and every reader for all that she or he is doing for kids with disabilities and their families.
JohnL
John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D.
Founder and Editor, Special Education Today
References
Cook, B. G., Lloyd, J. W., Mellor, D., Nosek, B. A., & Therrien, W. J. (2018). Promoting open science to increase the trustworthiness of evidence in special education. Exceptional Children, 85(1), 104-118. https://doi.org/10.1177/0014402918793138
Gersten, R., Baker, S., & Lloyd, J. (2000). Designing high-quality research in special education: Group experimental design. The Journal of Special Education, 34, 2-18. https://doi.org/10.1177/002246690003400101
Lloyd, J. W. (1984). How shall we individualize instruction—or should we? Remedial and Special Education, 5(1), 7-15. https://doi.org/10.1177/074193258400500104
Lloyd, J. W. (1992). How do we know? Journal of Behavioral Education, 2, 333-335. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41824016
Lloyd, J. W. Pullen, P. L., Tankersley, M., & Lloyd, P. A. (2006). Critical dimensions of experimental studies and research syntheses that help define effective practices. In B. G. Cook & B. R. Schirmer (Eds.), What is special about special education: Examining the role of evidence-based practices (pp. 136-153). Pro-Ed.
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.
Footnote
The references listed here should be available to readers with connections to academic libraries. If someone cannot gain access to any one of them, she should write to me personally and I can legally and legitimately send a PDF.
I should also note that in a couple of days, the list of work on these topics will grow by two additional publications. I am honored to be listed as a co-author of two studies about the trustworthiness of research findings that will appear in the journal Nature. The studies took something like seven years to complete. These are serious enough studies that Nature will be distributing press releases about them to mainstream media publications such as Science, New York Times, Die Zeit, and similar sources.