INITIATIVE

Organizing Schools to Serve Students with Disabilities

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In the year following the publication of Getting Down to Facts II, PACE heard from stakeholders in Sacramento, California and across the state that more knowledge on how to better serve students with disabilities was needed to guide policy and practice. The absence of practical knowledge on systems to support special education juxtaposed with the urgency that decisionmakers were placing on designing new special education policy made it well-suited as a topic of a PACE Policy Research Panel. On August 13, 2019, PACE hosted a meeting of key actors in special education policy, practice, and research (see below) to reimagine how students with disabilities are served in California and to identify the knowledge needs to make that vision a reality for all students. While discussions of special education in California often focus on issues of special education finance, the emphasis of the PACE Policy Research Panel on Special Education was to clarify the type of system we seek to build to serve all students—including students with disabilities.  The full set of publications were released on February 18, 2020, with a webinars on February 27, March 5, and March 10 to share findings. 

Recent Initiative Publications
Policy Brief Myung Feb 2020
A Summary of the PACE Policy Research Panel
More than 725,000 of California’s K–12 students qualified for special education services in 2018–19, but they entered a system that is often ill-equipped to serve them. This brief summarizes the findings from the PACE Policy Research Panel on…
Policy Brief Gee February 2020
Characteristics, Outcomes, and Transitions
In this brief, we leverage data from eight school districts, known as the CORE districts, to describe students with disabilities (SWDs) by their characteristics, outcomes, and transitions into and out of special education. We found that the…
Policy Brief Hunt Feb 2020
Only about 10 percent of eligible infants and toddlers with developmental delays nationwide receive early intervention services, which are widely agreed to reduce delays and lessen the adverse effects of risk factors and disabilities on learning and…
Policy Brief Kasari Feb 2020
California continues to fall below national averages in identifying and serving infants, toddlers, and preschoolers with developmental disabilities. The transition between infant/toddler services, administered by the Department of Developmental…
Policy Research Panel Members