The authors conducted a synthetic review of the research literature on the reading development and reading instruction of deaf students and compared their findings to the review of research literature conducted by the National Reading Panel (NRP) on four topic areas: (a) alphabetics (phonemic awareness instruction and phonics instruction); (b) fluency; (c) comprehension (vocabulary instruction and text comprehension instruction); and (d) computer technology and reading instruction. In their discussion of the areas of overlap in the two bodies of research and of the implications for future research, the authors note the lack of research with deaf readers on instructional interventions that have been found to be effective with hearing readers and on the implications for isolation from mainstream reading research.

In this topical issue of The Journal of Special Education, leading scholars in special education reviewed the literature and investigated whether special education is, indeed, special by examining to what degree (a) effective techniques have been developed for students with disabilities, (b) these effective techniques are applied and implemented with fidelity, and (c) utilization of these techniques is unique to special education. In this article, the authors analyze findings from this special issue regarding what is special—effective, implemented, and unique—about special education. The authors found that effective, empirically supported practices have been developed for students with disabilities, that these techniques are used predominantly in special education, and that these effective practices are not implemented regularly or with fidelity. Recommendations to enhance the implementation of effective, research-based practices are offered.

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In the spring of 2000, as discussions regarding the most recent reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act were beginning, the two of us had a conversation about the public perception and future of special education. We were struck by the growing number of disdainful accounts of contemporary special education and found our own perspectives to be quite at odds with what we were reading and hearing. As individuals who have worked in special education in a variety of capacities, we believed that the field has had a primarily positive impact and served an important role in providing an appropriate education for millions of students with disabilities-although we clearly saw the need for change and improvement in some areas. How then, we wondered, could our views and experiences be so discrepant with those of critics calling for the field to be fundamentally changed or even dismantled?We concluded that, at its essence, special education should fulfill three criteria to be considered efficacious and truly special: 1. A range of teaching practices that have been shown to work for students with disabilities must have been developed. 2. Those effective practices must have been implemented with fidelity. 3. The effective practices must in some way be unique to special education; that is, they could not be used as well or as frequently in the absence of special education.If these premises were sound, we believed that special education could be considered truly special and our experiences and viewpoint-that special education has a positive impact and should be maintained-had credibility. With that in mind, we set out to examine the validity of these tenets. We immediately recognized that the vast array of services and populations encompassed within contemporary special education necessitated the involvement of others-scholars with expertise and knowledge in specific, critical areas in special education. This special issue is the product of our invitation to a number of scholars well known for their research to examine the question of whether special education is truly special. We recognize that this is by no means an exhaustive or definitive commentary on the topic. Indeed, we realize that these articles probably raise more questions than they answer. We do hope that this work represents one piece of an ongoing analysis that can be used to both support meritorious aspects of special education and highlight areas in need of change.We are in debt to the authors who stuck with us through this long and sometimes trying process.

The purpose of this study was to identify the reading strategies used by students who are deaf by investigating their self-reported thinking during reading. The participants were 10 elementary students attending a residential state school for the deaf. After each page of reading a short story, the participants were asked to think aloud (or think visibly, in the case of sign language). Analysis of these verbal reports indicated that the participants constructed meaning, monitored comprehension and activated strategies to improve comprehension, and evaluated, but did not demonstrate, each reading strategy within these three classifications. They engaged in a considerably greater variety of reading strategies for constructing meaning than for the other two classifications.