Anna has serious learning differences, but she's bright. She was impulsive and irrepressible. She was often subject to high levels of anxiety and had difficulty focusing. She was sociable, but she didn't know how to make friends. Anna needed a calm, structured environment which valued academic achievement, but did not push the students to take on…

In the last three decades, special-education programs in the United States have grown at a tremendous pace. Much of this growth reflects a growing incidence of students diagnosed with the mildest form of learning disability, called a Specific Learning Disability (SLD), and thus the hardest to distinguish from an ordinary cognitive deficit. Between…

This paper evaluates the impact of exposure to a voucher program for disabled students in Florida on the academic performance of disabled students who remain in the public school system. The authors utilize student-level data on the universe of public school students in the state of Florida from 2000-01 through 2004-05 to study the effect of the…

Recent national studies show that nearly 2 million children have preventable learning "disabilities," and the number of students classified as learning disabled could be reduced by as much as 70 percent with rigorous early reading instruction. In predominantly white school districts, minority students are classified as learning disabled…