Evaluating Read 180's effectiveness for special education students

¶ … Scholastic's Read 180 program is beneficial for low level reading students with special needs, one needs to review all the data available. Once one reviews the data, they can look for similarities and consistencies and thus draw a conclusion as to the usefulness of Read 180 to low level reading students with special needs.

The Scholastic home page uses the case of the Des Moines Independent Community School District, which uses Read 180, as a case example of the products' beneficial use in improving reading abilities of low level reading students with special needs. According to the Des Moines statistics, more than 1,200 special education students participated in the Read 180 program between the years 2001 and 2005. Further, Scholastic hired outside consulting company, Policy Studies Associates, to conduct an independent analysis of student data based on standardized testing results during this period. According to the study, the data indicated that for special education students in Des Moines, Read 180 had "a positive and statistically significant effect." Further, the study showed that Read 180 was associated with "an annual increase of 5 scale-score points on the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test Total Reading scored."

Although these statistics suggest that Read 180 does have a positive benefit when used with low level reading students with special needs, one has to question whether 1) this study was fully independent in that it was presumably funded by Scholastic and 2) whether Des Moines is a representative sample of the national average. Even if these students were special education students, Iowa regularly places at the top of the national average for student scores and abilities. Thus, using Iowa students may bias the results by increasing the benefits in a way not reflective of the national average, which is typically much lower than Iowa's averages.