Are Two Teachers Better Than One?

Abstract

Coteaching, in which a general education teacher and special education teacher collaboratively provide instruction to students with and without disabilities in the same classroom, is widely endorsed as a strategy to give instructional support to students with disabilities within inclusive environments. We leverage longitudinal administrative data in Massachusetts to provide the first causal estimate for the effect of coteaching across a large public school system. We find evidence that coteaching leads to statistically significant test score improvements for both students with and without disabilities. However, the benefits for students with disabilities are much smaller than reported in prior studies.