Are Two Teachers Better Than One?

Abstract

Co-teaching, 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 co-teaching across a large public school system. We find evidence that co-teaching 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.