The Changing Landscape of Special Education Administration

Effective leadership and administrative support for special education are critical issues in today's schools. The field of special education administration is gaining attention in the literature as professionals seek ways to foster accountability and drive change in ways that support the success of students with disabilities and their teachers. The purpose of this special issue of Exceptionality is to address current issues in special education administration and to explore promising directions. This introductory article provides a conceptual overview of the collaborative nature of special education administration, including issues of instructional, ethical, and teacher leadership. This article is intended to serve as a foundation for the succeeding articles within this special issue addressing key concerns within the field.     

Relational Aggression and Friendship During Early Childhood: I Won't Be Your Friend!

Associations between relational aggression and mutual, dyadic friendships during early childhood were assessed in the context of a year-long, short-term longitudinal study. Children's mutual friendships were determined via sociometric ratings and their relationally aggressive behavior among peers was assessed via naturalistic, free play observations. Generally, children who were more relationally aggressive had more mutual friends, although this relation differed by gender and time of assessment. Future work should include measures of friendship quality and investigate the role of relational aggression within friendship dyads.     

The Effects of a Strategic Writing Program for Students with and without Learning Disabilities in Inclusive Fifth‐Grade Classes

The purpose of this study was to test the effects of a comprehensive writing program for students with and without learning disabilities (LD) in inclusive general education classrooms. The program incorporated research‐based components including instruction in a prewriting planning strategy, narrative text structure, writing strategies, and the process approach to writing. The study was conducted in five fifth‐grade inclusive classrooms with 113 students (including 14 students with LD). A quasi‐experimental comparison‐group design was utilized, whereby three intact experimental classes received the writing intervention, and two intact comparison classes received traditional writing instruction. Measures included several writing indicators as well as state writing competency test scores. Results indicated that the students with and without LD in the experimental group made significant gains from pretest to posttest on several writing measures. Although students in the comparison group made some gains, the gains were related to fewer measures than the measures associated with experimental‐group gains, and the effect sizes were smaller.     

The Labour Party and Higher Education: The Nature of the Relationship

Higher education policy has rarely been a major concern of the Labour Party in the second half of the twentieth century. This article explores the reasons for this and analyses the ideological coalition of the Labour Party in the context of the Welfare State and the commitments to moderate social democratic reformism. Three strands in particular are explored: the dominance of vocational, technological and professional priorities in HE expansion; the influence of utilitarian thinking, broadly construed; and the various social purpose, equality perspectives of those on the Left of the Party. Alongside these strands, has been Labour's reluctance to adopt interventionist policies especially in relation to the so‐called elite Universities, and the persistent advocacy of ‘modernisation’. Finally, the article considers, within a context of the debate in general political analysis, the potential of the Labour Party within this period to achieve significant reform in the field of higher education, drawing inter alia on the work of Ralph Miliband.     

The Labour Party and Higher Education: 1945–51

Assessments of Labour's achievements in education in the immediate post‐war period have been largely critical, but almost exclusively focused on schools’ reform. This article in contrast considers Labour's policies for higher education, particularly universities. Three themes dominated the post‐war agenda: science and technology, expansion (and access), and appropriate models of higher education. The demands of science and technology and the conse‐quent need for expansion were the main drivers in Labour's programme. But the failure to offer a clear view of post‐war development in higher education, together with a deep‐seated ambivalence as to the role of technology and vocational education in universities, meant that plans for science, technology and expansion were only partially realised. The issue of appropriate models of higher education has bedevilled subsequent Labour governments, including the present administration, in their search for a policy for higher education.