Special needs students in regular education: do they affect their classmates?

The impact on regular students is a prominent concern in the inclusive education debate. Recent studies find that the presence of students with special educational needs harms the achievement of regular students. This study investigates inclusive practices in Dutch primary and secondary education, where regular schools get substantial financial compensation for educating students with special educational needs. Using student fixed effects, school fixed effects and neighborhood variation, I consistently cannot reject that there are no effects of inclusive education, although the coefficients are precisely estimated.