Special education staff shortage puts students' futures at risk: How to fix it is complicated

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Each year, more special education teachers resign than graduate from the nation's teacher preparation programs, even as the number of students diagnosed with disabilities continues to rise.

Without enough qualified teachers and therapists, students don't always get the help they need to succeed in school. The shortage also contributes to serious situations where children are locked in small classrooms, teachers physically repress students, or children disrupt their peers' learning because they have not learned to regulate their own behavior.

There was broad agreement that special education staff shortage is a serious problem at a public briefing held by the United States Commission on Civil Rights on Friday. But there were widely divergent ideas about how to solve the problem and what role the federal government should play.

Some educators and experts said the solution is for the federal government fulfill its decades-old promise to cover more of the costs of special education. In their eyes, the Department of Education should flood the pipeline of special educators and offer training to all teachers to better support students with disabilities.

Others said it's about incentivizing work and that special education teachers should be paid more than their colleagues and offered retention bonuses. Still others said states should relax licensing rules and expand private school voucher programs to give desperate families more options.

The information session, intended to inform the president and CongressIt took place as President-elect Trump prepares to begin his second term. Trump has promised to expand school choice and Drastically reduce the federal role in education. – a movement The panelists said it could affect students with disabilities a lot or a little.depending on how the plan is executed.

The briefing did not include testimony from the U.S. Department of Education, which Trump has said he would abolish. Stephen Gilchrist, the Trump-appointed Republican commissioner who called the briefing, said the department's absence was “unconscionable.” A Department of Education spokesperson said scheduling conflicts prevented the agency from being there in person, but it would send written responses.

The debate comes as the number of students with disabilities is growing. About 7.5 million students required special education services starting in the 2022-23 school year, the latest federal data shows, or about 15% of students. That was up from 7.1 million or 14% of students in the 2018-19 school year, just before the pandemic hit.

It is not clear whether the increase is because schools are improving in identify students with disabilities or if more children have needs now. Many young children missed out on early intervention and early special education services during the pandemic.and many educators say they are seeing greater behavioral needs and wider academic gaps in their classrooms.

“Students come to our classrooms with a high level of dysregulation, which is manifested through their fight, flight or freeze responses,” Tiffany Anderson, superintendent of Topeka, Kansas, public schools, wrote in her statement. “Students are also exhibiting more physically aggressive behavior.”

All of this has trickle-down effects. When children become disengaged or misbehave, schools often remove them from class, said Dan Stewart, managing education and employment attorney for the National Disability Rights Network. That could be a suspension or something more informal, like shortening a child's day. So the burden of providing educational support falls on families, said Ariel Simms, president of Disability Belongs, a nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities.

“Parents and caregivers have had to step in to fill gaps in areas such as tutoring, therapy and learning accommodations, which has resulted in increased stress and financial strain,” Simms told the commission in her statement.

Why there is a shortage of special education teachers

There are many reasons for the shortage. Although the number of special education teachers has increased Over the past two decades, demand continues to outstrip supply, writes Chad Aldeman, who researches teacher labor markets. About 16,000 more special education teachers leave public schools each year than teacher preparation programs train to replace them.

Special education teachers are more likely to change jobs or stop teaching than their general education colleagues. On top of that, many districts struggle to recruit and retain paraprofessionals, whose crucial but low-paid work helps teachers meet the needs of students with disabilities. All of this increases the workload and contributes to burnout.

To get by, many schools increase class sizes or rely on substitutes and emergency-credentialed teachers who often lack adequate training to work with students with disabilities.

“We had to hire virtual teachers and those with special visas, which complicated things for our special needs students who were already facing academic and social challenges,” Karen Lockerman, a special education teacher in rural South Carolina, told the commission about how his district handled staffing shortages during the pandemic. “Language barriers and virtual instruction added further difficulties to their learning.”

Some say more funding; others want to extend the coupons

For some advocates, the solution is obvious: The federal government should pay a larger share of schools' special education costs. In 1975, when federal lawmakers passed what would become the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, they said the government would cover 40%.

But “actual federal funding for IDEA has never come close to that and is typically well below half of this ‘full funding’ amount,” Jessica Levin, director of litigation at the Education Law Center, an organization, told the commission. non-profit. Without adequate funding, Levin said, “it is impossible to meet the educational needs and legal rights of students with disabilities, including ensuring there are sufficient numbers of qualified teachers.”

Anderson said the lack of funding means his district has to take money out of the general education budget to cover the costs of educating children with disabilities. Kansas gave schools an additional $75 million to pay for special education this yearbut there are no plans to continue like this for now. The federal pandemic aid that helped is about to expire.

The federal government and states could also do more to break down financial barriers to becoming a special education teacher, said Julián Vásquez Heilig, director of the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group, by offering more scholarships, stipends and tuition forgiveness. loans. Investing in the expansion of “grow your own” initiatives, which often produce too few teachers to change overall staffing levels, could also help.

Jonathan Butcher, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said the federal government could present examples from states like Indiana, who created a program which pays licensed teachers to return to school to earn their special education license and condenses their coursework. The pandemic aid-supported program has trained more than 600 licensed special education teachers since 2021 and has become a reference strategy for some districts to fill vacancies.

In Topeka, Anderson has tried to hire paraprofessionals, career changers and international teachers. Through a state program, parents who had not gone to college or worked in a classroom before received on-the-job training from experienced teachers. Still, all that effort hasn't really made a dent.

“These programs have given us additional alternative pathways; however, the shortage is so significant that it has not eliminated the need and crisis that school districts like Topeka Public Schools continue to face,” Anderson told the commission.

The Heritage Foundation's Butcher also floated another idea: changing federal law so that families can take the portion of IDEA funds that would normally go to their children in a public school and use it as they see fit, an idea similar to create a national voucher program for students with disabilities.

“By making IDEA 'portable,' families could purchase educational therapist services, private school tuition, or other educational products that fit their children's needs,” Butcher told the commission in his statement. “This policy would help relieve pressure on public school officials to find special education staff while also providing families with private education options when frustrating legal battles with school districts prevent students from receiving the services they need. need.”

Many advocates for students with disabilities fear that such an idea would strip children of their right to a free and appropriate education, since families typically have to give up that right to participate in a state-level private school voucher program.

The idea would require congressional action and Trump's buy-in. Still, some are taking Butcher's proposal seriously, as the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a policy manual written by several former Trump White House officials. That plan calls for converting most special education funding into block grants that states would control.

chalk beat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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