Schools employ more special education teachers
It's not (just) a supply problem
When the editors at Education Next reached out to me to write about special education teacher shortages, I thought I would be writing about a supply problem. That is, schools face special education teacher shortages year after year because there simply aren’t enough people in the pipeline.
The simple version of this story might be boiled down to saying that “no one” wants to be a special education teacher.
But as I started to dig in, I realized that simple version of the story is completely wrong. Rather than having fewer special education teachers, we actually have a lot more of them. That’s true in raw terms, and it’s also true on a per-student basis.
The chart below presents the data. As I write in my piece, over the last few decades student enrollments rose 5% overall and the number of students receiving special education services rose 16%. Meanwhile, the number of instructional aides (who are often tasked with supporting students with special needs) rose 37% and the number of teachers serving in special education roles rose 59%.
In other words, this is not a supply problem at all! The number of people willing to work in special education roles has outpaced the growth in students receiving special education services. That’s a very different version of the story, and it means we need a different set of solutions to address special education teacher shortages.
What do those solutions look like? Read the full piece at Education Next for my recommendations on potential paths forward.