Is there a shortage of special education teachers in America's public schools? If so, why? And how can policymakers fix it? The first question sounds like an easy one. Yes, there is a shortage of special education teachers. In 2023-24, more than half of districts and 80 percent of states reported such a shortage. If you doubt the self-reported…

This qualitative descriptive study explored how special education teachers described their retention practices in a specialized school in the northeastern District of Columbia. The most significant issue districts face in staffing schools with qualified teachers is not the lack of certified teachers overall but a chronic and continuous…

Purpose: In this paper we investigate school district staffing challenges during the 2021-22 school year, the second school year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Research Methods/Approach: We use novel data from Washington state collected by scraping websites for job postings during the 2021-22 school year; the districts represented in the study serve…

This article evaluates the applicability at the state and district level of web scraping--an automated data-extraction technique that regularly exports and refreshes data from the Internet--to provide a low-cost way to get a close-to-real-time snapshot of the demand side of the teacher labor market. Once set up, web scraping can quickly build and…

In February 2023, the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) convened a technical working group (TWG) panel of experts on the K-12 special education teacher workforce, including state- and district-level education leaders, teacher educators, researchers, and technical assistance…

Many states struggle with shortages of special education teachers (SET). To address the shortage problem in the long term, policymakers, preparation providers, and state and district administrators must ensure that any short-term strategies are combined with a comprehensive plan that includes long-term systemic strategies to strengthen the supply,…

We describe the extent and predictors of staffing challenges faced by school districts in Washington state throughout the 2021-22 school year using data collected from job posting websites for districts representing more than 98% of students in the state. These data suggest that school districts in the state faced considerable challenges filling…

Research makes clear that having effective and diverse teachers in every classroom matters while teacher turnover, unfilled positions, and underprepared teachers all have a negative impact on student outcomes. In addition, school leaders have a significant influence on a school's climate and culture, impacting teacher retention, student learning,…

Two recent CALDER studies published in "Exceptional Children" provide new evidence about special education teacher preparation and its implications for students with disabilities. The first study (Theobald et al., 2021) shows that special educators who received dual endorsements in special education and another subject had lower rates of…

Debates about charter schools center on their immediate effects on students who attend them and how charter schools affect nearby traditional public schools. However, as the charter sector has continued to grow, a broader range of possibly unintended effects become relevant. This study is one of the first to examine the possibility that charter…

Research on charter schools tends to focus on direct and immediate effects on student outcomes. However, there may be unintended indirect effects on, for example, the teacher labor market. Charter schools tend to hire younger, less experienced teachers with fewer traditional teaching credentials, which may reduce the equilibrium quantity of…

In this study, using Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) personnel data from 2006 to 2014, we identified seven states with consistently low shortages of highly qualified special education teachers and seven states with persistently high shortages. We employed Guarino et al.'s framework to guide our assumptions and selection of demographic,…

Purpose: The Ohio Deans Compact sponsored a study of the supply of and demand for educators to serve Ohio students with low incidence sensory disabilities (LISD). Conducted from August through December 2020, the study appears to be the first of its kind in North America. Such educators include teachers of the hearing impaired, teachers of the…

The purpose of this study was to identify the relationships of self-efficacy, self-advocacy, and professional development opportunity of special education teachers in a suburban public high school in Western, Connecticut. The problem to be addressed is that as the need for qualified special education teachers increases, the number of qualified…

Teacher shortages in special education have been a source of long-standing concern for professionals and parents involved in the education of students with disabilities. Because of their geographic location, culture, and lack of resources, rural administrators have always struggled to staff their schools with qualified special education teachers.…