Abstract
Three years ago my co-authors of The State of the Special Education Profession Survey Report and I met at CEC for the annual Leadership Conference While there, we began speculating about the state of the profession, broadly including teachers, administrators, related-services professionals, and higher education faculty in research and teacher preparation.
We marveled at the increase in evidence-based practices in our field over the past 20 years but wondered why we lacked data on the perspective and sense of efficacy of educators charged with implementing the practices. We shared our discussions with our colleagues in the CEC Pioneers Division, who enthusiastically agreed to sponsor the initial work in producing The State of the Special Education Profession Survey Report. Those early discussions began planning that led to a national survey of special education teachers and the report presented on page 10 of this issue of TEACHING Exceptional Children. Our initial thoughts were to include voices from all sectors of our broad audience. But the reality of creating a survey to encompass all roles associated with special education quickly overwhelmed us, our design team, and the many members who participated in focus groups.
We acknowledged the critical nature of partnerships and collaborations within special education and pragmatically decided to stage our efforts, beginning first with teachers, who have daily contact with students with exceptionalities and their families. The CEC Executive Board agreed, and CEC provided support for emailing surveys and conducting data analysis.
Our hope and expectation is that, having set the stage with extensive survey results from teachers, other researchers will extend these efforts to assess the views of the many educators, early interventionists, specialists and administrators who are involved in providing services to children and youth with exceptionalities. Likewise, we hope this article will prime the pump for increased collaboration among the CEC divisions and the CEC unit leadership community to further explore issues within their topical areas (e.g., low incidence disabilities, administration), geographical areas, and local policy concerns.
Special education needs are pressing: in the United States, more than 7 million children receive special education (ages birth through 21 years) according to the 2018 Annual Report to Congress.
At the same time, 48 States report a shortage of special education teachers and more than half of all districts report challenges attracting qualified special educators. Attrition is alarming: nearly twice as many special education teachers leave the field (12.3%) as general education teachers (7.6%).
These are not teacher problems; these are systemic problems. Most respondents expressed high levels of competence in their own instruction, assessment and classroom management skills as well as their use of the IEP to guide instruction of children with exceptionalities. They raised concerns about issues that involved systems-level support (e.g., planning time, resources, support for collaborative practices, case-loads, knowledgeable and supportive administrators). Solving these issues require attention to practice at the school, district and state/provincial level as well as to policy and advocacy at all levels to ensure resources are available. It has implications for professional development, licensure and standards.
We have begun conversations with key organizations and other associations, such as the Office of Special Education Programs and the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE). We expect to expand these conversations to partnerships at the national, state and local level to address these findings. We invite CEC members to use these data to engage with local schools and districts, state departments of education, and with CEC divisions, units, and chapters to further the impact of these findings.