One of Kathleen Tejeda's students began freshman year just trying to get by. High school can be tricky for any teenager, but she was navigating it as a blind person.
By the end of her junior year, with support from Tejeda and other school staff, the student had gone from getting by to going big: She made the cheerleading squad and the school choir. She even sang the national anthem in front of the whole school.
Tejeda, who has been a special educator for 20 years in Riverside County, Calif., said that kind of advocacy is just as much a part of her job as teaching her students. But teachers like her can be hard to find.
There is a shortage of special educators in 45 out of 50 states, according to the Learning Policy Institute, an education research organization. That shortage is growing because the number of special education students is climbing: It's now more than 8.2 million — about 1 out of 6 public school students.
While turnover worsened sharply after the COVID-19 pandemic, the shortage isn't new. It has existed since special education became embedded in federal law with the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975. Half a century later, a fundamental question remains: Why is this shortage of special education teachers so persistent?
Myths and realities about teaching special education
Let's start with a common misconception: The kids are hard to work with, so teachers don't want to do the job. "That is not the case," said Liz Bettini, a former special education teacher who is now a researcher and professor at Boston University. "That has not borne out in our research at all."
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What Bettini's research does show: Special educators can feel isolated from other school staff and feel they have too many student needs to manage. The volume of required paperwork can be crushing. These educators are often responsible for teaching across several subjects and grade levels. Many feel they don't get paid enough to do this essential work.
"That's a very heavy weight to carry as a teacher," Bettini said.
NPR set out to hear directly from about a dozen special educators from around the United States' public schools to learn what it takes to do their jobs day to day. They have been sharing snippets of their lives through voice memos since the start of the school year, and some will open their classroom doors to NPR in the coming months.
"No teacher does this for the paycheck," said third-year high school teacher Diana Swanson, who works in Vail, Ariz., as she sat at her desk the day before her school year began in July. "Just the students, that fulfillment, seeing them fill their cup a little bit, seeing them smile, be a member of society and part of their community. That's what fulfills me."
"I feel like I was coming into this school year more prepared this time around," fourth-year elementary school teacher Danalyn Garcia said late one school night from her living room in Chicago. "Yet, I feel the needs are even greater than the year before."
"Honestly, I had no life outside of school and outside of being a teacher," said Kaori Anderson-Walker, looking back on his first year of teaching middle school in Philadelphia. Now in his fourth year, he said he has finally learned to manage his time more effectively but said the work is still never-ending. "When my students aren't performing where I want them in the classroom, my mind is just constantly moving."
Much of the day isn't spent on teaching
Being an educator of any kind is demanding and requires immense skill. Research shows that burnout among all kinds of public school teachers is high, but it's even more acute for special educators. These teachers work with students who have an incredibly diverse set of needs, including those with autism, learning disabilities such as dyslexia, developmental delays and physical disabilities.
Special educators also do a lot more than teach — in fact, one study found that they spent only about a third of their day on instruction. They spend the rest of their time tracking student goals, coordinating specialized services for students (say, speech therapy or extra reading help), training support staff and writing individualized education programs (IEPs), which are legal documents that track each special education student's needs at school.
In many states, that means teachers must have specialized certification and training, but they typically aren't paid more. In 32 states, teachers get no extra pay for the hardest-to-staff positions, including in special education, according to a recent study.
While all 13 special educators NPR has spoken to said building relationships with students is their favorite part of the work, they also described the realities of those students' needs being more complex than those of many general education students.
"Special educators have reported, 'I can't teach this kid and respond to the student's crisis simultaneously. So I'm abandoning instruction because the crisis has to take priority,'" Bettini said.
For example, Grace Fitzgerald, who teaches elementary school in Peoria, Ill., shared on a drive home from school that one of her students had an emotional crisis that forced her to evacuate the rest of her class for their safety. "It's been challenging mentally and emotionally to kind of go through that at the very end of the first quarter, my first year of teaching," she said. "No one gets a road map to deal with that kind of situation."
Several teachers shared that behavioral challenges with individual students can make it harder to meet the needs of their many other students.
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"Our school doesn't have walls. So we have six classes per grade level in one ginormous room, and it's separated by dividers," Garcia, in Chicago, said. "So when one kid is screaming and crying and begins to escalate, it disturbs the whole pod and then other kids react to it." Getting students back on track can be difficult in these kinds of situations, she said.
Essential but time-consuming paperwork
Individualized education programs are a key part of special education. These written plans, required by federal law, are managed by teachers and other school staff and serve as a kind of road map for each special education student. IEPs outline the student's unique needs and their annual goals. For example, a goal of a student with autism may be to maintain eye contact for a certain period of time.
IEPs help families hold schools accountable, and they also help enforce a primary aim of special education: to teach students in the "least restrictive environment," meaning students with disabilities are taught alongside students without disabilities as much as possible. But IEPs also require regular meetings with families, an understanding of special education law and time spent away from teaching students — time that teachers often don't have.
Then there's the work of putting the IEP into practice in the classroom. Tejeda, of Riverside County, said when she's "pushing in" to other teachers' general education classrooms, she provides targeted support without singling out special education students. "We're going to walk the classroom and check in with everybody, but at the back of our minds, we know that we need to make sure we're [making] accommodations for that particular student."
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For Anderson-Walker, in Philadelphia, "the biggest struggle" was feeling like he had to juggle IEP paperwork with teaching duties. Then, last year, his school, Boys' Latin of Philadelphia, hired staff members who are responsible for the paperwork part of IEPs, leaving teachers more time for the classroom. "Not having that stress is amazing," Anderson-Walker said.
Searching for solutions
In addition to the workload, at the core of the special education teacher shortage are pay and the sheer number of qualified people. Research shows that paying teachers more can help attract and retain them.
For example, in 2020, Hawaii raised special education teacher salaries by $10,000 annually. That cut the state's vacancies by 35%, but it wasn't enough to keep many special education teachers in their jobs. Seventeen states now pay teachers additional money to work in hard-to-staff subjects, including special education. That's down from four years ago, when 22 states did so.
The pipeline of qualified special educators is another big problem. According to education policy researcher Chad Aldeman's analysis of federal data a few years ago, about 46,000 special ed teachers leave public schools every year, while teacher preparation programs train fewer than 30,000 annually to replace those teachers.
Aldeman calls it a crude estimate but said that the rapid increase in demand for special education teachers is outpacing the supply of people trained to do those jobs. Many schools end up resorting to hiring teachers who aren't fully qualified for the work.
But research has found that "grow-your-own" programs that focus on recruiting people who already live in the community may be effective at filling special education jobs. Bettini and her research partners also found that supportive administrators and adequate planning time can help make the work feel more sustainable for teachers.
For example, Fitzgerald, the first-year teacher in Illinois, said she was feeling overwhelmed by her workload at the start of the year. So she worked with her school leadership to build more dedicated planning time into her day.
"I think that's going to be very beneficial and will hopefully lead to a decrease in time spent after school," Fitzgerald said. She uses that time to focus on lesson plans, logging data and writing IEP goals.
It allows her to be more present in the classroom, working with her students.
Visuals and graphics design by LA Johnson and Julianna Conley
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