Kathleen Tejeda remembers a student who started freshman year simply trying to get by. The teenager was blind, and high school was already hard enough. By the end of her junior year, with help from Tejeda and other school staff, she had made the cheerleading squad and the school choir, and she had sung the national anthem in front of the entire school.
Tejeda, who has worked as a special educator in Riverside County, California, for 20 years, said advocating for students is as much a part of her job as teaching them. Teachers like her are increasingly hard to find. The Learning Policy Institute reports a shortage of special educators in 45 of 50 states, and the gap is widening as the number of special education students climbs past 8.2 million, about 1 in 6 public school students.
The problem is not new. Turnover rose sharply after the COVID-19 pandemic, but shortages have existed since the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act became law in 1975. Liz Bettini, a former special education teacher who now researches the field as a professor at Boston University, rejects the idea that teachers avoid the work because the students are hard to teach. "That has not borne out in our research at all," she said.
Her research points elsewhere. Special educators often feel isolated from colleagues, face more student needs than they can manage, and carry a crushing volume of paperwork. They frequently teach multiple subjects and grade levels, and many feel underpaid. One study found they spend only about a third of their day on instruction. The rest goes to tracking student goals, coordinating services such as speech therapy, training support staff and writing individualized education programs, the legal documents that record each student's needs.
NPR has been collecting voice memos from about a dozen special educators nationwide since the school year began. Diana Swanson, a third-year high school teacher in Vail, Arizona, said no one does the job for the paycheck, and that seeing students smile and take part in their community is what fulfills her. In Chicago, fourth-year elementary teacher Danalyn Garcia said she began this year feeling more prepared, yet sees even greater needs among students. Her school has no walls, so when one child escalates, the disruption spreads through the whole room.
Crises can also push instruction aside. Grace Fitzgerald, a first-year elementary teacher in Peoria, Illinois, had to evacuate her class for safety when a student had an emotional crisis. "No one gets a road map to deal with that kind of situation," she said. Bettini noted that teachers often have to abandon a lesson because the crisis has to come first.
Paperwork is another pressure point. Individualized education programs help families hold schools accountable and support the goal of teaching students with disabilities alongside their peers as much as possible. But they require regular family meetings and knowledge of special education law. Kaori Anderson-Walker, who teaches middle school in Philadelphia, said juggling that paperwork was his biggest struggle until Boys' Latin of Philadelphia hired staff to handle that part of the process last year. "Not having that stress is amazing," he said.
Pay and the supply of qualified people are at the core of the shortage. In 32 states, teachers get no extra pay for hard-to-staff positions, and just 17 states offer such pay, down from 22 four years ago. Hawaii raised special education salaries by $10,000 a year in 2020, cutting vacancies by 35%, though many teachers still left. Analyst Chad Aldeman estimated that about 46,000 special education teachers leave public schools each year while preparation programs train fewer than 30,000, which leaves many schools hiring people who are not fully qualified.
Researchers see some promise in "grow-your-own" programs that recruit people already living in the community, along with supportive administrators and enough planning time. Fitzgerald worked with her school leaders to build planning time into her day, which she hopes will cut her after-school hours and let her be more present with her students.
