Supply Shortfall
The work of special education teachers is hard. These teachers report higher workloads than others, especially early in their careers. As a result, some state-level analyses have found that, compared to general education teachers, special education teachers are more likely both to move to other schools and to leave teaching. At the national level, a 2021–22 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) survey found that, compared to general-education public-school teachers, special education teachers were about 0.5 percentage points more likely to leave the profession entirely and 1 percentage point more likely to change schools. The survey found similar turnover differences between general and special education teachers in private schools, suggesting there may be inherent challenges in special education roles in both the public and private sectors.
When someone leaves a special education position, that creates an opening. Since there are a lot of special education teachers, there are also a lot of special education openings every year.
Data from the NCES illustrate the scale of the disconnect nationally. In 2020–21, public schools employed 541,000 special education teachers across elementary and secondary schools. Among those teachers, 8.5 percent left teaching and another 9.2 percent changed schools the following year. That means public schools needed to replace roughly 96,000 special education teachers that year.
Omitting from the count those who remained special education teachers but moved from one school to another, that still left a gap of about 46,000 special education jobs that needed filling. Those spots wouldn’t all have to be filled by teachers fresh out of a preparation program. One of the biggest sources of new hires is re-entrants—people who leave teaching for personal or other reasons and then decide to return. Nationally, depending on the year, 20 to 30 percent of new hires in public schools are re-entrants. If those percentages apply to special education hiring as well, that still leaves a large demand for newly licensed special education teachers. And over the last decade, teacher preparation programs have produced only 25,000 to 30,000 new special education teachers per year. This crude comparison points to a very tight labor market for these educators.
The preceding numbers probably undercount the national problem because they don’t account for any growth in special education positions, they ignore the private school sector’s demand for new special educators, and they include general education teachers who decide to retrain and earn a special education license. Worse, this comparison assumes that all newly licensed special education teachers accept a position as a special education teacher. In fact, many people who train to become special education teachers do not end up serving in such roles (more on this later).
The overall supply of teacher-preparation completers is down from where it was a decade ago. However, the supply of new special education teachers did not fall as far, and it has rebounded more strongly than the supply of new teachers in subject areas such as mathematics and English as a second language. (See Figure 3.) In fact, because of those differences, the share of new teachers with a special education endorsement has actually risen somewhat over the last decade.
