In this article, the authors describe the complexity of special education teacher (SET) shortage, how shortage undermines equal educational opportunity, and strategies that school districts and state and federal governments have used to combat them. The authors consider the economic consequences of shortage and describe how school budgets are burdened by turnover and, in some cases, litigation. The authors consider specific aspects of SET shortages, including the problems of staffing high-poverty urban and rural schools, recruiting and retaining teachers of color, and staffing alternative educational placements. The authors then consider more general factors related to shortage, including the valence of teaching as a profession, attrition, working conditions, and compensation. The authors describe how broad policy-based interventions, such as federal spending on personnel preparation and alternative route entrées to teaching, have largely failed to remedy SET shortage. Finally, the authors posit that SET shortage cannot be addressed successfully without improving working conditions and differentiating compensation for shortage area teachers and teachers working with struggling students. Although special education cannot achieve such sweeping change alone, the time seems ripe for moving forward on this important agenda.

This article provides a framework and description of pedagogies that may be used in teacher preparation across a range of settings from college classrooms to P-12 settings to support teacher candidates as they learn to use high-leverage practices (HLPs). These “pedagogies of enactment” must include a continuum of opportunities to use teaching practices in increasingly authentic settings, ranging from video analysis, case studies, rehearsal, and virtual simulations to use of practices with coaching support in a classroom (e.g., lesson study, structured tutoring, and aligned field experiences). In this article, we use research on the development of professional expertise and from cognitive science to identify pedagogies from the teacher education research base that have promise for promoting candidates’ learning and describe how these pedagogies might be scaffolded over the duration of a teacher education program to promote learning.

In this commentary, we revisit “NCLB and the Demand for Highly Qualified Teachers: Challenges and Solutions for Rural Schools,” an article we published in this journal in 2005. We consider the predictions we made then about the impact of the Highly Qualified Teacher mandate on special education teacher (SET) shortages in rural states and regions, acknowledging that we overlooked the diversity of rural areas and their differentiated needs in our original article. We then update strategies and programs for preparing, recruiting, and retaining SETs in rural schools and discuss the implications of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which has replaced the No Child Left Behind Act, for special education in rural areas. We note with optimism the resilience that rural areas have exhibited in the face of teacher shortages and see hope in recent technology applications and other context-based strategies.

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, supply, and demand variables and compared two groups in this descriptive analysis. We found significant differences across supply and demand variables. Low shortage states make greater investments in per pupil expenditures; have higher teacher salaries, generally; have greater preparation capacity; and produce more special education graduates. Taken together, our findings suggest that special education teaching is a relatively better job in low shortage states than in high shortage states. We situate the discussion of our findings within policy recommendations that states may use to address shortages. Limitations of our analysis are addressed, and implications for future research are proposed.

As the special education research community continues to identify new evidence-based practices (EBP), educators will need to make choices regarding which EBPs to implement. This article provides educators with practical guidelines for selecting EBPs that will improve outcomes for students with learning disabilities (LD), emotional and behavior disorders (EBD), and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Among the factors for EBP consideration discussed are strength of evidence, cost, complexity and transferability, and contextual fit. By taking these factors (and others) into consideration, educators can make more informed decisions from the outset about which EBPs will work in their particular contexts, meet the specific needs of their students, and lead to long-term sustainability.