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.

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.

This study profiles the qualifications and preparation of special educators from the 2003–2004 Schools and Staffing Survey and investigates their relationship with teaching in a high-poverty school. Based on Berne and Stiefel’s (1984) equal opportunity standard, students with disabilities in high-poverty schools are not provided an equitable education. The results echo state accountability reports that document a shortage of special education teachers meeting the highly qualified teacher standards in high-poverty schools and other research studies on the uneven distribution of teachers. Policies such as alternative certification programs, economic incentives, and induction programs aimed at recruiting and retaining qualified, prepared special educators are considered along with ideas for future research.

This study provides nationally representative information about the qualifications and preparation of secondary content and special education teachers in special education and alternative school settings, as compared with teachers in regular schools. Findings demonstrate that a statistically significant relationship did not exist between school types and many teacher inputs. However, a relationship between special education preparation and setting did exist among secondary content teachers. Moreover, results highlight the inadequate number of secondary teachers, both in content areas and in special education, who held a degree and/or certification in special education. Practical and policy implications of these findings are discussed, and limitations are addressed.

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.