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Teacher and Administrator Preparation, Training and Retention | The Shortages | Teacher Certification and Licensure | Teacher Preparation | Data-Driven Education and Public Reporting | Teacher Recruitment and Retention | Professional Development | Training Teachers to Provide Quality Reading Instruction | The National Shortage of Special Education and Related Services Professors | The Importance of Minority Teacher Recruitment | Conclusion
Teacher and Administrator Preparation, Training and Retention
Recommendation—Recruit and Train Highly Qualified General and Special Education Teachers. States and districts must devise new strategies to recruit more personnel who are highly qualified to educate students with disabilities. State licenses and endorsements for all teachers should require specific training related to meeting the needs of students with disabilities and integrating parents into special education services. States must develop collaborative, career-long professional development systems that conform to professional standards.
Recommendation—Create Research and Data-Driven Systems for Training Teachers of Special Education. Formal teacher training should also be based upon solid research about how students learn and what teacher characteristics are most likely to produce student achievement. State Education Agencies (SEAs) and institutions that train teachers and administrators should implement data-driven feedback systems to improve how well educators educate children with disabilities.
Recommendation—Institute Ongoing Field Experiences. Post-secondary institutions and state and private organizations that train teachers should require all students to complete supervised practicum experiences in each year of their training. These practices provide them with a comprehensive view of the full range of general education, special education and inclusive settings or service delivery models for students with disabilities.Recommendation—Require Rigorous Training in Reading. States and school districts must implement more rigorous requirements for training educators in scientifically based assessment and intervention in reading. General and special education teachers must implement research-based practices that include explicit and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
Recommendation—Require Public Reporting. Title II of the Higher Education Act should require programs for teacher education, administrative personnel and related services personnel to publicly report the performance of general education and special education program graduates relative to educating students with disabilities.
Recommendation—Increase Special Education and Related Services Faculty. Institutions of higher education should recruit and train more fully qualified professors of special education to address the shortage of special education and related services doctorate holders who are qualified to teach our nation’s future educators and prepare them to achieve better results for diverse learners.
Recommendation—Conduct Research. The Department of Education, in collaboration with other federal agencies, should conduct research to identify the critical factors in personnel preparation that improve student learning and achievement in schools. While recent research has begun to determine critical factors in instruction, more high-quality research is needed on instructional variables that improve achievement by students with disabilities.
Our nation is less likely to serve children with disabilities well because of our failure to appropriately train, recruit and mentor special education teachers. This will not only undermine our efforts to increase the achievement of students with disabilities; it will frustrate our efforts to improve our schools and increase the academic achievement of all children.
In response, the Commission recommends a series of changes to our teacher education programs for special educators, state licensure requirements, public accountability data systems and the translation of research knowledge into real classroom practice. Most notably, the recommendations will have major implications for general education teacher training programs and local school induction programs for all teachers.
Put simply, too many general education teachers lack the skills to teach children with disabilities effectively, and too many view serving those children as the responsibility of special education teachers. They lack those skills because too many teacher colleges and other professional development programs have failed to provide them that knowledge. Those teacher preparation programs fail to provide such background because many faculty lack the valid, scientific knowledge necessary to teach children with disabilities today. These problems are exacerbated by shortages of special education teachers, administrators with special education knowledge, and post-graduate instructors. The Commission strongly recommends that teacher colleges, state educational agencies and local schools implement the above recommendations to prevent the decline in the quality of our nation’s teachers.
There is a shortage of personnel adequately trained to provide special education and related services to children with disabilities. According to the U.S. Department of Education-funded SPeNSE study, more than 12,000 openings for special education teachers were left vacant or filled by substitutes in 1999-2000.58
The growing shortage of special education teachers alarms this Commission. Ninety-eight percent of school districts report special education teacher shortages.59 Roughly 10 percent of special education positions nationally—39,140 positions—are filled by uncertified personnel who serve approximately 600,000 students with disabilities.60 The proportion of special education positions held by uncertified personnel is even higher in some states.61
“Consistently, the single biggest factor affecting academic progress of populations of children is the effectiveness of the individual classroom teacher—period. The sequence of teachers that a child has will add more to their own personal academic achievement than probably any other single factor.”
—William L. Sanders, Ph.D.
Teacher Certification and Licensure
These shortage figures only address certified personnel. Certification is not a direct analog for qualification, and data do not indicate that certification necessarily provides a qualified teacher. Therefore, we must provide better indicators of what skills and abilities constitute competence for a qualified educator to achieve results for a student with a disability. In addition to the shortage of qualified special education teachers, the U.S. Department of Education estimates we will need more than 200,000 new special educators during the next five years, but colleges and universities currently have the capacity to prepare only about half that number.62
This Commission strongly believes in the teaching profession, yet we find that existing state systems of teacher licensure for special educators, with their various provisions for alternative, provisional and emergency certification, must be radically overhauled. Our review of relevant literature and the testimony provided before this Commission compel us to call attention to the need for reform in teacher certification and licensure. If for no other reason, we find no direct relationship between increased results for children with disabilities and whether a teacher holds a certificate or license.
While all 50 states and the District of Columbia require special education teachers to be licensed, the form and content of that licensing procedure varies greatly. Whether that license is in addition to a general education credential varies widely from state to state. Some states require specialized licenses in individual disability categories in addition to general educational preparation.63 Many colleges and universities offer baccalaureate programs in special education and also provide access to the courses that may be required to fulfill licensure requirements that variously include, among others, educational psychology, legal issues of special education and child growth and development, as well as general knowledge and skills required to teach children with disabilities.64
State licensure systems cannot ensure mastery of essential content or skills, largely because their means of assessing mastery are unclear. Rather, states presume that a teacher who has completed these requirements and then passed a low-level assessment is competent.
Therefore, we find that existing special education certification must be more focused on results and measurable qualifications of educators than now exists. What is particularly disturbing is that this Commission heard from leading teacher education researchers that no research exists as to whether certification and years of teaching experience are reliable predictors of student achievement for students with disabilities receiving special education. This is an area of research we desperately need in order to inform the educational community of evidence-based instructional practices for students with disabilities.
“[H]igher education ought to be driven by empirical results related to changes in children’s competencies rather than philosophically driven. I think much of higher education is driven by a set of premises about what children ought to be like rather than what works with kids.”
—Daniel J. Reschly, Ph.D.
Although there is currently not enough strong research about the teacher characteristics that affect student achievement, we do know that certain factors have a strong effect in producing student achievement. A synthesis of research shows that:
• Teachers with higher levels of general verbal ability tend to be more effective;
• Teachers who have developed knowledge of the subject they teach by majoring in it in college are more effective, particularly for math and science in middle and high school; and
• Teachers who have had intensive professional development in the curriculum they are expected to teach are more effective.
Teacher preparation institutions must move from folk wisdom, weak research and opinion on what are important characteristics of effective teachers and begin to focus on helping to strengthen the teacher competencies that have clear data for producing student gains.
The current system of pre-service and in-service education is not sufficient to produce personnel who can ensure students with disabilities achieve satisfactory outcomes. The high rate of attrition for both general and special education teachers is partly attributable to this less than robust system. All too often, curricula and methodologies utilized in colleges of education are not empirically connected to improved student achievement. And, too often, professional development offered to new and veteran teachers is inadequate in impacting student achievement. The Commission finds that both pre-service and professional development training must ensure that instruction in pedagogy is research-based and linked directly to student learning and achievement.
Many special education programs share attributes of effective general teacher preparation programs. Moreover, unified teacher education programs (i.e., integrated special/general education programs) more closely resemble all the attributes of effective teacher education programs, and may be better positioned to help students in general and special education develop the skills noted above.
Early field-based practical experience for teacher education would help students know what will be expected of them in teaching. The Commission recommends that college and university teacher training programs provide exposure to the classroom environment and the practice of teaching early in the first year of teacher training. Preparation of teachers must be supervised and relevant, with pre-service teachers receiving continual guidance and feedback as well as induction into the teaching profession. A principal goal of this experience is the ability to integrate and apply knowledge productively and reflectively in practice.65 The Commission recommends that this type of practicum experience be integrated into all college teacher preparation programs.66
Despite chronic shortages in the availability of special education personnel documented since 1988, the Congress did not adequately address the issue in the 1997 IDEA reauthorization. Throughout the 1990s, funding was primarily made available to stimulate innovation. This reinforces a constant cycle of new versions of practices—often unvalidated—in personnel preparation without support for the development and maintenance of effective personnel preparation programs. The result is low numbers of personnel who are well trained in scientifically based teaching practices.
Federal funds supporting teacher-training programs must be competitively awarded to institutions of higher education to develop, maintain and sustain high-quality personnel preparation programs rather than the current practice of funding different short-term programs. The Commission finds that allocating federal funds to invest in teacher preparation programs demonstrating high levels of effectiveness must become a priority for the U.S. Department of Education. Supporting an ever-changing series of “innovative” programs at the expense of long-term support for quality teacher training programs has not resulted in sufficient numbers of new special education teachers entering the classroom.
Data-Driven Education and Public Reporting
Higher education institutions have trained millions of teachers. Researchers and policy makers offered innumerable analyses of what leads to the development of quality teachers. Yet, very few higher education institutions or states have determined exactly which teachers have later proved to be high-quality teachers. Although they would be the primary beneficiaries of such information, most school districts lack a sufficiently large pool of data elements—teachers—to make collecting data related to the performance of their students worth their while. State educational agencies and universities could collect these data but, for a variety of reasons, do not do so. As a result, local administrators continue to use qualitative tools and personal experience to guide their recruitment and induction efforts. State agencies and colleges in turn lack key knowledge that would help lead reforms in their policies and teacher training programs. It is important that research efforts focus on teacher characteristics related to improving student achievement.
A solution lies with creating more data and putting that data to use. The Commission recommends that state and local education agencies enter into partnerships with universities and colleges to collect data on the career path of teachers and the aggregate achievement of children. The data would permit universities to refine their programs based on how well their teachers later perform. Colleges would abandon practices that do not work in favor of those that do.
The change would also drive state and local agencies toward quality programs. Universities that poorly prepare teachers would likely see their application pools shrink while teachers leaving strong training programs would find multiple offers for their services. To further drive college programs toward quality, the Commission recommends these data be made publicly available by institution. Public scrutiny of performance will help all stakeholders—deans, university boards, state licensure authorities and students with tuition dollars—make better decisions about those institutions.
Teacher Recruitment and Retention
There is little research about effective strategies to address the current personnel shortage. As a result, the Commission calls on states and districts to devise new approaches to recruiting personnel who are highly qualified to educate students with disabilities. Promising strategies include:
• Experimenting with differential pay for educators in shortage specialties;
• Experimenting with performance-based or knowledge-and-skills-based pay with the possibility of higher pay for successful special educators;
• Developing high-quality alternative routes into classrooms that enable high-potential educators to enter the profession and receive on-the-job professional development; and
• Improving working conditions of special educators by reducing paperwork and mitigating the adversarial nature of special education (issues addressed elsewhere in this report).
“We know that ongoing professional development is essential for educators to remain current in their teaching methods. As an urban school district administrator, I know the value and importance of this.”
—Commissioner Paula C. Butterfield, Ph.D.
Teacher preparation must be seen as a career-long continuum of development.67 Professional development does not end with a basic credential in teacher education. Instead, teacher-preparation must be seen as a long-term developmental process, beginning with undergraduate preparation, and continuing with professional development throughout each educator’s career. However, the content of professional development must always be linked to empirically validated methodologies and content that is related to improving student achievement.
Experts appearing before the Commission stated that research on the ability of general education and special education teachers to implement research-based practices is consistent with the findings of research on effective professional development.68 However, these data must be supported with more empirical research to inform our understanding of what constitutes effective professional development.
Existing continuing education efforts are often inadequate for a number of reasons, including lack of substantive and research-based content, the lack of systematic follow-up necessary for sustainability and the “one-shot” character of many workshop training programs.69 Special and general educators require continual opportunities to improve their ability to provide effective instruction to each student. Professional educator development should not be conceived as something that ends with graduation from a teacher-training program.
Training Teachers to Provide Quality Reading Instruction
The ability to read is the most critical academic skill a child can learn. As a result, the skills educators need to teach young children reading are of such profound importance that the Commission believes this issue merits further discussion. Key to successful preparation of teachers in reading is aligning the content of coursework with current research on reading. As such, the Commission is concerned not only about the quantity of pre-service coursework in reading, but the quality as well.
The Commission is concerned about the current methods of preparing new teachers to more effectively teach all children to read. The Commission is further concerned about the ability of teachers to identify early those children who may be at risk of reading difficulties and those factors associated with potential learning problems, particularly in the early elementary grades where learning to read directly affects a child’s future academic success.
The Commission finds that in the typical pre-service course of study, very little time is allocated to preparing teachers to teach reading. Virtually all states require that K-3 teacher credential candidates do some course work in the teaching of reading.70 Most teachers of the primary grades take only one course in the teaching of reading, and the average is only about 1.3 courses per teacher.71 The quality of this coursework is often questionable.
Many researchers who appeared before the Commission, including Sharon Vaughn, Ph.D., David J. Francis, Ph.D., and Daniel J. Reschly, Ph.D., noted that teacher preparation for the teaching of reading has not been adequate to bring about the research-based changes in classroom practices that result in academic success.72 Therefore, we recommend that SEAs, associations of teacher education, colleges and universities that provide teacher education and accrediting agencies of higher education programs implement more rigorous requirements in reading assessment and research-based intervention linked to improvement of student achievement, particularly for elementary endorsement.
“Teachers must have a deep understanding of the what, the how and the why of language and literacy.”
—National Research Council, 1998
Teachers must have continuing access to professional development to serve children likely to face or already experiencing reading difficulties. Teachers of children who are at risk of reading difficulties and children with learning disabilities need access to the most recent research to more effectively implement instructional methodologies that are scientifically based.
The National Shortage of Special Education and Related Services Professors
We are concerned about the growing need for special education faculty to train our nation’s future educators. The current annual supply of special education doctorates cannot fill the annual faculty position vacancies, and every year approximately one-third of all position vacancies go unfilled.73 As more faculty approach retirement, there are fewer doctoral level candidates to fill present and future openings. Providing quality faculty in our nation’s colleges and universities is critical to ensuring educators receive the best preparation to enter classrooms ready to serve children with disabilities.
We must focus on efforts to recruit and train through the doctoral level a new national cadre of fully qualified special education teacher educators and researchers. This new cadre should be recruited from the ranks of practicing special educators with experience in all relevant special education service delivery models, including inclusive or collaborative general/special education classrooms. They must be fluent in research-based best practices of instruction and assistive technology, and they must be diverse with regard to gender, race and ethnicity. Special education doctoral personnel preparation programs must be comprehensive in terms of program offerings and have a minimum of five full-time special education faculty with doctoral degrees.
The Importance of Minority Teacher Recruitment
Students in today’s classrooms are more diverse in ability, culture, language and learning needs. All too often, we ask students to move from place to place to accommodate teacher qualifications, rather than ask that teachers possess the ability to adapt to the individualized needs of diverse students. It has also meant that students who do not meet eligibility requirements have no access to individualized instruction practiced by many special educators. Instead, students struggle in a one-size-fits-all educational setting that may not fit their learning needs. It is time for educational systems to recruit, train and support teachers who can apply research-based and culturally competent practices to educating diverse students in their classrooms.
The Commission finds that an emphasis in the recommendation to recruit and retain special educators must focus on reaching out to our nation’s most talented individuals who represent the diversity of children in the classroom. The student population throughout the nation increasingly is more diverse, yet the proportion of minority teachers continues to decrease. In 1993-1994 children who are black made up 16 percent of the public school population, but only nine percent of the teaching force consisted of educators who are black.74 The Commission is concerned that not enough people from minority backgrounds and men, in general, are entering the profession of educating children. Children benefit from having teachers that include individuals from their own ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The representation of role models for children to emulate is an important function educators provide. We are disturbed that although the diversity of children will continue, the prospects that teachers will be largely white, middle class, female and monolingual will continue.75
The Commission echoes Assistant Secretary Pasternack in his comments before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee.
“The successful implementation of the IDEA is perhaps most critically dependent on the quality of the people who implement the principles contained in the law—the teachers, para-educators, related service providers and administrators, in cooperation with the parents and the students. Unfortunately, many general and special education teachers, as well as the administrators and other school personnel who work with them, are often ill prepared to meet the needs of students with disabilities. We know that much more needs to be done to better prepare and support all the members of the learning community in their efforts to educate students with disabilities.”76
The Commission’s recommendations will improve the quality and numbers of individuals entering special education professions. These improvements are critical elements that will bring about change in how well we serve children with disabilities in our nation’s schools. In sum, we hold that a national priority to recruit and retain the finest special educators and related services personnel must be an important component of IDEA.