Dr. Kimber Wilkerson: Special education teacher shortage
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A recent survey found that most schools (51%) have vacant special education teacher positions for this school year—a higher vacancy rate than for any other teaching specialty.
On August 29, 2024, SciLine interviewed: Dr. Kimber Wilkerson, a professor of special education and department chair at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. See the footage and transcript from the interview below, or select ‘Contents’ on the left to skip to specific questions.
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Introduction
[0:00:19]
KIMBER WILKERSON: My name is Kimber Wilkerson. I’m a professor of special education and the department chair of the Department of Rehabilitation, Psychology, and Special Education here at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. One of the things that I study are supports that we can provide to early-career special educators to try to reduce the level of burnout they feel and increase their intention to stay in the field of special education.
Interview with SciLine
Which students receive special education services, and what do those services entail?
[0:00:57]
KIMBER WILKERSON: Students who receive special education services are students who have a disability label, and it has been determined that because of their disability, they need some additional supports in school in order to be able to access the curriculum and to be able to thrive in school like their peers. So, special education services are supports—and sometimes instruction—that are provided to students with disabilities to sort of help address the areas that they have challenges in.
What is happening with staffing for special education?
[0:01:42]
KIMBER WILKERSON: Staffing in the area of special education has always been a challenge. Since special education became a thing in the 70s, there’ve always been some challenges filling all the positions. I’d say, in the past 10 years, preceding COVID, those challenges started to increase—meaning there were more open positions at the beginning of each school year in the area of special education—it’s one of the most challenging to staff positions in public schools. And as late as 2022, there were still, at the beginning of that school year, 78% of all school districts nationwide reported that they had one or more vacancies in the area of special education. So, that just gives you, that’s like one kind of indicator of the magnitude of the shortage is day one of the school year—how many of those jobs are still not filled? And special education, unfortunately, kind of leads all of the teaching areas in terms of the number of open positions at the beginning of each school year.
What is causing these shortages?
[0:02:54]
KIMBER WILKERSON: I think the root causes come in a different—a couple different forms. One is there are less young people choosing teaching as a major in college and as a profession. That’s something that’s kind of been on the decline education majors generally, but special education, sort of, you know, is affected more than other forms of education. Also, there’s been, there’s more attrition—which means people leaving their job sooner than you might expect—not because they’re retiring, but because they are tired of the job. They want a different job. They want to go back to school. Sometimes life circumstances, but the number of people who are leaving the job before retirement age has increased, and since COVID—in our state, which is Wisconsin—about over 40% of all educators have left the field before they hit their fifth year. And that number is even higher for special educators. So it’s pretty common for at least half of the special educators to be out of the profession by the time they hit their third or fourth year in schools.
Why do special education teachers leave the profession?
[0:04:15]
KIMBER WILKERSON: There’s not a national study that speaks to that reason. There are some sort of localized studies, and people report things like the paperwork or administrative tasks associated with the job. Sometimes they report, you know, challenges with—I’m just going to say classroom management—but essentially, like behavioral challenges that they experience in schools. Sometimes it’s a feeling of isolation, a lack of sort of support. So, those are some of the reasons that are that have been named, you know, sort of most commonly.
How are students with disabilities affected when their school does not have enough special educators?
[0:05:01]
KIMBER WILKERSON: If a building starts the school year and they are—one special educator has not been hired yet, that means the other special educators in the building have to kind of take over that caseload. So, instead of having 12 students on their caseload, maybe now they have 20 students on their caseload. And so the amount of individual attention that can be given to each student with a disability is, you know, sort of quite naturally decreased because the teacher is now spread more thin. Another thing that can happen, you know, another way that students might experience this is, you know, when the attrition is high. It’s something that kind of, again, when teachers leave the profession earlier than you might expect them to, it has the overall effect of in that building, there are just the core of the teachers in that building are less experienced. And so, often, when you have a brand new teacher—which is more common in special education because the turnover is higher—but when you have a brand new teacher, they are being mentored rather formally or informally, by other more experienced teachers in the building. And so, as you have sort of teachers leaving and you have overall sort of a younger, less—I shouldn’t say younger—a less experienced group of teachers in the building, then the students who receive their direct services from those individuals are sort of losing out on the benefit of those kind of years of wisdom and experience.
How are special education teachers affected when their department is experiencing high turnover?
[0:05:52]
KIMBER WILKERSON: When there’s more turnover, there’s kind of a collective need to bring new people up to speed. In special education, often teachers work with paraprofessionals—so, instructional assistants. And in instructional assistants, there’s also a lot of turnover and need, and so special educators who are there, I would say their day-to-day work life is definitely impacted in terms of, you know, tasks sort of repeating that might, in the past, have just been a beginning of the year task, and now it kind of crops up again in the middle of the year and crops up again in April. So, those are probably the most dramatic ways.
What are some strategies to recruit and retain more special education teachers?
[0:07:29]
KIMBER WILKERSON: There’s a range of strategies that different universities and states and individual school districts have taken to try to increase or entice more people into the profession of special education. One group of those strategies takes the form of making the preparation program appealing to career changers. So, as less kind of, you know, traditional college age students are choosing teaching, people are thinking about ways that, you know, adults in the community who already have a bachelor’s degree who might be interested in working in the schools, like giving them pathways. One of those pathways are something called residency programs. So that is when you, someone kind of takes a, they work alongside a mentor teacher for an entire year in a school, and they get paid to do so. So, they’re not the teacher of record, but they’re learning and they’re getting paid, and they are in that school community, and they know they’re going to work in that school community at the end of their preparation program.
Can you tell us a bit about your recent study on supporting new special education teachers?
[0:08:35]
KIMBER WILKERSON: One of the things we found that really made a difference for the teachers in our study was having access to a mentor and having access to a group of their peers. We called it a community of practice. So, just meant that every other week, on Zoom, we’d get together teachers from different school districts along with some experienced teachers, and we’d allow them to do some sort of work on some problems of practice, you know, bring in some of the things they were finding challenging, and kind of work on possible solutions as a group. And then this one-on-one mentoring was also done via Zoom. And one of the things that people really reported liking about it was that they could—they felt like they could talk to someone who wasn’t right in their building and right in their district—like that, they could be sort of open and vulnerable to, and they really enjoyed the community of practice, like getting to talk to other people who are exactly in their same situation. Because sometimes in schools, special educators can be isolated because they’re not necessarily a part of a grade level team, because they span, you know, they work with kids across a lot of classrooms, and so this gave them an opportunity to have their own kind of community, and that made a difference. This was a research study—so we checked, we interviewed them at the beginning and the end of the year, and we also surveyed their sort of level of burnout and their self-efficacy, like, how good at your job do you feel? And we also did the same thing for people who weren’t in our study. So, similar kinds of teachers who weren’t participating in our study, and at the end of the year, we could see that those people who had that mentoring and the community of practice felt less burnt out, and they also felt more effective in the area of classroom management. And one of the things that I think that’s so important about is that’s one of the areas that people identify as an area of burnout that causes them to leave the profession. So, if we can make people feel like they’re better equipped to like handle challenging behavior, then I think that’s one sort of strategy to also increase the retention, or also increase people wanting to stay in their job for another year and another year.
