Dr. Kimber Wilkerson: Special education
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As the Trump administration reportedly prepares to disband the Department of Education—which plays a critical role in the provision of special education for students with disabilities—17 states are also suing to overturn Section 504, a federal law protecting people (including students) with disabilities from discrimination.
On February 21, 2025, 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, that’s spelled KIMBER WILKERSON. I’m a professor of special education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I’m also the department chair for the Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education. I study the preparation of teachers to work with students who have academic or behavioral needs. I also study supports that help to retain special educators in their position.
Interview with SciLine
How many students in the U.S. receive special education services?
[0:01:00]
KIMBER WILKERSON: Currently, there are about 7.5 million students who receive special education services. About 15% of all the students in K-12 public schools are identified as having a disability and receive special education services for that disability.
What types of disabilities make students eligible for special education?
[0:01:24]
KIMBER WILKERSON: There are 13 categories of disability that are identified under the special education law, which is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which we often refer to as IDEA. So, IDEA stipulates 13 categories of disability. Those range. The largest category of disability is learning disabilities—so, students can have specific learning disabilities related to reading or math or language, even. There are speech and language impairments, there are intellectual disabilities. Students can receive special ed services for autism spectrum disorder, as well as things like mobility impairments or deafness or blindness.
What is the federal Department of Education’s current role in special education?
[0:02:19]
KIMBER WILKERSON: So, the Individuals Disabilities Education Act, IDEA, is administered by the Office of Special Education Programs, which is housed in the U.S. Department of Education. So, that law is administered in that office that ensures that all states kind of adhere to similar kind of baseline definitions for disability categories and set some sort of floor in terms of what services students and their families can expect to receive regardless of where they live. So, the U.S. Department of Ed essentially oversees that administration. They also provide some funding—I think nationwide it’s about 14% of the funding for special education comes from the federal government. So, it’s only a small fraction, but they also, again, they sort of ensure that the federal special education law is implemented evenly across states, and they set benchmarks for qualifications for special educators, etc.
How do special education programs affect students’ academic, social, and behavioral outcomes?
[0:03:23]
KIMBER WILKERSON: Each student who receives special education services has something called an IEP, which stands for Individualized Education Program. And so in that IEP, it’s essentially a contract between the family, the student, the school, and it is outlined what services they’re going to receive and through that kind of individualization of supports and services, those target students’ academic skills, their social skills, functional skills—it kind of depends on what the what the student needs. And over time—special education law came into being 50 years ago, and before IDEA was implemented, there were many students across the nation who didn’t access education at all, who were denied access to education period. So, over those past 50 years, we’ve made a lot of progress in terms of not only access for all students, but also outcomes. We’ve improved outcomes. So, as we have kind of learned to provide better services and also held ourselves to higher accountability standards, students with disabilities now access more general education content. They are more likely to graduate from high school. There are more students with disabilities attending post secondary school than there were decades ago. So, we’ve made a lot of progress. There’s still a lot of progress to go. Certainly, there are students with disabilities whose outcomes are not what we would hope for them to be. But overall, as a group of people, the existence of IDEA and it’s administration by the U.S. Department of Ed has resulted in a lot of improvements and a much greater amount of access for students with disabilities.
17 states are suing to overturn Section 504 of the Rehabilitation act of 1973. If successful, how would this impact students with disabilities?
[0:05:18]
KIMBER WILKERSON: Section 504 is civil rights legislation. It prevents—it protects people with disabilities from discrimination in settings that receive federal funds, and specifically to students that means that students in K-12 public schools, because K-12 public schools do receive federal funds, they are—that prevents discrimination. So, the Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act is actually administered by the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education. And so they provide avenues for parents, families, individuals—and now I’m speaking about K-12 students—so, if there’s a family who believes that their student has been denied access to some kind of educational opportunity, there is some recourse through the Office of Civil Rights to investigate that claim and to see if there are any accommodations that that could be made on that student’s behalf. Also within section 504, there is the ability to create something called a 504 plan for K-12 students, and currently, about 1.6 million students nationwide have a 504 plan, and these are typically students with disabilities, but whose disability does not impact them as significantly that they need the full support of special education. So, it may be that they don’t need any access to a special educator or separate kind of instruction. Kids with the 504 plan might need extended time on exams, they might need access to a quiet space when they get overwhelmed, they might need materials in a different format—so the accommodations are typically things that are more informal and don’t necessarily require the aid of a special educator. But I point this out because even though most students with disabilities receive their services under the umbrella of IDEA, there are 1.6 million students who receive some kind of accommodations because of Section 504, through their 504 plans, as well as just the protection and the knowledge that there’s these nationwide standards to which all schools will be held.
Can you tell us about your research on the special education teacher workforce, including investigating causes of special educator shortages?
[0:07:45]
KIMBER WILKERSON: So, I’ve thought a lot about the shortages of special educators. It feels acute in the most recent I’d say five years—not just in our state, where I’m located, in Wisconsin—but nationwide. It’s true across states and districts, it’s often the area of education that has the greatest shortages, and also the area where there is the most attrition—meaning teachers leave the field more quickly than they do in other avenues of education. And there’s a lot of research that looks at what causes like burnout or attrition, why people leave, and that includes things like, their feelings about the additional paperwork demands, sometimes they feel overwhelmed, overworked, sometimes they feel isolated or unappreciated. But on the flip side of that, when you ask people why they stay—because certainly there are lots of teachers who stay more than three to five years—and, so there are studies investigating when people stay, what are the reasons that they give for why they want to stay. And they often focus on the relationships they have with their students, with families, with other educators, and they also report feeling supported by administration. And so just the knowledge of those two things, the kind of importance of relationships and the importance of other people knowing what the job is, and being able to kind of support, know the rules and be able to at least appreciate what they’re doing. Because of that, I have, over the last five years, been working on a research project that’s funded by the by IES under the Department of Ed. That’s—we developed a professional development system for early career special educators in rural settings to help them feel less isolated, to help them feel more connected and supported. And part of that is creating communities of practice where they can talk to each other, where they can talk to more teachers with more experience, but it also provides direct coaching, and I do think that special educators, their job is complex. So, it’s not just delivering instruction, but it’s delivering instruction to kids with a wide, wide range of needs, sometimes very basic functional skills, sometimes reading. It’s usually across grade levels, and they can be sometimes the only person in their grade level who’s doing that work. So, we do find that that extra coaching helps people who have, you know, go into the profession, and it helps prevent them from feeling overwhelmed, and hopefully keeps them in the profession for more years.
Can you tell us about your work training special educators, and what has recently happened with your training grants from the Department of Education?
[0:10:39]
KIMBER WILKERSON: The U.S. Department of Education has a few different ways that they fund the preparation of teachers, and one of those ways is through a program called the Teacher Quality Partnership, and that is a grant that funds some undergraduate teacher preparation pathways, but also funds master’s level residency programs, and I have, at UW Madison, been fortunate with colleagues to have now my second teacher quality partnership grant. The first one was for five years. We worked with rural districts to place special educators in those districts, and we are currently working with Milwaukee Public Schools, which is an urban district. So, one of the criteria for Teacher Quality Partnership grants is that you work with a high need school district partners. So, meaning, those are based on levels of poverty in the community, based on how many openings they have for teachers—so, showing that they have this need for more stability in their workforce. So, we’ve had this program, and it’s funded by a Teacher Quality Partnership grant, which provides for living stipends for people who are teacher residents. And teacher residents are people who are basically doing a full year of student teaching under the mentorship of an experienced educator. So, they get to learn that school district intimately. They get to have sort of a long term relationship with school administrators and their mentor, and then they agree to teach in that school when they’re done for at least three years. So, we have this current program, and we just found out last week, abruptly, overnight, the program was terminated. We were just in our second out of five years. We’re just finishing up a first cohort. It’s not even—they’re graduating this summer. We have a second cohort of people who are, you know, have already been accepted into the program and anticipated starting in June. So unfortunately, because of the Department of Education’s new sort of interpretation of DEI restrictions, they have terminated many of these Teacher Quality Partnership grants because many of the grantees have explained in their grant how they would attract and retain potential teachers from a broad diversity of experiences and backgrounds, because the Department of Ed in the previous administration was interested in knowing how grantees would help contribute to diversifying the teacher workforce. So our grant, like many others, we explain the ways that we have sort of a robust recruitment strategy where we try to make sure that we advertise the possibilities of becoming a special educator in as many different communities and spaces as possible, to attract as wide a range as possible. And I’ll say that for special education, specifically with the number of open positions mid year, the difficulty people have attracting individuals into the field. For us, casting a wide net and trying to find people who are interested in child serving positions, people who come from the communities that are served by the schools. To us, this is just a common sense kind of recruitment strategy is to help, like, diversify the ways in which we try to bring people into a profession. So, there’s nothing about the preparation program specifically that is identity specific. It is just our regular Master’s preparation program sort of dovetailed with a residency in Milwaukee Public Schools, and unfortunately, that was terminated last week—again, overnight—without any kind of plan put into place about how to finish out the current residents or how to meet our obligations with the people who just recently accepted. So, we are working on appealing that decision. I don’t know how quickly we’ll learn about that appeal. But in the meantime, we have kind of scrambled to find some resources to continue to support the current cohort of residents so that they at least can finish their program.
