Special education has grappled with chronic staff shortages for decades. But efforts to support and retain new teachers can shortchange the specialized needs of educators serving students with disabilities, contributing to a constant revolving door of special educators moving to general education or leaving the classroom entirely.
That’s why Pennsylvania’s Attract-Prepare-Retain initiative—which personalizes mentoring and support for special education teachers, leaders, and aides who may be isolated in their own districts—could serve as a model for states looking to stabilize their special education workforce.
“When we talk to our [special education] teachers, many of the reasons that they are leaving are, they don’t feel supported by their administration, their administration doesn’t understand what their job is or how to support them to do their job,” said Carole Clancy, Pennsylvania’s director of special education.
Special education is one of the most highly regulated areas of K-12 public schooling. New teachers can easily get stressed and bogged down teaching students with disparate learning needs across multiple grades, while also managing paperwork for complying with federal and state laws. And parents of students with disabilities often have long experience with their child’s specific legal and educational requirements, which can set a less-experienced teacher on the back foot when it comes to working with parents.
Pennsylvania launched the teacher initiative four years ago, in response to increasing special education staff shortages and a high share of teachers working under emergency certification.
A challenging, chronically understaffed field
The Keystone State is far from alone in this; more than a third of public schools nationwide—across all income levels—lacked enough special education in 2024-25, federal data show. For at least 30 years, special education has consistently been the most frequently understaffed specialty teaching area.
The National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy organization, has found that few states few provide targeted mentoring and professional development for new teachers in special education. Over time, this leads to higher turnover among early-career special education teachers than their general-education peers, according to a study of seven states (including Pennsylvania) released last month by the the Special Education Research Collaborative, or SPARC, a team of five universities and the American Institutes of Research.
“The unique thing about Pennsylvania is they decided to do as many things as they can at once, addressing each part of the [special education teacher] pipeline,” said Allison Gilmour, a special education policy researcher at the American Institutes of Research who has been studying Pennsylvania’s approach.
The state gives grants to high schools to develop pathways for students to consider working with students with disabilities as a career, as well as partnerships between districts and higher education to develop accelerated programs to help existing teachers and paraprofessionals become fully certified in special education.
Support from experienced educators statewide
Pennsylvania also created a statewide mentoring network to connect teachers and other special education staff to experienced mentors across the state working in similar roles. Each teacher meets virtually with their mentor for at least 90 minutes each month to talk through their challenges and share best practices.
“The research speaks really loudly that you can have a lot of trainings, you can have webinars, you can have courses—we have all of it—but the true impact to the student is what happens in that classroom and ... that-side by side coaching support with the teachers,” Clancy said. “So we have shifted to prioritizing that.”
Michelle Haverly joined the state initiative’s special education administrator fellowship program this year when she became the special education director for the Solanco school district in rural Lancaster County. Haverly and other new special education administrators around the state connect with each other for virtual meet-ups and additional training. New special education administrators, like their teachers, meet monthly with an experienced mentor in a similar role.
More than 850 teachers and support staff have been paired with specialized mentors in the past two years, said Carol Good, the coordinating director of Pennsylvania’s training and technical assistance network, which works with districts to implement the state initiative. Mentees meet with their mentor at least once a month about challenges specific to their roles.
“If I’m a teacher of the visually impaired, I may be the only one within a 50-mile radius, so how do I connect with others that are teaching similar kinds of content, working through the same kinds of issues with students, and trying to meet their needs,” Good said. “We want to wrap supports around [teachers] with that mentoring and networking.”
Haverly, the special ed. director in the Solanco district, said her mentor has helped explain technical issues, like billing for Medicaid reimbursement for student medical services, as well as brainstorming ways to help students with foundational challenges like decoding words when the student’s disability precludes commonly used interventions.
Accelerating teacher certification
Coupled with these supports for classroom educators and administrators, Pennsylvania has also developed an accelerated-certification program for teachers working under emergency licenses in special education—whose number quadrupled in the state from 2010 to 2020, and has remained high since the pandemic.
The program focuses on college and university partners front-loading classes on classroom management and foundational literacy skills and interventions, which emergency-certified special education teachers have prioritized, “so that candidates aren’t waiting until they’re almost done the program a year-and-a-half later to have these critical strategies,” Clancy said.
Three years into the initiative, emerging evidence shows promise. Researchers with the American Institutes of Research Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research tracked the first group of teachers participating in the state’s pre-K-12 special education certification program.
While the researchers have not yet completed research on long term changes in special education teacher turnover in the state, they have found that more than half of the teachers who completed their certification through the program said they would have been unlikely to pursue a full special education certification without the program.
The state has also started to pilot ways to improve the larger school community for special education. School psychologists, paraprofessionals, and principals also can participate in training and networking on how to better serve students with disabilities and coordinate general and special education schedules and services. Some districts are analyzing their curriculum scope and sequence to ensure content is accessible and inclusive of students with vision and hearing impairments and other disabilities, Clancy and Good said.
