For the last 30 years, nearly every state has struggled to find and keep educators qualified to support students with disabilities. The intensity and variety of student needs makes special education a challenging role as well as a crucial one. But without proper support, districts may unintentionally create a revolving door of special educators.
That finding is the crux of the first comprehensive, year-over-year study of special education turnover across seven states, released by the Special Education Research Collaborative, or SPARC, a team of five universities and the American Institutes of Research, a research and evaluation firm.
States and districts have spent millions of dollars trying to recruit special educators through fellowships, bonuses, and programs that help paraprofessionals and career-changers get licensed in the field. The SPARC findings suggest that these efforts aren’t enough; states and districts must also attend to these teachers’ professional training and provide incentives to stay in their specialty.
“Our shortages aren’t really from not having enough people; it’s having people teaching the wrong thing,” said Allison Gilmour, the lead author and an AIR principal researcher in special education. Many teachers who are certified in both special education and general education begin their careers in special education—she called the job the “ticket into the career.”
“But then once they are in, they switch to a general education position that opens,” she said.
High turnover among special education teachers
The problem isn’t that states and districts aren’t trying.
More than a third of public schools ran short-staffed in special education in 2024-25, federal data show, across wealthy and high-poverty schools alike.
According to the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy organization, 18 states provide financial incentives to recruit special education teachers. But far fewer provide sufficient targeted mentoring and professional development for new special education teachers on the job. Special education spans 13 different categories of disabilities, and a single teacher may instruct students with very different needs in the same classroom.
To see how the policy landscape plays out on the ground, Gilmour and her colleagues analyzed data on how special education teachers entered the profession between 2017-18 and 2022-23 in the states participating in the research consortium: Hawaii, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Washington. (Indiana also provided teacher data from 2017-18 to 2019-20.) Then they tracked how long those teachers stayed in the specialty, and what drew them away.
They found about 15% of special education teachers left their positions each year overall—but many left their specialty, not the classroom.
Relying on more novice and out-of-field teachers in special education also worsened the revolving door, Gilmour and her colleagues found. In every state, teachers working under emergency certification while being responsible for students with disabilities were 31 percentage points more likely than certified special education teachers to switch to general education the following year. And they were 19 percentage points more likely to leave teaching in the state altogether.
In Texas, which has the highest share of uncertified teachers in the country, nearly 36% of special education teachers left their positions each year on average during the study period.
“Schools are in this cycle where they have more emergency-certified special ed. teachers, they have more novice teachers—and those people are the most likely to leave. They leave. And then, the replacements are also emergency-certified and novice teachers,” Gilmour said. “We saw it pretty consistently across states.”
Mentoring needed
While many states have invested in new teacher mentoring and induction, both SPARC’s research and earlier studies by NCTQ found most do not individualize professional development supports to issues focused on specific disabilities, fields, or challenges.
Typical mentoring matches up with someone at their school, Gilmour said, but often special education teachers are the only one in their school, or the only one working with a low-incidence population in their school, such as speech impairments.
“Being paired with a mentor who does a completely different job just isn’t that helpful,” she said.
Some states are taking new steps. Pennsylvania, which has experienced a sharp increase in special education teacher turnover since 2020, recently launched a statewide program to build specialty teachers’ career pathways, including role-based mentoring programs.
