Education Week - December 5, 2018 - 6

lected from every state. Personnel data is not required
from the states in the same way that federal law requires
other data, such as a count of children served and their
disability categories. However, the data has been collected since 1976, and includes the number and type of
personnel employed under the IDEA and whether those
personnel are fully certified or qualified in their field.
The numbers can be used to study national employment trends. However, anomalies in the data make it
challenging to make state-to-state comparisons, because the number of special education teachers reported in some individual states fluctuate dramatically
from year to year in ways that are not fully explained.
States and the federal government offer different explanations for why their personnel numbers have so
many aberrations.

Quantity and Quality Shortages
Data problems aside, the federal statistics show that
there's not only a shortage of teachers to contend with, but
that there's also a "quality shortage." That term, coined by
researchers, occurs when a relatively high percentage of
special education teachers in a state are not fully qualified.
Nationally, over the past five years, on average nearly
95 percent of special educators have been identified
as highly qualified. But in some states that number is
much lower. In Kansas, for example, only around 70 percent of its special education teachers are classified as
highly qualified. Colleen Riley, the state's director of
special education, confirmed the figures, and cited the
pressure of decreased school funding as one factor that
makes it difficult to find highly-qualified educators.
"When funding is reduced, there are increased demands in every part of the educational environment and
these demands are challenging for teachers," Riley said.
Leaders of teacher-preparation programs, those
who have studied personnel shortages, and educators
themselves cite additional factors when asked about the
shortage: For example, fewer young people, particularly
women are interested in entering teaching at all, let
alone special education.
"The perception of education has changed so drastically.
It's not really viewed as the profession that it once was,"
said Brittany Bales, a former special education teacher who
is now a lecturer at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.
and a member of the Muncie district school board. And
special educators are a tiny slice of a shrinking pie: in
2015-16, only 7 percent of teachers who earned bachelor's
degree in education majored in special education.
To lure people into the field, Ball State is asking its special
education teacher candidates why they wanted to make that
their focus. Universally, they say they have had direct
experience with people with disabilities, either through
their own families or through mentorship activities in

| Education Week * December 5, 2018

Spec. Ed. Teacher Data
Plagued by Faulty Figures
By Christina A. Samuels
& Alex Harwin

hy is it so hard to figure
out how many special
education teachers are
employed in each state?
For more than four decades, the
U.S. Department of Education has
asked states to submit information on special education teacher
employment, along with a raft of
other information that the Individuals with Disabilities Education
Act requires to be collected.
But the employment numbers that
are submitted to the federal government are sometimes wrong-
wildly so. In some cases, state data
managers say the mistake is theirs.
In other cases, state officials say
they aren't sure where the federal
government got the numbers, even
though states are the ones responsible for submitting them.
This is not the first time that data
collected by the Education Department has come into question. The
department's office for civil rights
conducts a massive data collection
from most of the nation's schools
and districts. It also contains errors
and omissions on topics such as the
counts of students restrained and
secluded, preschoolers suspended
or expelled, and districts under desegregation orders.
For the special education teacher
count, Education Department said
that it's the state's job to get the
numbers right. States are sometimes
asked to explain anomalies through
"data notes" that are added to the
file. But such notes are not required,
meaning that unusual or incorrect
results remain publicly available.
Researchers in the field say that the
data works to track national trends.

But comparing individual states to
one another is trickier.
As an example, the federal data on
Indiana says that the state had 7,039
special education teachers in 200506. By the 2015-16 school year, however, federal statistics showed the
number of special education teachers
had inexplicably dropped to 1,203.
No data note exists to explain
that number. If it were correct, it
would mean that Indiana had one
special education teacher for every
127 students.
But that's not correct, said Adam
Baker, the press secretary for the
Indiana Department of Education.
He said that for the past several
years, Indiana had made a reporting error in its federal data: It was
excluding certain special education teachers from the count, such
as teachers who weren't the primary classroom teacher or those
who were not teaching in core
academic areas.
The correct number of Indiana
special education teachers for
2015-16 is 5,986, Baker said. That
still reflects a 15 percent decrease
from a decade ago. In contrast, the
special education population in the
state dropped by over 3 percent in
the same time period. Baker said
the state plans to submit corrected
numbers to the federal government.
Mississippi is another one of
several states with implausible
personnel numbers. Federal records show the special education teacher count at 3,770 for the
2005-06 school year. The number
of teachers reported in federal records drops to 910 in the 2010-11
school year. It jumps again to 4,145
teachers in 2011-12. For 2015-16, the
number of special education teachers reported in the state is 5,086.
Patrice Guilfoyle, the director of

Education Week - December 5, 2018

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