New project to study working conditions for EC teachers in North Carolina
A new four-year project is launching to study working conditions for exceptional children (EC) teachers in North Carolina’s public schools, according to a press release.
The study, which is supported by a $1.34 million award from the Institute of Education Sciences, will be conducted by researchers from the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina (EPIC) at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Public Policy and the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG).
The release says that EC teachers play a critical role in “helping students with disabilities learn, grow, and access the services they are entitled to receive.” However, the release says, many pressures in the EC teaching field have had a negative impact on educator well-being and retention, as well as on EC students and their families.
The research will systematically examine both “school- and district-level factors are connected to stronger or weaker working conditions for special educators” in order to understand how those conditions might influence outcomes for EC teachers and their students.
“We want our findings to be informative and actionable for practitioners across scales,” said Dr. Helen Rose Miesner, the EPIC research assistant professor who will lead the project. “Rather than solely documenting the state of working conditions for special education teachers, our work will identify systems-level elements that stakeholders can address to engender improvements for staff and students.”
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Stress on NC’s EC teacher pipeline
EC services is a broad term referring to the ways the needs of children with a disability, health impairment, or learning difference are met. In recent years, as EdNC has reported, the EC teacher pipeline has faced stress, due to factors like pay, resources to recruit candidates, and the daily needs and demands of teachers.
Nationally, research from the Learning Policy Institute has found shortages for EC teachers to be one of the most pervasive of any teaching field, with 45 states reporting shortages in staffing EC teachers since at least 1990, when the U.S. Department of Education began collecting data.
In 2024, about 70% of public schools across the country “reported having vacancies for special education teachers.” In North Carolina, the 2023-24 school year saw a 28% increase in EC teacher vacancies, or roughly 1,544 positions. A 2024 EdNC survey found that 75% of educators in these roles felt the EC teacher pipeline at their school was “stressed.”
Shortages can impact on the education of students with disabilities. The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) guarantees each child’s right to a “free and appropriate education.” Through this law, each student with a disability is legally entitled to an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), which outlines the extra support they will receive in school and is signed by the student’s guardian.
However, often times IEP services are disrupted when there are staffing shortages, meaning students are not receiving the support they are legally entitled to.
“A 2024 Government Accountability Office report found that some students with disabilities did not receive special education services or had services delayed because of staffing challenges. Districts reported relying on unqualified staff or substituting in-person services with virtual ones that were less effective,” said GHR Education.
According to the release, understanding the factors that produce these outcomes “is especially urgent now.” The goal of the study is to identify “malleable” factors, the release says, or “conditions that schools, districts, or policymakers may be able to change to better support special educators.”
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Details of the study
The study is titled, “Working Conditions for Special Education Teachers in North Carolina: Exploring Predictive Factors and Related Outcomes.” Instead of examining the experience of individual teachers, the release says the team aims to “look at the broader systems around them.”
Researchers will examine many factors, including:
- Teacher assistant staffing
- Administrator credentials
- Student-to-teacher ratios
- Support personnel
- Accountability pressure
- Educator credentials
- Spending on special and regular instruction
- Investments in professional learning
Researchers at EPIC and FPG will interview about “120 special educators and administrators in 18 schools selected to reflect different working conditions, rural and non-rural settings, and school levels,” per the release. These interviews make up the qualitative portion of their study, helping the team understand how educators and administrators describe the causes and consequences of working conditions in their own schools
“Recruitment and retention in special education is in crisis,” said FPG Senior Technical Assistance Specialist Dr. Megan Vinh, who will help lead the study. “And the best way for us to understand how to create systems change is to talk to the people most impacted — our educators and practitioners. The qualitative portion of this research will hopefully provide critical insights on how working conditions impact decisions on whether to stay or leave the special education field.”
The research will combine the voices of “nearly 2,500 traditional K-12 public schools across North Carolina’s 115 school districts,” the release says, and will come from three years of the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey, as well as administrative data from the Department of Public Instruction (DPI).
Researchers said they expect the sample to include data from “approximately 13,000 special educators and 190,000 students with disabilities.”
“NCDPI began including an option for teachers to report their role on the survey starting in 2024, creating this opportunity to distill how special education teachers’ perceptions of working conditions specifically differ from their colleagues in other positions,” said Miesner. “This dataset is crucial to the design of our project.”
The release says the team’s goal is “to ensure that stakeholders across levels can not only understand the findings but also see concrete ways to support special educators’ work and students’ learning.”