An analysis of federal data by the Education Week Research Center shows that while the number of special education teachers was dropping, the number of students with disabilities ages 6 to 21 declined by only about 1 percent over the same time period. And as a whole, the number of teachers in all fields has gone up slightly over the past decade, as has overall enrollment.

The Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) provides recommendations to Congress for federal solutions to the shortage problem.

The Illinois State Board of Education recently released a report about the best ways to ease the state’s teacher shortage. State officials found that there is a statewide shortage of teachers. The need is acute for special education and bilingual educators in rural and poor school districts.

For a three-year time period beginning in 2001, North Carolina awarded an annual bonus of $1800 to certified math, science and special education teachers working in public secondary schools with either high-poverty rates or low test scores. Using longitudinal data on teachers, this paper estimates hazard models that identify the impact of this differential pay by comparing turnover patterns before and after the program’s implementation, across eligible and ineligible categories of teachers, and across eligible and barely-ineligible schools.

This report analyzes evidence of teacher shortages, looks at national and regional trends in teacher supply and demand, and investigates policy strategies that might mitigate these effects based on research about effective approaches to recruitment and retention.

This paper investigates the effects of the Florida Critical Teacher Shortage Program (FCTSP), a statewide program designed to increase the supply of teachers in “hard-to-staff” areas. FCTSP had three elements: (a) it provided loan forgiveness to teachers who were certified and taught in designated shortage areas; (b) it compensated teachers for the tuition cost of taking courses to become certified in a designated shortage area; and (c) for a single year, it gave bonuses to high school teachers who were certified and taught in a designated subject area.