California schools have had persistent difficulties filling special education vacancies, but in the past two years, these shortages have skyrocketed, as evidenced by the growth of substandard special education authorizations. When schools struggle to fill a position with a qualified teacher, they often hire teachers who are still in training or who hold emergency-type permits without training.

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 paper explores differences in the curricular, instructional, and role expectations experienced by beginning special and general education teachers. It also documents variations in how novices from both groups addressed expectations they encountered. The authors provide evidence that the instructional decisions and resources associated with positive induction experiences for the new special educators in this study seemed to differ from those associated with comparable experiences for the novice general educators. 

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 present findings from a comparative study of 3 teacher preparation prototypes: traditional, university-district partnership, and district add-on programs.

In this study, the authors randomly surveyed 1,576 Florida special education teachers to examine factors that contribute to their propensity to leave or stay in the special education classroom or transfer to a new school. The variables identified, based on extensive review of the literature, included background, classroom, school district, and personal factors. 

This paper explores how colleague relationships are critical for the experiences of beginning teachers, as are the school organizational norms that these beginning teachers experience. For special education teachers in particular, perception of colleague support was a strong predictor of retention plans. Similar results were seen with respect to their perception of the level of collective responsibility among the faculty. Taken together, these results suggest that schools and districts should make efforts to facilitate productive relationships between general and special education faculty, as well as to differentiate induction support for beginning special educators.