An Unprecedented Shortage of Special Education Faculty Is Looming: Findings from SEFNA. The Claremont Letter. Volume 6, Issue 2

The author and her colleagues have just completed a four-year long project that was funded by the federal government. The project focused on the nation's capacity to prepare a sufficient supply of general and special education professionals to provide a quality education to students with disabilities and others who struggle becoming proficient learning the general education curriculum. One key finding of their work is that an impending and accelerating attrition rate of special education (SE) faculty will make staffing teacher education programs with faculty who have new expertise extremely challenging. Across the next five years, special education teacher training programs will experience an annual faculty turnover rate of 21% due to retirements, and doctoral granting programs will lose between 1/2 and 2/3 of their faculty. In this paper the author summarizes their findings, provides some background for the study, and explains why a shortage of special education faculty is important.