Standing at the front of a large, darkened room in a Capitol Avenue office building in late July, teacher-trainer Betty Menacher clicked quickly through a presentation on a highly technical but essential topic – how to assess students’ reading. Her audience was a group of career-switchers who within weeks would be using what they’d learned during this five-week crash course in tackling one of education’s most difficult challenges: teaching special-education students.
Menacher knew she had little time and a lot to cover. So, as the clusters of soon-to-be teachers took notes, she pushed through a five-slide summary of the main components of reading. Switching from “vocabulary” to “fluency,” she paused. “I know we’re going through this really fast. I kind of want to stop on each one,” she said. “But we don’t have time.”
Fast forward to September 1st, the first day of school: those individuals will join others with no previous teaching experience or traditional training who’ll also be teaching in special-education classrooms in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).
Special education has been a critical shortage area in MPS for years, exemplified by the fact that not one special-education teacher was included in the 482 layoff notices that went out in June. In fact, the district has hired 52 new, fully certified special-education teachers since then, said Karen Jackson, MPS director of human resources.
There aren’t enough fully licensed special-education teachers to go around, so the district leans on alternative-route teacher certification programs that allow teachers to work toward full licensure while teaching with “emergency” credentials.
The method still fuels debate about whether teachers who come up through these programs are as prepared to work with special-education students — an area MPS has provided substandard service in for years, according to a federal lawsuit — as those who come up through traditional, four-year education schools.
This year, the district is employing 17 special-education teachers from the Milwaukee Teacher Education Center program, 24 new special-education teachers from Teach For America (nine special education teachers in last year’s inaugural TFA corps will continue teaching on emergency permits), and 20 new special-education teachers from The New Teacher Project (33 of the project’s Milwaukee Teaching Fellows will continue in their second year of special education teaching on emergency credentials).
MPS also pulls from a fourth alternative track program that provides training to credentialed teachers who don’t have a background in special education, Jackson said.
Representatives of emergency-credential programs say that the intensive summer training covers enough ground and that they offer a full support system throughout the school year to ensure the teachers-in-training are successful.
Other experts and advocates argue that a few weeks of preparation over the summer — and even less time for teachers who start training in the winter — isn’t enough to help individuals, regardless of their passion and motivation, deal with the often profound needs of special-education students.
“My view is that you need the extensive training,” said George Giuliani of the National Association of Special Education Teachers. “Even though the need for special-education teachers is there, I am in no way an advocate” of these programs.
A national shortage
All told, about a quarter of Milwaukee’s about 1,100 special-education teachers last year held emergency licenses, reflecting a large national problem in finding, training and retaining such teachers.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, there’s a national shortage of 45,000 highly qualified special-education teachers, although determining who counts as highly qualified isn’t straightforward. About 11 percent of special-education classrooms in the U.S. aren’t led by a highly qualified teacher, the department noted in 2008.
According to the federal government, “highly qualified” means the instructor is licensed for the grade-level and subject for which he or she is teaching. Teachers on emergency credentials in core subject areas are considered highly qualified only if they: have a major, minor or have completed Wisconsin’s Praxis II content test in the subject area they are teaching, are enrolled in an approved teacher-training program that will be completed in three years, are given high-quality professional development by the district and are overseen by supervisors or mentors while teaching, according to the state Department of Instruction.
Jackson, the human resources director, explained it this way: teachers on emergency credentials are considered highly qualified “if they meet the criteria, have an emergency license, passed the Praxis and have a degree.” Attrition in these positions is high, with one out of seven special-education teachers quitting each year.
Nearly one in five Milwaukee students receives special-education services. Yet, the city’s special-education students lag behind their counterparts elsewhere in the state. In 2009, only 17 percent of Milwaukee’s sixth-graders receiving special education were proficient or advanced in math and only 15 percent achieved those levels in reading. Statewide, 37 percent of students with disabilities were proficient or advanced in math and 44 percent were at those levels in reading.
In recent years, however, Milwaukee hasn’t been able to attract enough fully trained teachers to meet those students’ needs. “There’s no doubt that there’s a challenge filling special-education positions,” said Pat Yahle, director of special education for the Milwaukee Public Schools. “The more challenged the students are, the more challenged the teacher is.”
The same is true nationally. Massachusetts granted almost 1,000 teaching waivers last year to allow districts to hire teachers who weren’t formally licensed to work with special-education students. At least 22 states have some sort of alternative-certification program for individuals with no previous teaching experience to enter special-education teaching, many of which require no more than a bachelor’s degree and a background check.
Teach For America and The New Teacher Project provide districts with even more options. About 900 TFA fellows, or about 12.5 percent of its corps, worked as special-education teachers last year. And The New Teacher Project will supply New York City with about 300 newly minted teachers to help fill the city’s 1,000 vacant special-education positions.
The Milwaukee programs say their rigorous selection processes ensure that only highly capable individuals are chosen. TFA is as selective as the nation’s Ivy League colleges. The New Teacher Project and MTEC both emphasize how hard the work will be ahead of time. “When I do an information session, I try to discourage as many people as possible,” said Sue Ristow, director of teacher certification for MTEC.
But general knowledge and intelligence may not necessarily help these new teachers reach students who have emotional, behavioral or learning disabilities. That’s why the summer training sessions are so important.
Traditional special-education teacher certification programs, although not exempt from criticism, typically take a year or more to complete and include coursework, observations and supervised teaching. Some states even require a master’s degree in special education before granting a license.
Individuals who go this route will take entire classes on individual disabilities, learning not only what the disability is, but how to manage it and, perhaps most importantly, effective strategies to teach students with it. For instance, courses on learning disabilities might feature whole lessons on complex concepts such as the structure of language and phonemic awareness, things Menacher had to cover in just one slide.
The Teach For America program focuses on reading instruction and assessing student learning. MTEC also places an emphasis on assessment techniques but doesn’t have enough room in its schedule to instruct recruits on how to teach reading.
The New Teacher Project’s program, Milwaukee Teaching Fellows, divides its six weeks into modules on preventing and handling disruptions, teaching students at different levels, and planning and delivering instruction. The program also spends many lessons on “big ideas” in education, such as differences in achievement between white and minority students as well as between those with and without disabilities. Special education has its own one-week module.
Trainees in all three programs teach summer school in the morning alongside a licensed teacher. But because of privacy concerns, they might not know which students in their classrooms, if any, have special needs.
Sue Endress, an advocate for Disability Rights Wisconsin, doesn’t doubt the abilities of the trainees; it’s the time-crunch that worries her. “To the credit of these people, they try really hard,” she said. “It must be frustrating for them to know, ‘If I had more training … then I could do so much of a better job.’ ”
In 2001, Disability Rights Wisconsin brought a lawsuit against MPS and the state , representing families of special-education students in what has become a class-action case that alleges the district failed to adequately identify and serve students with special needs.
Learning as they go
Knowing he could have benefitted from longer training doesn’t bother Darwin Peters, a 2009 Milwaukee Teaching Fellow who taught reading and writing to special-education high school students last year. “Nothing can really prepare you for the first year of teaching,” he said, noting that he was at least more qualified and a more stable influence for his students than the substitute he was replacing.
Peters and several other teachers say the format of their programs didn’t hurt their students. They tell of how they learned along the way and how they went from developing relationships with students to becoming more effective in raising their pupils’ performance.
But the picture painted by the research is less clear, with varying studies indicating that teachers who opt to go through alternative-certification programs perform worse, the same or better than those prepared in more traditional programs. Studies looking at training programs in general have noted that the more preparation and student-teaching, the better – for both general-education and special-education teachers.
Alexa Posney, Assistant Secretary for Special Education in the U.S. Department of Education, couldn’t comment on any specific alternative-certification programs, saying she’d want to know what kind of support system was in place for teachers after the training period. “I would want to have them working with a person who is fully licensed at the exact time,” she said. “That would give me the assurance that we are meeting the needs of the kids.”
All three programs say they provide such support through their staff and mentors. And Milwaukee’s Yahle thinks the supports are sufficient, saying that without them, hiring emergency-credentialed teachers would be “risky.”
Many teaching fellows also reported that they were given adequate help throughout the year. They said the experience was among the most challenging of their lives. Even so, they found it rewarding to be able to learn on the job.
“I’d do it all over again if I had to,” said Tiffany Miller, who taught in a self-contained classroom of emotionally and behaviorally disturbed high-schoolers. “Of course, knowing what I know now, I would change a few things.”
Erin Richards, an education reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, provided additional reporting.
A version of this story appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on September 1, 2010.
Since the vast majority of students who receive “special education” in US public schools are struggling readers parents naturally expect their child’s special education teacher(s) to have expertise in the evaluation and teaching of reading. They expect that these teachers will know how to help their child.
Despite excellent research on how to prepare teachers to help struggling readers ….
( http://www.aft.org/pdfs/teachers/rocketscience0304.pdf)
….and the enormous difference it can make to our children’s and our our country’s future…
(http://www.csun.edu/~krowlands/Content/Academic_Resources/Reading/Useful%20Articles/CunninghamWhat%20Reading%20Does%20for%20the%20Mind.pdf)…
….states’ continue to allow their education agencies perpetrate this illusion of “highly qualified” professionals.
Imagine cramming even an introduction to the psychology of reading (Moats, 1999) in to one “lesson” in one “learning disabilities.” course.
I hope you will continue to inform the public about this important subject. Parents often wait, trusting that the school will help their child, until it is too late.
I totally agree with the comment above! My daughters school even has perpetuated the fact that a “school psychologist” is in place when in fact she is a “psychoeducational therapist” and that she is a “doctor” when she has no doctorate (I refused to call her this!)! This individual even REFUSED to complete psychoeducational testing when we requested it and issued us a prior written notice that it wasn’t needed. We had asked about a learning disability in math as she continued to nearly fail in that subject every year. She stated she did not have one based on testing that was nearly five years old.
That was when we found out about this little “loop hole” by the district of the above that they could do that with the psychologists. We took our daughter to a private psychologist who did the testing for us and found out far more than we ever could imagine. Not only did she have a math LD, she had a processing disorder, Asperger’s Syndrome (which we knew about), ADHD, and severe anxiety. We took this to the school with that psychologists recommendations and they sat on it for two months! We ended up filing a state level complaint. The district director of special services now attends all her IEP meetings to ensure she gets what she needs and her IEP has been completely rewritten. The “so-called” school psychologist has been removed from her case and she now has an actual school psychologist.
Out of this we also found that NONE of the teachers in the school had even been in-serviced about what Asperger’s was (despite that we asked for it four years ago and that there are hundreds of kids in the school with it!!). We have fought with the school every year over the last four years. She finally has the best IEP ever and has individualized tutoring by a certified math teacher two hours a week (to start this week) and is doing very well. And, the teachers had a one day in-service about Asperger’s put on by the district! Yeah! On the down side, the transition services remain horrible. Things that were suppose to start last year have not started. Her special ed teacher in her resource room really only used that time as a homework room. She has a new special ed teacher this year. I hope things are better this year as she is due to graduate this year! We are now looking at college and have already talked to the college she is interested in and they have given us far more support in that regard.
Parents MUST stay on top of the schools as I have or my daughter would have failed miserably. She tends to sail “under the wire” as she is not a disruptive child and I know she is a smart and talented young lady and can excel. She is not a good self-advocate either so parents must be their childs’ advocate. Parents need to understand that the schools do NOT necessarily know what is best for your child. I have found this over and over. And yes, they are not necessarily the most “highly qualified” individuals! I’m a nurse practitioner (pediatric at that!) and they don’t even listen to me!
This is a crisis. To compound the problem, very few teachers who are working in special ed today – either the fully certified or the less prepared – have ever taken a course or received useful training on how to teach young children that come from different home languages! And – as long as you are thinking about it, take a moment to realize that almost none of the people who supervise these teachers have training in special education with young children who are English language learners. Is there a stronger word than ‘crisis’???
YOu want special ed students to learn better? Get them with teachers who are trained to deal with them and reduce time in regular classes. Get rid of NCLB and make the Feds pay for special ed so that district budgets are not eaten up by these programs and we can hire teachers and not run classes of 40+ students due to having to pay for special ed tiny classes that are pull out. You want it Fed’s you pay for it.
What this article doesn’t address–as well as the general notion that training is going to give special ed. teachers an edge–is the fact that it takes more than a highly trained teacher to achieve student success; it takes a bevy of other trained people who work alongside the teacher. Passing the Praxis has little if anything to do with being able to survive in a special ed. class as a teacher.
I work with moderately to severely disabled high school aged kids. Many are in diapers, some hit and pinch, many cannot feed themselves, yet they have IEPs and have teachers who are paid $80,000 a year to “teach”. It’s a huge waste of tax payer’s money. What these kids need are caregivers who train kids to be as self-sufficient as possible, which can be done with caring, highly paid nursing/behaviorists and not by people with a liberal arts background and a teaching credential.