Specail Education and Inclusion One

Specail Education and Inclusion

One of the most concerning issues with regard to education in the United States is the fact that there is an increasingly alarming shortage of teachers in the system. The difficulty associated with this problem would seem to some to be that there are too few quality teachers to fill the available positions, but the reality, statistically, according to many educators is that teacher retention and turnover rates are astounding. This fact creates a demographic of teachers who are highly skilled and effective but who resist working in their original field of choice for many reasons and the attrition rate among special education, resource room teachers is particularly troubling.

Reports from various states indicate that special education teachers leave special education teaching positions at disproportionally higher rates than their peers in general education. For example, in the 1995-1996 school year, attrition rates in Wisconsin were 6.5% for general education teachers and 8.4% for special education teachers (Lauritzen, 1997), and there was an average annual attrition rate for special educators of 24.2% in California (Pyecha & Levine, 1995) and 8.9% in Kansas (McKnab, 1995). (Katsiyannis, Zhang & Conroy, 2003, p. 246)

There are likely many reasons for this problem, some associated with condition, pay, empowerment, and the increasing numbers of student with disabilities and even environment. (Katsiyannis, Zhang & Conroy, 2003, p. 246) Furthermore, one of the most important reasons has to do with feelings of preparedness, or in this case lack there of. Teachers entering the field frequently cite as a reason for leaving that they feel woefully under prepared to teach in the environment they encountered once they entered the classroom. In special education this is particularly troubling, because traditional resource room teaching offers a diversity of such extremes that the ability of one teacher and a few secondary staff to meet the diverse needs of all the students is challenged daily if not hourly. Resource room teachers, feel under prepared to encounter the varied degrees of skill level, behavioral challenges and even personalities because the diversity of just these three factors, in addition to any physical limitations that special education students might have comprises a multitude of issues requiring specialized training. The kind of specialized training required goes far beyond general education offerings and a sense of doing the right thing for the love of children with special needs, though such elements are also crucial.

In an interview study of beginning special educators, Kilgore and Griffin (1998) found that novice special educators reported different problems from their beginning colleagues in general education. They often described themselves as insufficiently prepared, frustrated, and exhausted. The compounded pressures unique to inexperienced special educators have also been noted by Rosenberg, O'Shea, and O'Shea (1998). (Stempien & Loeb, 2002, p. 258)

Many experts feel that the issue of attrition is probably the number one reason why there is a teaching shortage at all and that creating systems that are inclusive of special training, growing professional development continued education programming as well as empowering teachers to be influential in their environment would likely greatly help the circumstances.

The retention of public school teachers has been an issue of continuing concern in education. Some studies reveal that bright college graduates are less likely to enter the teaching profession, and that even if they do, they leave in a short period of time (Murnane, Singer, Willett, Kemple, & Olsen, 1991; Schlechty & Vance, 1981). This phenomenon causes concerns about the quality of the teaching force. In addition to the issue of quality, high rates of teacher attrition disrupt program continuity and planning, hinder student learning, and increase school districts' expenditures on recruiting and hiring (Shen, 1997, p. 81)