Special education teachers play a critical role in helping students with disabilities learn, grow, and access the services they are entitled to receive. But for many educators, the job can come with heavy workloads, limited planning time, staffing shortages, extensive paperwork, and uneven access to support. Those pressures matter—not only for teachers’ well-being and retention, but also for the students and families who depend on consistent, high-quality instruction and services.

A new four-year project led by Helen Rose Miesner, PhD, research assistant professor with the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina (EPIC) in UNC’s Department of Public Policy, will take a closer look at what shapes those working conditions in North Carolina’s public schools. The research team includes investigators from EPIC and the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG).

The study, “Working Conditions for Special Education Teachers in North Carolina: Exploring Predictive Factors and Related Outcomes,” is supported by a $1.34 million award from the Institute of Education Sciences. It will examine which school- and district-level factors are connected to stronger or weaker working conditions for special educators—and how those conditions may relate to outcomes for both educators and students with disabilities.

That question is especially urgent now. National reports continue to identify special education as one of the hardest teaching areas to staff, with shortages driven by high demand, fewer people entering the profession, and educators leaving because of stress, workload, and lack of support. In North Carolina, reporting on exceptional children teacher vacancies has pointed to a strained educator pipeline and growing concerns about whether schools can consistently provide the specialized instruction and services students need.

Rather than focusing only on individual teachers, the project will look at the broader systems around them. Researchers will study factors such as teacher assistant staffing, administrator credentials, student-to-teacher ratios, support personnel, accountability pressure, educator credentials, spending on special and regular instruction, and investments in professional learning. The goal is to identify “malleable” factors—conditions that schools, districts, or policymakers may be able to change to better support special educators.

To do this, the team will combine statewide data with the voices of educators and administrators. The quantitative portion of the study will include nearly 2,500 traditional K-12 public schools across North Carolina’s 115 school districts, drawing on three years of the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey and administrative data from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. The sample is expected to include approximately 13,000 special educators and 190,000 students with disabilities. “NCDPI began including an option for teachers to report their role on the survey starting in 2024, creating this opportunity to distill how special education teachers’ perceptions of working conditions specifically differ from their colleagues in other positions,” said Miesner, who is also a faculty fellow at FPG. “This dataset is crucial to the design of our project.”

 "Recruitment and retention in special education is in crisis and the best way for us to understand how to create systems change is to talk to the people most impacted, our educators and practitioners. The qualitative portion of this research will hopefully provide critical insights on how working conditions impact decisions on whether to stay or leave the special education field." ~Megan Vinh

The qualitative portion will add a more personal view of the issue. Researchers will interview about 120 special educators and administrators in 18 schools selected to reflect different working conditions, rural and non-rural settings, and school levels. Those interviews will help the team understand how educators and administrators describe the causes and consequences of working conditions in their own schools. "Recruitment and retention in special education is in crisis,” said FPG Senior Technical Assistance Specialist Megan Vinh, PhD, a Co-PI on the study, “and the best way for us to understand how to create systems change is to talk to the people most impacted, our educators and practitioners. The qualitative portion of this research will hopefully provide critical insights on how working conditions impact decisions on whether to stay or leave the special education field."

Researchers will then examine how working conditions are connected to outcomes such as teacher retention, absences, evaluation ratings, student attendance, reading and end-of-grade achievement, and suspensions. By linking survey responses, administrative data, and interview findings, the team hopes to produce evidence that is both rigorous and useful.

The project’s findings could help school and district leaders move beyond broad concerns about special education staffing and toward more targeted solutions. If researchers can identify the conditions that help special educators stay, thrive, and do their best work, the study could point to practical changes that benefit teachers, students, and families across North Carolina—and offer lessons for other states facing similar challenges.

A collaboration rooted in systems change

For Miesner, the study grew out of a longstanding interest in understanding how the environments around special education teachers shape what they are able to do in classrooms—and how those conditions affect students with disabilities. As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she studied how working conditions influenced special educators’ practice. Later, when EPIC and FPG began exploring opportunities to work together, she saw a natural opening to examine those questions in North Carolina. “I noted my interest in getting a stronger understanding of how overlapping contexts shaped special education teachers’ and students with disabilities’ experiences in schools,” Miesner said. “Several others were interested in these relationships, and a project team was born!”

“We want our findings to be informative and actionable for practitioners across scales. Rather than solely documenting the state of working conditions for special education teachers, our work will identify systems-level elements that stakeholders can address to engender improvements for staff and students.” ~ Helen Rose Miesner

That origin story also shaped the project’s design. The team is not simply documenting challenges that many educators and school leaders already recognize; instead, researchers hope to identify conditions that can be changed. “We want our findings to be informative and actionable for practitioners across scales,” Miesner said. “Rather than solely documenting the state of working conditions for special education teachers, our work will identify systems-level elements that stakeholders can address to engender improvements for staff and students.”

The collaboration between EPIC and FPG is central to that approach. Miesner described the partnership as one built on complementary strengths: EPIC brings deep experience analyzing North Carolina administrative data, while FPG contributes essential content knowledge regarding the educational experiences of students with disabilities. Together, she said, the team is better positioned to produce research that is both methodologically rigorous and relevant to the people who can use it. "I am so excited to get to collaborate with the amazing people at EPIC,” said Vinh. “I am grateful that they are so willing to share their deep expertise with the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions survey and administrative data. This is a great opportunity for us to cultivate relationships that hopefully create lasting partnerships, for many years to come, around improving working conditions and supports for special educators."

Just as important, the partnership expands the study’s potential reach. By working together, EPIC and FPG can communicate findings to a wider range of audiences, from community members and school practitioners to district leaders and policymakers. That matters because, as Miesner noted, “Too often, research remains inaccessible to practitioners or incompatible with the practical realities of schools.” The team’s goal is to ensure that stakeholders across levels can not only understand the findings but also see concrete ways to support special educators’ work and students’ learning.