At Special Ed Teacher Shortage Hearing, Panelists Debate Dismantling Ed Dept.

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President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal to dismantle the federal Department of Education — and the impact it would have on the nation’s special education teacher shortage — was hotly debated at a public briefing in Washington, D.C. Friday morning.

Some panelists argued the move — long a goal of conservatives —  would be disastrous while others testified it would be largely symbolic. 

“The elimination of the Department Of Education would do significant harm to the teacher shortage and particularly for our students with disabilities,” testified Tuan Nguyen, an associate professor at the University of Missouri whose team runs one of the only national databases on teacher shortages. 

“The Department Of Education is largely responsible for making sure we follow the laws and to divest funds, and if we don’t have a Department of Education to oversee what we’re doing … we’re going to have a free-for-all in terms of who we’re going to put in the classroom,” Nguyen added.

Fellow panelist Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution had another take: “I don’t think that eliminating the Department of Education would do much.”

While he’s concerned it might jeopardize the collection of data and funding of research, ultimately Hanushek said the department is largely responsible for dispersing funds, a role another department could take on. 

“I think it’s largely a political statement,” he added.

Jessica Levin, litigation director at the Education Law Center, disagreed. “The DOE is not just a pass-through [of funds],” she said. “The DOE has expertise in the complicated distribution of those funds and the enforcement of the civil rights guarantees that go along with them.”

She added that “eliminating it would be not just on a practical level extremely harmful but part of an attack on institutions that protect civil rights in this country,” making it a “dangerous proposal both on a practical and symbolic level.”

Both state and federal governments are responsible for ensuring that the rights of students with disabilities are met through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The law, initially passed in 1974 but amended and renamed in 1990, proposed that federal funding would cover 40% of the average costs of special education, a directive that has yet to be met in the 50 years since. Experts noted that when special education isn’t fully funded, district leaders are forced to reallocate money from elsewhere, ultimately harming all students.

The federal Commission on Civil Rights held Friday’s briefing to better understand the impact of teacher shortages on students with disabilities nationwide. A final report on their findings is anticipated in fall 2025, Stephen Gilchrist, the lead commissioner on the report, told The 74 before the briefing.

“Having been involved with some of this in my own home state of South Carolina, we’ve seen many issues where students who were entitled to these federal accommodations were not receiving them at all in school districts,” Gilchrist said, a dilemma he noted is only worsened by teacher shortages.

An appointee from Trump’s first presidency, Gilchrist expressed optimism that the incoming administration will help lawmakers “think differently about how … we deliver education to students in America … without there being such a bureaucratic process.”

His observations and the debate at the briefing over the education department’s fate comes amid a firestorm over a series of controversial Trump appointees this week. Trump has yet to name his education secretary and it’s unclear whether what critics see as the extreme nature of his latest picks makes the department’s possible demise more likely.

Friday’s briefing focused on a persistent problem in K-12 education — the shortage of special education teachers — that was exacerbated by COVID. As of October 2023, 21% of public schools said they were not fully staffed in special education, and 51% reported having to move teachers around to fill a variety of vacancies. 

In 2024, 72% of public schools with special education vacancies struggled to fill the position with a fully certified teacher, according to Brittany Patrick, senior policy analyst on education at the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.

That being said, there is a lack of specific and reliable data, according to Nguyen, who noted that while almost every state has indicated shortages, there’s no information on the magnitude. “Knowing there’s a shortage is not particularly helpful if we don’t know the extent of the problem,” he said.

In the face of these vacancies, some states have issued thousands of provisional and emergency licenses, filled positions with substitute teachers, lowered teaching requirements, or sent the National Guard into classrooms, all of which means students are being instructed by under-qualified teachers, Nguyen argued.

Panelists across the spectrum noted the particularly challenging circumstances in which special education teachers currently work, marked by low pay, large caseloads and class sizes, inadequate support and political divisiveness — all of which appear to be driving them out of the classroom. At the same time, there is a dearth of new educators in the pipelines. 

Together this means that special education students don’t receive the services they’re entitled to, “a pervasive issue, exacerbated by decreased professionalization and the mental health effects of COVID,” said Amanda Levin Mazin, senior lecturer at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Even pre-pandemic, a number of these students were falling behind their peers.

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