The special education teacher pipeline in Washington State: A comprehensive analysis of preservice predictors of special education teacher career paths and effectiveness
2017-2021
Institute for Education Sciences
The first comprehensive analysis of the special education teacher pipeline that will leverage a unique longitudinal data set from Washington State that combines data about preservice teacher candidate experiences with information about K–12 teacher and student outcomes. This data set has been assembled as part of the Teacher Education Learning Collaborative (TELC), a partnership with teacher education programs (TEPs) in Washington designed to explore the effects of teacher education experiences on inservice teacher and student outcomes. The TELC data set is unique because it includes comprehensive transcript and student teaching data (such as where teacher candidates did their student teaching and which inservice teachers supervised it) for teacher candidates who receive their teacher education in specific TEPs and allows us to track these teacher candidates into the state’s K–12 public school workforce. We combine the TELC data with novel survey data (collected as part of this project) of special education faculty from participating TEPs and special education directors from school districts.