Sp.Ed. Friendly

It isn’t the students. It’s the system we’ve built around them — and once you see the three forces driving the special education achievement gap, you can’t unsee them.

If you teach middle or high school in America, you’ve felt the special education achievement gap even if you’ve never called it that. You see it in the graduation data, in the reading scores, in the student who crosses the stage with a diploma that opened fewer doors than it should have. And somewhere in the back of your mind sits a quieter question: is this just what disability looks like?

That question deserves an honest answer — because it’s the one a skeptic asks first, and the one that, answered well, changes how you read everything that follows.

Short version: Students with disabilities don’t succeed at the same rates as their peers largely because of three compounding system failures — a compliance-driven policy culture that rewards paperwork over progress, chronic special education teacher shortages that leave services undelivered, and underprepared staff who can’t execute the plans on paper. All three sit on top of a federal funding promise Congress never kept. None of them locate the problem in the students.

Let’s take each one in turn — but first, the objection worth meeting head-on.

Is the achievement gap just a result of how students are identified?

Here’s the fair pushback: of course students with disabilities score lower on academic measures — for many, academic difficulty is part of how they were identified in the first place. If we opened with a raw gap and blamed the system, a thoughtful reader would tune out immediately.

So let’s look at the numbers with clear eyes.

The gaps are real and wide. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), roughly 72% of fourth-graders with disabilities scored below basic in reading — the lowest category — along with 66% of eighth-graders. In math, 53% of fourth-graders and 74% of eighth-graders with disabilities landed below basic. On graduation, the national on-time rate for students with disabilities sits around 66%, versus about 84% for their peers — and in some states the gap runs past 30 points.

But here’s the detail that turns this from an accusation into an argument: the score declines since 2019 for students with disabilities closely mirror the declines for all students. Disability isn’t the variable driving the drop. And the ceiling is far higher than the floor we’re hitting — experts estimate that up to 90% of students with disabilities are capable of graduating on time. When 90% are capable and far fewer make it, that delta isn’t a measure of disability. It’s a measure of what the system did or didn’t do.

That’s the whole game. The real question isn’t “why can’t these students perform?” It’s “why does a system with the tools to close this gap keep failing to?” Three forces answer that. And they don’t sit side by side — they stack.

The root cause: a special education funding promise Congress never kept

Before the three forces, one number explains the ground they grow in.

When Congress passed the law we now call IDEA in 1975, it committed to funding 40% of the additional cost of educating students with disabilities. Fifty years later, the federal share sits under 12% — by some accounts below 10% in the current fiscal year, less than a quarter of what was promised. That shortfall, tens of billions of dollars a year, gets pushed onto states and districts that were never resourced to carry it.

Hold that number. Every force below is what chronic underfunding looks like when it reaches a classroom.

Force #1: A policy system that rewards paperwork over progress

For decades, the legal bar for a “good enough” education was set humiliatingly low. Courts in several parts of the country held that a student’s program only had to deliver “merely more than de minimis” — barely more than trivial — progress. Think about what that sentence permits.

In 2017, a unanimous Supreme Court finally said no. In Endrew F. v. Douglas County, the Court threw out the “de minimis” standard and ruled that every student’s program must be “appropriately ambitious” — reasonably calculated to enable real progress in light of that child’s circumstances. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that a program aiming as low as the old standard would leave a child “sitting idly… awaiting the time when they were old enough to drop out.”

That ruling should have been a turning point. In many places it still hasn’t been — because the day-to-day incentives push the other way.

Districts live under the constant, expensive threat of due-process litigation, where a single hearing can cost tens of thousands of dollars. So the rational institutional move is to become airtight on compliance: every deadline met, every signature collected, every service minute documented. None of that is wrong — but it consumes enormous time. Between IEPs, progress monitoring, Medicaid billing, and compliance tracking, paperwork can eat more hours than instruction. The letter of the IEP crowds out its substance. We get very good at proving a service was owed, and much worse at making sure it changed a child’s life.

And when progress lags, the path of least resistance is the oldest one in education: move the student along anyway. Social promotion — passing students who haven’t met the standard — is exactly the “aiming low” that Endrew was meant to end. It’s a policy of quiet surrender dressed up as kindness, and in middle and high school it’s how a student arrives in your class years below grade level with a folder full of passing grades.

Force #2: The special education teacher shortage means services go undelivered

Here’s where the paperwork meets reality. An IEP can promise the perfect set of services — but only if there’s a qualified person in the room to deliver them. Increasingly, there isn’t.

Special education is the single hardest teaching role in the country to staff. Entering the 2024–25 school year, 74% of elementary and middle schools reported difficulty filling a special education vacancy with a fully certified teacher. Special education was the most-reported shortage area in the nation — flagged by 45 states, more than science or math. And 21% of schools were not fully staffed in special education at the start of 2023–24, worse than any other specialty.

The pipeline math explains why this never resolves on its own: roughly 46,000 special education teachers leave public schools each year, while preparation programs train fewer than 30,000 to replace them. This isn’t a post-pandemic blip — most states have reported special education shortages in most years for decades.

Now the part that matters most. A shortage is an abstraction until you follow it to the student. In 2024, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that some students with disabilities did not receive their services — or had them delayed — because of staffing shortages, with districts leaning on unqualified staff or less-effective virtual sessions. And the courts have been clear this isn’t acceptable: when a Pennsylvania student with autism went without his IEP services because of understaffing, a court ruled that staff shortages are not an excuse for denying a free appropriate public education.

Sit with that. The plan exists. The law requires it. And the service still doesn’t happen — because no one qualified was there to provide it.

Force #3: Underprepared teachers can’t execute the plan

The final force is the subtlest, and the one teachers feel most personally: not the absence of a teacher, but the presence of an underprepared one.

To keep classrooms covered, districts fill special education roles with people who haven’t completed the training. Nationally, about 8% of teachers working with students who qualify under IDEA are not fully certified. In the toughest markets it’s far starker — in California, nearly 60% of first-year special education teachers have worked without special education certification.

This is not a knock on those teachers, most of whom are doing heroic work with a fraction of the preparation they deserved. It’s a knock on a system that keeps handing its most complex instructional challenge to its least-supported staff. The consequences are documented: students with disabilities are more likely to be assigned novice teachers who are less effective at raising achievement, and underprepared teachers are more likely to rely on suspension and other exclusionary discipline — which loops right back to the graduation gap we started with.

And the burden isn’t shared evenly. Because low-income, high-minority schools are the most likely to be staffed by uncertified teachers, the students with the highest needs are the most likely to be taught by the least-prepared adults. That’s the moral center of this whole picture, and it should make all of us uncomfortable.

Three forces that don’t add — they multiply

Read separately, these look like three problems. They’re really one machine.

Congress underfunds the promise. Cash-strapped, litigation-wary districts optimize for compliance over learning and quietly pass students along. They can’t find or afford enough certified specialists, so the services the IEP promises often aren’t delivered at all. And where someone is in the room, they’re disproportionately underprepared to execute the plan. The paperwork says a service is owed, no one qualified is there to give it, and the person who is there wasn’t trained for it.

The student sits at the center of that failure — and gets “passed along.”

That’s not a story about what students with disabilities can’t do. It’s a story about what we haven’t built for them.

What can teachers actually do about the special education achievement gap?

If you’ve read this far, you might feel the weight of a problem that runs from Congress down to the copier. That weight is real. But it’s also why SPED Friendly exists — and why this is the first post in a series, not a one-off.

We can’t personally fix IDEA’s funding formula this week. What we can do — every one of us, whether you’re a special educator, a general educator with students on IEPs, or a coach or coordinator — is get sharper at the part that’s actually within reach: the instruction. The strategies that raise progress even inside an underfunded, understaffed system. The moves that make an “appropriately ambitious” goal something you can deliver on a Tuesday afternoon with the caseload you have.

That’s what the rest of this series is about. These three forces are the why. Everything we build from here is the what now.

Because the students were never the problem. They’ve been waiting on us.

Frequently asked questions

What is the special education achievement gap?
The special education achievement gap is the persistent difference in academic outcomes — test scores, graduation rates, and post-school success — between students with disabilities and their peers without disabilities. On the 2024 NAEP, most students with disabilities scored below basic in reading, and their on-time graduation rate trails peers by roughly 18 points nationally.

Why do students with disabilities struggle in school?
Research points less to disability itself than to system failures: a compliance-driven policy culture that prioritizes paperwork over progress, special education teacher shortages that leave required services undelivered, and underprepared staff who can’t fully execute IEPs. Chronic federal underfunding of IDEA underlies all three.

Why is there a special education teacher shortage?
Special education is the hardest teaching role in the U.S. to staff. About 46,000 special education teachers leave public schools each year while fewer than 30,000 are trained to replace them, and 45 states reported special education shortages in 2024–25 — more than any other subject area.

What did Endrew F. v. Douglas County change?
In 2017, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the old “merely more than de minimis” standard for IEPs and ruled that a student’s program must be “appropriately ambitious” — reasonably calculated to enable meaningful progress in light of the child’s circumstances.

Can students with disabilities graduate at the same rate as their peers?
Largely, yes. Experts estimate up to 90% of students with disabilities are capable of graduating on time, yet far fewer do — evidence that the gap reflects system barriers, not student ability.