Report
Learn Together Surveys
Nov 2, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic presented new challenges for educators who teach students with disabilities (SWD). The authors of this Data Note present national survey findings from secondary school principals and educators from the spring of the 2020–2021 school year, exploring educators' access to and use of supports for teaching SWD.
Findings from the American Educator Panels
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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic presented new challenges for educators who teach students with disabilities (SWD). Research on the experiences of SWD during the pandemic is limited, but what is known suggests that SWD access to services and supports declined during the pandemic and that steeper learning losses are likely. Pandemic interruptions may be particularly problematic for secondary SWD because they missed out on critical preparation experiences while approaching the transition to college and career. Given these disruptions, it is critical that educators have the support and training they need to accelerate learning for SWD moving forward.
In this report, the authors present national survey findings from secondary school principals and educators from the spring of the 2020–2021 school year, exploring educators' access to and use of supports for teaching SWD. The analysis focuses on the roles that teachers play (i.e., general or special educator) and the service delivery models that they use for teaching SWD. Despite the massive disruption brought about by the pandemic, many long-standing patterns in roles and support for educating SWD remained unchanged. These patterns shed light on the challenges that educators in secondary schools faced, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, that made effectively educating SWD in secondary schools so challenging during the pandemic.
The research described in this report was conducted by RAND Education and Labor and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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