Over the next five years, a federally-funded study through the Indiana University School of Education is designed to get a better handle on just how special education instruction should change. The U.S. Department of Education has awarded the school a Special Education Pre-service Training Improvement Grant for $500,000 over five years. The school will receive $100,000 per year starting August 1. The amount is the maximum award given by the U.S. Department of Education for this grant program.

Gretchen Butera
Associate Professor of special education

The money will go to examining and improving special education masters and graduate certification programs. It will particularly address issues related to "highly-qualified" teachers, as mandated by the federal "No Child Left Behind" act. The project will also look to redesigning how teachers are prepared to address the needs of an increasingly diverse student population, and students with emotional and behavior disorders.

The money comes at a time when educators must address a student population changed dramatically by immigration patterns. "The things that we know about how to prepare special education teachers for schools of today have been changing," said Gretchen Butera, associate professor of special education. "Schools are different."

U.S. Department of Education statistics indicate the school-aged population grew 14% to an all-time high of 55 million between 1990 and 2000. The government estimates a million new students who are either children of immigrants or immigrants themselves enter the school system each year. That growth, the department concludes, will double the school population by 2100.

Butera will lead the project in collaboration with other faculty from special education, math education, and language education, as well as from the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community, a center for disability information, research, and training based at IU.

Butera says the research will focus on new requirements of special education teachers. "Special educators need to have content-area competence," she said. "So the federal government is asking personnel preparation programs to look at their training and see if they can improve the way special education teachers are trained in content areas." She added that the federal grant is unusual in that in previous years most money given to personnel preparation programs was allocated almost exclusively for student support. This money provides the opportunity to strengthen the program by examining and redesigning it to meet the changing student and teacher population.

The IU project, Butera said, could help address the problems Indiana and other states have with "limited-license" special education teachers. Nationally there is a shortage of fully-qualified special education teachers, especially in middle and secondary schools and for students with emotional-behavioral disorders. Because of the shortages, schools often have to hire special education teachers who are not fully-qualified. "There's a large number of limited-license special education teachers in Indiana," Butera said. "They're teaching, often, in classrooms or settings where they're addressing issues related to kids who have emotional behavior disorders." She said these teachers may have had little or no training, but the demand for teachers is so great and the supply so small that schools districts must hire them. "So here they are with the most vulnerable kids and the least amount of preparation to address their needs." These individuals often enroll in IU's graduate certification or master's program in special education.

Much of the work in the project will be field-intensive, with students examining actual classroom practices while developing their own. Butera said that is how she and others involved in the project will determine how training special educators might need to do to change. "We have the luxury of going out to actually figure out what it is we should do to change things," she said. "Hopefully our training can be more responsive to that, to what's really going on in the field."