Emergency Teacher Certifications in Special Education: Implications for Educators and Their Students

• In Event: The Special Education Teacher Workforce: New Evidence on Composition, Distribution, and Effectiveness Across Contexts

Abstract

Objective:
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2004) mandates that SETs be fully licensed, yet many states struggle to maintain this standard. As a response, states have turned to emergency licensure to address these shortages (Backes & Goldhaber, 2023). In Indiana specifically, emergency licenses for teacher shortages have been issued since the 1960s, though the state ceased issuing emergency licenses in special education after the 2021-2022 academic year.

Perspective:
While emergency certification may provide immediate relief in hard-to-staff areas (Chi et al., 2023; 2025), it raises important questions about who is entering special education through these nontraditional pathways, where and who they are teaching.

Research Questions:
The goal of this study is to build on the literature on emergency teacher certification and extend this work to describe:
RQ1: How have the proportions of SETs on emergency licenses changed over time?
RQ2-4: To what extent do SETs on emergency licenses differ from their non-emergency licensed SET peers in terms of school characteristics (RQ2), instructional setting assignment (RQ3), and the disabilities of their students (RQ4)?

Data:
We use longitudinal administrative data on all Indiana teachers and students from 2012–2021. The teacher dataset includes school, position type, instructional setting, salary, gender, race/ethnicity, and licensure details, including certification pathways. We create a binary variable indicating whether SETs were initially emergency or traditionally certified. These records are linked to student data (race, gender, socioeconomic status, and disability) to construct measures of caseload size and composition. We also incorporate school-level data from the Common Core of Data.

Methods:
We descriptively compare SETs who entered via emergency versus traditional certification.
RQ1: We use annual counts and proportions to document trends in emergency-certified SETs.
RQ2: We compare school characteristics (e.g., % economically disadvantaged students) between the two groups using means, standard deviations, and regressions with year fixed effects and clustered standard errors.
RQ3: We examine differences in instructional setting using regressions, including models with school fixed effects to assess within-school variation.
RQ4: Using the same approach, we compare the proportion of students in each disability category on SETs’ caseloads by certification type.

Results:
RQ1: The proportion of emergency certificates has steadily increased over time, with SETs on emergency certificates making up nearly one third of SETs in 2022.
RQ2: SETs on emergency licenses are more likely to work in schools serving more disadvantaged students.
RQ3: SETs on emergency licenses are more likely to work in self-contained settings
RQ4: SETs on emergency licenses work with students with significant needs.

Significance:
Special education teacher shortages have persisted for decades (Mason-Williams et al., 2020) and worsened during and after the COVID-19 pandemic (Goldhaber & Theobald, 2023). This is a nationwide issue, with 80% of states reporting shortages (Aldeman, 2024), leading to high vacancy rates and increased reliance on non-certified teachers (Nguyen et al., 2022). Research shows uneven distribution of traditionally certified SETs (Mason-Williams, 2015; Lai et al., 2021), and students with significant disabilities may face limited access to fully certified teachers (Gilmour & Henry, 2018).

Authors

• Tashnuva Shaheen, Boston University

• Hannah Kistler, Brown University