Comparing Special Education Teachers in Public and Private Schools Using Administrative Data

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

Abstract

Purpose and Perspectives:
Despite federal requirements to provide special education services to some children in private institutions and an increase in private school choice programs for students with disabilities (SWDs; Miller, 2024), we know relatively little about how private schools serve SWDs at scale. A key input in how all schools serve students is through staffing. Indeed, decades of research demonstrate the importance of teachers to student outcomes (Chetty et al., 2014), including SWDs (Feng & Sass, 2013). Yet, although advances have been made in understanding the composition, distribution, and effectiveness of special education teachers (SETs) in public schools (Gilmour et al., 2024), we have limited large-scale evidence on these dynamics for private-school SETs, largely due to data limitations.

In this paper, we aim to overcome these limitations by leveraging administrative data on private-school SETs in the state of Nebraska to characterize this workforce at a population-level. Specifically, we ask:
1) What are the levels of SET staffing in private schools?
2) What are the characteristics of private-school SETs as it relates to education, experience, and race/ethnicity?
3) What are the turnover patterns for private-school SETs?
Additionally, we ask how these patterns change over time and how they compare to public school educators in the state.

Data and Methods:
We use administrative data from the Nebraska Department of Education on all public and private school employees from 2001-02 through 2024-25. These data include information about each employee’s personal and professional characteristics. We employ descriptive methods to report counts of FTEs, school-level rates of SET employment, and mean SET characteristics by sector. We also calculate annual measures of turnover that we decompose into switching schools, switching sectors, and leaving Nebraska schools.

Results:
Preliminary analyses reveal several key findings:
1) SET FTE in private schools more than doubled from 2002 to 2025 while the percentage of private schools with any SET FTE grew from 20% to 40%. Nevertheless, students in private schools were 50 percentage points less likely to have any SETs in their school compared to students in public schools.
2) On average, private-school SETs were the most experienced educators in the state compared to general education teachers and public-school SETs. They also diversified faster than public-school SETs with respect to race/ethnicity and, in many years, were the most racially diverse teachers in the state.
3) Private-school SETs turn over at much higher rates than public-school SETs, largely due to elevated rates of attrition from the workforce.

Significance:
We provide, to the authors’ knowledge, the first quantitative analyses of SETs in private schools using population-level data. The patterns we observe have important implications for the outcomes of SWDs in private schools, given the negative relationship between turnover and student outcomes (Kaler et al., 2025) and the benefits of having experienced and racially diverse teachers (Chetty et al., 2011; Gershenson et al., 2021). As efforts to expand private school choice proliferate across the U.S., studying special educators in this sector becomes essential for understanding how well SWDs are served in private schools.

Authors

• Nicholas James Ainsworth, University of California - Irvine

• Aaron J. Ainsworth, University of California - Irvine