The government’s recent white paper on Post-16 Education and Skills places flexibility and choice at the centre of the future student experience.
When it comes to students, the government wants universities and colleges to adapt to a much wider range of demographics and to further embrace diversity – while continuing to break down the barriers to opportunity for students from all backgrounds.
One of the ways to strengthen opportunity is through the additional forms of financial support (via bursaries, scholarships and special-case funds) that higher education institutions provide for those students most at risk of dropping out, or those simply denied opportunity in the first place.
When it comes to this funding, the sector needs to work much harder in supporting a more varied set of future students, whilst making better use of data to design support packages, and adapting to the real-time user requirements for this type of funding.
Beyond the post-school model
The majority model of financial support is still designed primarily for a post-school entrant market (in line with access and participation plans) but we now need to evolve this for a much broader range of working students, part-time students, later life students and so on – based on the white paper’s steer for different student demographics and for more support for students from lower income backgrounds. This will require more agility. It will also require a closer and more strategic, data driven approach to the timing, delivery and use of such student funding.
Universities will increasingly be expected to meet the needs of a more diverse and complex learner population, one that is typically older, more financially stretched, and balancing work, family, caring responsibilities, and study. While the student body is evolving at pace, and there are encouraging signs of greater flexibility and adaptability across the sector, as highlighted in The Shape of Student Financial Support in 2025, there is also clear recognition that more progress is needed.
In our work with universities (designed to strengthen the effective delivery and impact of student financial support) we refer to this sea-change in funding as enabling both more optionality (for the funders) and greater agency (for the beneficiaries). Too much of the sector’s current model still assumes the profile and rhythms of the traditional 18-year-old school leaver. Policy momentum is pushing us firmly beyond this, and institutions will need to rethink not just how much financial support they provide, but how, when and in what form it is provided, and crucially, who it is designed for.
A new student majority
Commuter students, part-time learners, those studying while working full-time, and individuals returning to education later in life are no longer outliers. They are becoming a significant and growing segment of the student population, and the white paper’s direction of travel signals that this growth will continue.
These learners typically have different cost profiles, different pressures, and different expectations around support. Rent and food costs matter, of course, but so do childcare, caring responsibilities, travel to placements and campus, and the financial instability that often comes with shift-based or zero-hours work. Their support needs do not fall neatly around term dates.
A modern student support system must reflect that reality.
Beyond the “once-a-year” mindset
One of the strongest messages emerging from our work with universities is that timing of support is as critical as the pound value that support. Students increasingly need support that works with the grain of real life, not against it. That means agility: funds that can be released quickly during a crisis; support that can be drawn down in a way that helps with budgeting; and options that reflect different lifestyles, responsibilities, and individuals preferences around how they manage their finances.
For mature learners, the notion of a predictable “start of term” pressure point is often irrelevant. Housing, employment and family commitments create fluctuating financial pinch-points throughout the year. A forward-looking and agile hardship and support model must therefore allow universities to intervene dynamically, reacting to student need rather than institutional calendar.
Across the more than 40 institutions we partner with, we see a growing shift toward more targeted, purpose-led and flexible support. Although institutions are facing significant financial constraints, they are adapting, often rapidly, to ensure funding reaches the right students in a way that genuinely makes a difference.
We are seeing:
A move toward more tailored interventions, with universities reshaping bursaries and hardship schemes around specific learner profiles, including mature and commuter students.
Increased use of real-time payment mechanisms, enabling rapid support when a financial shock threatens continuation.
Greater use of data to understand how different types of students use support, and what interventions are most likely to prevent financial distress, disengagement or withdrawal.
Growing recognition that support must be designed around lived experience, responsive to trends and feedback, not just institutional tradition.
This shift is encouraging, but the system as a whole is not yet optimised for the demographic change that the White Paper anticipates.
Where policy meets practice: recommendations for a modernised support model
To prepare for a more diverse learner population, the sector will need to reimagine its support architecture. From our work with universities and our ongoing analysis of funding patterns, several recommendations emerge:
We should build support models around life-stage, not simply level of study. Mature and non-traditional learners experience costs and vulnerabilities that differ from the archetypal school-leaver. Support schemes should explicitly recognise this, particularly around childcare, travel, digital access, and household stability.
There is a need to shift from fixed-cycle payments to flexible, real-time support. Financial crises rarely occur conveniently during scheduled disbursement windows. Universities need mechanisms that allow for rapid, secure, and dignified disbursement of funds whenever needed.
It is time to explore hybrid support models that blend cash, credit and vouchers. Different pressures require different tools. Cash support is essential in alleviating hardship. Credit and voucher mechanisms can help direct funds toward participation, learning, and targeting food poverty. Mature learners often benefit from a mixture of both.
We must make data central to decision-making. With financial pressure mounting across the sector, institutions must allocate limited resources with precision. Data on spending patterns, draw-down behaviour and student feedback can inform more effective and equitable holistic support strategies.
We should co-design support with the students who rely on it. There is no substitute for listening to those living the experience. Mature and non-traditional students frequently report that support systems “aren’t designed for people like me”. Bringing their voices into design and evaluation will be vital.
A financial support system fit for the future
The white paper’s direction is clear: widening participation will no longer be defined simply by access for school leavers from underrepresented groups. It will increasingly require a system capable of supporting learners from every life stage, people retraining, upskilling, switching careers, balancing caring responsibilities, or returning to education for the first time in decades.
This transition will require institutions to be flexible, evidence-led, and prepared to evolve their traditional models of support. Our latest annual report provides one lens on how this evolution is taking place, and where further change is needed. But the wider policy moment demands more than reflection: it demands intentional redesign.
If universities are to deliver opportunity for all, as the white paper sets out, they will need financial support systems that reflect the real, diverse, year-round lives of today’s and tomorrow’s students. Flexibility is no longer a helpful addition; it is the foundation on which effective, equitable support must be built.
Wales’ tertiary education and research sector is something we should all be proud of.
This is why I want to ensure it not only remains sustainable but continues to build on the achievements of the past five years.
These achievements include our progressive higher education funding policy, which has ensured financial barriers do not hold back talent and ambition. Welsh full-time undergraduates studying away from home outside London are entitled to £12,345 in maintenance support, with up to £8,100 in grants for those from the lowest income household.
Our financial package for part-time study has opened higher education to thousands more students since 2018.
Welsh universities led the UK for the proportion of their research whose impact is considered internationally excellent or world-leading in REF 2021.
The pandemic had a tremendous impact on every aspect of education, but the tide has started to turn. Further education has seen a revival in participation in recent years, helped by increased funding for colleges and the continuation of the Education Maintenance Grant and Welsh Government Learning Grant. Last year there was an 8.5 per cent increase in school leavers progressing to college and it is promising that early data suggests a similar increase this year.
A time of challenges
But I am mindful that there are significant challenges facing tertiary education, not just in Wales, but across the UK.
Yesterday in the Senedd I set out what I believe are now the five most pressing challenges for higher and further education in Wales in the coming years, and how I will use the remainder of the Senedd term to work with the sector to address them.
The Welsh Government has a long-standing goal of 75 per cent of working age people being qualified to level 3 or higher by 2050. To achieve this, we need to expand access to a full range of vocational, technical, and academic pathways from age 16, which is why we are already reforming both 14-16 and post-16 qualifications.
And our tertiary education sector must be ready for a significant decline in the numbers of young people. The number of 16-year-olds in Wales is expected to fall by 17 per cent between 2027 and 2037. As a result, demand for university places across the UK could fall by almost 20 per cent in the 2030s.
Lifelong learning is already well ingrained in Welsh higher education. In 2022-23, 36 per cent of Welsh students studied part-time, compared with 23 per cent of English students, and 44 per cent of Welsh students were aged 25 and above compared with 36 per cent of English students. And during this Senedd term we have been able to increase the numbers of part-time learners in further education for the first time in a decade.
This is a platform to build from, but we will need to go further to enable adults to upskill around work and family commitments, at all levels, by providing more flexible, part-time and lifelong learning opportunities.
Unintended consequences
Another challenge relates to the unintended consequences of growing competition between providers. The competition in student recruitment is fundamental to the financial challenges now facing our universities and it will only intensify from 2030.
The removal of student number caps has permitted some UK universities to grow their domestic enrolments – often by lowering entry requirements – at the expense of the rest of the sector, including many of our excellent universities here in Wales. A future where higher-tariff providers continue to expand their enrolments at the rate of the past few years cannot be sustainable for the wider UK sector.
So I agree with the UK Government’s white paper that the future for tertiary education lies not in greater competition, but in increased collaboration. We have already worked with the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) to clarify the position on collaboration between universities. Medr is working to map subject provision so we can better understand which subjects may be at risk in the future from growing competition and changes in student preferences. Now we must look at how we enable closer collaboration in practice, and create the right incentives in funding and regulation for institutions to act more collaboratively.
I believe working in partnership will also be key to addressing the financial challenges facing not only institutions, but also students.
Our financial support for tertiary education and students is significant, totalling over £1.2bn this year alone. Despite taking the difficult decision to increase tuition fees in the past two years and again next year, education must remain affordable. This is why we provide generous student support and a more progressive repayment policy in Wales. We will therefore consider cost-of-living pressures for students and learners in the ongoing evaluation of the Diamond reforms. But the challenges facing the public finances are likely to last, and we need to consider how every penny spent to support institutions and students is delivering the greatest value possible.
Delivery
Finally, a thriving tertiary education sector must deliver for our economy. There are already excellent examples of this – such as the role of Cardiff University to support the compound semiconductor manufacturing hub, or the work of the North Wales Tertiary Alliance to power the new reactors at Wylfa with a skilled workforce. But we will need to change our approaches to vocational skills and research and innovation, both to respond to UK Government reforms, and to ensure that our economy has the skills and ideas to boost productivity and reduce inequality.
We have begun some of the work needed to meet these five challenges but must go further. In the coming weeks, we will publish an evidence paper, alongside a call for submissions from stakeholders, which will set out the challenges in much greater depth, and call on the sector to comment and advise on what more we need to understand about them.
I have also invited representatives from across the Welsh sector to join a new Ministerial Advisory Group, to consider these challenges in depth and in the spirit of social partnership.
Together, this work will provide a comprehensive evidence base upon which to deliver further reform, and help us to secure a thriving future for our tertiary education sector in Wales in these challenging times.
For more than a century, U.S. higher education has been intertwined with American empire. Universities have served as ideological partners, intelligence hubs, policy workshops, and training grounds for the managers of U.S. global power. When Washington supports authoritarian allies, fuels regional conflicts, or looks away during humanitarian disasters, the academy rarely stands apart. Instead, it aligns itself—through silence, research partnerships, and selective outrage—with the priorities of the federal government and the corporations that profit from U.S. foreign policy.
Recent U.S. actions in Venezuela, Ukraine, Yemen, South Sudan, and Palestine reveal how deeply embedded this pattern has become.
In Venezuela, the United States pursued years of sanctions, covert pressure, and diplomatic isolation as part of a regime-change strategy. Throughout this period, universities repeated a narrow range of policy narratives promoted by the State Department and U.S.-aligned think tanks. Panels and conferences elevated experts connected to defense contractors, oil interests, and government-funded NGOs, while the humanitarian consequences of sanctions and the legality of U.S. interference were often ignored. The atmosphere of academic neutrality masked a clear alignment with Washington’s objectives.
Universities also showed a troubling degree of complicity during Russia’s assault on Ukraine, a war marked by the systematic killing of civilians, mass displacement, and the kidnapping and forced transfer of Ukrainian children into Russia. Even after international human rights organizations and war-crimes investigators documented atrocities, some U.S. institutions maintained partnerships with Russian universities aligned with the Kremlin, accepted visiting scholars linked to state propaganda outlets, or avoided direct condemnation of Putin’s actions for fear of disrupting scientific or financial relationships. In certain cases, academic centers framed the invasion as a “complex geopolitical dispute” rather than a brutal, unilateral attack on a sovereign population, allowing Russian narratives about NATO, Western “provocation,” or Ukrainian illegitimacy to seep into public programming. While some campuses cut ties, others hesitated, revealing how financial incentives, research networks, and institutional caution can blunt moral clarity even in the face of internationally verified crimes against civilians and children.
Higher education’s relationship with the Gulf states adds another dimension to this complicity. As Saudi Arabia waged a catastrophic war in Yemen—with U.S. weapons, logistical support, and diplomatic protection—American universities deepened their financial partnerships with Saudi and Emirati institutions. Engineering programs, medical schools, cybersecurity labs, and energy research centers accepted major gifts and expanded joint research agreements. Few leaders questioned these ties, even as human rights groups documented atrocities in Yemen or as the UAE’s role in proxy conflicts, including episodes in South Sudan, came into sharper focus. Protecting revenue streams took precedence over confronting abuses committed by powerful allies.
Nowhere is the failure of higher education more visible than in its response to Israel’s assault on Gaza. As civilian deaths soared and international human rights organizations sounded alarms about the scale and intent of the military campaign, most universities responded with repression rather than reflection. Administrators disciplined student protesters, sanctioned faculty for political speech, and issued public statements carefully aligned with prevailing U.S. political positions. Research partnerships with Israeli institutions linked to defense industries persisted without scrutiny. Universities that once examined apartheid with clarity struggled to acknowledge parallels when the subject was Palestine. Donor sensitivities, political pressures, and fear of congressional retaliation overwhelmed any commitment to moral consistency or academic freedom.
The same institutional behavior is likely if U.S. policy shifts in East Asia. Should Washington move toward accommodating the People’s Republic of China’s ambitions regarding Taiwan—whether through diplomatic recalibration or reduced willingness to intervene—universities will likely adapt quickly. The history of U.S.-China normalization in the 1970s showed how fast higher education can reorient itself when geopolitical winds change. Partnerships, narratives, and research agendas would shift to align with new federal signals, demonstrating again that universities follow the imperatives of state power more readily than they challenge them.
The deeper issue is structural. U.S. higher education relies on federal research funding, defense and intelligence partnerships, corporate relationships, overseas investment programs, and philanthropic networks shaped by geopolitical interests. Endowments are tied to global markets that profit from conflict. Study-abroad and academic exchange programs depend on diplomatic priorities. Administrators understand that openly challenging U.S. foreign policy—from Venezuela to Ukraine, from Yemen to Gaza—can threaten institutional stability and funding. Silence or selective engagement becomes the safest administrative posture.
If the academy hopes to reclaim its integrity, it must learn to confront rather than replicate state power. That requires transparency about foreign funding and defense contracts, protection for dissenting scholars and students, genuine engagement with global South perspectives, and ethical evaluation of partnerships with authoritarian governments. Universities cannot prevent wars, but they can refuse to serve as intellectual and financial enablers of violence.
Until such changes occur, higher education will remain entangled in the machinery of U.S. empire, complicit not through passivity but through the routine normalization of policies that inflict suffering around the world.
Sources
Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; U.S. Congressional Research Service; Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; Brown University’s Costs of War Project; Washington Post and New York Times reporting on U.S. sanctions and foreign policy; Investigations by the Associated Press, Reuters, and Al Jazeera on Yemen, Gaza, Venezuela, and South Sudan; HEI archives and independent higher education researchers.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon appointed on Tuesday five new members to the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, a body that advises on accreditation, including which organizations should be recognized by the federal government.
A sixth member is expected to be appointed later, according to the Department of Education. The five members announced on Tuesday are below:
—Robert Eitel is president of the Defense of Freedom Institute, a conservative think tank. Eitel previously served as senior counselor to the Secretary of Education from 2017 through 2020, during the first Trump administration, and as Deputy General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Education from 2005 until 2009. Eitel has a background in for-profit education, serving past stints at for-profit college operators Bridgepoint Education Inc. and Career Education Corp.
—Joshua Figueira is currently the deputy general counsel and managing director of the Office of Compliance, Risk, and Legal Affairs at Brigham Young University–Idaho. Prior to joining BYU-Idaho in 2017, he worked on First Amendment and religion issues at Utah law firm, Kirton McConkie.
—Jay Greene is a senior research fellow for the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Greene previously taught at the University of Arkansas, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Houston and also worked for The Manhattan Institute for a decade. He is a school choice advocate and frequent critic of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
—Steven Taylor is the policy director and senior fellow in economic mobility at Stand Together Trust. Taylor also serves on the State Council for Higher Education for Virginia. His past posts include almost six years at the American Council on Education. Taylor has argued that the current accreditation model needs an overhaul and “rewards compliance over performance, fails to track outcomes, and leaves students burdened with debt and weak returns” among other concerns.
—Emilee Reynolds is a student at Western Carolina University.
The Higher Education Act dictates that ED appoints six of 18 total NACIQI members while Congress names the other 12. The department cast its most recent picks as reformers needed to help fix a broken accreditation system in a Tuesday news release.
“Americans recognize that the accreditation process needs reform to better serve students and families, and the Trump Administration is addressing this, in part, through these reform-minded appointees,” Under Secretary Nicholas Kent said in the news release announcing the new members.
Kent said he was confident the appointees will help the administration “realign the accreditations system and get it back on track.”
“We can no longer accept a protectionist system in which a few powerful non-governmental entities gatekeep billions in federal student aid and licensure opportunities, overlook poor student outcomes, contribute to rising college costs and degree inflation, and prioritize divisive DEI standards over the skills students need to compete in the next-generation workforce,” he said.
NACIQI’s next meeting is scheduled for December 16. The meeting was originally scheduled for July but pushed to October, and was then delayed again because of the government shutdown.
This week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott labeled the Council on American-Islamic Relations a foreign terrorist organization, and prohibited them from purchasing land in the state. That move doesn’t just have practical ramifications for CAIR’s ability to operate in Texas — it follows an all-too-familiar pattern in American history. In moments of perceived crisis, public officials cast unpopular ideological minorities as internal enemies, exploiting “security” concerns to trample on speech and belief.
CAIR is a D.C.-based, national organization whose mission is to “enhance understanding of Islam, protect civil rights, promote justice, and empower American Muslims.” CAIR has been fiercely critical of Israel and American efforts to support Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Recently, CAIR successfully sued Abbott’s administration over executive orders that targeted pro-Palestinian campus protesters. CAIR also defended EPIC City, a Muslim-oriented development in Texas that Abbott investigated in September.
Against that backdrop, Abbott’s order designating CAIR cites to the organization’s protected speech and viewpoints, alleges that CAIR supports terrorism, and says they are “radical extremists” who “are not welcome in our state.” He then offers the vague assertion that CAIR wants “to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world.’” CAIR has since sued Abbott’s administration for the terror designation.
Using the language of “terrorism” and “foreign enemy” is not a new tactic to quash disfavored speech. In 1918, on the heels of World War I and the ensuing anti-German and anti-Bolshevik fervor, Montana passed its Sedition Act. The Act made it a crime to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, violent, scurrilous, contemptuous, slurring or abusive language” about the U.S. government, Constitution, flag, military, or any language “calculated to incite or inflame resistance” to federal or state authority during the war. In other words, it made criticizing the U.S. illegal.
Under Montana’s Sedition Act, hundreds of Montanans were arrested and 79 ultimately convicted for things as minor as making offhand anti-war remarks in a bar. One convict, Slovenian native Josef Gocevar, said “President Wilson had no business getting into this war.” He was sentenced to six years in prison. Another convict, Fay Rumsey, made the mistake of saying that he “wished the Germans would come in and clean up the U.S.” He received a two-year sentence. By proscribing one side of the debate over the war, Montana’s Sedition Act effectively criminalized dissent.
When First Amendment rights are at stake, such speculative connections are nowhere near sufficient to impose sweeping punishments.
The Sedition Act also proved useful for pressuring anti-war Montanans into violating their consciences by buying war bonds. Local patriotic councils created lists of dissenters. Mobs weaponized the lists, threatening to report fellow citizens to the authorities if they did not purchase war bonds. It worked: One council boasted that Montana subscribed to war bonds at a level “far exceeding national projections.”
When men pressured Earnest V. Starr, an Ohio native who moved to Montana, to buy war bonds and kiss an American flag, Starr refused, stating that the flag was “nothing but a piece of cotton with a little paint on it.” Starr was sentenced to 10 years in prison and had to pay a $500 fine, which is about $9,000 in today’s dollars. Another mob threatened to lynch German immigrant Herman Bausch for refusing to buy war bonds, instead interrogating him for several hours. After Bausch admitted that he was “opposed to war” and that he would “not contribute financially to this world calamity,” he was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.
Dissenters during the Second World War fared similarly, particularly Jehovah’s Witnesses. Jehovah’s Witnesses are pacifists, and categorically opposed the war. Their opposition — and refusal to salute the American flag — drew accusations that they were fifth columnists, a term for a group that secretly sympathizes with the enemy. Between 1940 and 1942, there were hundreds of attacks on Jehovah’s Witnesses in the US, almost always with the support of local law enforcement. In a sick twist, Nazi Germany similarly persecuted Jehovah’s Witnesses for refusing to participate in Hitler’s patriotic exercises. Many were ultimately murdered in Nazi concentration camps.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the First Amendment
Between 1938 and 1943, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had an astonishing 30 cases before the Supreme Court that mostly expanded First Amendment liberties. The result was a much stronger and richer jurisprudence.
In Minersville School District v. Gobitis(1940), the Supreme Court held that public schools did not violate the First Amendment when they compelled Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the American flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Within days of the Gobitis ruling, members of the American Legion (in conjunction with the local police chief) in Richwood, West Virginia, forced Jehovah’s Witnesses to drink castor oil and march to the post office to salute the flag. Similar attacks were carried out elsewhere: Litchfield, Illinois jailed all 60 Witnesses in the town, while a mob burned a Witness building to the ground in Maine. As one Southern sheriff put it: “they’re traitors; the Supreme Court says so. Ain’t you heard?”
But the Jehovah’s Witnesses persevered. Only three years after the Gobitis-inspired fervor, the Supreme Court reversed course. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette(1943), the Court overruled Gobitis, famously holding that the government cannot “prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”
That reversal fit into a broader rethinking of how far officials can go to marginalize “disloyal” speech. Early World War I prosecutions under the federal Sedition Act ended in victories for the government. But in Abrams v. United States(1919), Justices Brandeis and Holmes cautioned in dissent that punishing unpopular dissidents for their words alone was incompatible with a free society. It took decades, but their view eventually prevailed: Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) held that even ugly, extremist advocacy is protected unless it is intended and likely to spur imminent lawless action. The logic that undergirded Montana’s Sedition Act no longer holds water, which should make us very skeptical when today’s officials reach for “national security” to silence opposition.
Yet in Texas today, you can hear the same soundtrack playing underneath Abbott’s rhetoric about CAIR. He says CAIR has taken “actions . . . to support terrorism across the globe and subvert our laws through violence, intimidation and harassment” and calls them “radical extremists” who “are not welcome in our state.” That line about support for terrorism does the same work as “disloyal, profane, scurrilous . . . language” in the Montana Sedition Act: It collapses speech and advocacy into treason. Much like Gobitis’ effect on Jehovah’s Witnesses during World War II, Abbott’s decision singles out CAIR as a potential fifth column — and asks the state government to treat it as such.
Of course, if CAIR has broken the law, state law enforcement may follow its regular processes for criminal or civil investigations. That means opening investigations based on actual evidence of legal violations, not based on a target’s viewpoints and speech. When constitutional rights are at stake, evidence like Abbott’s is too thin. For example, Abbott cites an FBI agent who claimed that CAIR was a “front group” for Hamas, but that was only one agent, 17 years ago, and the federal government (across Democratic and Republican administrations) has brought zero material support for terrorism charges against CAIR. Abbott also cites a War on Terror-era case where a judge denied CAIR’s motion to file an amicus brief. In denying the motion, the judge suggested that CAIR was connected to terrorists. But that’s not an evidence-based ruling by a judge — it’s an aside in a decision that didn’t touch the core issues of the case. When First Amendment rights are at stake, such speculative connections are nowhere near sufficient to impose sweeping punishments.
The Montana Sedition Act and Gobitis should mark the outer boundary for what we should tolerate in a free society. States cannot demand ideological conformity from individuals, interest groups, or religious minorities to operate in their state. If a blue state banned pro-Israel or Jewish groups — claiming that those groups sponsored violations of international law by supporting the war in Gaza or violence in the West Bank — that would be just as much of a red flag for civil liberties as Abbott’s order. Whether one agrees with CAIR or not, the entire point of the First Amendment is that government officials do not get to decide which critics are patriots and which are enemies of the state.
The Institute for Free Speech’s Bradley Smith and Brett Nolan join the show to discuss two upcoming Supreme Court arguments involving donor disclosure (First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, Inc. v. Platkin) and political party contributions to candidates (National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC).
The conversation also explores the broader landscape for political speech and campaign regulation, what legal battles may be next for the Supreme Court, and how both guests found their way into First Amendment advocacy.
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Since the fallout of Occupy Wall Street in 2011, a small but persistent movement has sought to expose the widening inequities and systemic failures in U.S. higher education. We have agitated, analyzed, and educated, warning that the “market-driven” model championed by elite managers—presidents, trustees, CFOs, and state policymakers—would erode both academic quality and access. Today, that warning has become reality.
The College Meltdown is not a metaphor. It is a literal unraveling of an ecosystem where public support has eroded, tuition has skyrocketed, and students are left with crushing debt. Colleges are shuttering campuses, programs are disappearing, and adjuncts—already the backbone of instruction—face insecure employment. Meanwhile, neoliberal administrators, entrusted with guiding institutions through turbulence, have mostly engaged in cosmetic pruning rather than systemic reform.
This is not accidental. The managerial class in higher education—driven less by pedagogy than by budgets, branding, and financialization—has embraced austerity measures that protect elite interests while passing costs to students and staff. Endowment growth, athletics spending, and executive compensation often take priority over the academic mission. HBCUs and tribal colleges, already underfunded, bear the brunt of this mismanagement.
Efforts to stabilize the system have been tepid at best. Proposals for meaningful structural reform, from debt relief to state reinvestment, are watered down by political and market pressures. Neoliberals tout efficiency and innovation, yet rarely address the underlying moral crisis: the deliberate prioritization of profit over learning, and the failure to cultivate a socially responsible citizenry.
Our own engagement, since 2011, has aimed to shine light on these contradictions. We have chronicled how policies favoring privatization, corporate partnerships, and debt-financed tuition have created conditions ripe for collapse. We have amplified voices of students and faculty navigating these pressures. And we have challenged complacency in the academy, insisting that higher education be measured not just by financial metrics but by its capacity to educate, empower, and expand human potential.
“Pruning in Chernobyl” captures the essence of this moment: managerial actors trimming the edges while radioactive structural failures spread unchecked. Unless institutions confront the root causes—inequality, extractive financial models, and an erosion of public purpose—the meltdown will deepen. Our work remains to educate the public, hold decision-makers accountable, and imagine a higher education system that nurtures learning rather than merely managing decline.
This is part one of a two-part series on the 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. For part two, click here.
When Antoinette Banks’ daughter, Nevaeh, was diagnosed with intellectual disabilities in 2011, Banks was told her 5-year-old daughter would have a 0% chance of living independently as an adult.
“What I’m hearing is that my kid doesn’t have a future,” Banks says. “It broke me for a little bit.”
To fill in all the unanswered questions she had about her daughter’s future, Banks began trying to better understand the special education system she and her daughter were now a part of.
Just understanding all the processes and paperwork — individualized education programs, evaluations, assessments, procedural notices and more — got “super confusing sometimes,” says Banks, who lives in Sacramento, California.
Even after she filed all the special education documents in a three-ring binder, Banks still struggled to organize documents critical for monitoring the interventions provided by multiple teachers and therapists, as well as for tracking information from doctors and diagnosticians.
She created what she called an online “spreadsheet on steroids” to share with her daughter’s support teams. As she improved her homemade tool, she began sharing the template with other families in similar situations.
Antoinette Banks (right) stands with her daughter Nevaeh in northern California in spring 2025.
Permission granted by Lana Andruh
That prototype evolved into Expert IEP, a platform that’s now powered by artificial intelligence to help families, school districts, therapists and doctors collaborate on services for children with disabilities, Banks says.
“I thought that if I could get everyone to just communicate with one another and not be so siloed and not telling me what they think, but what does the data say about my daughter, then maybe we can get focused on what she actually needs in her learning environment,” Banks says.
Fast forward to today: Banks’ daughter is 19 years old and graduated in June from a public California high school with a general education diploma. Nevaeh is now studying biological systems engineering at a northern California college and wants to become a nanotechnologist, according to her mother.
“I feel so very, very blessed to have been able to be on this wild roller coaster ride with my daughter and continue to advocate and refine, because anything is possible,” Banks says.
The tool Banks created — which she said was born out of both frustration and necessity — is but one example of the many tools and techniques developed over the past five decades to support students with disabilities and their families and teachers.
On Nov. 29, the landmark Individuals with Disabilities Education Act turns 50. President Gerald Ford signed the legislation, originally known as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, guaranteeing students with disabilities the right to a free and appropriate public education. Before then, no federal requirement existed that schools must educate students with disabilities.
In addition to opening public schools to a whole population of children, the law became the catalyst for legions of innovative practices and tools cultivated from both public and private sources. The transformations, special education experts say, were spurred by an ongoing need to individualize student supports while helping children with disabilities progress in general education classrooms.
IDEA eligibility grows over 5 decades
Since the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was enacted, the portion of all public school students qualifying for special education services almost doubled.
Many of these practices and technologies — such as universal design for learning, assistive technology, and positive behavioral interventions and supports — would not only be proven to help students with disabilities, but also to benefit their peers without disabilities.
Innovative and proven practices that are effective for a student with disabilities are “going to work with a student without disabilities,” says Lindsay Kubatzky, director of policy and advocacy for the National Center for Learning Disabilities.
To mark IDEA’s 50th anniversary, K-12 Dive spoke with special education experts about approaches, practices and technologies that have revolutionized how students with disabilities are supported — and how these innovations keep evolving.
In rural Oregon, K-2 students at Warrenton Grade School take part in the CAST Take Flight drone curriculum in October 2025, showcasing how universal design for learning principles enable meaningful STEM learning for even the youngest learners.
Permission granted by Carolyn Peterson
Eliminating learning barriers with UDL
Delana Robles spends her day problem solving. As the universal design for learning resource teacher in New Mexico’s Albuquerque Public Schools, Robles helps teachers make learning accessible for students who have dyslexia, hearing or vision impairments, learning disabilities or other conditions.
“UDL is a way to include every student in the classroom by looking at who they are as a learner and as a person, versus seeing them as someone with a deficit,” Robles says. If educators understand each student’s strengths and needs and how to support them, “education will improve across the board,” she says.
The UDL framework can be applied across all ages and learning environments to reduce instructional barriers through classroom design, assistive technology and engaging teaching and learning practices. These could include using text-to-speech features or large fonts, or allowing students to choose how they demonstrate their knowledge by writing a report, creating a slideshow or performing a skit, for example.
UDL got its start in 1984 when neuroscience researchers were looking for ways computers — which were just becoming more widely used for personal and professional use — could improve learning for students with disabilities. A group of five clinicians from North Shore Children’s Hospital in Salem, Massachusetts, formed the nonprofit Center for Applied Special Technology.
Lindsay Jones is the CEO of CAST.
Permission granted by Lindsay Jones
Lindsay Jones, CEO of CAST and former president and CEO of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, says one of the biggest developments in special education over the past 50 years has been the acceptance of learner variability — the idea that each student processes and demonstrates learning differently. UDL, Jones says, helps schools use technology, classroom designs and instructional practices to make learning more effective and inclusive for each student.
Jones calls UDL “future proof,” meaning demand will only grow to customize learning so as to propel student understanding, engagement and agency. “I think it’s exciting that special education has driven a lot of the research that’s impacted all of education,” she says.
A student from the California School for the Blind in Fremont, Calif., reads a book using Bookshare’s accessibility features on March 4, 2025.
Permission granted by Erick Salazar
Making reading accessible through Bookshare
Obtaining books in accessible formats for students who have low vision or are blind used to be a slow and laborious process. Schools typically had to manually request large-print or Braille editions that could take weeks or months to arrive.
In some cases, schools could track down the limited number of large-print or Braille copies that existed. Schools in rural areas faced even greater barriers to obtaining accessible books, according to historical accounts. And when obtained, these books were big and heavy for students to carry around.
Schools also relied on staff or volunteers to make audio recordings of entire books — another time-consuming process.
All this meant that students rarely got the accessible content in time to participate in learning along with their peers, and that delay impacted their learning outcomes.
But as technology evolved, and as the 1997 reauthorization of IDEA required schools to consider assistive technology for every student with disabilities, schools became more equipped to serve students who had difficulty processing or comprehending printed words.
One tool that opened access to learning for students with disabilities is Bookshare. The free repository of titles allows students to customize how they see or hear text on a screen and to physically manage how to flip pages on reading devices.
It’s the world’s largest library of audio and ebooks — with 1.4 million titles, according to the organization. And access is free for qualifying U.S. students in public, private and home schooling because it is supported through grants from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs. In fiscal year 2025, OSEP awarded $9 million to Bookshare.
Part of Benetech, a nonprofit software organization focused on improving accessibility, Bookshare is the largest distributor of accessible textbooks in America. It operates through the National Instructional Materials Access Center, a federally funded, searchable online repository of source files for K-12 instructional materials that was created through the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA.
For schools, this means educators can request an accessible book for anyone from an early elementary school student who is struggling with decoding, to a high schooler who is blind and studying for Advanced Placement exams. Bookshare is also free for qualifying students in postsecondary, graduate, vocational and continuing education classes.
Ayan Kishore, Benetech CEO, says giving pre-K-12 students access to Bookshare materials helps put them on a pathway for postsecondary success and beyond.
Ayan Kishore is CEO of Benetech.
Permission granted by Benetech
“Bookshare started because we zoomed into a huge challenge. There are many challenges, but one challenge is accessibility,” he says. “The books that are used in a classroom are just simply not accessible for someone who is blind or dyslexic or has other sorts of disabilities.”
Guidance issued by the Education Department in January 2024 urges schools to consider an array of assistive technologies for students with disabilities. These include text-to-speech software, word prediction devices to help with writing and communication, augmentative and alternative communication devices, and visual schedules and timers. Low tech tools, such as pencil grips and modified scissors are also encouraged to remove barriers to learning.
I think it’s exciting that special education has driven a lot of the research that’s impacted all of education.
Lindsay Jones
CEO of CAST
Rebecca Thomas, a coach at New Mexico UDL, a state-funded grant program, helps teachers remove barriers to learning. Bookshare, assistive technology and UDL approaches are helping drive student engagement and close learning gaps through accessible tools, she says.
Supporting teachers in their jobs is also core to New Mexico UDL’s mission. “We love finding new tools that will help take things off teachers’ plates,” Thomas says.
Kishore says Bookshare keeps evolving. Several years ago that meant adding accessible STEM content. Now in development is Bookshare Plus, which aims to use AI to make any educational content — such as classroom handouts and worksheets — accessible.
Nonetheless, the future of Bookshare, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, is tenuous. President Donald Trump’s FY 2026 request would cut all funding for the Education Department’s Education Technology, Media, and Materials for Individuals with Disabilities program under IDEA, which provides accessibility technology and services for students with disabilities. Rather, the proposed budget recommends states use Part B grants to set their own priorities for special education spending.
Earlier this month, after a prolonged federal government budget impasse and shutdown, Congress agreed to a continuing resolution to fund the Education Department through Jan. 30, 2026, at fiscal year 2025 funding levels.
A student at Kershaw County School in South Carolina uses an augmentative and alternative communication device during teletherapy speech and language intervention in 2020.
Permission granted by Kathryn Boyd-Batstone
Addressing student needs through teletherapy
When Missouri’s Carthage Intermediate Center’s only speech-language pathologist moved away in 2023, the grade 4-5 school in the Carthage R-9 School District struggled to find a replacement who could support students whose IEPs required speech and language interventions.
Then, the next year, the center’s two feeder elementary schools lost their speech-language pathologists, too. The void — which couldn’t easily be filled because of a shortage of these specialists in the area — led the three schools to use teletherapy to supplement their services, says Susan Hatcher, assistant principal of Carthage Intermediate Center.
During online asynchronous sessions, a remote speech-language pathologist works 1-to-1 or with small groups of students on their communication skills while an in-person paraprofessional keeps them on task.
“We’ve got lots of examples of where kids have just really done well with this particular service and have really made some great growth,” says Hatcher.
Teletherapy, which began in the medical field, has allowed school districts, particularly in rural areas, to provide student services in the face of significant shortages of special education and related service providers.
Exact numbers are difficult to pin down on how many schools or students are taking this route. But several teletherapy platforms, including Presence, eLuma and Parallel Learning are working directly with school districts.
Presence alone has delivered more than 7 million teletherapy sessions to partner schools since its founding in 2009, according to the company. The company works with about 10,000 public, charter, private and virtual schools.
Bonnie Contreras, senior director of clinical solution engineering at Presence and a former school counselor, says that while the vast majority of students do well with the virtual interaction, it is not a replacement for special education teachers and other in-person experts.
“At the end of the day, the goal is for the student to really thrive with the resources that they need to do their best,” she says.
Hatcher says the district “would have been holding out hope” to attract and hire a qualified speech-language expert. The schools might have been able to partner with neighboring districts to share a provider, she says. But in the worst case scenario, a lack of available services would have required the schools to provide compensatory services or additional interventions, which can be costly, she adds.
While more in-person speech-language pathologists would be ideal, teletherapy allows the flexibility and customization to provide services to students when and how they need them, Hatcher says. In the end, these services are “very individualized, which, of course, is very much the spirit of IDEA.”
Students from Maplewood Elementary, in Maplewood, Mo., are being recognized in April 2025, for meeting school expectations — Safe, Respectful, and Responsible — that school staff have taught and practiced with the students through their school-wide PBIS program.
Permission granted by Maplewood Elementary School
Supporting learning through PBIS
Would you punish a student for failing a math test?
That’s the question Timothy Lewis asks people when he explains how positive behavioral interventions and supports in a school can be just as vital as academic interventions and supports.
If a student failed a math test, educators might review the material, organize learning supports and monitor the student’s progress, Lewis says. But when he began working with students and young adults with challenging behaviors as a special educator in the 1980s, the common approach was to discipline students for disruptive behaviors.
Lewis, director of the University of Missouri Center for School-wide Positive Behavior Support and a professor of special education, wanted to find a way to avoid punitive approaches and increase students’ academic performances by teaching appropriate and expected behaviors.
“Here’s the key about behavior,” Lewis says. “Behavior is functionally related to the teaching environment, meaning kids do behaviors because they can predict outcomes. And if you’re a really good teacher, you set up your environment to increase the likelihood kids learn.”
Timothy Lewis is the director of the University of Missouri Center for School-wide Positive Behavior Support.
Positive behavioral interventions and supports got their origins in the late 1980s from researchers like Lewis, along with George Sugai, Robert Horner and others at the University of Oregon. Their work on PBIS evolved from research on improving student behavior supports not just for individual students, but for entire classrooms and schools.
PBIS is built on a multi-tiered system of supports where all students gain an understanding of classroom and school expectations and appropriate social, emotional, and behavioral skills. Interventions intensify for the students who need more individualized supports.
Nearly 27,800 schools in the U.S. used PBIS in 2024, according to the Center on PBIS, a technical assistance center that began in 1998 and is funded through federal grants from OSEP and the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.
PBIS practices contributed to improved attendance, teacher retention, and English and math achievement, along with reduced substance abuse and bullying, according to various research.
For instance, students with and without disabilities attending Missouri schools with universal PBIS showed better attendance, and students with disabilities spent more time in a general education classroom, than students at schools without PBIS, according to a report from the 2022-23 school year published by the Missouri Schoolwide Positive Behavior Support team. Moreover, schools with high levels of PBIS implementation over time showed more positive outcomes for both students with and without disabilities.
PBIS can also lead to cost savings. For every dollar spent on implementing PBIS schoolwide, about $105 is saved through decreased suspensions that also reduce dropout rates, according to a 2017 report published by the federal PBIS technical assistance center.
“PBIS is probably the most researched and has probably some of the best gold standard research to show its effectiveness of anything out there, and OSEP supported that,” says Larry Wexler, a longtime former director of research to practice at OSEP.
Lewis says the PBIS work, through the national center and statewide programs, keeps evolving. The PBIS framework in schools has been used to address school crisis situations, opioid addiction, mental well-being and other challenges. In terms of scope, it has been implemented in everything from a one-room K-12 school to large urban schools, he says.
“No one in education can make kids behave, nor can we make them learn. It’s all about building an environment to increase the likelihood” of learning for students with and without disabilities, Lewis says.
Visuals Editor Shaun Lucas contributed photo support to this story.
This is part two of a two-part series on the 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. For part one, click here.
Special education staff turnover is a constant challenge at Godwin Heights Public Schools in Michigan.
Sometimes a special education role will turn vacant just a month or six weeks after the district hired someone because they start and leave so quickly, says Derek Cooley, the district’s special education director.
“We used to have staff that would spend their whole careers in special education” at Godwin Heights, Cooley says. “We just don’t see that anymore.”
People often enter the special education field because they have family members with disabilities, or they come from a family of public educators, says Cooley. Throughout his own hiring history and over 20-year education career, he’s noticed this pattern, he says.
But what keeps special educators in schools “isn’t just passion,” Cooley says. “It’s also having strong mentoring and coaching, a manageable workload, and practical supports like tuition reimbursement that make the job sustainable and rewarding.”
Godwin Heights Public Schools is not alone in the struggle to recruit and retain special education staff. In fact, this field is typically cited as one of the top staffing problem areas among districts nationwide. During the 2024-25 school year, 45 states reported teacher shortages in special education, according to the Learning Policy Institute.
45
The number of states that reported teacher shortages in special education during the 2024-25 school year.
Source: Learning Policy Institute
These shortages can also lead to costly litigation between districts and families for missed special education services. To fill special educator vacancies, schools often rely on teachers not certified in special education or hire outside contractors to fill these roles.
These widespread shortages — which researchers and special education experts say were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic — continue to be a sticking point as the education community celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The historic legislation, signed into law on Nov. 29, 1975, guaranteed students with disabilities the right to a free and appropriate public education nationwide. Until then, there was no federal requirement that schools must educate students with disabilities.
But five decades later, special education experts and advocates say much work remains to ensure that all students with disabilities indeed have access to a high-quality education.
Since the 1990s, special education has been the top staffing shortage area in U.S. schools, said Bellwether Education Partners in a 2019 data analysis.
Meanwhile, the number of students with disabilities ages 3-21 served by IDEA has surged by nearly 20% since 2000-01, to 7.5 million students in the 2022-23 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Derek Cooley is special education director at Godwin Heights Public Schools in Wyoming, Mich.
Permission granted by Derek Cooley
While all students are falling behind academically since the pandemic, as measured by the Nation’s Report Card and other data collections, students with disabilities are performing even worse than their general education peers. A majority — 72% — of 4th graders with disabilities scored below basic in reading, and 53% scored below basic in math on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress. That’s compared to the 34% of 4th grade students without disabilities who scored below basic in reading, and the 19% who scored below basic in math.
Research and special education experts agree that special educator turnover and student outcomes are inextricably tied. A study released in May by the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, for instance, found that in Washington state, high turnover among special educators is “especially detrimental to students with disabilities” and their academic performance.
“I think we’re far from the vision” and commitments of IDEA, says Heather Peske, president of the nonprofit National Council on Teacher Quality. As the latest scores from the Nation’s Report Card reveal, “there is the need for access to effective teachers, and so states and districts really need to focus on the opportunities available to them to increase both the quantity and the quality of special ed teachers,” Peske says.
But hope remains alive — and is actively fueling efforts by researchers and state education leaders to implement innovative strategies to address the widespread, decades-long struggle to staff special education.
When we fail to fully staff our classrooms, we fail to deliver on the promise of a free and appropriate public education for students with disabilities.
Abby Cypher
Executive director of the Michigan Association of Administrators of Special Education
In late September, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a report acknowledging that the special education teacher shortage is more than a staffing problem — it’s also a civil rights issue.
“I 100% agree with that,” says Abby Cypher, executive director of the Michigan Association of Administrators of Special Education. “When we fail to fully staff our classrooms, we fail to deliver on the promise of a free and appropriate public education for students with disabilities.”
Viewing the special education shortage as a civil rights issue is what keeps pushing Cypher to improve special educator recruitment and retention in Michigan. And it also reminds her that this is a problem that needs urgent solutions.
In recent years, Cypher says, the Michigan association has implemented new strategies to tackle the shortages as recommended by a state Legislature task force known as OPTIMISE, or Opening the Pipeline of Talent into Michigan’s Special Education. While the work is only just beginning, early results are promising, she said.
Special educators commonly leave the profession for a myriad of reasons, including low pay, poor working conditions, large workloads and heavy paperwork, as well as lack of school leadership support and professional development, according to special education experts.
With IDEA’s 50th anniversary upon us, K-12 Dive spoke with special education leaders and researchers about promising innovations to tackle special education teacher shortages and best practices for implementing the ideas at state and local levels.
Special educator shortages persist as a top staffing issue
The percentage of surveyed public schools that anticipated a need to fill certain teaching positions by subject areas before the start of the next school year.
Targeted compensation
Eighteen states differentiate compensation for special education teachers by paying them more than general education teachers. But Hawaii is the only one that offers over $5,000 in additional annual pay — the amount that research suggests could make a meaningful impact, according to a September NCTQ report.
The Hawaii Department of Education found in an October study that its $10,000 differential pay for special education teachers boosted teacher retention. But lower amounts had no impact on recruitment or retention in that state, the department said. The state’s average annual salary for all teachers is $78,124.
Increasing compensation or creating student loan forgiveness opportunities for special educators could boost both recruitment and retention, says Laurie VanderPloeg, associate executive director for professional affairs at the Council for Exceptional Children. “People are going to stay if they feel that they are being compensated for their workload and the time and the effort that they’re putting in.”
One way districts could cover higher salaries for special educators would be to stop paying teachers more across the board for having a master’s degree, Peske says. “We found that 90% of large school districts across the U.S. pay teachers more for having a master’s degree, and nearly one-third of states require districts to pay for these master’s degrees despite the evidence that master’s degree premiums are bad policy for almost everyone.”
In NCTQ’s own research, the nonprofit has found that master’s degrees for teachers do not correlate with effectiveness in the classroom, Peske said.
If we don’t have a strong climate and culture within the building, if we don’t have the administrative support, if we don’t have other areas to incentivize staff … they’re not going to stay.
Laurie VanderPloeg
Associate executive director for professional affairs at the Council for Exceptional Children
Meanwhile in Michigan, several educator unions have been able to negotiate higher wages for paraprofessionals who complete training developed by MAASE, Cypher says.
But VanderPloeg emphasizes that higher compensation is just “one piece of the puzzle.”
“If we don’t have a strong climate and culture within the building, if we don’t have the administrative support, if we don’t have other areas to incentivize staff … they’re not going to stay,” says VanderPloeg, who served as director of the federal Office of Special Education Programs during the first Trump administration.
Tammy French, autism special education teacher at Bishop Elementary School in Rochester, Minn., goes over a new educational tool with autism paraprofessional Marion Fosdick after class on March 14, 2019.
Ken Klotzbach/The Rochester Post-Bulletin via AP
Training and professional development
In Michigan, Cypher says schools face a lot of turnover among paraprofessionals who often say in exit interviews that they left because they had neither the skills nor access to the training they needed to be successful. Paraprofessionals don’t need teaching licenses, and they typically are paid significantly less than full-time licensed teachers. These staffers perform various roles, such as assisting teachers in their classrooms through tutoring, helping to manage student behaviors or organizing instructional materials.
To address the paraprofessional turnover challenge and hopefully improve paraeducator retention, Cypher says that MAASE developed paraeducator standards with CEC. Since March, the Michigan association has trained nearly 5,000 paraeducators through this new professional development program, she says.
Special education administrators in schools don’t always have the capacity to provide high-quality professional development for their paraprofessionals, Cypher says. The new training empowers those administrators, including instructing them separately on how to effectively and consistently train staff across their districts.
But targeted training needs to go beyond paraprofessionals and special education administrators.
Prospective special education teachers, during their clinical training, should work with mentor teachers who are certified in special education, Peske says. This strategy has been proven to boost a new teacher’s efficacy in the classroom later on, she adds.
School principals also need more training in special education, according to industry experts and leaders. That is especially true given that special education teachers often cite a lack of support from their building administrators as a factor for leaving, says Natasha Veale, a special education leadership consultant.
States should require principal preparation programs to include more content and instruction on special education, Veale says.
And districts should provide principals with professional and personal development opportunities to help foster relationships with their special education teachers, she says.
Veale expresses optimism about the future of special education staffing given the increasing conversations at education conferences she’s seen about integrating a deeper understanding of special education issues more into school leadership.
Michigan is looking to tackle the leadership challenge through a new 18-month program called Developing Inclusive Leaders. This initiative, also from the Michigan Association of Administrators of Special Education, trains principals and building administrators on special education law, inclusive practices and collaboration with educators, families and communities.
A year into the program, Cypher said the association is already starting to see meaningful gains in school leaders’ knowledge of and confidence with overseeing school inclusion practices.
Developing pipelines
In recent years, grow-your-own programs have gained steam as an innovative approach for recruiting and retaining teachers across all instructional areas.
While these programs vary by district and state, they typically focus on bringing high school students into the education field or moving paraprofessionals into fully professional positions. Such initiatives can offer college tuition assistance to prospective teachers as they gain classroom experience working alongside veteran teachers — with the ultimate goal of earning a teaching degree or certification.
Illinois alone has 15,000 paraprofessionals with a bachelor’s degree, says Daniel Maggin, associate dean of research and professor in special education at the University of Illinois Chicago. If the state trained all those paraprofessionals as special education teachers, he said, its special educator shortage would be solved and there would even be a surplus.
That’s because paraprofessionals represent the group with the most accessible and fastest on-ramp for getting a special education license and endorsement, Maggin says.
Those professionals are local and they’re right there, and they’re familiar with students in the area, and it just makes more sense to capitalize on that population.
Natasha Veale
Special education leadership consultant
While that gives Maggin hope about addressing Illinois’ special education teacher shortage, he says it’s still unclear how the state could train that many people — and where the money would come from to do so. Such an effort would require district, state and federal support, he says.
Veale says most paraprofessionals have a strong desire to teach in special education full time, so grow-your-own programs for these staffers can be “a great way” to help alleviate the shortage.
“Those professionals are local and they’re right there, and they’re familiar with students in the area, and it just makes more sense to capitalize on that population,” Veale says.
Districts and states are indeed using the model to build up the special educator pipeline.
In 2024, Arizona launched two grow-your-own programs for special educators. One program offers tuition reimbursement to school districts for general education teachers who want to move into special education. Another Arizona program provides tuition reimbursement to school districts helping paraprofessionals earn a teaching certificate in the field.
And two years before that, North Dakota invested in an online grow-your-own program that trains paraprofessionals in rural areas to become licensed full-time special education teachers.
A group of high school students from Charlevoix-Emmet Intermediate School District in Michigan participate in a paraprofessional boot camp together in April 2025.
Permission granted by Michigan Association of Administrators of Special Education
In Michigan, grow-your-own programs often focus on training paraprofessionals for full-time and licensed teaching roles, according to Cypher. But without a pipeline to backfill their roles, that can lead to a deficit in paraprofessionals, she says.
To address that gap, Cypher says, the Michigan Association of Administrators of Special Education worked with the state education department to help high schoolers participate in a similar grow-your-own program, known as a paraprofessional boot camp, that started in March 2025.
The boot camp is offered as a career and technical education course where high school students train and work in elementary schools for several hours in a day. Then after graduating high school, they can immediately step into a paraprofessional role.
This new initiative not only helps fill paraprofessional positions but could lead to more interest in full-time special educator roles, Cypher says. “Once students have access to those standards on being a paraeducator, it might entice them to consider going into teaching as well.”
News Graphics Developer Julia Himmel contributed data and graphics support to this story.
