Lessons from Special Education Research

Although the ultimate goal of teacher education is to provide an adequate supply of highly qualified teachers for the nation's schools, many factors hinder its success. In special education, too few people enter the field, and a policy context that promotes easy entry via unconventional preparation threatens to dilute teacher quality. In this challenging and complex context, teacher educators struggle to improve their work and to assess innovations credibly. In this paper, the authors describe the particular position of the special education teacher education community as it attempts to provide a qualified teacher for every special education student. The authors begin by describing the Center on Personnel Studies in Special Education (University of Florida, Gainesville) and the process that led to the development of a research agenda. They also provide an overview of four studies underway and how they provide insight about assessing innovations. In the last section, the authors discuss what they have learned thus far.