Do Teacher Training Courses Prepare Us for the Challenge of Students Experiencing EBD?

A Question of Quantity and Quality

Currently teacher recruitment, preparation and retention in the United States are under acute stress. In terms of the numbers entering and staying within the profession, the situation has become critical across most states and urban centers, with teacher shortages a common phenomenon at the start of each school semester. But demographics alone hide a more complex picture. In certain subjects, such as elementary teaching and social studies, graduates compete for teaching positions in most states. For other subjects the contrary is true, with the label of ‘acute shortage’ being applied to the availability of teachers of certain subjects by state and federal agencies with increasing frequency. Special education belongs to this category, and across the country's school districts the availability of teaching opportunities in special education grows longer, just as the line of students with individualized educational plans (IEP) does so too. Today, more than 6 million students with disabilities are educated in the United States, comprising 11 percent of the total public school enrollment (Brodsky, 2001). Compounded with this demographic shift is the issue of [Page 418]retention. National data and local experience shows that whilst the numbers entering the profession remain level, the demand for teachers is increasing just at the point where retention of teachers beyond the initial five-year post-certification period is at a crisis level.

That crisis is discernible in terms of the shrinking reality of the professional teaching ‘career’. The average classroom life of a special education teacher is now eight years, the lowest duration of the past generation, and the pressure continues downward with attrition from the profession across all subjects, and particularly the shortage areas. Put simply, states are faced with large numbers of early leavers from the profession at an unsustainable rate. This context to the special education is both shared and particular. It is shared because the whole system of teacher training is under scrutiny and change in the United States, with the Bush administration's ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act of 2001 (USDOE, 2001) providing a federal framework that coheres statewide norms of testing in recent decades with fiscal consequences to educational performance, thus ratcheting the temperature of the accountability climate even higher. It is also particular, because special education faces an unusual tension between the forces of supply and demand, since the demand for special education teachers is heightened through increasing nationwide rates of student IEP identifications at the same time that supply is short.

In this context if might appear odd to focus on issues of training quality when examining the work of teachers of students with serious emotional and behavioral disturbance (EBD) in the United States. It might seem more pertinent to ask whether the quantity rather than the quality of teachers might be the more pressing need. Such reasoning, though, would miss the crux that teacher recruitment and retention is widely connected to the issue of training. There is an emerging consensus from policymakers, legislators and the profession at large that if the teacher shortage crisis is to be addressed, then questions of training are as much at the heart of any solution as others of working conditions and salaries. Clearly, a nexus of issues lies at the center of the problem, and it would be naïve to consider that employment conditions are not relevant. Indeed, the teacher shortage is creating working environments that directly impact on the quality of learning for students and the conditions of work for those teaching them. Nonetheless, the main professional thrust toward equipping teachers for working with EBD students is to be found in the question of teacher quality and professional development, rather than simply in numbers of trainees getting hired in the field, and this chapter will focus on how teacher preparation might be the clue to both the quantity and quality of special education teachers who work with EBD students. It will do so first in showing how special education has appropriated the same [Page 419]ideology of educational standards that is prevalent in the United States and other Western educational systems. Second, through an examination of ethnographic data obtained in a contemporary research study of special educators, the professional voice of teachers of EBD students in the field will be heard and examined for insights into training needs. Although this data is focused on teachers' voices, it also provides insights into student experiences to which the reform agenda typically turns a deaf ear. From this it will be suggested that an ecological model of professional development is needed before we can come to grips with the changing needs of EBD student learning in modern America as well as the systemic problem of supply and demand of a highly-qualified and competent profession.

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