How to Keep Teachers: Step One, Try Not to Break Them
What the OIGE report about special education in Howard County tells us about educator retention
On August 5, 2025, the Office of the Inspector General for Education (OIGE) released a report1 detailing the deficiencies found at Cedar Lane School, part of the Howard County Public School System (HCPSS).2 As someone who has worked with children with severe and profound special needs in the past,3 I was interested in the details of this report, its conclusions, and HCPSS’s reply. It’s worth pointing out that HCPSS has been working on implementing a new plan for special education, which was announced shortly before their releasing of a 3rd party report4 about the current state of special education on July 17.
All of this is interesting in its own right, but what really drew my curiosity was the response a representative of HCPSS gave to WBFF (Fox45 Baltimore) for its news segment & online post about the OIGE report:
The good news is, Cedar Lane School is fully staffed for the upcoming school year with the exception of one certified teacher, which is expected to be filled before the end of this week.
Both the news article and the OIGE report made special note of the shortage of special education teachers in Maryland and nationwide, but neither make recommendations about what to do to retain these teachers once they are hired. The OIGE report does note that special education teacher attrition is higher than their general education counterparts, but none of their recommendations actually take that into account. Theoretically, some of the recommendations (like better communication, technology, and responsiveness to teacher needs) could improve the attrition rate, but as someone who has been in the classroom for over two decades, it does not surprise me that while there is significant emphasis on recruitment, there is little emphasis on retention… Which is hilarious when you consier the fact that one of the biggest issues cited in the OIGE report is that there were two classrooms with no special education teacher at all.
It is the retention of special educators that is most important.
The RTI International report for HCPSS does indicate in two separate places that, while recruitment is important, so is retention. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that people don’t want to show up every day for jobs that affect their own individual well-being.
So what can school systems do to retain special educators? Just pay them more, right?
A common solution proffered in discussions of special education teacher shortages is to simply pay more and wait for the market to adjust. While this solution may hold in the private sector and where funding is bountiful, neither condition describes the realities of K-12 public education.5
Even if payment was increased, there’s no guarantee that it would work against the continued attrition of special educators, especially in discrete programs like Cedar Lane School. Prevailing recommendations seem to be around things like mentorship, ongoing professional development, partnering with universities to create teacher development programs, and data collection to see what is actually driving teachers out of special education.6
It’s no wonder, with recommendations like this, why people continue to leave the profession in droves. Support is certainly a factor, to be sure, but at the end of the day, the real answer is both support and workload.7 Principals and other school leaders seem to be good at identifying when someone needs support (though their follow-through isn’t always great), but workload issues feel like they are never actually addressed.
A friend of mine, who was a special educator for 14 years in MCPS, most of which was in a self-contained moderate/severe program, before taking a job as a general educator, related the workload of a special educator to me like this:
Imagine being asked to not only complete daily lesson plans and instruction, but also being the primary contact to the parents for your students—in some cases, you are the only school contact because administrators don’t understand SPED or how your students actually learn—the primary clerk and secretary for special education documentation, and the person who gets to fill out form after form after form—some of which are only created by MCPS to cover their own ass and aren’t actually required by the state or feds. That’s what it’s like to be a SPED teacher in Montgomery County. Now, imagine on top of all of that, you are in a windowless classroom in the basement, are working with kids who can’t have a conversation with you, and you’re expected to teach them how to read?8
Personal and professional isolation, working with students who can be behaviorally and emotionally unstable: these are only a few of the daily stressors facing educators in these programs.
What it boils down to is this: individual schools have tremendous control over the happiness of their educators, and while administrators may claim that their hands are tied due to national, state, or local school district mandates, it’s time for individual principals and district administrators to find other solutions to protect the people in their buildings. “Most administrators do not know how to support special education effectively or understand what conditions enable teachers to carry out the job effectively.”9 Sadly, finding a school administrator with a backbone is harder than finding a Maryland blue crab with one. Leaders need to not only support, but take the heat for supporting, the well-being of all of the educators in their building.
If you’re an administrator and you’re reading this, you are probably thinking “But there are so many things that prevent me from doing that.” No, there aren’t. School principals wield a tremendous amount of power over their school buildings. Though it is true that principals have a duty to implement and comply with federal, state, and local policy, they have a significant amount of leeway in how those things get done. Too often, especially in MCPS, principals don’t want to “interfere” with district or state mandates and so allow people at central office dictate how certain work needs to be done, even when teachers have discovered other ways to accomplish a task that is more condusive to their well-being.
So what can actually be done?
Teacher autonomy: allow teachers to figure out what actually needs to be done and focus on that
Remove unnecessary paperwork from the desks of teachers and hire people whose job it is to focus solely on the paperwork
Administrator follow-through on reduced workload, student behavior, parent communication, etc.
Administrator push-back against central office requirements that overburden educators.
And so, it goes back to funding.
Henry, Richard. 2025. Investigative Report Summary OIGE Case 25-0002-I. Office of the Inspector General for Education. https://oige.maryland.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2025/08/OIGE-Case-25_0002_I_HCPS_FINAL-08052025-RPH.pdf.
For those of you more familiar with MCPS, it seems that Cedar Lane School is similar to Stephen Knolls School in Montgomery County
Full disclosure: I have never worked for HCPSS before. My observations and commentary will be influenced by the reality in next-door Montgomery County, as I understand it. I have not worked with children with severe/profound disabilities in over a decade at this point, and I readily accept that best practices may have changed during that time. However, this post is more about the politics than the best practices; if there are any outdated ideas about working with children with special needs, I will take full responsibility for that oversight.
RTI International. 2025. Howard County Public School System (HCPSS): Special Education Evaluation Report. https://go.boarddocs.com/mabe/hcpssmd/Board.nsf/files/DJENRH612FB1/$file/07%2017%2025%20Research%20Triangle%20Institute%20(RTI)%20Report%20on%20Special%20Education%20Services.pdf.
Peyton, David, and Kelly Acosta. 2022. Understanding Special Education Teacher Shortages. State Education Standard 22 (1): 20–25. https://nasbe.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/2022/01/Peyton-Acosta_Jan-2022-Standard.pdf.
Collaborative for Efective Educator Development, Accountability, and Reform (CEEDAR) Center, and Center on Great Teachers and Leaders at the American Institutes for Research. 2020. Review of Preparing and Retaining Efective Special Education Teachers: Short-Term Strategies for Long-Term Solutions: A Policy Brief. https://ceedar.education.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CEEDAR-GTL-Shortages-Brief.pdf.
What’s really amazing is how often this has been cited in the literature in recent years, and yet no one seems to be taking this seriously, at least in Montgomery County. See, for example,
Billingsley, Bonnie, Elizabeth Bettini, Hannah Morris Mathews, and James McLeskey. 2020. “Improving Working Conditions to Support Special Educators’ Effectiveness: A Call for Leadership.” Teacher Education and Special Education: The Journal of the Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children 43 (1): 7–27.
Hester, Olivia R., Shannon A. Bridges, and Lauren Hart Rollins. 2020. “‘Overworked and Underappreciated’: Special Education Teachers Describe Stress and Attrition.” Teacher Development 24 (3): 348–65.
Mockovciak, Alice M., Glennda K. McKeithan, Xaviera T. Johnson, Deborah E. Grisworld, and Mabel O. Rivera. 2023. “Special Education Teacher Attrition.” Global Journal of Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities 11 (3): 1–9.
Anonymous Educator. Letter to Education Superhero. 2025. Email, August 7, 2025.
CEEDAR 2020