Exploring differences in job resources between special and general educators
Creators: name: Ellerbach, George
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2022
Subjects: public abstract

description: The education of children with disabilities is a particular concern, given academic and social barriers they face in public schools. The guarantee of special education in the United States is an education that is as inclusive as possible and individually-tailored to student needs. I argue that the job resources teachers have access to within schools are important to living up to this promise. In particular, close attention should be paid attention to the gaps in resources that exist between general educators and special educators.In Chapter 2, I explore differences in job resources between general educators and special educators within American public schools. For these analyses, I examine data from a national survey of teachers and other school staff, the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). I use these data to compare differences between special educators on several social and job resources including collaboration, committee participation, cooperation, parental support, administrator support, perceptions of teacher influence and perceptions of shared culture among teachers. Results show no differences in the administrative support variables, but lower levels of collaboration, cooperation and perception of shared culture for special educators relative to general educators. Conversely, special educators have higher levels of perceived influence and control.
description: In Chapter 3, in addition to using the teacher survey from Chapter 2, I analyze data collected about the schools and surveys of the principals of these schools. I examine how the variation in context (both in schools and principals) can be used to explain differences in social and collaborative resources between general and special educators. Specifically, I examine the effects of percentage of students with IEPs in a school that are included in the general education environment for most or all the school day as well as the effect of principal priorities of basic literacy, academic excellence and actions to support teacher-centered professional developments. I find a limited number of effects of school and principal measures on the social and collaboration resource gap. This demonstrates that these contextual factors do little to modify the gap in resources between special and general educators.
description: In Chapter 4, I take what I learned about differences in gaps in social and collaborative resources between the two groups of teachers and apply this to explaining potential differences in teacher attrition, satisfaction and stress. I analyze follow-up data, taken a year after the first survey, which documents whether teachers, after a year, have left teaching or moved from one school to another. I use these data to describe differences in attrition and turnover as well as differences in job satisfaction and stress between the two groups of teachers. Finding differences in turnover, I investigate whether collaboration and other social resources explain part of that difference. I find that collaborative and social resources explain a small part of the resource gap between educators.
description: In Chapter 5, I analyze my own qualitative data to describe the experiences of teachers in special education and related staff. I interviewed a mix of special educators, other educators and special education-related staff to understand experiences of teaching and collaboration. I analyze transcription of interviews to find common themes of experiences, demonstrating challenges, barriers and supports of teachers and staff within the realm of special education. These overall findings demonstrate the presence of collaborative and social barriers as well as implications of these differences for teacher outcomes.