In the U.S. overall, 15.2 percent of all students were special education students (ages 3-21) in 2022-23. The percentage varied by state from 11.7 percent in Hawaii to 21.1 percent in Pennsylvania.
See the percent of special education students by state in the map below:
Yes. In the past decade , the number of students with disabilities has grown from 6.4 million, or 12.9 percent of all students in 2012-13, to almost 7.5 million, or 15.2 percent in 2022-23.
Read more about efforts to prepare, recruit, and retain special education teachers of color.
Getting students with disabilities into general education classrooms is not a silver bullet, researchers say. Read more to learn what else needs to happen to raise academic outcomes for students with disabilities. And here are some tips to help students with disabilities feel like they belong .
The percent of students with disabilities who had a specific learning disability, like dyslexia, decreased from 35.4 percent in 2012-13 to 32 percent in 2022-23. And the percent of students with disabilities with autism grew from 7.8 percent to 13 percent over the same period.
In fiscal year 2018, the federal government earmarked $12.3 billion for the education of children ages 3-12 with disabilities. That’s only about 15 percent of the excess cost of educating students with disabilities, compared with the cost of educating a general education student. The federal government under the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act set a goal to pay states up to 40 percent of the excess cost. It never reached that goal.
Teacher shortages are hard to track on the national scale . But the March 2024 School Pulse Panel survey found that 51 percent of all public schools anticipated needing to fill special education teaching positions before the start of the 2024-25 school year, the highest of all the teaching specialties.
And an EdWeek Research Center survey in April 2024 found that 62 percent of principals and district leaders said it had been more challenging to fill special education teaching positions this year compared with 2021-22.
