Michaela Krug O’Neill, Monica Arpino, Alfredo J. Artiles, Lakshmi Balasubramanian, Paul Bruno, Dion Burns, Desiree Carver-Thomas, Linda Darling-Hammond, Philip Fisher, Kevin Gee, Lindsey Kaler, Eliana Katz, Tara Kini, Elizabeth Kozleski, Chris Lemons, Melanie Leung-Gagné, Sihong Liu, Susanna Loeb, Patrick McClellan, Susan Moffitt, Susan K. Patrick, Heather Price, Tye Ripma, Lucy Sorensen, Joao M. Souto-Maior, Patricia Strach, Tiffany S. Tan, Radhika Unnikrishnan, Jason Willis, Peter Yu
Students with disabilities have a legal right to a free and appropriate public education under federal law. In California, fulfilling that promise requires a large and complex system that serves more than 865,000 students with disabilities, over 10 percent of all students with disabilities in the country, and spans multiple layers of governance, staffing, funding, assessment, and service delivery.
California’s special education system is expanding in scale. The number of students identified for special education has grown, overall spending has increased, and more staff are supporting students with disabilities. At the same time, the Getting Down to Facts III technical reports show that growth in scale has not always been matched by growth in capacity or coherence. Staffing shortages, siloed professional roles, administrative and compliance demands, regional variation, and persistent disparities continue to shape students’ experiences.
This brief draws on multiple technical reports to summarize five key findings about special education in California: growth in identification, staffing, and spending; workforce capacity and siloing; compliance demands across a multilayered system; disparities at the intersections of race, language, and disability; and data limitations that constrain transparency and improvement. Across these areas, the evidence points to a central challenge: California’s special education system is growing, but its ability to deliver consistent, student-centered, and equitable supports remains uneven.
Key Findings
1. The number of students identified for special education, the staff who support them, and overall special education spending have all increased. The number of students identified for special education in the state has increased, mirroring national patterns. Growth is being driven both by rising identification overall and by increases in certain disability categories, particularly autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (Bruno; Kaler et al.). Staffing to support special education students and services has also increased, with some segments of the workforce growing at faster rates than others (Kaler et al.; Lemons et al.). Along with these trends, special education spending has more than doubled over the past 20 years (Bruno).
2. Staffing challenges and professional siloing limit schools’ ability to meet the needs of students with disabilities. Recruitment, training, retention, and collaboration challenges affect teachers, related service providers, and paraeducators. Siloing between general and special education, and between teachers and paraeducators, makes it harder to build shared responsibility for students with disabilities.
3. Administrative and compliance requirements absorb substantial time and resources across California’s multilayered special education system. These requirements can protect students’ rights, but they can also create tensions with direct services and instructional needs when they are misaligned or duplicative. Districts and regional agencies often spend substantial effort navigating eligibility, reporting, and governance requirements, leaving less time and capacity for instructionally useful assessment, collaboration, and student support.
4. California’s education system creates unique burdens and notable disparities for students and families, particularly when race and language intersect with disability status. The intersection of race, language, and disability status creates unique and often compounding obstacles for families and students in public education. Disparities in opportunities and outcomes exist for students with disabilities, and these disparities can be greatest for students with intersectional identities including Black students and multilingual learners of English with a disability (Artiles et al.).
5. California’s current data systems make it difficult to answer critical questions about special education staffing, spending, and students’ educational opportunities and outcomes. Across the technical reports on special education, researchers highlight questions they were unable to answer and data that is not publicly available or collected. These data could help policymakers and practitioners better understand how special education is working in California and what needs to be done to improve the system.
