Special and General Educator Working Conditions During and After COVID-19

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 was highly disruptive to the ways in which students and teachers experienced school. While nearly all schools responded to the start of the pandemic by shifting to virtual instruction, the return to in-person and hybrid learning formats was highly variable across states, schools, and school stakeholders, particularly for students with disabilities and their teachers. Motivated by intersectional professional vulnerability theory, we documented nuanced differences in special and general educators’ working conditions, particularly as related to their experiences of learning modality and instructional experiences, in spring 2020 (i.e., the onset of the pandemic) and the subsequent 2020–2021 school year, depending on the schools in which they worked and the students their schools served. Using descriptive and regression analyses with nationally representative data from the National Teacher and Principal Survey, we found that special education teachers had different experiences of their roles during and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to general education teachers, though these differences did not translate into observed differences in satisfaction.