15% Isn’t a Statistic, It's an Indictment.

There’s a number that I am a bit fixated on: 15%.

Across California, on average, 15% of students have IEPs. Even in some of the highest-performing, most well-resourced school districts, roughly 15% of students are identified as eligible for special education services. Fifteen percent. In communities where parents are highly engaged, property taxes are robust, and schools have more than their share of advantages.

Think about that for a moment. 15% of students are not only identified as having a disability, but their performance is so significantly impacted that they require specialized instruction to succeed.

The national average hovers around 15% now, too, but since the pandemic, we’ve normalized that number without asking the hard question: What does it say about our system when this many children can’t access their education through the instruction we’re providing?

To be clear, I’m not questioning whether these students have real needs. I question whether our school systems create or exacerbate those needs, and whether we are using special education as a general-education intervention strategy when it was never intended to be one.

Tier 1 Is Failing. And We’re Not Saying It Loudly Enough.

In an effective district, roughly 80% of students should thrive in Tier 1— general high-quality classroom instruction. Another 15% might need some targeted small-group support (Tier 2). Only about 5% should require intensive, individualized intervention (Tier 3).

When 15% of students require Tier 3 interventions, that’s not a disability issue. That is a Tier 1 failure.

15% means core instruction is not reaching a significant portion of students. It means children are sitting in classrooms day after day, falling further behind, until someone insists, “This student needs to be in special education,” and refers them for testing.

That’s what I want educators and administrators to sit with: referral for special education (along with the rhetorical construction of it as a place rather than a service) often comes not because a student has a disability, but because no one knows what else to do, and the school has few, if any, other ideas. The pipeline from “struggling in class” to “IEP eligibility” is far too short, and the supports in between are far too thin.

Special Education Is Not an Intervention. Stop Treating It Like One.

“Special education” is a legal designation. It exists to protect students with identified disabilities and guarantee their rights. It is not — and was never intended to be — a solution for students who haven’t learned to read yet, or who are behind in math, or who need more time, or who are dealing with trauma, or who speak a language other than English at home.

But in district after district across California, we see the same pattern: a student struggles, the teacher raises the concern to the Student Support Team (or that district’s equivalent if there even is one), and the next step is a referral for a special education assessment. Not a structured literacy intervention implemented with fidelity. Not a tutoring program. Not a behavior support plan rooted in trauma-informed practice. Not a conversation with the family about what’s happening at home

Why? Because even in districts that have multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) on paper, they are rarely followed consistently across school sites or even from teacher to teacher. For many schools and districts, special education is the only robust intervention system they have. Once a student has an IEP, they may receive small-group or individualized instruction, an aide, related services, and a legally mandated plan. Those are real resources and supports.

We have built a system where, in more districts than not, the only accountability system for a child to get real help is to declare them disabled. That is a moral and structural failure, and we need to name it as such.

The Teacher Preparation Gap Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here’s a hard truth: many teachers enter California classrooms without the foundational training needed to teach reading, writing, and math to students who arrive with varying levels of foundational knowledge or experience learning through conventional instruction.

This is not a criticism of teachers. It is a criticism of how we prepare them. Teacher credential programs vary wildly in quality. Too many graduates enter classrooms having never taught a student to decode a word systematically, having never designed a small-group differentiated lesson, and having never been trained in the science of reading — a body of research that has been clear and consistent for decades but was deprioritized in many programs in favor of philosophies that didn’t survive contact with struggling learners.

When a teacher hasn’t been trained to meet a struggling reader where they are, the student doesn’t get better. They fall further behind. And eventually, they get referred.

Setting aside academic instruction, most new teachers have never been taught how to manage a classroom of students with different behavioral expectations at home. How to support appropriate behaviors, rather than punish rule-breakers. How to proactively create instructional programs grounded in the principles of universal design for learning (UDL), so that all students are engaged, experience success, and feel safe taking risks to push their levels of academic and social competence.

We have created a system that sets teachers up to fail struggling students — and then we feign shock when the students aren’t thriving.

You Can’t Staff Your Way Out of This Crisis with Low Pay and High Costs

Weak teacher training programs both contribute to and are the product of the staffing crisis. California has some of the highest costs of living in the country. Teaching salaries, while improving in some districts, remain deeply uncompetitive in high-cost regions. The result is predictable: the districts with the greatest need often have the most difficulty attracting and retaining qualified teachers — and the best-resourced districts pull talent away from schools that need it most.

Special education programs take the hardest hit. Special education teachers carry enormous responsibility. They navigate complex legal requirements, high caseloads, family expectations, and the most significant student needs in the district. And they are chronically underpaid and undersupported. Burnout is epidemic. Vacancies are filled by long-term substitutes or emergency credentialed teachers who are learning on the job (typically without any mentoring or coaching).

The students who need the most expertise are getting the worst of it. And no one in Sacramento or on local school boards seems willing to have a serious, solution-based conversation about it.

What It Would Take to Actually Fix This

I don’t believe in voicing problems without suggesting solutions, so here’s what I believe needs to happen if we are truly committed to improving student outcomes:

1.   Invest in Tier 1 like it’s our most important intervention. Because it is. Every dollar spent on high-quality core instruction, ongoing coaching, and evidence-based curriculum is a dollar that prevents ten dollars in remediation later.

2.  Build real Tier 2 and Tier 3 systems before you open the special education referral pipeline. Students should be receiving documented, systematic intervention before any referral is made. This is not a box-checking exercise, but a genuine effort to meet their needs. This needs to be a district-wide mandate. District administrators must hold principals accountable, and principals must hold their teachers and staff accountable, for following these processes at their sites.

3.  Overhaul teacher preparation in literacy and math instruction. The science of reading is not a trend. Structured literacy works. Systematic phonics instruction works. We must require credential programs, both general education and special education, to teach it, and require districts to support it with ongoing coaching.

4.   Overhaul teacher preparation in classroom management. Universal design for learning (UDL) is the first step here. UDL proactively accommodates individual learning differences. It reduces barriers to instruction. Accessible instruction means engagement — and engaged students are, overwhelmingly, not disruptive. Preparation programs also must teach how to manage behavioral challenges. Too many teachers have never learned how to create and implement class-wide systems that support and sustain appropriate behavior, or how to address inappropriate behavior. Too many teachers are only equipped to “call the office” when a child misbehaves — and too often unions and administrators encourage that.

5.   Pay teachers appropriately for the job they do, but understand that pay alone won’t fix this. Until we treat compensation as a quality and equity issue, not just a budget line item, we will continue to lose our most skilled teachers and service providers. Let’s be real, though - no salary makes an impossible workload sustainable. No paycheck compensates for being handed a caseload well beyond the recommended size, for equating caseload with workload, for requiring implementation of a new “reform du jour” with each new administrator or trend, for being evaluated on metrics that have nothing to do with what actually happens in classrooms. Money matters. But if we hand someone a raise and send them back into a broken system, we haven’t solved anything; we’ve just given them “combat pay” and made the exploitation a little more comfortable.

6.   Audit our referral pipeline with an equity lens. Who are we referring? Who are we finding eligible? Are Black, Latino, and lower-income students disproportionately identified? In most California districts, they are. That is a symptom of a system that responds to unmet need by pathologizing students rather than reflecting on the root cause.

We Owe Students and Families More

15% is a signal that something has gone wrong upstream — in classrooms, in preparation programs, in how we fund, staff, and design schools.Every child who ends up “in special education” because we didn’t intervene earlier, didn’t train their teacher well enough, or didn’t build a support system robust enough to catch them before they fell — that child deserved better. Their family deserved better.

We can keep pretending 15% is just the natural distribution of disability in our population. Or we can start asking hard questions about the system we’ve built and what it’s actually doing for and to our children.