While some aspects of the putative teacher shortage in America are matters of perspective, the dearth of teachers to staff special-education classrooms is real and growing. Could a cash bonus be enough to nudge potential recruits into these jobs? Many policymakers and pundits think so. A new report looks at the surprising outcome of one such effort.
In 2019, looking to fill persistent vacancies, education leaders in Hawaii instituted a plan to boost the annual salaries of special-ed teachers statewide in two ways: a flat $10,000 bonus for doing the job, and additional bonuses for working in the hardest-to-staff schools. Schools were placed into four tiers based on geographic isolation, student need levels, and previous staffing difficulties. Teachers working in Tier 1 schools received an additional $3,000; Tier 2 teachers received $5,000; Tier 3 teachers earned $7,500; and Tier 4 teachers, who worked in the hardest-to-serve schools, were given $8,000. These annual incentives, up to $18,000 over and above the regular salary (averaging about $68,000 at the time), went into effect with the 2020–21 school year.
A group of researchers, led by Roddy Theobald of the American Institutes for Research, examines how hiring for these positions changed in relation to general teacher hiring and across various school tiers before and after the incentives were implemented, as well as which specific mechanisms were driving these effects. And because the comparisons are between teachers in the same schools at the same time, the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on hiring do not hinder the analysis. Data come from Hawaii Department of Education records and include all teaching positions at traditional districts between 2014 and 2023, excluding those in community schools for adults. The sample includes 115,000 teacher positions across nine school years in seven regions, fifteen complex areas (high schools and their K–8 feeders), and 261 school buildings.
Using a difference-in-differences model, Theobald and his team estimate that the bonus plan reduced the proportion of vacant special-ed teaching positions, relative to general education positions, by 32 percent and the proportion of special education positions that were vacant or filled by an unlicensed teacher by 35 percent. While it is a statistically-significant improvement, those percentages translate to a 1.2 percentage point reduction in overall special-ed vacancies and a 4.0 percentage point reduction in special-ed positions that were vacant or filled by an unlicensed teacher. Helpful, but not a solution to the problem. The largest impacts were seen in the hardest-to-staff schools, including reductions of 15 to 20 percentage points in the proportion of special education positions that were vacant or filled by unlicensed teachers in Tier 4 schools. While these findings do indicate that the additional bonuses were effective incentives for hiring at the higher-tier schools, it is also true that these schools had the most difficult time finding teachers prior to the bonus plan implementation (a.k.a. a greater “scope for change”).
Also notable is that the mechanism at work in driving the increase in special-education teachers was neither a boost in new teachers nor increased retention of existing teachers. It was the fact that general education teachers moved over to special education teaching positions to take advantage of the bonus, usually within the school where they already worked!
The researchers tout these findings as a “hidden in plain sight” solution to blunt Hawaii’s special education teacher shortage, although it is unclear from the discussion whether these switchers were already licensed to teach special education and weren’t doing so or took the opportunity of the impending bonus plan to get licensed in order to take advantage of the bonus. Either way, until big bonuses were on the table, it was more likely that special-ed classes would be overseen by unlicensed subs or other non-teaching staffers than by a gen ed teacher who chose to make the switch. In this light, the effectiveness of a $10,000 to $18,000 per year incentive to make that switch cannot be ignored, even if it didn’t really solve the problem. (You can check out another analysis of this report, including discussion of important limits to the generalizability of these findings, on a recent edition of the Education Gadfly Show.)
In the end, two big questions remain: Will the switchers stay in their special education roles long term, or will the lure of the bonuses prove insufficient to keep them in a more demanding job they had previously opted against taking? Surely it is just as easy for them to switch back to gen-ed at will…especially if vacancies remain (or grow) there. The other question is whether the bonuses will continue. They are currently approved through the 2024–25 school year, but must be re-authorized every year. Even the possibility of a pause or the threat of a reduction in payment could undo all of the impacts observed in an instant.
SOURCE: Roddy Theobald et al., “The Impact of a $10,000 Bonus on Special Education Teacher Shortages in Hawai‘i,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (January 2025).
