Special Education Professional Standards

Abstract

Teacher performance evaluation represents a high stakes issue as evidenced by its pivotal emphasis in national and local education reform initiatives and federal policy levers. National, state, and local education leaders continue to experience unprecedented pressure to adopt standardized benchmarks to reflect and link student achievement data to formal teacher performance evaluations. No teacher performance evaluation measures have been developed for use with special education teachers or the settings in which they teach. Dedicated focus is needed to ensure that adopted evaluation measures are sensitive to the specific expertise reflected in the practices of specialty teachers and valid for use. This study explored whether special education stakeholders perceived skills subsumed within nationally endorsed professional special education standards to be important for special education teachers’ effectiveness. Findings are presented in terms of next steps to inform the development of a meaningful measure of special education teacher professional performance and implications for future research.