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Middle school special ed teachers

Official title Special Education Teachers, Middle School (SOC 25-2057)

Also called Special education teacher middle school, SPED middle school teacher, Resource teacher middle school, IEP teacher middle school, Special education resource room teacher middle school

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 95,200 US middle school special ed teachers, with median pay of $66,810 a year. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 75,000 from 1960, not measured the same way as today's count. The current technology era for middle school special ed teachers: Magic School AI + Goalbook IEP tools + Microsoft Reading Coach, since 2022.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects little or no change in employment from 2025 to 2035 (-0.4%).

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 30.5% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
  • 0.016 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Middle school special ed teachers: jobs and pay since 1960 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-2057

Chicago

Future History. "Middle school special ed teachers: jobs and pay since 1960." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-2057.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_25_2057, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Middle school special ed teachers: jobs and pay since 1960}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-2057}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

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18251850187519001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Teacher of the Deaf / Teacher of the Blind (residential institution-based; no public-school equivalent)
Known then as Special class teacher / ungraded class teacher (Massachusetts terminology; scattered municipal programs)
Known then as Special education teacher / exceptional children teacher (CEC terminology, 1922+; state-by-state variation)
Known then as Special Education Teacher (P.L. 94-142 / IDEA: federal IEP mandate standardizes role nationally)
Known then as Special Education Teachers, Middle School (BLS SOC 25-2057)
Known today as Special Education Teachers, Middle School (BLS SOC 25-2057)
Projected to still be called Special Education Teachers, Middle School (BLS SOC 25-2057)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
95K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$66,810
Est.

≈ $65,097 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1817

April 15, 1817: Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc open the American Asylum for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb in Hartford, Connecticut, the American School for the Deaf, the first permanent school for students with disabilities in North America. Clerc, a Deaf man who was himself a student of Abbé Sicard at the Paris institute, becomes the first Deaf teacher of the Deaf in America. The school's founding establishes the premise, radical in 1817, that children with disabilities can be educated by trained teachers in structured schools rather than managed in asylums or households. The Hartford model spreads: by 1863, twenty-six schools for the deaf exist in the US.

Beat · 1869

Massachusetts passes the first state law requiring towns to provide education for blind and deaf children: the first public special education mandate in American history. The law does not yet reach children with intellectual disabilities, emotional disturbances, or learning disabilities; those populations would wait nearly a century for legal protection. But it establishes the precedent that public education has an obligation to children with at least some disabilities, a precedent that federal law would finally universalize in 1975.

Beat · 1922

The International Council for the Education of Exceptional Children, now the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), is founded in 1922 by Elizabeth Farrell, a New York City teacher of "ungraded classes," and a group of colleagues meeting at Columbia University's Teachers College. Farrell had spent two decades teaching children with intellectual and developmental disabilities in New York City's first special classes, beginning in 1900. CEC becomes the first professional organization specifically for special educators and the primary advocacy body for the field for the next century, representing over 50,000 professionals and publishing 17 peer-reviewed journals by the 2020s.

Beat · 1954

Brown v. Board of Education, decided May 17, 1954, holds that racially segregated schools violate the Equal Protection Clause, but its logic is also the seed of IDEA. The plaintiffs in Brown argued that separate education was inherently unequal; twenty years later, advocates for students with disabilities applied exactly that logic to school systems that educated children with disabilities in separate, inferior settings, or excluded them entirely. Two 1972 federal district court cases, PARC v. Pennsylvania and Mills v. Board of Education (DC), explicitly invoked the Brown principle to hold that exclusion of children with disabilities from public education violated due process and equal protection. PARC and Mills are the direct legal ancestors of P.L. 94-142.

Beat · 1975

November 29, 1975: President Ford signs the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142). Every child with a disability, regardless of the nature or severity of the disability, is guaranteed a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment, an Individualized Education Program, and procedural safeguards including parent participation. Ford signs it with reservations, expressing concern about the cost and the degree of federal control over local schools; he is right about the cost, SPED becomes the highest per-pupil expenditure category in K-12, but the law holds. P.L. 94-142 creates the occupation of special education teacher at national scale: a workforce that had been approximately 200,000 grows to over 400,000 within fifteen years, and the IEP becomes the defining artifact of the profession.

Beat · 1990

P.L. 94-142 is renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The 1990 reauthorization adds autism and traumatic brain injury as new disability categories, requires transition planning for students age 16 and above, and replaces the term "handicapped" with "disabilities" throughout: a shift of significant cultural weight. The 1997 reauthorization further strengthens the law by requiring SPED students to be included in state and district assessments and by adding functional behavior assessment requirements for students whose behavior impedes learning.

Beat · 2001

No Child Left Behind (signed January 8, 2002) imposes annual testing requirements on all students in grades 3-8, including students with disabilities. For special education teachers, NCLB creates a new mandate to demonstrate that students with IEPs are making progress toward grade-level standards, and it imposes the "highly qualified teacher" requirement on SPED teachers, requiring them to demonstrate content-area knowledge in every subject they teach, a compliance pressure that persisted through the 2002-2015 era.

Beat · 2004

IDEA 2004 (Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, P.L. 108-446) introduces the Response to Intervention (RTI) framework as a pre-referral pathway: school-wide tiered interventions before a child undergoes full special education evaluation. RTI changes the special education teacher's role from solely serving already-identified students to collaborating with general education teachers to monitor at-risk students in "Tier 2" and "Tier 3" interventions. The 2004 law also strengthens the "IEP by consensus" model and adds dispute resolution requirements. The assistive technology consideration requirement (made explicit in 1997, reinforced in 2004) drives the first wave of systematic AT integration into IEPs.

Beat · 2023

The first AI-native IEP tools emerge: Magic School AI (January 2023) and Goalbook's AI features allow teachers to generate draft IEP goals from student profiles in seconds rather than hours. Concurrently, CEC policy publications report approximately 22,000 unfilled special education positions nationally in 2024: among the highest documented shortage figures in the occupation's history, with rural and high-poverty urban districts most severely affected. The occupation is, for the first time, both acutely short-staffed and beginning to see substantive administrative automation.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace middle school special ed teachers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
-0.4%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 25-2057 (Special education teachers, middle school): 94.8 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 94.4 thousand in 2035, a change of -0.4 thousand (-0.4%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.2% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
30.5%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 25-2057.00 Special Education Teachers, Middle School. Shown: human-rated β = 0.305, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.13 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.481; GPT-4-rated β 0.305. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"
2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)
1.6%
probability
What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 25-2053 Special Education Teachers, Middle School: probability of computerisation 0.016, rank 76 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable), mapped one-to-one to SOC 2018 25-2057 by the BLS 2010-to-2018 crosswalk. Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for middle school special ed teachers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDevelop and write individualized education programs (IEPs) for students with disabilities in grades 6-8, synthesizing present levels of academic achievement and functional performance (PLAAFP) from evaluation reports, classroom observations, and subject-area teacher input

Develop and write individualized education programs (IEPs) for students with disabilities in grades 6-8, synthesizing present levels of academic achievement and functional performance (PLAAFP) from evaluation reports, classroom observations, and subject-area teacher input; drafting measurable annual goals across academic, behavioral, communication, and functional skill domains; using Playground IEP's IEP Copilot or MagicSchool AI's IEP Generator to produce SMART goal drafts from present-level data as a scaffold, then editing every goal against the specific student's profile; specifying accommodations that apply across all six-to-eight content-area classrooms (extended time, reduced assignments, read-aloud, calculator use); ensuring compliance with IDEA individualization requirements before the IEP team meeting.[14],[9],[5]

Where your edge is

CDT (2024-25) reports 57% of SPED teachers now use AI for IEP writing: the drafting time savings are real and growing. Playground IEP and MagicSchool AI can produce standards-aligned SMART goal drafts in seconds from a prompt; AbleSpace generates progress notes automatically from session data. But the CEC (2025) is explicit: AI produces structurally correct language that the teacher must personalize with specific baseline data. A compliant middle school IEP goal for an 8th grader with dyslexia reading at a 4th-grade level must reflect the actual student's current ORF score, not a template, and an OCR complaint investigation will read those goals for individualization quality. Develop your IDEA compliance fluency (procedural safeguards, prior written notice, dispute resolution) so you can write defensible individualized goals faster with AI assistance, not replace your professional judgment with AI output.

AI is sitting alongside you hereImplement and monitor AI-powered assistive technology mandated by student IEPs, deploying and training students on Google Read&Write (text-to-speech, word prediction, PDF annotation) and Microsoft Immersive Reader (syllable decoding, picture dictionary, translation) across all six content-area classrooms

Implement and monitor AI-powered assistive technology mandated by student IEPs, deploying and training students on Google Read&Write (text-to-speech, word prediction, PDF annotation) and Microsoft Immersive Reader (syllable decoding, picture dictionary, translation) across all six content-area classrooms; programming or coordinating programming of AAC devices for students who are nonverbal or minimally verbal; documenting AT effectiveness for annual IEP review; coordinating with the district assistive technology specialist for students with complex AT needs (eye-gaze systems, adapted keyboards, AAC devices).[15],[16],[17]

Where your edge is

Google Read&Write and Microsoft Immersive Reader are now standard IEP-mandated AT tools for middle school students with dyslexia, ADHD, and language processing disabilities: both are free within the Google and Microsoft education ecosystems schools already use. The middle school-specific AT challenge is cross-classroom implementation: a 7th grader with dyslexia who uses Read&Write fluently in your resource room may never activate it in their science class because no one trained the science teacher and the student is too embarrassed to ask. Your AT value-add is the training, troubleshooting, and follow-through across all six content teachers, and the documentation of AT use effectiveness that the IEP annual review requires. Students who graduate from your middle school caseload using AT tools independently are exercising a skill that will follow them through high school, college, and employment.

AI is sitting alongside you hereModify and differentiate the general middle school curriculum for students with disabilities, adapting grade-level ELA and math content to individual learning levels using n2y Unique Learning System's age-appropriate modified-core curriculum (covering ELA including Classics-adapted literature, math, science, social studies, and life skills) for students with complex cognitive needs in self-contained settings, and Playground IEP's Text Leveler or MagicSchool AI's UDL differentiation tools for students in inclusion or resource room settings

Modify and differentiate the general middle school curriculum for students with disabilities, adapting grade-level ELA and math content to individual learning levels using n2y Unique Learning System's age-appropriate modified-core curriculum (covering ELA including Classics-adapted literature, math, science, social studies, and life skills) for students with complex cognitive needs in self-contained settings, and Playground IEP's Text Leveler or MagicSchool AI's UDL differentiation tools for students in inclusion or resource room settings; ensuring modifications preserve access to grade-level concepts and connect to each student's IEP academic goals.[11],[9]

Where your edge is

n2y Unique Learning System eliminates the hours-per-week of manual curriculum modification that previously defined the self-contained middle school SPED teacher's prep: it provides age-appropriate modified-core content aligned to extended state standards at each student's level, including adapted versions of the literature 6th-8th grade gen-ed students are reading (the Classics feature), which preserves the social currency of shared cultural content for students with complex needs. Your professional value shifts to matching the ULS complexity level to where the student actually performs today (not where the system default lands them), ensuring the modified content ties to IEP academic goals, and delivering instruction with the behavioral and communication supports the curriculum cannot provide. For inclusion and resource room students, MagicSchool AI's differentiation and Playground IEP's Text Leveler reduce the per-lesson modification burden: edit every output for IEP goal alignment.

Where middle school special ed teachers go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

Middle school special education teachers are a primary pipeline for special education director, special education coordinator, and transition coordinator positions: roles that demand deep IDEA compliance knowledge, IEP legal expertise, and transition planning fluency that only comes from middle school caseload practice. The 2024-2025 wave of AI IEP tool adoption has created urgent demand for SPED administrators who can evaluate Playground IEP, AbleSpace, and MagicSchool AI on IDEA compliance implications, set district acceptable-use policies for AI-generated IEP content, and respond to parent concerns about AI in high-stakes disability planning. Middle school SPED teachers who have led complex transition IEP meetings, supervised paraprofessionals, and navigated OCR complaints are the strongest candidates for special education director tracks.

What you'd add
  • · Special education administration and supervision: IDEA Part B compliance monitoring, state special education audit preparation, district-level IEP policy development
  • · Administrator licensure or special education director certification (state-specific; most require a principal preparation program or special education director endorsement)
  • · Budget and staffing for special education: IDEA Part B federal funding flow, proportionate share for private school students, ESY staffing, paraprofessional hiring
  • · AI EdTech evaluation for SPED: assessing ESSA evidence tiers, vendor FERPA/COPPA compliance for IEP data, and IDEA individualization implications of AI-generated IEP tools
  • · Dispute resolution and due process: mediation, hearing officer processes, OCR complaint response, and prior written notice compliance across a large district caseload
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of middle school special ed teachers changed since 1817?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Sign language + oral method (residential institution era): the two competing paradigms for deaf education

    At the American School for the Deaf (Hartford, 1817), Laurent Clerc and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet established a sign-language-based curriculum derived from French methodical sign language. The institution's tools were simple: slates, chalk, signed demonstration, and the community of Deaf students who taught each other through shared language. Simultaneously, across the Atlantic, the oralist movement, which insisted that deaf children should learn to speak and lip-read rather than sign, was spreading from Germany. The contest between "manualism" (sign language) and "oralism" (speech-only) would define deaf education for the next century and create the conditions for the 1880 Milan Congress, where hearing educators voted to suppress sign language in schools worldwide. For the first teachers of children with other disabilities (intellectual, physical, visual) the toolset was even more rudimentary: Édouard Séguin's "physiological method" (sensory training, muscle exercises, repetition) and Samuel Gridley Howe's work at Perkins School for the Blind, which placed enormous emphasis on reading via embossed letters and touch-learning.

  • Special class model + IQ testing (Binet 1905): segregated public school instruction before federal mandate

    The opening of the first "special classes" in public schools (Providence 1896, Chicago 1898, New York 1900) gave special education its first foothold outside residential institutions. The defining tool of this era was the intelligence test: Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon's 1905 scale, Americanized by Lewis Terman into the Stanford-Binet (1916) and later the Wechsler scales. IQ testing became the primary instrument for determining which children would be placed in special classes; a score below a threshold resulted in placement that was often permanent. The special class teacher in this era worked in a largely segregated room, often with children of wildly varying ages and disability profiles, with minimal specialized training. The Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), founded in 1922 by Elizabeth Farrell and colleagues at Columbia University's Teachers College, was the first professional organization for special educators, but membership was voluntary, credentials were unstandardized, and the occupation had no federal recognition.

    Effect on the work

    IQ testing expanded the pipeline of students routed into special classes, but the expansion was double-edged. It also provided the mechanism by which Black children were disproportionately placed in special education classes in racially segregated systems, a pattern later challenged in Diana v. State Board of Education (1970) and Larry P. v. Riles (1979).

  • P.L. 94-142 IEP mandate (1975): the paper IEP as the foundational artifact of the occupation

    On November 29, 1975, President Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142), requiring every public school district to provide a "free appropriate public education" in the "least restrictive environment" to every child with a disability, and to document that education in an Individualized Education Program co-signed by the child's parents. The IEP was a legal document: measurable annual goals, the specific special education services to be provided, the child's current levels of performance, how progress would be measured. It was also the single most labor-intensive artifact in K-12 education. In 1975, IEPs were handwritten or typed on paper. A teacher with a caseload of several students maintained several complete IEP files, updated them at least annually, and convened team meetings for each. The paper IEP would remain the medium until the mid-1990s, when state education agencies began fielding proprietary software for IEP management.

    Effect on the work

    P.L. 94-142 transformed the special education teacher from an occupational oddity employed at district discretion into a federally mandated category. Total special education teacher employment roughly doubled in the first five years after enactment, through 1980 (all grade bands combined).

  • IDEA 1997 reauthorization + early IEP software (EXCENT, Frontline Special Ed): digitizing the paper IEP

    The 1997 IDEA reauthorization expanded IEP requirements significantly: greater emphasis on general curriculum participation, transition planning beginning at age 14, and expanded parental rights. The compliance burden increased at precisely the moment that the first generation of IEP management software was entering the market. EXCENT (later acquired by Frontline Education), Encore, and a generation of state-specific platforms promised to reduce the clerical burden of IEP documentation, and partially delivered. Templates replaced blank forms. Progress monitoring could be linked to goal tracking. But the software of this era was not user-friendly; teachers reported spending as much time navigating the software as they had spent writing by hand, and data entered in one system could rarely be exported to another. The digital IEP was not yet a productivity tool; it was a compliance tool that happened to be electronic.

  • IDEA 2004 + assistive technology mandates (AAC, text-to-speech, reading software): the AT classroom

    The 2004 IDEA reauthorization, passed as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, required IEP teams to explicitly consider whether a student needed assistive technology (AT) as a related service. This single provision turbocharged the assistive technology industry: augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices (Dynavox, Prentke Romich Company), text-to-speech software (Kurzweil 3000, Natural Reader), and specialized reading software (Read&Write Gold) became classroom fixtures for students with communication, vision, or reading disabilities. The special education teacher's technical repertoire expanded enormously, not just teaching, but configuring and troubleshooting AT devices, training paraprofessionals and families to use them, and integrating AT into IEP goals. The simultaneously growing autism diagnosis rate drove demand for evidence-based behavioral interventions (Applied Behavior Analysis, Discrete Trial Training, PECS) that required teachers to master structured data-collection systems alongside instructional delivery.

    Effect on the work

    The autism diagnosis surge was the single largest driver of special education enrollment growth in the 2000s-2010s. Autism categories in special education rose between 1997 and 2016 (NCES), creating persistent demand for teachers with autism-specific training that the credential pipeline could not satisfy.

  • COVID-19 remote instruction, severe disruption for students with disabilities

    The COVID-19 school closures of March 2020 imposed a crisis unlike any other on special education. Students with disabilities lost not just instruction but related services (speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy) that are legally mandated in their IEPs and cannot be meaningfully delivered over Zoom to a six-year-old with a communication disability. CEC and CASE documented widespread IEP service delivery failures across the US in 2020-2021. The students who suffered the most disproportionate learning loss were those with the most significant disabilities, the population that had already been the most underserved before the pandemic. For SPED teachers, remote instruction meant improvising adapted instruction without access to the physical materials (manipulatives, sensory tools, adapted seating) that define the resource room, conducting IEP meetings with families over video, and managing IEP service logs for sessions that had never been fully delivered.

    Effect on the work

    Post-pandemic attrition hit SPED teachers even harder than general educators. The combination of increased compliance burden (compensatory services for missed ESEA-mandated services), reduced paraprofessional support, and pandemic-era stress drove experienced SPED teachers from the profession at elevated rates. CEC documented worsening shortages in 2022-2024 that exceeded pre-pandemic vacancy rates.

  • Magic School AI (2023) + Goalbook IEP tools + Microsoft Reading Coach: AI-assisted IEP drafting

    ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022. By 2023, tools built specifically for the IEP workflow had emerged: Magic School AI (launched January 2023, 3 million+ teachers by 2025) included an IEP-goal generator that could draft SMART goals from a description of a student's disability and current performance level. Goalbook (launched 2011, AI features added 2023) offered a similar IEP-scaffolding workflow with progress monitoring. These tools address the single most time-consuming, documentation-heavy task in the special education teacher's week, IEP goal writing, and early user reports suggest draft quality is sufficient to serve as a starting point that a teacher edits rather than a blank page to fill. Simultaneously, Microsoft Reading Coach (launched 2023) and AI-enhanced speech-to-text tools (Otter.ai, Dragon Professional) created augmentative AI pathways for students with dyslexia and reading disabilities, partially taking over the adaptive content delivery that special education teachers had previously performed manually. The substitution angle is narrow: the diagnostic assessment, behavior intervention, therapeutic relationship, and crisis management at the core of the SPED teacher's role are not LLM-tractable. But the administrative burden, which teachers consistently report consuming a sizeable share of their week, is the target-rich environment for AI savings.

    Effect on the work

    Early surveys (RAND American Teacher Panel 2023-24) do not yet break out special education teacher AI adoption separately from general education. The Gallup–Walton 2025 survey finding that teachers using AI weekly save several hours per week likely underestimates the potential for SPED teachers specifically, given the higher administrative burden. However, AI tools do not reduce headcount: IEP-mandated service hours, caseload limits, and meeting requirements are set in law and by IEP teams, not by teacher productivity.

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Special Education Teachers, Middle School employment and pay by year

On record since1817
Latest US employment95,200 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$66,810 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook-0.4% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 12 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
196075,000n/aEst., NCES Researched contextReport
1976200,000n/aEst., IDEA Researched contextReport
1980n/a$14,500Est., NCES Digest Table Researched contextReport
200087,790$41,000BLS OEWS 2000 (employment) Official statisticEst., BLS OOH 2000-01 (pay) Researched contextReport
2010100,510$53,440BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201985,840$61,440BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
202080,110$61,820BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202179,070$61,820BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202282,970$62,990BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202388,850$66,600BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202495,330$64,880BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
202595,200$66,810BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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