The National Association of Special Education Teachers (NASET) empowers special education teachers, advocates, and professionals with practical training, trusted resources, and meaningful connections - supporting those who make a difference in the lives of students with diverse learning needs.
Happy Friday! We hope your weekend is full of luck and fun! 🐈⬛ 🥳 Here's the news you may have missed this week
This week’s issue picks up where the election left off. Voters across the country weighed in on school funding measures, and in many districts the answer was no, setting up tighter budget conversations just as states decide whether to opt into the new federal school choice program. In Washington, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill to simplify how college students with disabilities document their accommodations, a federal review declared several civil rights guidance documents unenforceable, and the Justice Department sued a major rideshare company over disability discrimination.
At the state and district level, accountability is the thread. Texas ordered Houston’s district to fix its new special education program or risk funding, families in Portland are pushing back on school closure plans they say overlooked students with disabilities, and Connecticut parents are making the case for cameras in special education classrooms. There are bright spots too; a Boston special education school earned a $100,000 award for improving student outcomes, New York City is expanding a program that helps students with emotional disabilities return to their classrooms, and Detroit launched a partnership to train more special education teachers.
On the research front, scientists identified three distinct brain biotypes in kids with ADHD and anxiety, a step toward understanding why the same diagnosis can look so different from student to student. New work on autism spans the full arc, from genetic findings that may explain a long-standing mystery, to technology that could identify autism earlier, to a reminder that nearly one in four Americans still believe misinformation about its cause. As always, thank you for reading, and have a wonderful weekend.
Thank you for everything YOU do!
It’s our favorite time of year: we get to say THANK YOU to all of you for your incredibly hard work day in and day out! As a token of our appreciation, grab your FREE Intervention Toolkit. 15 one-page strategies for math, reading, and regulation, plus a free seat at Dr. Matthew Burns' (University of Florida) live webinar on December 10th at 7pm EST (CE certificate included).
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Hello from the NASET Break Room - our quick pulse check on the state of special education based on trending posts and questions we saw online this week.
Last Week:
Has a paraprofessional on your team ever told you they felt “thrown to the sharks” with no onboarding or training?
Yes, and it still bothers me how we handled it 😤 (57%)
Have you ever disagreed with a district decision about where a student with an IEP should be placed (general ed vs. SDC vs. private)?
Yes, but I didn’t feel like my opinion carried weight 😬 (56%)
Has a behavior specialist or evaluator ever refused to run an FBA before an IEP meeting where one was clearly needed?
No, FBAs happen here when they’re needed ✅ (63%)
Has your team ever been unsure whether a physical intervention crossed the line from acceptable restraint into something that could be called abuse?
Yes, and it created real tension with staff or admin afterward 😬
Yes, but our CPI training made the line clear 📋
No, we’ve never had a close call like that 🙅
I’m not CPI trained and wouldn’t know where the line is 🤷
Have you seen a student placed in a less restrictive setting because of staffing shortages rather than what was actually best for them?
Yes, and I think it hurt that student 😣
Yes, but we found a way to make it work 🤝
No, placement decisions here aren’t driven by staffing gaps ✅
I’m not sure what actually drives those calls in my district 🧩
Has a student ever been receiving services for years before someone caught that they actually had an auditory processing disorder?
Yes, and I think about how much earlier it should’ve been caught 😣
Yes, but we caught it relatively early and course corrected ✅
No, APD hasn’t come up on my caseload 🙅
I honestly wouldn’t know how to spot it 🧩
✈️ Join us on TUESDAY November 17th at 7pm ET for What Protections Travel With You: Your Rights as an Educator in a Public, Private, or Religious School with Dr. Suzanne E. Eckes, J.D., Ph.D. Susan S. Engeleiter Professor of Education Law, Policy, and Practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Past President of the Education Law Association. She will walk through how the ministerial exception actually operates, which employees it reaches, and how it limits disability and other employment anti-discrimination protections in private religious schools - including the significant limits on teacher speech outside a public district. Recording and certificates available 24 hours after the webinar. 👩💻 Register Today
Is there a topic or guest speaker you’d like us to feature? Reply to let us know!
🧮 We teamed up with Dr. Sarah Powell from the University of Texas at Austin for our exclusive new course Math Intervention for Special Education: Instructional Strategies. Join Dr. Powell, one of the nation's leading researchers in math intervention, for a comprehensive six-module course on research-validated math intervention for students who struggle with math, with or without an identified disability
📝 Our newest course partner is Dr. Edward Schultz from Midwestern State University in our exclusive new course, Dyslexia Identification and Intervention. Join Dr. Schultz, co-author of the Core-Selective Evaluation Process and a national trainer on learning disability identification, for a three-module course on what dyslexia is under the new 2025 IDA definition, how to recognize and screen for it early, and how to teach students with dyslexia using structured literacy.
🧠 We partnered with Dr. Michael Taylor, a special education director in Arkansas who built his career in behavioral classrooms, for our exclusive new course, Nervous Systems in the Classroom. Join Dr. Taylor for a six-module course on what is actually happening in a student’s body during a meltdown, a shutdown, or a refusal, how to read where a student is on the autonomic ladder before the behavior shows up, and how to respond with co-regulation, classroom design, and behavior supports that teach skills instead of adding shame.
♾️ November 23rd at 630pm EST is Session 2 of our BCBA Series: Behavioral Interventions (with Assent) Led by Dr. Beth L. Raiola, EdD, BCBA, LBA, Program Chair for Applied Behavior Analysis at Post University, sessions are 90 minutes each and offer BCBA CEUs and RBT PDUs, covering autism in the classroom, family dynamics, and coaching early-career teachers. The full series is included with membership. Recording & Certificate 24 hours after the session.
Support Special Education Research
Burned-out public school SpEd teachers are eligible for $50 😮💨 Take the survey
Your Classroom Affects Your Health, Too
Special educators manage lighting, noise, and space for their students. But who's studying how those environments affect you?
Schools are among the most female-dominated workplaces in America, yet occupational health research has largely overlooked them. The Educator Health Survey, a national study of K–12 educators by AREA Research and Perkins&Will focused on women's health, asks about lighting, air quality, temperature, acoustics, restroom access, break space, and health across your career.
It takes 15–20 minutes, and any question can be skipped. The first 350 participants receive $20. No names or emails are collected. Findings publish Fall 2027. 👩🏫 Take the survey
Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) users, this is for you! Includes an opportunity for a $10 TPT gift card - Take the survey
📚From the NASET Vault
🎉 NASET Family Navigator
👉 Read The November Special Education e-Journal
⬇️ NASET Support Squad Downloads of the Week Teaching Social Thinking and Perspective Taking and Supporting Students with Limited Verbal Communication Scroll down to instantly download ⬇️
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The IEP is a year-round job. Your system should support the whole year.
Built for special education teachers managing timelines, assessments, goals, instruction, and progress monitoring, The Intentional IEP helps you organize the work across the school year. Start by mapping the steps for your next IEP with a practical writing timeline.
You Organize Everyone Else’s Lives. Let Us Help With Yours. 📋
You spend every day keeping IEPs, meetings, and other people’s children organized. Then one phone call puts you in charge of an aging adult’s care with no plan. GrayBrief’s online course gives you the same clear, step-by-step structure you bring to your classroom: Medicare, care options, paperwork, and what to do first.
Shout Out to Last Week’s Winners Who Correctly Answered, “Orthographic Mapping.”
This Week's Question:
Reinforcing successive approximations toward a target behavior is called what?
Correctly answer 3 or more trivia questions each month to be eligible for a gift card! We had 31 winners in October!
What’s one resource you REALLY need, but can’t find? Reply to let us know!
Caseload counts students. Workload counts the week.
A caseload number never shows the evaluations, meetings, consultation, paperwork and travel that fill a special educator's week. The Workload Census, from PULSE's free Special Education Observatory, measures the real week. It's anonymous, takes about four minutes and is open to every role, from SLPs and school psychologists to teachers, paras and administrators. When you finish, you'll see how your week compares with others in your state.
“Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.”