Conceptual Frameworks for Understanding Special Educators’ Decisions to Stay or Leave

US schools have never had enough special education teachers (SETs) to serve all students with disabilities, in part due to high SET attrition rates. As such, researchers have long sought to understand why SETs leave, but they have often done so without grounding their analyses in clear conceptual frameworks. Conceptual frameworks help scholars build schemas for understanding a problem; in doing so, they point out potential directions for future inquiry, directing scholars' attention toward new ways of conceptualizing a problem. Efforts to research and improve SET retention thus require strong conceptual foundations, supported by robust research, to understand why SETs leave and stay. Therefore, in this chapter, we describe conceptual frameworks that researchers have used to study SET attrition and retention. We first present an overview of the frameworks used in prior research, and second, consider some of the possibilities presented by these frameworks, and gaps for which the field needs stronger frameworks.