The full program study is available now. Read it here!
Nashville’s charter schools have changed significantly over the past decade. Most are fully grown now, with experienced leaders, stable communities, and students who have been with them for years. For many of those schools, the question has shifted from how do we build a special education program to whether what we’ve built actually works for every student who needs it?
In partnership with Tennessee SCORE, DLC conducted the most comprehensive look at special education programming in Nashville’s charter schools since 2017. We surveyed 178 individuals across five school-based roles — school leaders, special education leaders, special education teachers, general education teachers, and operations leaders — representing 32 unique campuses. Eleven schools also participated in deeper on-site visits, including classroom observations and structured staff interviews.
Here is what we found.
The sector has the necessary infrastructure
Nearly every school in our study has a full continuum of services in place. All 24 school leaders confirmed push-in support and targeted interventions. Evidence-based reading programs are present at virtually every school, and students are making measurable reading gains as a result. And perhaps most notably: the average experience level of special education teachers has grown from 1.4 years in 2017 to 8.7 years today. Students with the highest needs are being served by more experienced educators than at any point in the sector’s history, something worth celebrating.
Co-teaching is still a work in progress
Co-teaching and push-in support are the most widely offered service models, but the gap between co-teaching as a structural commitment and co-teaching as a high-impact instructional practice is where the sector has the most room to grow. Across all 11 Deep Dive schools, “one teach, one assist” was the most commonly observed model. The barrier isn’t willingness, but structures and sustained support. Schools that participated in structured co-planning professional development described meaningfully different outcomes, with teachers sharing instructional ownership and describing the work as truly collaborative rather than parallel.
Behavior support is the sector’s clearest growth area
Across every survey group, behavior-related items received the lowest ratings of any domain in the study. Culture teams and special education teams often operate in parallel rather than in coordination, and the gap between having a behavior framework and implementing it consistently across classrooms is real.
Educators know what they need
When we asked staff across all five roles what one thing they would want to exist, the answers converged: a shared resource hub, cross-school learning opportunities, access to specialized expertise that no single school can afford on its own, and common professional development that doesn’t require every school to build from scratch.
What comes next
The study points to four sector-level priorities: deepening the quality of service across the continuum from co-teaching to specialized settings, strengthening behavior systems at the school and sector level, reducing data fragmentation, and investing in the special education workforce pipeline.
And already, the work is moving. IGNITE Nashville 2.0 is launching this summer — built directly in response to what this study confirmed: that co-teaching is present across the sector, but structured co-planning support is what separates presence from impact. IGNITE 2.0 will deepen its reach into schools through ongoing co-teaching support and quarterly learning consolidation sessions that bring educators together across the sector. It is the kind of shared infrastructure the sector asked for, and DLC is proud to help build it.
Nashville’s charter schools are full of educators who have chosen to stay in difficult jobs because of the students they serve. This study elevated a sector that has built meaningful capacity and is ready to go deeper. We are grateful to every school leader, special education leader, teacher, and operations staff member who gave their time, shared their data, and answered our questions with candor and care.
Read the full program study here: Special Education in Nashville’s Charter Schools