Subminimum Expectations: A Cautionary Tale from the Gig-ified Future of Special Education

On Special Education, Gig Platforms, and the Quiet Refusal That Says: I’m Not Disposable.

A credentialed autistic educator reflects on declining a dehumanising job offer—exposing the gig-ification of special ed, systemic ableism, and why saying no can be an act of resistance, integrity, and care.

Introduction: The Irony Within the Reply

“The irony within your reply is notable.” That’s what I wrote. Short sentence. Full stop. A little bell of understatement, rung politely before exiting the conversation.

The listing from LinkedIn.

It had begun, as these things often do now, with a LinkedIn job post. Virtual Extensive Support Needs Educator (California Certified). The specificity of it caught my attention. At a glance, it sounded like someone understood the assignment. That title alone carried weight—implying a role tailored to my credential, my experience, my deep, weary knowledge of the IEP process. I foolishly let myself believe, if only for a moment, that the job would reflect the work.

It did not.

Instead, I found myself in a queue—one of many, presumably—all herded through the same generic process. No acknowledgement that the needs of a student with multiple disabilities might require something more than screen sharing and good lighting. No gesture toward accessibility, despite the population being served. No differentiation at all, really—just a calendar link, a two minute video without captions to answer any questions I might have about the hiring process, and the cheerful insistence that “our process is the same across candidates to ensure equity.”

That line. That lovely, well-laundered sentence.

Equity, it seems, now means sameness. A one-size-fits-all application for a role that, by definition, is supposed to be tailored, specific, legally protected. I wasn’t even surprised. Just tired. Tired in the way only special educators get tired—down in the joints, behind the eyes, somewhere between the inbox and the IEP binder.

Of course, I asked the question. Is there a protocol for evaluating applicants like me—Extensive Support Needs educators—who adapt instruction across all content areas and disability profiles, often on the fly, with nothing but an outdated curriculum map and the sharp end of an IEP team’s expectations?

The answer: No. But thank you for asking.

And of course, I asked another: Is there a version of your company overview video with captions?

The answer: Also no. But we’ll pass that feedback along. Which, for the record, is corporate-speak for we will forget you ever asked.

So, no, I didn’t continue. I said thank you, and I left. And then, sometime later that day, the platform spat out its automatic reply. Thank you for your interest in Fullmind. We will not be moving forward with your application at this time.

It would be funny, if it weren’t so perfectly bleak. Because I had already opted out. They just beat me to it with their algorithm.

But it’s not the rejection that lingers—it’s the shape of the system I walked away from. A system that now outsources special education to the lowest bidder, that dangles “flexibility” like bait while erasing the expertise it claims to want. A system in which companies like Fullmind backfill public school positions, not with real supports, but with remote staff paid less than what a teenager might earn mowing their elderly neighbours front lawn.

This wasn’t just a misfire. It was a glimpse into the future of education. And that future is very, very quiet—the sound of dignity being replaced by convenience, of access outsourced to a platform that doesn’t even caption its own introduction.

The Bait and Switch of Credentialed Gig Work

Here’s the thing: when a job posting includes the phrase Extensive Support Needs Educator (California Certified), it really ought to mean something.

In California, earning that credential is no casual affair. It’s a layered, multi-year process involving graduate coursework, clinical placements, state exams, and the quiet swallowing of your weekends for the better part of two years. To hold that title is to be fluent not only in pedagogy, but in systems navigation. To know how to read the white space between IEP clauses. To modify Algebra II for a student who speaks in scripts from Encanto and responds best to lessons presented in metaphor. It means knowing how to teach without assuming shared language, shared regulation, or even a shared sense of time.

So you can imagine the whiplash when the platform’s response boiled down to: This isn’t a job, it’s a pool. You’ll be on call. There’s no specific assignment. No guarantee of hours. Pay is negotiable but usually between $29–$36/hr. Prep time isn’t included. Neither are benefits. You’ll be a contractor. You’ll figure it out.

What was pitched as a profession turned out to be piecework.

What was titled like a calling turned out to be a side hustle.

And what was framed as “equity-driven” turned out to be entirely generic—an undifferentiated funnel into a gig economy model that doesn’t acknowledge the existence of specialised expertise, let alone compensate it.

This is not an idle grievance. The distinction matters. When you're hired as a substitute teacher, the expectation is to keep the class alive until the real instruction resumes. When you’re brought in as an Extensive Support Needs Educator, you're expected to be the instruction, the adaptation, the lifeline. You’re responsible for the legal implementation of a student’s IEP or 504 Plan—documents that are not suggestions, but binding contracts under federal law. The stakes are different. The work is different. The preparation is immense.

And Fullmind knows this. Or at least, they should. The language in their job postings certainly implies awareness of the legal gravity involved. But the moment you enter their process, it all falls away—flattened into a standardised screening protocol designed, apparently, for a generic Zoom-ready generalist with a decent internet connection and a flexible schedule.

The “virtual demonstration” they request has no rubric tailored to students with complex needs. No acknowledgement that you might be modifying language for non-speaking students, or adapting multiple simultaneous access points. You’re just expected to perform a kind of polished versatility on camera—without support, without differentiation, and without, ironically, captions.

It’s not just disappointing—it’s telling. Because this is how professional knowledge is being eroded: one catch-all application form at a time. One platform that promises schools a quick fix, and delivers them an unprotected, overextended educator operating as a freelancer from a bedroom office. It’s education-as-service contract. Learning-as-delivery model. Specialist teaching rebranded as a streaming service.

And you don’t notice the switch right away. That’s the bait. The title. The illusion of care. The nod toward certification. It’s all there—right up until you’re in the queue and realise: the title was a veneer. The actual job is something else entirely.

Four Hours of Prep for One Hour of Zoom

Here’s what they don’t tell you when they dangle a $36/hour teaching rate: that the actual teaching is the easy part.

Not easy in the breezy, low-effort sense—but in the relative sense. Because by the time you reach the moment of delivery—your one hour on Zoom—you’ve already done four hours’ worth of labour, most of which is both uncompensated and invisible.

That one hour of instruction might involve a reading task, a maths warm-up, and a scaffolded writing prompt. But behind that hour lives a mountain: the tailoring, the translation, the triangulation of standards with goals, accommodations with materials, and human needs with systems that weren’t built to hold them.

If the student has a communication device, you’ve already previewed the vocabulary set. If they have a behaviour plan, you’ve already mapped out triggers and mitigation strategies. If they’re a gestalt language processor, you’ve spent hours thinking about metaphor, rhythm, and co-regulation through language that rarely lands linearly. If the original lesson was designed for a neurotypical, grade-level reader with zero sensory needs and two college-educated parents at home to help, you’ve had to dismantle and rebuild it from the ground up—just to make it usable.

This is not a niche skill. It’s a profession. A field. A whole knowledge base developed over decades of disability advocacy, pedagogy, and legal frameworks—none of which are captured in a per-session contractor rate.

And still: the platform pays only for the hour you’re visible.

There’s no time allotted for the emails to families clarifying home support.
No line item for the fifteen-minute phone call with the speech therapist.
No invoice for the hours you spent rewriting grade-level content in plain language, or drafting the daily data sheet to track progress on a self-regulation goal.

You are expected to do it anyway. And you do—because it’s what the student needs. Because the IEP requires it. Because your name is attached to this service. Because you still believe that education should be more than content delivery on demand.

But make no mistake: this is unpaid labour. And not because it’s unworthy, but because it is strategically devalued. Because the work of access—the real work of access—is everything that happens before the Zoom call starts and after it ends. It’s the scaffolding. The modification. The foresight. The humanisation of a system that was not built for disabled learners in the first place.

And so what they offer as a “competitive rate” is, in truth, a kind of cruel arithmetic:
$36 an hour, divided by five.
No benefits.
No union.
No prep pay.
No acknowledgement that any of it even exists.

The work of access is invisible. That’s why they don’t want to pay for it.
It’s also why we do it anyway.

Because someone has to.

The Cost of Entry: Credentialism Without Compensation

What does it take to become qualified to do this work? To legally and ethically teach students with extensive support needs in California?

For me, it meant enrolling in a rigorous internship programme through Loyola Marymount University. The Education Specialist credential wasn’t a standalone—LMU embeds it in a Master of Education in Special Education. Even with a tuition discount from Teach For America and a modest AmeriCorps stipend, I still paid around $12,000 out of pocket. Retail cost for the programme sits just shy of $50,000 a year. And that’s before counting the tests.

CBEST. CSET. RICA. None of them built for someone like me—but all of them mandatory. I’m a gestalt language processor navigating exams calibrated for analytical ones, tests that measure compliance more than competence. I hired tutors—human scaffolding to help me translate the disjointed logic into something I could move through. Altogether, I spent about $2,000 just to clear the testing gauntlet.

And for what return? A wage offer that, broken down hourly, doesn’t even match the cost of becoming eligible. A system that demands thousands in sunk costs up front, only to respond with rates that can’t sustain even a modest life, let alone repay the investment.

But the real price wasn’t just financial.

It was professional labour—teaching full-time while attending night classes, writing case notes during lunch, managing IEPs by torchlight at the kitchen table. It was emotional toll—the relentless code-switching of a neurodivergent, disabled, trans educator working inside a system that demands conformity from those of us built for difference. It was watching colleagues coast through on scripts while I rewrote every word to fit the shape of truth.

So when Fullmind responded with their offer, it wasn’t just a lowball.

It was a structurally insulting one. It said: your credential is valuable enough for us to require—but not enough for us to honour.

It said: we want the badge, not the labour behind it. The veneer of compliance, not the cost of care. It said: we will extract the value of your effort, but don’t expect to be compensated for what it took to get here.

And in that moment, the irony echoed back—louder now. Because the very system that trained me to support the most marginalised students is the same one that sees me, and others like me, as disposable.

Accessibility Denied: The Captioning Exchange

This was the moment that sealed it.

I asked a simple, disability-informed question. A request, really—rooted not in preference but in need. Could their interview platform enable live captions?

The reply came quickly. Not in the form of accommodation, but in the language of refusal, draped in the robes of equity. Their system, they explained, was designed to ensure fairness. Uniformity. Consistency. Everyone would get the same experience.

The problem is—I don’t need the same.

I need access.

I have the adult version of an IEP. A formal autism diagnosis. Documentation from my doctor detailing my support needs, including auditory processing challenges. I’ve shared these with every employer and institution I’ve worked for. And yet, in this moment, none of that mattered.

Their process—pre-written, pre-loaded, inflexible—was already optimised for equity. At least, their version of it.

So I opted out.

Because there’s nothing equitable about denying accessibility to a disabled educator applying to teach disabled students.

Equity is not “sameness.” Equity is adaptation. To invoke equity whilst denying captioning is to speak the language of justice with the tools of exclusion still in hand.

The irony stings deeper here. This is a company that claims to serve students with IEPs, 504s, complex support needs. But the moment a disabled adult educator dares to ask for what their students are entitled to by law? The door quietly closes.

Their system wasn’t broken. It was working exactly as designed.

The Future We’re Sleepwalking Into

This was never just about one company.

Fullmind is a symptom, not the disease. A glimpse of the direction we’re already heading—where public schools, increasingly underfunded and overburdened, outsource their most complex educational roles to third-party vendors with sleek platforms and no skin in the game.

Where Resource Specialist and Special Day Class positions—once full-time, protected, relational roles—are being reshaped into gig work. Hourly contracts. No benefits. No paid prep time. No obligation to attend IEP meetings or stay with a student across years. Just Zoom links and compliance checkboxes.

It’s special education without a centre.

This shift doesn’t just erode working conditions—it undermines the legal rights of disabled students. Under IDEA, every child is entitled to a Free and Appropriate Public Education. But how do you uphold “appropriate” when the educator providing support is paid a fraction of the prep time they need? How do you ensure “free” when the cost is shifted to unpaid emotional labour, to families navigating an ever-thinner support net?

The workforce of specialist educators—already stretched thin, already burned out—is being hollowed from within.

We are being replaced by platforms. By scale. By contracts that wear the language of inclusion but have no soul. We are being replaced, not because we failed, but because the system wants efficiency, not relationship.

This is collapse—not loud or sudden, but quiet. Decentralised. Already underway. You don’t notice it all at once. A district here. A vendor there. A qualified teacher walks away. A student’s needs go unmet. The IEP becomes a formality. The scaffold unravels.

And still we call it progress. Still we tell ourselves this is innovation.

But in truth, it’s abandonment, disguised as flexibility.

Refusal as Integrity

I walked away. Not out of fragility, but out of clarity.

Because even in a country where the unemployment and under-employment rate for autistic adults hovers above 80%, not all labour is worth accepting. Not all “opportunities” deserve your expertise. When a system is designed to exploit, participation isn’t neutral—it risks becoming complicity.

I was looking for extra work. Not because I’m idle, but because I’m underpaid. My full-time job—credentialed, caseload-carrying, service-providing—doesn’t actually pay a full-time wage in this economy. Like so many educators, I live in the gap between hours worked and bills due. Each month is a patchwork: public service, freelance contracts, and the slow, sustaining support of my Substack subscribers. (To those of you who do subscribe—thank you. You’re helping me breathe.)

So yes, I was open to something on the side. But not this.

Because what Fullmind offered wasn’t just underpaid. It was structurally unethical. It was a model built to extract value from disabled students and disabled educators alike—then wash its hands in the language of equity.

To refuse that is not to reject work. It’s to insist on work that means something.

They automated their rejection. But I had already declined. With my full name. My full title. My full self. That was the real ending.

Refusal, in this context, is not resignation. It’s resistance. It’s care. For myself. For my students. For the profession I still believe could be otherwise.

Closing: The Cost of Saying No

Saying no is never easy.

Especially when the options are so few, and the needs—financial, emotional, practical—are so real. I know what it means to live close to the edge. I know how tempting even a poorly structured offer can be when rent is due and groceries are low. I know some of us say yes to these contracts. And I respect that. Money is money.

But for me, time is money too.

Time to write the articles that keep me anchored. Time for the poems that only arrive when the world slows down. Time for a slow walk to the mailbox, for a quiet coffee, for noticing the lizards that sun themselves on my walkway. And most importantly, at the end of this long and relentless school year—time to get some of those spoons back.

This no wasn’t easy. But it was necessary. Necessary for my integrity. For my students, who deserve more than a burnt-out, underpaid teacher juggling five platforms just to stay afloat. For the profession I still want to believe in. For myself.

To say no is to carve out the possibility of a different kind of yes.

One built on care. On rest. On enough.