Terms of use
The Observatory is a free public resource. These terms keep it that way.
You may
- Read, print and share any page.
- Quote figures, tables and passages, and use them in reports, presentations, testimony, articles and research.
- Download the open data and reuse it, including in your own analysis.
Citation is required
Anything you reuse must name the Observatory as its source, with the original publisher where the page names one. For example: “PULSE, The Special Education Observatory, pulseforeducation.com/observatory, retrieved October 4, 2026; original data: U.S. Department of Education, IDEA Section 618.” Use the date you retrieved it. Federal data keeps its own license, which each source names.
You may not
- Scrape, crawl, harvest or otherwise collect the Observatory’s pages or data by automated means, except search engines indexing pages for search. Use the open data downloads instead.
- Use the Observatory’s pages or data to train or tune a machine learning model without written permission.
- Present the Observatory’s figures as your own, or change them and present the changed figures as the Observatory’s.
- Try to identify any person from Workload Census results, field notes or any other part of the Observatory.
What the figures are
Federal figures are as their publishers released them, with the publishers’ own suppression of small counts. Workload Census figures are self-reported and are shown only for groups of 10 or more; the method states their limits. Field notes are the views of their authors.
No warranty
The Observatory is provided as is. We correct errors when we find them or are told of them, but we do not promise that every figure is free of error, and we are not liable for decisions made with it.
Privacy
How the Observatory handles what you send it is in the privacy policy and, for the Workload Census, on its method page.
The Special Education Observatory is a public resource from PULSE, by The Inclusive Practice, LLC.