Toolkit

Take the evidence where decisions are made.

Every state page exports to the formats leaders actually use, with the citations attached.

Board slides

A state’s figures as a short, cited slide deck for a school committee. Print it, or save it as a PDF from the print dialog.

State

Choose a state to open its slides.

One-page brief

A printable summary for budget hearings and community meetings, with every source named.

State

Choose a state to open its brief.

District briefs and slides arrive with the district pages.

Letter to your legislators

Your state’s special education figures in a letter you edit and send yourself. The Observatory sends nothing and keeps nothing.

Your state

Open data

Every table as a download, with sources, years and suppression rules. Free to reuse with citation; see the terms of use.

Table	Years	Rows	Download
Special education by state: students with IEPs, share of enrollment, time in general education, districts reporting	2024–25	52: 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico	CSV
Workload Census results: medians by role and state, self-reported	Current school year	Groups of 10 or more only	CSV

How the state figures are built

Figures are sums of district-reported values from the U.S. Department of Education’s IDEA Section 618 files for the 2024–25 school year, matched to federal enrollment files by district.
The Department suppresses small counts to protect student privacy. Those districts are left out of the sums, so a state’s total can run slightly below its official count.
Rates use only districts that reported both parts of the fraction.
Districts reporting counts the local education agencies with a reported school-age IEP count, including cooperatives and charter schools that report on their own. Withheld counts are those the Department suppressed for privacy.
Share of students compares school-age students with IEPs, kindergarten through age 21, with all students enrolled, prekindergarten through grade 12, in the same districts.
Time in general education comes from the educational environments file, which reports where school-age students with IEPs spend the school day under the least restrictive environment requirement (34 CFR 300.114).
Colorado reports IDEA counts by administrative unit, so its share of students uses statewide totals. Wyoming’s file includes school-age counts but no ages 3 to 21 total. Hawaii and Puerto Rico each report as one statewide district.
The Workload Census has its own method, which is published here.

Sources

U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs. IDEA Section 618 Part B Child Count (file specification 002), district level, 2024–25. data.ed.gov. Public domain.
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs. IDEA Section 618 Part B Educational Environments (file specification 089), district level, 2024–25. data.ed.gov. Licensed CC BY.
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Common Core of Data, district membership, 2024–25 (final). nces.ed.gov. Public domain.
Map boundaries: U.S. Census Bureau cartographic boundary files, via the us-atlas project (ISC License).

Cite as: PULSE, The Special Education Observatory, public sample, 2024–25. Compiled from the sources above; data retrieved Sep 25, 2026. The Observatory is not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Department of Education.