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Leveraging IEPs to Understand Special Education Services at Scale

7.5 million (15%) U.S. public school students have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) that guide $14 billion in special education services. However, the content of IEPs remains unexplored, primarily because they have been historically inaccessible to researchers at scale. In this study, we develop a coding taxonomy to categorize IEP services from digital IEP records for an entire state. We identify the diverse IEP services provided to students with disabilities. We codify 459,703 IEP services for 158,460 students into 25 categories, six subjects, four support types, five settings, five service modalities, six group types, and five personnel types. This information helps understand variation in IEP services across schools. It can inform educator training and future research on the efficacy of services.

Keywords
special education, administrative data, students with disabilities, text analysis, regression
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/t22y-r243
EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:
Cleveland, Christopher, Lindsey Kaler, and Jessica Markham. (). Leveraging IEPs to Understand Special Education Services at Scale. (EdWorkingPaper: -1249). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/t22y-r243

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