I've been excited to share this one for a long time. The Special Education Observatory is live at pulseforeducation.com/observatory, and I couldn't be more excited to share it with you.
Here's why we built it. Every director I've worked with, and every conversation I’ve had across the U.S. in the past few months, has the same problem: the numbers that should shape staffing, budget and policy decisions exist, but they're spread across federal tables, state reports and spreadsheets nobody has time to piece together. So decisions about students with IEPs get made on partial pictures, and the people doing the work go unseen.
The Observatory puts that public data in one place, with every figure cited to its source, so you can see where your state and district stand and bring that evidence to the table.
What's inside
A national map. Start with the share of school-age students with IEPs in every state for 2024–25, from the U.S. Department of Education's IDEA Section 618 data. Darker means higher.
A page for every state and district. All 50 states, plus Washington, DC and Puerto Rico, and a page for every district. Type your state or district name and go straight to it.
Reports and white papers. Two are up now: The Measurement Gap and From Caseload to Workload. Both are written to be brought to a board meeting.
A toolkit. Board slides, a one-page brief, a letter to your legislator and open data downloads, so the evidence can go where decisions get made.
Field notes. Signed pieces from practitioners and families about what the numbers look like from where they stand.
Regional partners. National data is most useful when people who know the region help read it. We're inviting educational service agencies, study councils, professional associations and researchers to partner with us.
Why this matters to me
Caseload counts students. Workload counts the week. For years, the official picture of special education staffing has been a count of positions and a count of students, and that count leaves out the meetings, evaluations, consultation, documentation and travel that fill a provider's real week. The Observatory is our first step toward showing national trends and gaps in special education, inclusion and funding, out in the open, where districts, families, researchers and lawmakers can all see them.
This is just the beginning. We'll keep adding data, reports and partners, and we'll do it with districts, nonprofits and organizations who care about the same questions. Districts that work with PULSE will get deeper staffing, workload and caseload analytics built on top of it.
Three ways to help this week
Find your district and share its page with your team.
Take the Workload Census. It takes about four minutes and asks for no name, no school and no student information. Results by role and state publish once ten or more people in a group respond. Add your week.
Join the Observatory to hear first when new data and reports go up. Join here.
If you lead an educational service agency, a study council or a research group and want to help read your region's data, reply to this email. I'd love to talk.
Thank you for reading, and for the work you do for students every day.
~Eric