States Face a December Deadline to Submit Special Education Data

State special education officials are scrambling to meet a massive data-collection deadline, mandated by the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, that will change the way the states have traditionally tracked information on students with disabilities.

The federal Department of Education’s office of special education programs has outlined more than 30 separate indicators for infants, toddlers, and school-age children with disabilities that states must begin tracking—and ultimately, publicizing—to ensure their compliance under the federal special education law.

The deadline to submit the “state performance plans” is Dec. 2, a year after the revised IDEA was signed into law. The states received the final list of the areas they are supposed to track during an Education Department seminar in August, leaving them just three months to gather input from interested parties, retool their data-management systems, and gain approval from their...