Fifty years ago, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) promised to bridge the gap between what students with disabilities need and what the public education system was designed to provide. Today, that bridge is at risk of collapse as ever-larger shares of students are identified with disabilities, only to languish without access to the support they need.
While explanations of increasing rates of childhood disability abound, none help us understand perhaps the most confounding feature of today’s epidemic: trends around students identified as having a disability vary dramatically across states. We launched the Unlocking Potential Data Center in October 2025 to make those contours more visible than ever. Unlocking Potential is the nation’s first digital record documenting the share of students identified for special education since 1976 across all 50 states.
We then invited educators, researchers, and advocates to dig into the data, uncover new patterns, and propose ideas for a better system. Today, the winning contributors to the Data Sprint offer several preliminary explanations for those underlying trends.
Does money talk? Maybe, but not in the ways you might predict. In two separate entries, Krista Kaput from Bellwether Education and Sana Fatima from Afton Partners both wanted to understand whether states induce increased identification rates through their special education funding formulas. Their results suggest the relationship between money and identification rates is far from simple.
Using longitudinal data on special education revenue from the Census Bureau, Kaput shows that high-spending states do not reliably identify more students for special education compared to low-spending states.
Fatima explores this facet of special education finance further, constructing an index-based rating of state financial formulas based on whether they reward higher identification rates with more dollars. Like Kaput, she does not find evidence that financial incentives are responsible for increased identification rates overall. Her analysis, however, suggests that changes in those financial formulas–such as changes to “intensity tiers” that provide districts more money based on the number of services students receive–can result in increased identification rates compared to those in other states.
Does your child have a special education need? It may depend on how their regular classroom is staffed. Special education eligibility criteria are based in part on whether a child needs special education to succeed in school. But what if instead those needs were a feature of the regular classroom? Fatima found that states with lower pupil-to-teacher ratios (i.e., more staff for fewer students) consistently demonstrated lower rates of special education identification.
Response-to-intervention: Much ado about nothing? Response-to-intervention and its cousin, multi-tiered systems of support, were originally introduced to stem the growth of special education identification rates. The idea behind them was simple: if schools provide support for students outside of special education, fewer students will be found to have a disability. While a handful of studies have examined these programs’ effects in specific states, Zhiling Shea’s analysis provides the first national assessment. They find that RTI adoption reduced the share of students identified with a learning disability. But there’s a catch: more students were identified for special education overall. This pattern suggests an offsetting effect, whereby RTI implementation changes the disability categories that students are identified under, while doing little to reduce the share of students identified overall.
Is special education the nation’s de facto trauma response system? This provocative question provides a backdrop for Seth Saeugling’s exploration of the causes and consequences of increased identification rates in rural North Carolina. Saeugling invites us to consider the relationship between childhood trauma, disability, and special education. Drawing upon data collected by the Rural Opportunity Institute, his analysis points to how special education eligibility criteria can prevent resources and support from getting to children in need, regardless of whether they are found to have a disability.
Does special education provide equal opportunity for all? Parent voice is a defining feature of special education law: whether students are found eligible and what services they are provided depend entirely on negotiations with parents. While this design was intended to empower families, exercising that power may depend on having resources that some families lack. Patrick Denice considers these differential effects in his intriguing analysis of the relationship between parental demand for resources and identification rates. He finds that identification rates are higher in states with higher median incomes and with higher rates of enrollment in schools of choice, raising questions about how current eligibility criteria shape resource allocation and access to support in school.
These findings make clear that there are many factors—beyond simply whether a student needs support—that drive eligibility for special education. Could a different system better connect resources to students in need of help? That’s a topic we’ll return to in future phases of Unlocking Potential.
The winning white paper submissions have not been peer reviewed. The findings presented reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of CRPE or CRPE’s funders.
