ED Submits IDEA Report to Congress

The U.S. Department of Education (ED), Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) submitted its 44th Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), 2022. The 320 page report focuses on IDEA results and accountability and contains six sections, “(1) a summary and analysis of IDEA Section 618 data at the national level; (2) a summary and analysis of IDEA Section 618 data at the State level; (3) a summary and analysis of the U.S. Department of Education’s (Department) findings and determinations regarding the extent to which States are meeting the requirements of IDEA, Part B and Part C; (4) a summary of special education research conducted under Part E of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002; (5) a summary of national special education studies and evaluations conducted under Section 664(a) and (c) of IDEA; and (6) a summary of the extent and progress of the assessment of national activities, which focus on determining the effectiveness of IDEA and improving its implementation.”

The 2022 report showed that the greatest disability categories of students served in ages 5-21 under IDEA Part B continued to be specific learning disabilities (2,319,699 or 34.9% of 6,647,000 served), speech or language impairment (17.8%), and other health impairment (16.5%). Other categories of note in 2020 included autism (11.6%), intellectual disability (6.1%), and emotional disturbance (5.2%). The data used in the report comes primarily from EDFacts Data Warehouse, a repository for performance data collected across all offices of the Department and contains all required IDEA data reporting. A reminder about the use of this report, however, is that the 44th Annual Report to Congress, 2022 does not include assessment data from the school year 2019-2020 because the reporting requirement was dropped due to COVID.

Access the report here.