Frequently Asked Questions

Data are drawn from information published by state education agencies. Texas data are obtained from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) through the Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS). For more detail on the datasets we use and how they are compiled, see our Data Sources page.

No. Preliminary analyses suggest that the SPED Support Score measures something meaningfully different from traditional school ratings. In Texas, we compared the SPED Support Score against the Annual Median Household Income for nearly 9,000 schools and found essentially no relationship between the two measures. While some individual components of the score showed modest correlations with income, the overall SPED Support Score did not. Examples from Texas include:

• Academic Performance – Moderate positive relationship with household income
• Academic Growth – Weak-to-moderate positive relationship with household income
• Inclusion & Placement – Virtually no relationship with household income
• Staffing Support – Weak positive relationship with household income
• Discipline Climate – Little or no relationship with household income
• Graduation & Dropout Outcomes – Little or no relationship with household income

This suggests that the methodology is identifying schools that support students with disabilities effectively regardless of the affluence of the surrounding community. However, these findings should be considered preliminary. LearningDifferences.Info® plans to continue evaluating the relationship between SPED Support Scores and socioeconomic factors as additional states are incorporated into the database.

Statewide rank can be misleading because many schools are clustered within a narrow score range. A school ranked hundreds of places lower may have only a small score difference. Percentiles provide a more meaningful comparison.

It shows how a school’s SPED Support Score compares with other ranked schools in the state. A 90% percentile means the school scored higher than about 90% of ranked schools.

Some educational settings serve specialized populations and are not directly comparable to traditional public schools. These include virtual schools, ECSE centers, transition programs, residential treatment schools, hospital programs, homebound programs, juvenile justice programs, and alternative education programs.

Yes. Available data for non-ranked schools are still displayed on LearningDifferences.Info®. Non-ranked means the school is not included in statewide scoring, not that the school is low quality.

A school can be a rankable campus type — Traditional Public School, Charter School, Magnet School, Traditional K-12 School, or Specialized Special Education Campus — and still not receive a SPED Support Score if it does not meet the Moderate Core Rule, our minimum data requirement. This rule requires at least four of the six component sub-scores to be available, and Academic Growth, Inclusion & Placement, and Staffing Support must always be among them. This is different from being excluded due to campus type: it simply means the state has not reported enough of the underlying data for that school. These schools still display all available public data on LearningDifferences.Info®, just without an overall score or percentile.

Students receiving special education services have diverse learning profiles and different starting points. The methodology balances academic performance with growth, inclusion, staffing, discipline, and graduation outcomes.

Academic performance is only one component. A school may have strong test scores but weaker inclusion, staffing, discipline, growth, or graduation outcomes for students receiving special education services.

Growth helps show whether students are making progress from where they started. For many students with disabilities, progress over time may be more meaningful than proficiency alone.

Inclusion reflects access to neurotypical peers, general education classrooms, and the Least Restrictive Environment when appropriate. It is an important part of special education quality.

No. Some students appropriately require more intensive or specialized settings. That is why LearningDifferences.Info® also applies a Complex Needs Adjustment and displays the underlying data for parents to review.

The Complex Needs Adjustment helps account for schools serving larger populations of students with significant support needs, using alternate assessment participation and Intellectual Disability percentages.

Autism spans a broad range of support needs. Some autistic students require minimal accommodations, while others require intensive supports. Autism prevalence alone is not a reliable measure of student complexity.

No. The same scoring framework is applied to all ranked schools.

Yes. Specialized special education campuses serving K-12 students are ranked when they are comparable enough for statewide scoring and have sufficient data.

Virtual schools provide a fundamentally different educational experience and generally do not provide the same in-person instructional, social, behavioral, therapeutic, and inclusion opportunities as physical campuses. Their data remain visible where available.

These programs serve highly specialized populations in settings that are not comparable to traditional campuses. Their data remain visible, but they are excluded from statewide scoring.

Not necessarily. The best school depends on the child’s disability, strengths, needs, IEP goals, services required, family preferences, and school fit.

Yes. Parents can review the sub-scores to understand why a school scored higher or lower.

Teacher counts reflect Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) staffing, not headcounts, based on how the Texas Education Agency reports staffing data. A teacher who splits time across two campuses, or works part-time, is counted as a fraction (for example, 0.5) at each campus rather than as one whole person. This means figures like Total Count of Teachers and Count of Special Education Teachers reflect actual allocated instructional time, and measures built from them — including the Staffing Support sub-score and student-to-teacher ratios — are based on real staffing capacity rather than a simple headcount.

Scores are updated when new state assessment, staffing, enrollment, discipline, graduation, and special education data become available.

Parents should review the detailed data, visit schools when possible, ask about services and staffing, speak with other families, and discuss the child’s needs through the IEP or ARD process.