About the Study
The National Study of Special Education Spending (NSSES) aims to provide comprehensive insights into the financial resources allocated to special education services across the United States. There is a critical need for accurate and up-to-date data on special education spending: the most recent national estimates are now more than 20 years old.
By gathering data from a diverse national sample of districts and schools, this study will shed light on the expenditures involved in educating students with disabilities and the costs associated with operating special education programs. Study findings will equip policymakers to make data-driven decisions about special education funding, which supports more than seven million students.
Under subcontract with the American Institutes for Research, and in collaboration with NORC at the University of Chicago, PowerSchool Allovue is leading financial data collection for this study. The PEER Center partners with PowerSchool Allovue on all finance-related research.
For Participating Districts
This page will serve as your resource hub through the financial data collection process.
Please follow the steps in the Action Items section.
You will receive direct communications from our Odoo case management system. The PEER Center team is also available to discuss and support your team through file preparation.
Allovue, a PowerSchool company, will collect 2024-2025 financial data from district administrative files during the 2025-26 school year. These data will come from districts’ chart of accounts, general ledger, and transaction journal files. Please refer to the "Details of Requested Data" section for further details.
Information collected for this study comes under the confidentiality and data protection requirements of the Institute of Education Sciences (The Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, Title I, Part E, Section 183). ED and its data collection partners follow strict procedures for data storage and the protection of participants’ confidentiality. All data will be collected through secure, online systems, including secure file transfer protocols when necessary. Individual responses to survey questions will not be shared with anyone outside the study team. All the information may be used only for statistical purposes and may not be disclosed, or used, in identifiable form for any other purpose except as required by law (20 U.S.C. §9573 and 6 U.S.C. §151).
Federal research studies require approval from the Office and Management and Budget (OMB). The study’s data collection activities, including collection of special education financial data, have been approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The OMB control numbers are 1850-0952 v.10 and v.11 and the approval expiration date is November 30, 2026.
Action Items
Step 1
Review the details of the data requested for this study by clicking the "Review Details" button. Note: this scope reflects all expenditures, including non-special education expenditures.
Step 2
If you utilize an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system as identified in Step 1 documentation, sign in to the Odoo portal and go to the Documents folder to access and download templates of SQL queries.
Sign in
These templates will help your team pull the requested data from your ERP.
To access any of the queries, you must be in a district currently participating in the study and have a district email address.
Step 3
Head to the secure data repository upload site to submit your financial data. Make sure to save the four (4) requested data files as a .csv or .txt file (pipe-delimited, if possible), following the formatting and naming conventions specified in Step 1's "Review Details" documentation.
To access the site, you must be in a district currently participating in the study and have a district email address.
Study Partners
American Institutes for Research
Tammy Kolbe
Principal Investigator
NORC, at the University of Chicago
Cynthia Simko
Data Collection Project Director