In 2014, Indiana's special education students graduated at 74.9% — nearly 20 percentage points behind their general education peers. It was the widest equity gap in the state's graduation data, larger than the racial gaps, larger than the poverty gap, persistent year after year.

By 2025, that gap had collapsed to 6.7 percentage points.

Special education students gained 13.2 percentage points over the period, reaching an 88.1% graduation rate. No other subgroup came close to that level of improvement. English learners gained 10.6 points. Black students gained 7.4. White students gained 1.7.

The largest gain belongs to the group that needed it most

The 13.2 percentage point gain for special education students is not just the largest in Indiana — it is the kind of improvement that education researchers rarely see in statewide data for this population. Special education graduation rates tend to be stubborn. Students with disabilities face compounding barriers: modified curricula, assessment accommodations, transition planning gaps, and a historical tendency for schools to counsel students toward certificates of completion rather than diplomas.

Indiana's special education rate was stuck in the low 70s from 2014 through 2019. It barely moved. Then something shifted: the rate jumped to 77.9% in 2020, dipped slightly in 2021, and then began climbing steeply — 76.4% in 2022, 83.2% in 2023, 85.3% in 2024, 88.1% in 2025.

The acceleration after 2020 is notable. It coincides with pandemic-era flexibility around graduation requirements and an expansion of Indiana's waiver diploma pathways. Whether the improvement reflects genuine academic gains, broader access to alternative completion pathways, or both is a question the data raises but cannot answer on its own.

The gap that shrank the fastest

The general education-special education gap held at roughly 19-20 percentage points for six straight years, from 2014 through 2019. Then it dropped to 13.8 points in 2020, rose slightly in 2021, and resumed its decline: 11.7 in 2022, 9.0 in 2023, 8.3 in 2024, 6.7 in 2025.

General education students also improved — from 94.1% to 94.7% — but the gap closed almost entirely because special education students gained so much ground. The convergence is driven from the bottom up.

At the corporation level, the results vary enormously. Twelve school corporations with special education cohorts of 20 or more graduated 100% of their special education students in 2025, including Bartholomew Con School Corp (83 students), Seymour Community Schools (58), Sunman-Dearborn (55), and School City of East Chicago (50).

At the other end, Gary Community School Corp graduated just 41.3% of its special education cohort. Anderson Community sat at 61.5%. Monroe County Community at 74.4%.

The waiver question

Indiana's statewide graduation rate includes waiver diplomas — students who did not meet all postsecondary readiness requirements but earned a diploma through an alternative pathway. The gap between Indiana's state rate (which includes waivers) and its federal rate (which excludes them) has been widening, reaching 1.9 percentage points in 2025.

The federal rate is not available by subgroup in the public data, so it is impossible to measure how much of the special education improvement specifically is driven by waiver pathways. But the timing — the steepest gains occurring after pandemic-era flexibility measures and diploma waiver expansions — suggests that policy changes around completion requirements played a role alongside any academic improvement.

Even accounting for waivers, a special education graduation rate of 88.1% represents a state where the overwhelming majority of students with disabilities are completing high school, which was not the case a decade ago.

A decade ago, roughly one in four special education students did not graduate on time. Now, roughly one in eight does not. That gap, 19.2 points down to 6.7, is the single largest equity improvement in Indiana's graduation data. The next test is whether those diplomas lead somewhere.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.