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This study examined how U.S. political leaders publicly framed disability during calendar year 2025, using a systematic discourse analysis of public statements and federal legislation. It also examined how this discourse was reflected in federal education policy, including statements by the Secretary of Education and education-related bills.

The study analyzed 121 public statements about people with disabilities made by White House and Cabinet officials, and 32 federal bills introduced in 2025 that could affect the rights, services, or educational opportunities of individuals with disabilities. Statements were identified through a two-stage process that combined a custom Python-based web-scraping tool, which extracted verbatim, attributed quotations from news articles, press releases, interview transcripts, official speeches, and social media posts using the OpenAI GPT-4 API, with manual verification searches conducted in ChatGPT Plus and Perplexity AI Pro. Federal bills were identified through Congress.gov. All statements were reviewed by the authors to confirm accuracy, attribution, and date. Each statement and bill was independently scored by two human coders and by GPT-4 using an author-developed four-point rubric grounded in the social and human rights models of disability, ranging from 1 (dehumanizing) to 4 (affirming).

The data contain one record per statement, including the speaker's name and title, date, verbatim quotation, source, context, an analysis of the framing, a score from 1 (dehumanizing) to 4 (affirming), and the rationale for the score. The bills data are available on the project website and are not included in this deposit.

The study was approved by the university Institutional Review Board (March 2025) and was preregistered on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/hbfe5/).

The Language Development of Non-verbal Children Age 3 Years through 7 Years in the Kansas Metro Area is one of the three projects in the Communication of People with MR, 2006 to 2012 Series, which focuses on identifying participant variables that predict success in increasing communication skills of individual with intellectual disabilities. Data for Dataset 1 of this study were collected to illustrate how acquisition of symbolic communication using Voice Output Communication Aid (VOCA) affects the development of successful communication exchanges. For the data collection of Dataset 1, children were recruited by contacting school districts in and near the Kansas City metropolitan area, specifically, in Topeka, Kansas, and Wichita, Kansas. Teachers and speech-language pathologists were asked to nominate any children meeting specific criteria. The 93 children who were enrolled were administered the Mullen Scales of Early Learning and the Preschool Language Scale. A structured play assessment was also administered.

Subsequently, data for Dataset 2 was collected to analyze and compare 19 Spanish-speaking children to the original sample. Both data files contain the results of Complexity of Communication Scale, a measure developed by the Communication of People with MR project.

This mixed method, in-depth case study in Colorado examines the degree to which key players in the child welfare, early intervention/preschool special education (EI/Preschool SPED) and early care and education (ECE) systems (e.g. Head Start, preschool, child care centers, family child care homes) collaborate to meet the developmental needs of children ages 0-5 who are involved in the child welfare system. An ecological perspective serves as the conceptual framework to support the goals of the project and to guide the development of this study (Bronfenbrenner, 1979).

This research includes a quantitative analysis of data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Wellbeing (NSCAW, a nationally representative sample of children involved in the child welfare system). Additional quantitative research was conducted through two surveys (optional paper or on-line survey) in Colorado between 2005-2006: the Foster Parent Survey, a statewide survey of foster parents drawn from public and private agency lists of licensed families (n=266), and the Child Welfare Caseworker Survey, a statewide survey of child welfare caseworkers and caseworker supervisors drawn from public and private agency lists (n=339).

The qualitative component of this research was conducted through field study interviews, with professionals (Child Welfare, Early Intervention, and Early Care and Education) and foster and biological parents of children under 5 in the child welfare system. These interviews were conducted in Adams, Alamosa, Arapahoe, Conejos, and El Paso counties (n=134).