[Abstract]
Adjudications under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) continue to be an active area of education litigation at both the hearing officer (HO) and court levels. One of the many questions for IDEA litigants, in light of the considerable costs and time of this “ponderous” process, is whether to appeal an adverse HO decision.
The previous empirical analyses suggested that to the extent that the basis is the likelihood of decisional change, the answer seemed to be no. However, these analyses did not extend to wider and more recent case samples after 2016. The purpose of this brief analysis is to examine the extent of decisional change between HO and final court decisions in a random sample of both published and unpublished court decisions for the 4.5-year period since the end of 2016.