A Retrospective Analysis: The Evolving Mission of Exceptional Children

As we began our tenure as editors of Exceptional Children (EC) in 2023, we committed to a set of interconnected goals, aligned with the Council for Exceptional Children's (CEC's) mission, to realize our vision for the journal. These goals included: (a) situating special education as a civil rights issue; (b) cultivating increased diversity and inclusiveness in the publication process; (c) expanding theoretical and methodological diversity; and (d) attending to the intersections of students’ identities (Thorius et al., 2023a). Early on, we highlighted four interrelated critical issues impacting special education, as identified in the consensus study report The Future of Education Research at IES: Advancing an Equity-Oriented Science (Gamoran & Dibner, 2022). In our second editorial introduction, we set out to leverage EC to address these identified issues, which are: (a) essentialized and deficit-based understandings of culture, learning, and disability; (b) shortages of educators prepared to effectively teach students with disabilities in general and special education settings; (c) relational and structural factors shaping effective education of students with disabilities; and (d) incomplete conceptualizations and application of evidence-based practices (Thorius et al., 2023b).