By Christina A. Samuels

After years of steady decline, the nationwide count of school-age students covered under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act has shown an upswing since the 2011-12 school year based on the most recently available federal data, driven by rapid growth in such disability categories as autism.

The count of students ages 6-21 with disabilities fell to a low of 5.67 million in fall 2011, but had risen to 5.83 million by fall 2014, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

Sarah C. Bauer, Jessica Winegar, Sandra Waxman

Behaviors that are considered red flags in the U.S. and Western Europe are considered normal, even desirable, in other parts of the world

How do we determine who has autism, and is this the same around the world?

BY ANN GRISWOLD  /  1 APRIL 2016

Roughly 7 percent of children with autism eventually lose their diagnosis, swapping social problems and language difficulties for more typical skills and behaviors. But it is unclear whether this transition is associated with a return to typical brain function or reflects a compensatory process.

Terms like “low-functioning” are short on nuance and long on stigma.

It’s clear that Alex and John each function well in certain areas of life and struggle in others; each has an idiosyncratic patchwork of skills and challenges. Their stories illustrate a problem that has plagued autism research for decades: What, exactly, do the terms high- and low-functioning mean and to whom do they apply?

Left to languish in psychiatric institutions or drugged for disorders they never had, many older adults with autism were neglected or forgotten for decades. Efforts to help them are finally underway.

Teams of reporters are cornering candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire, and pressing them to pay attention to issues that are often ignored.

Hot on the heels of Silberman's Neurotribes book, the recent publication of In a different key: the story of autism by journalists John Donvan and Caren Zucker has book reviews in high profile journals. For example, see

Revelations in a new book cast Dr. Asperger in a new and unflattering light

By John Elder Robison

What’s the rest of the story of Asperger and autism?

Opinion by Emily Willingham

It’s a pleasure to have the abundance of choices available this year in selecting the best online places to read news and views about autism online. Some sites stand out as reliably respectful of autistic people and disability in general, and this year offered up some truly remarkable storytelling about the past, present, and future of autistic people.

I started writing online about autism more than 10 years ago. Even as the Internet and social media were emerging as a gathering place, accommodation and access point to others that autistic people had never had before, it also was a place where one could stumble at every turn onto the worst of the worst: People who brutalized children with false treatments falsely promised, news stories that infantilized, belittled and dehumanized autistic people and an incessant drumbeat of fear and paranoia about that monster, Autism.