In March 1996, the Region XI Education Service Center, Fort Worth (Texas), was designated to continue a project implemented in 1990 by the Texas Education Agency to study the overall effectiveness of special education programs. The 1996 project was extended in 1997. This paper reports on the first of three newly planned study components, the "Adult Outcome Component," which was designed to look at students in their last year of high school and to follow them for 4 years after graduation. Other components will focus on the secondary school experience of special education students and case studies of student records, interviews, and observations. For the adult outcome component, 832 students in special education programs from 40 school districts were identified. A comparison sample of students without disabilities remains to be selected. A 65-item questionnaire was developed to gather information from each student's comprehensive and special education records, and a followup questionnaire is to be developed to elicit student responses about their educational experiences. Over the next several years, a number of efforts will be implemented to gather information about students, and data will be analyzed on individual differences among disability categories, gender, ethnicity, and community type. Findings of previous studies indicate that students with disabilities do not fare as well as their nondisabled counterparts after graduating from high school. State and federal legislative changes that have affected special education, especially in the delivery of transition services, should have favorable impacts on the quality and effectiveness of programs for students with disabilities. (Contains eight tables and one reference.) (SLD)