9.6% of US Special Education Structurally Broken
Actually, the number is probably higher…. and we really don’t know what it is. US Special Education built around the Individualized Education Program (IEP)… and the problem is.. there is no Program for many students.
Even worse, many students, they may not even know their IEP is broken.
To understand what goes wrong, you first have to understand what an IEP is…
A Contract between your child and the US Government
In effect, and IEP is an amendment to the “educational contract” between your child and your child’s school / school district that can completely re-write the terms of the education that your child is being provided. Theoretically, you could take a signed IEP to any school or school district in a US state or territory or other US jurisdiction (say a military base) and it SHOULD be honored (your mileage may vary a lot).
Cool. Powerful.
Dangerous.
Unlike most major contracts in your life – a house sale or car lease or apartment rental agreement, there is no standard “boilerplate” in place to keep things on track. There is nothing “there” to keep things from going off the rails except the vigilance of parents and the expertise and goodwill of the school staff in negotiating contracts (not really a part of educator’s education)…
In our case, things broke with a small “check the box” in my son’s midyear second grade IEP.
The Critical Checkbox and The Curriculum Conundrum
We’ve been having a “polite war” with our current school district for years now and it has no end in sight (I’m going to try something this fall to break the deadlock… I’ll let you know how it goes).
At the bottom of the page marked (ironically perhaps) “Offer of FAPE” of the standard California SELPA IEP form is an innocuous 3 position checkbox labeled “Promotion Criteria: District, IEP, or Other”.
No comment or explanation is made.
No state or federal data is collected.
Yet this is perhaps the most important 🗹 in the entire document.
Because, it basically says, your child’s academic progress through school is no longer driven by the school’s curriculum, but purely by your IEP (or some “Other” that I’ve never seen).
On one hand, this makes sense… standard school district auto-generated report cards are Grade Cohort phased paths through the school and state’s curriculum and, if your child is not on the schedule, the school district’s software has problems….
E.g. If you are in 4th grade chronologically, but doing 2nd grade math, the standard school report card software does work (this is potentially true for academically advanced students as well but usually this is addressed by adding additional classes called “honors” or “advanced placement”).
*** FUN ASSERTION – I believe this is actually a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) because it is making academic reporting inaccessible for disabled students, not principally an IDEA violation, but I’ll leave that to the lawyers….if you want to work on this – call me :) ***
When this checkbox isn’t checked or present, then your child is moving through school more-or-less on schedule with their age/grade cohort…
BUT, once checked, your child’s education is a total “blank slate” – defined entirely by what is included in their IEP and reported solely against the explicitly documented IEP criteria.
… anyone who has had or read an IEP should be cringing right about now.
On a good day, parents have to become experts in their state’s curriculum and how it has been adapted for their child.
On any other day….
A personal example:
…. we have an EXCELLENT IEP team and a good general education teacher. One of the things my wife and I do is to request copies of all of the worksheets and forms and assignments that my son’s general education peers receive (I strongly recommend this!) even if he isn’t doing them. In the math work, his peers were doing decimals… no big deal, except that we had not EXPLICITLY included decimals in our IEP (only fractions)… so we would up amending the IEP to add in decimals. Not a huge deal, but if we hadn’t asked, it wouldn’t have happened.
There is no “P” in IEP
Standard IEPs “work” for disabled students who are within a year of their general education peers academically. This is why school IEP teams focus on “deficits”… they are tweaking the system to give a student who needs a bit of help the help they need.
Leveling(ish) the Playing Field
But, once a student is outside of that “one year” zone, the tools are inadequate.
While, theoretically, the IEP agreement is “an amendment to the general education contract”… it is in practice closer to a “Work Order”.
If you’ve ever hired a contractor to work on your house (or car)… the contract describes the overall work that they will do… there is rarely (ever?) any explicit reference to building codes, safety standards, or other criteria.
All of those things are implicit and part of the “standard professional expectations” for the job.
But, what if you are changing those building codes?
That is where we are when your child’s IEP has to address needs outside the bounds of their grade/age cohort.
…and the existing documents (at least that I’ve seen) totally fail to handle this.
… and the systems and tools totally fail to handle this.
… and the teachers and staff don’t have a tool to help them handle this.
Delivering 60 minutes every hour
Once upon a time, I was a government contractor. We had either a “Cost Plus” (typically) or “Time and Materials” contract tied to task orders.
I kind of hated the structure.
We “did stuff” pointed in the right direction-ish, but we were not paid to solve problems (directly), we were paid to deliver hours.
… in fact, I got in trouble for suggesting doing things more efficiently..
… and I was right to get in trouble for that…
… because we weren’t paid or rewarded for outcomes, but hours.
That 🗹 breaks the link between the IEP and educational outcomes.
And it becomes up to the parents to try to rebuild that connection through IEP goals…
… most of which are mainly a mechanism to justify service hours.
Just how big is this problem and Who is affected?
I’m not quite sure who or how many students are affected by this… and I haven’t seen every state’s IEP template to see if someone is doing this better.
The closest two metrics that are available arethe selection of the “Alternative Assessment” (instead of state standard assessments)…. and non-participation in state assessments.
At least in California, there is a hard cap on the number of students who use the Alternative Assessment at 1% of the total state student population (or at most around 10% of students with IEPs)… so far so good…
… this is done over the whole student population, and statewide assessments are done in grades 3,4,5,6.7.8, and 11.
According to the latest IDEA report (from June 2025) – pages 62ff,
For Math, the non-participation and Alternative Assessment percentages are:
Grade 3 – 4.6% 7.4%
Grade 4 – 4.7% 7.5%
Grade 5 – 5.0% 7.4%
Grade 6 – 6.1% 7.8%
Grade 7 – 7.2% 7.9%
Grade 8 – 8.1% 8.0%
High School- 13.2% 8.0%
For reading, the non-participation and Alternative Assessment percentages are:
Grade 3 – 4.5% 7.4%
Grade 4 – 4.6% 7.5%
Grade 5 – 4.7% 7.8%
Grade 6 – 5.8% 7.9%
Grade 7 – 6.8% 8.0%
Grade 8 – 7.8% 7.9%
High School- 15.7% 8.0%
So, by the end of our public education system, at least 8 percent of students with IEPs are no longer being “assessed” using state standard tests…
The one other number that indicates where things are at is high school graduation.
For the last year for which we have data (the 2021-22 school year – page 176ff of the 2025 IDEA report) …
Just 73.6% of disabled students graduated from high school and 52.0% graduated with a regular diploma (as opposed to a certificate)…. a 11.6% gap.
Working it
There is no easy solution to this problem that I am aware of (I’m not sure if many people even think that this IS a problem).
As a parent, you can try to load more curriculum standards into your child’s IEP or find some other way to track delivery of educational content over time (a curriculum is not just a list educational content, it is a schedule of that content delivered over time and a way to report on successful learning).
Institutions need to start looking at this. I now things are particularly hard for educational programs in general in the US and even more so for our disabled learners, but waiting until “things get better” isn’t likely to be the answer. We are coming up on the 50th anniversary of the passage of IDEA… our kids can’t wait for another 50 years.
