Disappearing the Disabled

We are in the middle of a conscious effort to make disabled people disappear.

• Of the of hundreds of thousands of US federal workers just 4000 or so were laid off in this second week of the US government shutdown in October 2025. Of those 4000, the understaffed, underfunded Special Education Office was a priority target and gutted.
• IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act will turn 50 next month and I doubt any of the coverage will mention that 30 states are not in full compliance with the law and the bulk of them never have been (including my home state of California).
• Here in California, the State Superintendent of Schools, Tony Thurmond proudly remarked on school achievement across “all student groups”... while failing to mention the lack of progress for Students with Disabilities or English Learners or actually failing to mention them at all.
• In my school district, the district has stopped reporting detailed staff turnover information. Hiding their longstanding problem with higher turnover in special education (special education teachers used to be listed as “Education Specialists” in staff reports).
• And I just found out that our much celebrated “Every Student Reads Initiative” doesn’t actually include our disabled, Extensive Support Needs students in their data at all.
• At our school board meeting on 14 October 2025, the district will celebrate the vocational training for disabled students at the VA yet provide no data on whether any of those students actually will be employed by the VA … or anywhere else.
• And, of course, the school district has other vocational programs both on campus and off and provides no reporting on employment outcomes for them either… or whether the school district itself employs any disabled workers.

These are all conscious intentional choices. We are choosing to make disabled people disappear from our “report cards” where we judge our success and at the same time we are adding administrative burdens and cutting budgets to support them.

Outrage on social media just feeds the algorithms and pad the pocketbooks of the greedy billionaires and corporations who are utterly indifferent or worse to the lives of disabled people they are obliterating.

The choice as to what to next is up to each of us. but it is pretty clear where things are going if we do nothing.