US Special Education at Risk?

Is US Special Education in trouble? Absolutely. Is this news? Not really – unfortunately. Let’s start with the facts today:

Close to thirty (30) states have not been in basic Compliance with the Individual’s Disabilities with Education Act (IDEA) even ONCE in the past 10 years and IDEA is turning 50 this year. This is a low bar – like passing your written exam for driving – not about doing a good job for your disabled students.
IDEA was never fully funded and funding has dwindled from around 20% in 2000 to 12 – 14% today. This gives the federal government very little meaningful voice in special education at the state and local levels.
State funding varies dramatically. From Mississippi at $5265 per special education student per year to Connecticut at $24,443 each student (fiscal year 2020 – nice analysis by Bellwether – I’m having trouble finding the source data – the National Center for Education Statistics is …. tricky).
The national and state-level statistics for disabled people in the US aren’t good. The unemployment gap hovers around 37%. poverty rates are high… choose your metric… at https://disabilitystatistics.org/ … it will not fill you with confidence in the past, present, or future – or perhaps it will inspire you to action).

(One could argue that, taken together, IDEA has had close to 50 years of what Project 2025 is proposing for other federal programs and it is not pretty – it is just pretty ineffective).

This is where we are today without Project 2025, the abolition of the Department of Education, or Musk “attention”.

What is coming?

Who knows?

Some thoughts…

Switching to block grants… the federal contribution numbers are already small. States that care about special education will continue to care, those that don’t now, aren’t going to start doing better. We (meaning us) have got to start having a much more public dialog about our investment in our disabled youth (and adults) at the state level. No one else is taking up the cause. The change is likely to be more damaging in states that are “net receivers” of federal dollars and those that don’t focus on good programs for students with disabilities already. As always, those most in need will be hurt the most. Shame on us all.

Abolishing the Department of Education.. meh… President Carter with the support of Congress elevated Education out of the then Department of Health, Education and Welfare to increase national focus and visibility on Education. I think we can safely say that at a national level, this has been a failure. It is hard to name a Secretary of Education (at least in a good way)… the job has been a political reward for allies and donors. The little US national leadership we have had on Education has come from Presidents…such as No Child Left Behind from President Bush. Assuming that data collection and research (very underpublicized) continues… little will change for disabled kids in school at least formally.-

And…

Targeting Special Education for Attack – is just depressing. It is based on cruelty, ignorance, and cruelty. It is on all of us to explain the importance of these programs, and how they are already vastly underfunded at the federal, state, and local levels in most jurisdictions. The way the systems are administered adds additional burdens to our actual disabilities. This is true for other disability-related programs as well. The only way to change this is to work together, engage with media, and be the social, cultural, and political force that the “Forgotten Fifth” can be… but that is and has always been up to us.

BOTTOM LINE: We shouldn’t be fighting to preserve the status quo.