What every parent needs to know about Special Education

After 8 years in the crazy world of disability and special education, there are things that I would have wanted to know and things that I think every parent (whether they have a child in special education or not) should know:

1. Special Education Students are in (almost) every class (almost) all of the time. Most students in special education spend most or all of their days in general classrooms with their typical peers. Nationally, 67.1 percent are in general education classes 80% or more of the school day, 15.7% spend 41% to 79% of their time in general education classes, and only 12.5% of all disabled leaner students spend less than 40% of their time in general education classes (from the 46^th Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act – published in 2025, data from Fall 2022). These numbers vary WIDELY by state and school district – California actually has the most segregated education program with 18.4% of students spending less than 40% of their time in general education classes while Colorado has only 4.6% in that educational setting).
2. 10% of all people between age 6 and 21 in the United States have an individualized education program (IEP) – are in special education (same report).
3. Special education is a canary in your school district coal mine: if there is a weakness in your school program at all, it’s probably going to be immediately and highly visible in special education.
4. The law that defined special education in the United States, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, is 50 years old. It actually protects every child, and that includes those without disabilities, to make sure that if they need services and support they can access services and support.
5. A lot of us are used to the public school education system just working. You may be surprised, but don’t be: special education doesn’t just work. It’s a completely different game for parents.
6. When your school district and school report on their academic outcomes in your state or school or school district for the students with disabilities, you may not be seeing the students with the most significant disabilities reported on at all (about 1% of all students or 10% of students with disabilities use alternative assessments and tend to opt out of educational assessments at a higher rate).
7. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is supposed to protect every student’s access to special education. One of the important parts of this is something called Child Find, where the obligation is on the school and school districts to help identify students with disabilities. This is unfortunately the exception rather than the rule.
8. IDEA gives every parent — or rather every child — the right to an assessment to see if they need special education services. This protects students whether they have a disability or not. Unfortunately, you may have to push for those rights.
9. There are two major formal programs for students with disabilities in public schools. They are known by the laws that govern them. As mentioned previously, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) which is implemented through an Individualized Education Program (IEP). An IEP allows the school education structure to be completely changed to meet a specific student’s needs – scary and powerful. The other disability program is defined by Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and it’s called a 504 plan, which is there to ensure accessibility and non-discrimination for disabled students — basically to make sure that students can access their education just like their general peers.
10. Warning: IDEA and Section 504 are founded on a general model of procedural safeguards, which means that it’s up to you to make sure you’re protected – the procedures are safeguarded, not the education of your child.
11. The most important procedural safeguard is to make sure that something happens, which means communicating in writing by default (see other articles). The burden is on you to protect your child’s right to access their education. Unfortunately, sometimes the schools take the opposite perspective because there’s a structural conflict of interest for the school. They are obligated to provide disability education services or special education, but they are also responsible for paying for it, and they don’t get enough of money to do so.
12. Federal payments to support special education — disabled learner education — were supposed to be 40% of the total costs when the law was passed in 1975. It has never been fully funded. It started out around 25% of funding and has now drifted down to less than 12% (bills to fully fund IDEA have never passed).
13. Funding for students for special education by the federal government is about $1578 per student per year as of 2020. A typical school year is 180 days, so that puts the total dollars per day for special education for a student at something on the order of $8.77 per day (excellent report from Bellwether).
14. By the way, state funding for special education varies from just over $5314 per student per year — that’s total federal and state — in Mississippi, to $24,562 per student per year in Connecticut. By the way, California sits at $15,273 per disabled student per year. This is in addition to general education funding per student which can also vary wildly.
15. Some schools will push students away from an IEP because of costs and because of various demographic and management concerns. For example, here in California we have a metric that the state is concerned about if there are too many students with IEPs, but no one is concerned if the number is low, which in my mind probably means the school is missing students who need services. There are also concerns where students have been misdirected into special education because of shortfalls in other funding or flat-out discrimination, which can cause problems for students in those groups who have those needs. This is called disproportionality, and there is a general concern and problem with over-identification of African American students with emotional disturbance and, in some school districts, a general problem with over-identification of minorities for special education to make up for lack of funding in the school district at all.
16. Children are eligible for school services starting at age 3 under IDEA. Some states divide up how they handle this — dividing up services for younger students, pre–school students, and then the standard years of the public school system. And then some students under IDEA are eligible for education services until they turn 22. Double-check the details for your state.
17. In addition to the right to an assessment, you also have a right to decline the services offered.
18. Private schools have no obligation to support students with disabilities. They are free to discriminate and not serve disabled students at all. In general, there are very few charter school or private school options for students with more substantial disabilities.