These moves raise significant concerns that the federal government won’t be able to meet its legal obligations to students with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ().

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has numerous times that federal special education funding will continue flowing, no matter where the office and programs land within the government. But what she has not acknowledged — and what is troubling — is how moving the program to an agency like HHS inevitably shifts the focus of special ed from education to health care, thus pathologizing disabled students.

This is especially true considering HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made about children with autism, calling them tragic and doubting their ability to lead full and meaningful lives. His statements indicate a belief that a medical diagnosis absolutely leads to tragic outcomes — which is simply untrue. 

Framing students with disabilities solely in medical terms hinders their potential for growth by narrowly confining them to a diagnosis and perceived limitations — resulting in low expectations in school. As recently as the , this allowed most states to exclude disabled students from academic assessments. Many schools encouraged their parents to keep their children at home on testing days.

Since then, the country has steadily moved away from low expectations for students with disabilities. Under the Biden administration, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services issued specifically focused on setting a high bar for these children. The guidance included a focus on inclusive education practices to ensure students with disabilities have access to high-quality education with the opportunity to meet challenging goals. It also offered details about how states and districts could leverage federal funding to achieve those ends. 

Inclusive education practices are flexible and creative. Using such an approach, a team determining appropriate classroom settings during an Individualized Education Program meeting might decide that instead of placing a student in need of behavioral support in a segregated class of peers with disabilities, the student could be put in a general-education classroom, assisted by a paraprofessional or special education teacher. operates this way. Teachers or paraprofessionals accompany students with disabilities to general-education classes, providing behavioral and academic support in real time, innovatively and effectively meeting a child’s unique education needs. Instead of limiting children with disabilities, guidance and practices like these help students look to an expansive future. 

But between moving special education to HHS and the longer-term to convert IDEA grants into formula block grants, it will fall to the states to ensure that their special education laws and regulations are robust. IDEA includes minimum requirements for supporting disabled students. States can and should do more, including developing their own laws and guidance on issues like inclusion, challenging academic standards, teacher and service provider support and training, and requirements to provide services in an equitable manner to all students.

Families and advocates can work to hold states and districts accountable by, for example, pushing for state-level disaggregated reporting on timely provision of services, restrictive class and school placements, and disproportionate disciplinary practices. Additionally, states must work toward timely resolutions of and for any violations of disabled students’ civil rights. 

Leaving schools without timely access to federal funding to provide legally mandated services means students will unnecessarily struggle, and their lack of progress will be used as an indication of the failures of the current program. There have already been that shifts of education programs to other federal agencies have tied up resources in even more layers of bureaucracy. 

Shifting responsibility for specific IDEA and special education programs to HHS means that when states come looking for guidance, the staff with deep understanding of the interplay among civil rights, disability and education will no longer be available to help them. What guidance they do receive could be limited and unsupportive of students’ true intellectual, cognitive or physical capabilities.

Burying special education deep in the can only make things more difficult for children with disabilities. Finding essential services that families are desperate to reach will be like looking for a needle in a haystack. 

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of IDEA. What should be a time for celebrating milestones in increasing inclusivity and accessibility in America’s public schools has instead been fraught with fear and fights to retain the unique supports provided to disabled children through the Department of Education. It doesn’t have to be this way, and it shouldn’t. 

Harold Hinds, is a civil rights attorney and Ph.D. student at the New School’s School for Public Engagement, also contributed to this essay.

It was 1969. Two men from the Pennsylvania Association of Retarded Children made an appointment to meet with the young lawyer with a reputation for taking pie-in-the-sky cases more experienced attorneys wouldn’t touch. Gilhool was five years out of Yale Law School, practicing out of an office that was no wider than his desk — barely large enough to receive the visitors. 

Wedged in sideways, the men handed him a report they had commissioned on conditions at the Pennhurst State School and Hospital, the state’s notoriously overcrowded asylum for the mentally retarded. They were hoping to use the courts to better the lives of the people confined there. (In the interest of historical accuracy, in portions of this article The 74 uses terminology now recognized as offensive.)

Gilhool had never heard of the organization, now known as The Arc of Pennsylvania, but he knew more than most people about Pennhurst. At the time, children could be deemed retarded for a host of reasons: for having an intellectual disability, but also for seizure disorder, cerebral palsy, birth defects, bad behavior, even not speaking fluent English. 

Public school was often the first stop on a short path to institutionalization. Children would enroll, quickly be deemed “ineducable” and consigned to places like Pennhurst, where forced labor, neglect and violence often cut their lives short. 

Gilhool’s brother Bob had been committed to the asylum, the attorney told his stunned guests.  

By the meeting’s end, Gilhool had taken the case — never mind that the three were still uncertain exactly what the case would be. The lawyer asked for a little time to think. Nine months later, he reappeared, grand design in hand. 

Eventually, they should ask the courts to close the facility. But the first task, Gilhool told his new clients, was to establish disabled children’s right to an education. 

Prohibiting schools from using asylums as dumping grounds was the initial step toward shutting down the pipeline of new residents and triggering the creation of alternatives — including the classroom instruction that would help children fulfill their potential. 

Providential, indeed. 

The cultural and political waters had been warmed up by a decade of Kennedy family activism. Rosemary Kennedy, sister to John F., Robert F. Sr. and Ted, had been born with a developmental delay, lobotomized as a young woman to a tragic result and institutionalized. JFK had to push for a new era for people with intellectual disabilities. 

Indeed, upon touring New York’s notorious Willowbrook asylum in 1965, RFK Sr. . “We have a situation that borders on a snake pit,” he said. “The children live in filth …  many of our fellow citizens are suffering tremendously because of lack of attention, lack of imagination, lack of adequate manpower. There is very little future for these children who are in these institutions.”   

The ARC, the Council for Exceptional Children and other organizations pushing for more humane conditions knew it was time — and that the moment called for someone with an audacious vision.  

“They knew they needed a lawyer who was prepared to imagine with them, and dream,” Gilhool, who died in 2020, recalled in a series of interviews that are preserved as an oral history at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. “And act on those dreams with them to kick over the traces and to restructure the world which had so thoroughly confined them.” 

The 1971 case Gilhool filed and won, PARC vs. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was swiftly copied by disability advocates in dozens of states. The settlement — which anticipated the sundry ways in which children like Bob Gilhool were excluded from school — became the template for one of the strongest of the era’s civil rights laws, enacted by Congress in 1975.    

Fifty years after passage of what is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it’s hard to overstate the law’s impact. Originally titled the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, but better known as Public Law 94-142, it said no child could be declared ineducable. Advocates celebrated the end of the school-to-asylum pipeline.��

Today, however, people with disabilities see flashing warning lights. In the sweeping proposals advanced by President Donald Trump, they see the start of a new era of institutionalization. And in the dehumanizing descriptions of disabled children made by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who grew up visiting his aunt at her asylum — they hear echoes of past rhetorical justifications. The same groups that tapped Gilhool half a century ago today are suing to protect the law.

Pennhurst was not built to care for people who could not live independently. Like most asylums, the motive for its construction was crystal clear: Eugenics.

The era’s dominant belief was that disability, poverty and race were matters of poor breeding. In the parlance of the time, “normal” children needed protection from exposure to disordered ones. “Idiotic, imbecile or feeble-minded persons” should be , the Pennsylvania legislature proclaimed. State after state mandated confinement, and many went so far as to order the sterilization of anyone deemed defective. 

Conditions at Pennhurst were wretched.

“Large numbers of retarded persons have been herded together to live as animals in a barn, complete with stench,” said the report that ARC leaders gave to Gilhool. “Many are forced into slave labor conditions; deprived of privacy, affection, morality; suffering the indignities of nakedness, beatings, sexual assaults and exposure. Some are doped out of reality with chemical restraints while others are physically deformed by the mechanical ones. Many are sitting aimlessly without motivations, incentives, hopes or programs.” 

In 1965, researcher Burton Blatt and photographer Fred Kaplan used a miniature spy camera to secretly take pictures at five unnamed asylums in four Eastern states. They self-published their photos as Christmas in Purgatory, shocking the public and policymakers.

was hardly a secret. But without services to help care for their children or classrooms where they could learn, families struggled to stand up to authorities who pushed institutionalization. Which is how Bob Gilhool ended up at Pennhurst.  

The third child born to Tom and Mary Gilhool, Bob was social and curious. As a result, he was not diagnosed as intellectually disabled until it turned out he was also slow to talk and toilet train. For a little while, he went to a special school, but only for two hours at a time, twice a week. The rest of the time, he was home.  

At the time, a child’s developmental disabilities were viewed as the parents’ deficit. “The diagnosis was very wrenching to my mother and father,” Gilhool would tell the UC Berkeley oral historian. “The learned understanding that it was, of course, the parents’ fault; that these things were genetic … and that they should be embarrassed and ashamed and feel guilty.”

Gilhool’s father was taunted and shamed at work for having a disabled child, to the point that he had what was then called a nervous breakdown. Still, the family resisted experts’ recommendations to institutionalize Bob, who was 10. A few years later, dying of pancreatic cancer, the older Tom urged his wife to consider sending her youngest away. 

“Probably, you’d have to look around and find a place for Bobby,” Gilhool recalled his father telling his mother one night. “Because surely … you will not be able to keep him at home.” 

It was 1954, and Tom Gilhool was 13. It was his job as an older brother, Gilhool later recalled believing as a child, to set aside his anger at what was happening and focus on keeping his mother’s spirits up. 

Whatever Bob understood, he did not complain. 

During the nine months when attorney Tom Gilhool was exploring ways for the ARC to take on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, he heard, over and over again, about the role schools played in funneling children to Pennhurst.

Like Mary Gilhool, sometimes parents were simply unable to provide around-the-clock care unassisted. But often, families would enroll their children in school, only to have them rejected. Commitment, social workers and other experts would argue, wasn’t just in the best interest of the retarded children; it was to protect their siblings and spare their parents experiences like that of Gilhool’s father.

A Catch-22 for Parents

In 1955, around the time Bob Gilhool was being institutionalized, Minneapolis Public Schools opened an experimental school in a former orphanage and polio hospital. on The Sheltering Arms’ first five years provides a vivid illustration of how school was frequently the first step toward confinement in an asylum. 

Today, to guard against children languishing, IDEA requires schools to assess individual students’ needs, identify strategies for meeting them and document progress, or lack thereof. But in 1960, Sheltering Arms’ administrators were free to dismiss pupils they believed were neither “educable” or “trainable” for a variety of general and subjective reasons. 

An outburst-prone 8-year-old, for instance, was dropped for being “unable to adjust” despite having gained six IQ points during his seven-week school trial period. “His family situation was also a ‘problem’ one,” evaluators wrote, so they called in county welfare officials to arrange “institutional placement.”  

Another 8-year-old was excluded for behaviors that included wanting “maternal-style closeness” with his teacher. During his trial, he learned to “play happily” with other children and formed “some meaningful social relationships” with adults. But in the evaluators’ opinion, “These gains seemed too small to justify the time and attention he was consuming in the classroom.”

Though they were often vague when it came to documenting their own efforts, the Sheltering Arms evaluators were quick to scrutinize students’ home lives in search of justifications for institutionalizing a child. 

In administrators’ opinion, parents who said they faced minimal issues at home often were in denial: “Their discrimination will also be affected by the degree of their defensiveness about the fact of the retardation,” the program report explained. “A parent unable to accept this emotionally may very well proceed, in her diary, to deny all problems and describe the child as ‘perfectly alright.’ ”

Sometimes, children were excluded because evaluators felt the break their family got while they were in class only postponed a painful, inevitable decision. “This was a situation in which we felt that school attendance was permitting the family to just barely survive the situation so that, in effect, a disservice rather than a service was being done to the whole family unit,” Sheltering Arms reported in one case. “These parents were highly realistic and competent people, and his exclusion from school led to institutional placement rather promptly.”

The report declared the overall effort a success. Children gained independence, communication and socialization skills and behaved better. Still, it recommended institutionalization as the long-term outcome for most “trainable” children, and parent education as key to achieving it. 

“We think that great harm is done by the casual provision of classroom experience for children with no effort to interpret to parents in what ways and for what reasons this experience differs from that which their normal children are having in school,” they wrote. “We see this kind of provision as a step backward.”  

Of the 54 children enrolled in the five-year experiment, 23 were subsequently confined to institutions in Minnesota, while 16 were sent home with no possibility of future education. 

PARC v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 

On Jan. 7, 1971, Gilhool filed a federal against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and 13 school districts with the backing of numerous advocacy groups, most notably the Council for Exceptional Children, the American Association on Mental Deficiency and the National Association for Retarded Citizens.

Gilhool’s goal was to get the court to outlaw the classification of any student as “ineducable.” To that end, the stories of the 13 children named as plaintiffs were representative of the array of excuses schools used to justify their exclusion.  

Citing Brown v Board, in 134 numbered paragraphs that the state’s failure to educate all children violated the U.S. Constitution’s due process and equal protection clauses: 

On Aug. 12, the court was scheduled to hear preliminary statements from seven witnesses. In the afternoon, after just four had testified, the three-judge panel hearing the case stopped the proceedings. Gilhool and his opposing counsel agreed to turn their efforts to drafting an order for the court to approve. On Oct. 7, the judges signed off on the document. 

“This landmark agreement commits the state to a program of identifying, locating, evaluating and placing of all children adjudged to be retarded,” Gov. Milton J. Shapp said at a news conference the next day. “In the long run, this agreement will save the taxpayers money because it is a known fact that many children adjudged to be retarded can lead normal and productive lives if given the proper kind of educational assistance early enough. In the short run, this agreement seeks to put as many children as feasible into the public school system.”

The New York Times weighed in with an editorial: “The court ruling is humane and socially sound. Whatever the cost of educating retarded children, the cost of setting them adrift in the world without giving them the means to lead useful lives is far higher.” 

The suit and settlement were quickly copied by advocates in 26 other federal court cases, pressuring Congress to act. In 1975, lawmakers passed what was then known as the Education for all Handicapped Children Act, guaranteeing the right to a free, appropriate public education for all students, including those with severe disabilities.

On Dec. 2, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the bill, but reluctantly, noting both that Congress promised states more money than it actually appropriated and complaining, in essence, that Gilhool’s checks and balances — the oversight required by the law to keep schools from shirking their obligations — were burdensome. 

“Everyone can agree with the objective stated in the title of this bill — educating all handicapped children in our nation. The key question is whether the bill will really accomplish that objective,” . “It contains a vast array of detailed, complex and costly administrative requirements which would unnecessarily assert federal control over traditional state and local government functions.”

Ford was right about the first part. Congress promised to fund 40% of IDEA’s average per-pupil cost but has never appropriated anything close to full funding. Right now, states get 13%. 

But as for the checks and balances, Gilhool was correct in anticipating that states and school districts — historically poor enforcers of civil rights — would need continuous federal oversight to deliver on the law’s central tenets: that children with disabilities have a right to a “free and appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive environment” possible. 

Creating Special Education

By the time the PARC case went to trial, Brown v. Board of Education had been the law of the land for 17 years. Yet from coast to coast, communities had to return to court to try to force districts to take even baby steps toward integrating schools racially. 

Anticipating similar resistance to desegregating students with disabilities, Gilhool asked the court to give the Pennsylvania defendants one year to find kids who were not being served by schools — and to continue to identify children who might have unmet needs. 

The clause became one of IDEA’s most important provisions, a duty known as Child Find. It requires school systems to seek out and evaluate students who may need special education services — no excuses. It applies to children from birth to age 21, whether they are being homeschooled or are enrolled in a private school, are migrants or without homes.  

When IDEA became law, Linda Stevens was one of a very small number of educators trained to work with children with disabilities. A speech pathologist with a master’s degree — rare for a woman at the time — she taught a class of  “18 educable mentally retarded students” in Florida’s Alachua County Public Schools. 

“So much of retardation can be attributed to a language problem,” she was quoted as saying in the April 1974 newsletter of the local chapter of the Council for Exceptional Children. “If you can get the students to master the oral skills first, the difficulty of other tasks is then reduced.” 

To that end, her class played phonics-heavy games with puppets and enjoyed homemade books on tape. Stevens’ efforts were so admired that the University of Florida sent special education teaching candidates to learn in her classroom.

When the federal law passed, Stevens and an art-teacher neighbor were tasked with figuring out how to fulfill the district’s Child Find obligations, according to her daughter, Elizabeth Clark, now a teacher in the same school system and a member of the Council for Exceptional Children. Working together, Stevens and her neighbor canvassed the community, showing up at doctor’s offices, PTA meetings and other places families congregated. 

“At the dinner table, my mother would talk about having spent the day going door to door … to let families know that their kids with exceptionalities, moderate to severe, were not only now allowed to come to school, but would have supports,” says Clark. 

The shame of having a child with an intellectual disability that had visited the Gilhools was still prevalent, so the women had to do a lot of coaxing. If a family wouldn’t agree to a home visit, Stevens would invite them for coffee. After each conversation, she would ask whom else she should reach out to.

The hardest part of the job was persuading people that schools would heed the law instead of finding justifications to exclude their children. “Sometimes she would have to visit with a family three times to convince them,” says Clark. “People were in disbelief.”

Once, a parent got up mid-sentence and called a relative: “There’s a lady here that says so-and-so can go to school even though he can’t use the toilet by himself,” the father said. “And that he’s going to be okay.” 

At the same time, in Illinois, Pam Gillet was using every conduit she could think of to find families with children who were not in school. She placed announcements in newspapers and tacked handwritten notes on grocery store bulletin boards. 

A member of the Council for Exceptional Children, Gillet, too, talked to parents who were reluctant to tell a stranger they had a disabled child, but also many who had tried to register their kids for school, only to be turned away. 

“Now we were going back to those parents trying to build trust with them to say, ‘Now we’re going to welcome you,’ ” she recalls. “We capitalized on the legal mandate that the parent must be an equal partner in the planning process and must agree to what the school district was recommending.”

Unlike before, a district could not say it lacked the resources to meet individual students’ needs. If a service was included in the Individualized Education Program, or IEP, that parents and teachers agreed to, the school must find a way to provide it.  

Just as Gilhool had hoped, Child Find put bottom-up pressure on the entire school system to find the classrooms, research the strategies and recruit and train the staff to be able to offer meaningful opportunities. Even as they were trying to find their sea legs, educators like Stevens and Gillet got pressed into service to envision and build out entire programs. 

Of the 33 fourth graders Gillet taught in 1968, her first year in the classroom, five had the word-recognition skills expected of first graders, while another five had some ability to read but not to comprehend. Often, kids who were behind academically were funneled into vocational programs in eighth grade, so there wasn’t much fuss when students were allowed to languish. 

Gillet turned to her principal for help, but didn’t get much. The school had an after-school program, but it was an informal effort, organized by concerned teachers, working without pay. Often, they grouped children according to where each was academically and assigned them to an educator who was strong in that subject. 

Frustrated, Gillet enrolled in a new university program that promised to train teachers to work with children with disabilities: “I thought, ‘Well, even if I don’t get a master’s in special education — because I wasn’t even sure what all that was — I’d at least maybe get some help with the children I was going to have for the rest of the year.’ ” 

Fast-forward six years to IDEA’s passage, and Gillet found herself running a federally funded initiative to train general educators to teach special ed. Using empty classrooms in a school in the northwest part of Cook County, near Chicago, the program enrolled 20 to 25 teachers per term for two semesters. 

During the first term, they would take intensive classes with instructors from five area universities. For the second, the teachers would work alongside highly qualified special educators. The goal was two-fold: to be able to staff special ed classrooms quickly and to expose faculty from different teacher preparation programs to colleagues with expertise in a variety of areas. 

Federal officials were watching. Every three years, the Office of Special Education Programs — a division Congress created to provide expertise and monitor IDEA’s implementation — would visit every school in the district. Still trying to figure out how to get the right staff in the right places to meet students’ varied needs, Gillet valued the feedback from the visits. 

As newly trained special educators opened classrooms throughout Illinois — rising to the challenge of educating children whom schools had never before attempted to accommodate — she sat back and considered how much had been built, and how quickly. “All of those evenings and weekends that we all spent together, and all of the tough times that we said, ‘We’ll never be able to do this,’ we did it,” she recalls thinking. “Kids are in school, they’re learning. They’re having opportunities that some never had and may not have had if it had not been for this law.”

Ignoring the Experts

The doctor who diagnosed Brianne Burger as deaf at age 2 warned her parents that she was unlikely to graduate from high school. They ignored him, becoming zealous advocates out of necessity. 

About 1 million U.S. children under 18 are blind, have limited vision, are deaf, hard of hearing or deaf-blind. Laws requiring publicly funded programs to educate them date, in one case, to the 1800s. Services are expensive, however, and states are quick to target them for cuts when budgets run lean. Because of this, the money, oversight and technical expertise required to keep them running is laid out in IDEA.  

Burger is living proof both of states’ tendency to try to restrict access to costly programs and of disabled children’s academic and career potential. When she was diagnosed in the early 1980s, her family lived in Stamford, Connecticut, 90 minutes’ drive from the state’s only school for deaf children — and the only option state officials offered. 

Burger’s parents, however, were unwilling to put a toddler on a bus for three hours a day. By word of mouth, they learned of two schools for the deaf in New York. One was just 15 minutes from their home. Connecticut had to pay the New York tuition. 

Burger got an excellent education there. When her family moved to Massachusetts, long a disability-friendly state, she was placed in a general-education classroom where her parents advocated for her to have an interpreter. 

She ended up at a California university with strong services for deaf students, and later at Emerson College for graduate school. After a stint in vocational rehabilitation, helping people with disabilities find and settle into jobs, she went to work managing federal grants for Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. 

Her timing could not have been better. President Barack Obama had pledged to increase the number of people with disabilities employed by the government. Burger worked in disability policy for several federal agencies, landing at the U.S. Department of Education in 2016. 

For nine years, she monitored a number of congressionally mandated institutions that provide expertise or services states don’t have: the American Printing House for the Blind; the Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center; Gallaudet University; the Helen Keller National Center for the Deaf-Blind; and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. 

In March, despite the fact that the law requires her position to be filled, Burger was one of more than 1,300 Education Department employees fired as Trump attempted to close it. Since his second inauguration, millions of dollars in funding for at least a dozen programs to support deaf and blind students has been eliminated. 

Shortly after Burger’s firing, South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds introduced legislation to transfer the department’s responsibilities to other federal agencies. Under the bill, oversight and support for the organizations she oversaw would be assigned to the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Labor.

During the Great Recession of the late 2000s, Rounds — then governor of South Dakota — attempted to close the state’s residential school for the deaf, which was established in 1880. Federal stimulus funds saved it, albeit in a drastically curtailed form. 

A task force appointed by Rounds recommended that its functions be assigned to individual districts, which can draw on the school for support. But without the pressure to staff a residential school, services have ebbed. In 2016, for example, the last university degree program for deaf educators closed, choking off the supply of interpreters able to work in regular schools. 

This year, schools that serve deaf and blind students and universities that train their educators have been or threatened with closure in . At the same time, offices like Burger’s — created to ensure states and districts don’t shirk their obligations — have been hollowed out. 

In March, a group of educators, school districts and public-sector unions , hoping to stop the Education Department’s dismantling and reverse the mass firings. (The Arc of the United States has since joined the suit.) A Massachusetts judge issued an order halting the administration’s efforts, pending further legal proceedings, but in July, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that ruling, at least temporarily allowing the dismantling of the department to proceed. 

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has since laid off more of the department’s employees, although some have been temporarily rehired. 

If Trump and McMahon eventually succeed, the department’s Office of Civil Rights, which investigates violations of disabled students’ rights, will have shrunk from 446 employees to 62. The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services — one of the divisions Congress explicitly required in IDEA — will retain just 14 of its 135 employees.

Echoes of a Dark Past

Over the last year, disability advocates have repeatedly warned that the Trump administration’s policies — and the president’s use of the slur “retarded” — open the door to a return to the dark past. Most visibly, as health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeated false claims about the causes of autism and promoted an unproven “cure.”

“These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date,” he said in April of autistic children. “Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

Indeed, one of was to eliminate the Administration for Community Living, the HHS division that oversees programs that help people with disabilities and the elderly be as independent as possible. The office’s responsibilities, he announced in March, will be handled by other parts of the agency. 

Perhaps ignorant that Pennhurst and other asylums forced residents to grow their own food, Kennedy has also proposed the creation of “work farms,” where hard labor will supposedly heal people struggling with addiction, mental health issues and even attention deficit disorder. 

In July, Trump opened the door to re-institutionalization with an executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” It calls for “the reversal of federal or state judicial precedents and the termination of consent decrees” that limit broad institutionalization, threatening to withhold federal funds from states and municipalities that don’t adopt and enforce “maximally flexible” commitment standards. 

Like the laws that justified confining in asylums people perceived as dangerous, the edict proposes to “restore public order” via the “civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.”

A statement from the American Bar Association raises Gilhool used to frame PARC: “The order raises serious constitutional and civil rights concerns — particularly regarding due process under the Fourteenth Amendment and the rights of individuals with disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Its proposed standard for commitment — encompassing not only those who pose a risk to self or others but also those who are merely unable to care for themselves — falls short of established constitutional safeguards.”

Hoping “,” in 2010 a group of advocates and former residents formed the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance with the intent of acquiring the abandoned facility and turning it into a national museum of disability history. 

But a businessman by the name of Robert Chakejian beat them to it, paying the state of Pennsylvania $2 million for Pennhurst in 2008. Chakejian was struggling to turn a profit on a composting business he had started on the grounds when his teenager suggested he convert the asylum — and its abandoned cribs, beds, wheelchairs and an electric shock chair — into a haunted house. 

After they sued and lost, advocates tried to persuade the entrepreneur to at least populate the attraction with vampires and monsters instead of mental patients. But when the haunted house opened in September 2010, it had an asylum theme, complete with a fictional backstory involving a made-up Austrian scientist (named Dr. Chakajian, an intentional misspelling of the owner’s name) who experimented on Pennhurst’s prisoners. 

These days, there’s a late-night paranormal tour — complete with actors in gory makeup who lunge at visitors — and holiday events like “Crazy Christmas” and “Bloody Valentine.” Because it’s too scary, children and pregnant women are not allowed to tour. Active members of the military get discounted admission. 

Between 1908 — when Pennsylvania built what was originally called the Eastern State Institution for the Feeble Minded and Epileptic — and 1987, nearly 11,000 people were confined to Pennhurst. About half died there, historians estimate. 

After Pennhurst’s closure, some 150,000 people moved out of institutions nationwide. Since then, an estimated half a million have been spared institutionalization. 

In one of the longest-running to date, researchers at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Temple University stayed in touch with 1,156 people who were at Pennhurst in 1978. Each got a visit once a year, aimed at answering a single question: “Are the people better off than they were at Pennhurst?” 

They were. None wound up homeless or in jail. They lived an average of six years longer than those confined had, and their care cost 15% less than in the institution. Many moved into small group homes in the community. 

Bob Gilhool was among those who eventually lived independently. Long after the trial that began the process of emptying the asylum, Tom Gilhool asked whether his brother wanted to tag along on a visit the lawyer was making with a group of Japanese disability activists. 

No way, was the quick response, Tom Gilhool told an interviewer compiling for Temple University’s Institute on Disabilities. But he was proud.

“As Bob tells me often,” Gilhool said, beaming, “ ‘You and I closed Pennhurst.’ ”

As a disabled American, it’s hard to express how profoundly this piece of legislation has impacted my life. Without it, I would likely be living in an , deprived of the rights and opportunities I have now. As the IDEA turns 50 this month, attacks from the Trump administration threaten to undermine the protections it provides millions of Americans like me.

The IDEA stems from the Supreme Court’s decision, which quashed the racist “separate but equal” doctrine and heralded the desegregation of American public schools, with Chief Justice Earl Warren segregation as a “denial of the equal protection of the laws.”

Disability advocates took notice of the decision, arguing that segregation based on disability is also inherently unequal. This led to a case called Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children (PARC) v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1972, where a federal court ruled that disabled children have a right to education. Three years later, the IDEA was passed.

Thanks to the new law, I attended public school from pre-K through 12th grade, receiving vital services that prepared me for college and a robust career. Each year, my parents and I met with teachers and other specialists to carefully negotiate services and develop an individualized education plan, or IEP, that ensured my experience at school remained equitable.

It wasn’t until high school that I realized how important these meetings really were. From accessible buses to physical therapy to participating on my high school track team, the IDEA funded services so that I could continue learning alongside my non-disabled peers. It even ensured that I received adaptive driver’s education training during my junior year. Without the support these services provided me during my formative school years, I have no doubt I’d be in a much different place today.

Alarmingly, the Trump administration is now trying to eliminate the protections and services that the IDEA guarantees. For example, racial minority students with disabilities are often when they’re young and in later years, leading them to miss out on key early interventions. This can lead to Black and brown disabled students being placed in segregated classrooms and receiving punishment at higher rates.

In 2016, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services finalized a rule requiring states to follow procedures to improve monitoring of schools that are disproportionately identifying and punishing disabled racial minority students. In August 2025, the Trump administration’s Department of Education to reverse that rule. If successful, it would likely mean a spike in educational discrimination against disabled Black and brown students who are already struggling.

The current administration is also attempting to eliminate IDEA funding by consolidating funding with other programs in a block grant and letting states decide how to spend those dollars.

Obtaining IDEA evaluations and services is already difficult, since it often requires parents to fight on behalf of their children. My parents spent countless hours pushing schools to provide the right services so that I could attend and fully participate in school and after-school activities. I was lucky enough that my parents had the resources and knowledge to fight for my rights under the IDEA.

Many don’t have the time, resources, or knowledge to successfully negotiate with schools, which leaves many disabled students to navigate their education through significant barriers.

My education led me to become the senior director at a policy think-tank in Washington, D.C. I’ve had the privilege of speaking before Congress and even a vice president to advocate for disabled people. But I fear the opportunities afforded to me may vanish for the next generation of disabled students in the U.S.Disabled people are already twice as likely to be and live in than non-disabled people. Obtaining an education is ways to help disabled people secure a stable income—and by weakening the IDEA, the Trump administration is trying to take those opportunities away. As the rates of rise, it’s more important than ever for us to protect and fund this essential civil rights law.

Yet these cuts are only the latest symptom of a deeper problem: The special education system is failing. Fifty years ago, the (IDEA) was a revolutionary step forward that mandated a free, appropriate public education for students with disabilities, tailored to their individual needs. It has since hardened into a compliance-driven exercise that leaves most of the students it serves without the educational support they need to succeed in school or life.

We understand these failures better than most, having watched our own children’s struggles compound due to their schools’ failures to provide the “basics,” such as a high-quality curriculum, evidence-based instruction, orderly classrooms and a little extra academic support. These are the same things millions of students without identified disabilities also need — but that neither the general nor special education system reliably delivers.

The result is a crisis that long predates the current funding fight, because special education was never designed to help students achieve grade-level expectations. It is a system that prioritizes sorting children into diagnostic categories over improving student learning. Every year, more students are labeled, more money is invested, and yet the results remain the same: Millions of children unable to read, write or calculate proficiently. The problem isn’t too little special education, it’s that special education as we know it does not work.

That’s why the Center on Reinventing Public Education has launched a new project, , that aims to generate conversation and solutions around meeting the needs of students who struggle in school — one grounded in evidence, transparency and a willingness to question the faulty assumptions that have shaped special education for a half-century.

Part of this initiative is the , the first-ever 50-state digital record of rates of students identified as needing services since 1976. The data document America’s increased reliance on special education to address learning and behavioral differences that are more common than those that originally inspired Congress to pass IDEA. But giving more students access hasn’t solved the core problem: Eligibility is based on subjective determinations of disability (something that can’t be measured) rather than demonstration of student need (something that can). As a result, students’ access to special education depends on the local policies and practices used in their schools, creating a huge disparity in services depending on where they happen to live.

While these findings illuminate longstanding inequities, they also open up new opportunities to act. To encourage deeper exploration, CRPE is inviting educators, researchers and advocates to , uncover new patterns and propose ideas for a better system. Selected participants will receive financial support to develop deeper analyses that can help policymakers and practitioners design a new generation of interventions.

Those new insights and fresh approaches could help reimagine the current system from the ground up. Instead of sorting students into rigid categories, schools could respond flexibly to their needs. Instead of disconnected experiences across general and special education, there could be a continuum of evidence-based supports. Instead of investing in gatekeeping, legislators could use analyses of this new dataset to justify allocating resources directly to the instruction and tools students need to succeed.

None of this can happen so long as advocates hunker down in defense of a program that is failing the students it was designed to serve. Instead, is an attempt to give advocates, families and educators the tools to see the system as it truly is and imagine what it could become. Invention can offer hope in the face of despair, abundance in place of scarcity and power to the powerless. Those are the resources disability advocates brought to Congress 50 years ago. They can be tapped again to advance the interests of children with disabilities in today’s challenging political climate.

Carter was in first grade when the suspensions began. His mom describes it as the year “all hell broke loose.”

As he made his way through the public school system in York County, South Carolina, the now-15-year-old, who has multiple disabilities, continued to struggle.

The situation reached a crescendo in 6th grade, when Carter was suspended out of school for 7.5 days and in school about a dozen times, according to school district records and his mother’s estimates. This was in addition to numerous lunch suspensions — during which he was forced to sit at a table alone in the cafeteria — and bus suspensions, which meant Carter couldn’t ride school-provided transportation. His offenses, Kimberly Tissot, his mom, said, ranged from minor ones,  like “incessant talking” and “cussing,” to the more extreme, including breaking one classmate’s glasses and threatening another.

While Tissot understands why these behaviors needed to result in clear consequences, she argued that every one of them was a manifestation of her son’s disabilities, which include ADHD, fetal alcohol syndrome, a disability involving written expression and a mild intellectual disability. They could have been avoided, she said, if Carter’s school had followed his Individualized Education Program, which lays out the supports and services the school is legally mandated to provide Carter so he can progress and learn.

Ultimately, her son, who has difficulty connecting his actions to their ramifications, was left confused and convinced, “he’s in trouble because he’s bad,” said Tissot, who is also the president and CEO of , an advocacy organization. 

Carter is one of hundreds of thousands of students with disabilities across the country who are suspended from school each year. It’s long been documented that this population of kids is generally more likely to face exclusionary discipline , but because of where he happens to live, Carter is particularly susceptible: No state removes students with disabilities from school for 10 days or fewer at a higher rate than South Carolina.

There, some 15% of special education students faced out-of-school suspensions for up to 10 days in the 2022-23 school year — nearly twice the national average, according to The 74’s analysis of the most recently available data.

These numbers may also be a substantial undercount, according to experts who told The 74 they’ve witnessed widespread in South Carolina — in some cases to avoid the legal protections that kick in for students with disabilities once they’ve been kept out of the classroom for more than 10 cumulative days. Tissot said she was asked to pick Carter up from school without an official suspension on multiple occasions, a practice she knew to push back on only because of her advocacy work. And she said she only learned of some of Carter’s in-school suspensions, which weren’t all officially documented, from him.

Macaulay Morrison is assistant director of a at the University of South Carolina Law School who represents special education families in their legal battles with schools.

“It’s just reflective of the state of public education of South Carolina as a whole,” Morrison said of the IDEA suspension data. “Sometimes it’s easier for schools to exclude these students than it is for them to figure out how to support them.”

In response to The 74’s findings, a South Carolina Department of Education official said they remain “committed to ensuring that all students, including those receiving special education services, are supported in safe and positive learning environments.”

The department has established a goal of working with districts to reduce suspension rates for students with disabilities to 9% or less — significantly lower than its current rate, but still higher than the national average — by working with advocacy and support groups, like the Behavior Alliance of South Carolina, to provide conferences, institutes and training opportunities.

And the department will continue to “closely monitor student discipline data to track progress toward this target … including assisting with district reviews of disciplinary referral data, revision of policies and procedures, and the development of targeted improvement plans at both the school and district levels.”

South Carolina was the only state whose numbers were not broken down by race after state officials notified the U.S. Department of Education of data quality concerns, according to federal Education Department staff. The South Carolina state education department official told The 74 that they provided corrected data once they were made aware of the issue, but that update was not reflected in the final federal dataset. 

The federal Department of Education did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The 74.

The IDEA dataset is particularly significant because it’s the first to document disciplinary rates among students with disabilities at the national level post-pandemic, a time when . The U.S. Department of Education’s more frequently scrutinized has long shown disparities in discipline between students with disabilities and their general education peers but the most current available complete numbers are from the 2021-22 school year — when most kids were back to in-person learning but some districts were still offering a hybrid model and still others were allowing kids to

The 74’s analysis of the more recent IDEA data of some 7.5 million students with disabilities across three suspension categories reveals the differences experienced within this vulnerable student group. For example, in addition to South Carolina, special education students living in North Carolina, Delaware and Nevada are far more likely to be excluded from school than students with similar disabilities living in Vermont, Utah and New York.  

The IDEA data, which is released annually, shows that race — also a well-established to suspensions — plays a role among students who are already facing disproportionate discipline. While Black students made up 16% of all students with disabilities nationally, they accounted for nearly a third (31%) of all those students suspended out of school for 10 days or less. 

In some cases, race and geography combined in striking ways in the IDEA data, such as in Nebraska, where almost 1-in-10 Black students with disabilities were removed from school for more than 10 days (a figure which includes in-school and out-of-school disciplinary removals) in 2022-23 — more than any other group in any other state.

Other key findings of the The 74’s analysis include:

• Nationally, boys are more likely than girls to be identified as having a disability, and — even when that’s considered — are disproportionately removed from classrooms: While about two-thirds of students with disabilities are male, they account for about 75% of special education students removed from school for any duration of time.

• On average nationally, just over 7% of all students with disabilities received at least one out-of-school suspension for 10 days or fewer.

• Black students with disabilities are disproportionately suspended out of school for 10 days or less in every state, to varying degrees. In Georgia, for example, they make up 39% of those with disabilities, but 59% of those who were suspended. In Delaware, Black students make up just over a third of those with disabilities, but over half of those suspended.  In five states (Indiana, Nevada, Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin), at least 20% of Black students were suspended out of school for 10 days or fewer. 

• In both West Virginia and Pennsylvania, almost 1-in-10 Hispanic children with disabilities were suspended for 10 days or less outside of school — more than any other state for this group, though closely followed by Nevada, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.

• In South Dakota, 17% of students with disabilities who identified as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander were suspended for 10 days or less in school — a greater share than in any other state.

• California suspends students with disabilities for 10 days or fewer in school at the lowest rate (0.8%), and Vermont suspends them out of school at the lowest rate (3%).
  
• No state removes students for more than 10 days at a higher rate than Missouri (4%), 2.5 times the national average.

While supporters of stricter school discipline argue suspensions and expulsions are necessary to keep schools safe, research also shows that these measures are associated with a host of negative outcomes, including , and a lower likelihood of and greater involvement with the

exclusionary discipline, which children with disabilities are more frequently subjected to, does not seem to positively impact students’ future behavior and, for younger students, may even exacerbate it. 

For students with disabilities, the loss of instruction time can be particularly devastating, said Amy Holbert, CEO of , a training and information center for families whose children have disabilities. And especially when students receive out-of-school suspensions, it can put a strain on working families who suddenly have to scramble to find child care, she added.

These challenges have only worsened since the pandemic, according to Holbert, who said referrals to her organization for educational concerns have increased 128% since 2020.

The 74’s data analysis confirms “what advocates across the country have been saying over and over again about the students most likely to experience school pushout and get deprived of access to instructional time,” said Jennifer Coco, interim executive director of .��

It holds up an “important mirror” she added, “on who is getting appropriate interventions and who are the students that we still collectively need to do better by.”

‘The Wild Wild West of civil rights enforcement’

Keisha Sims-Williams’ son, Savion, was just 2 years old when she began to suspect he might have a disability. He was hyperactive and impulsive. Sometimes she’d call his name and he wouldn’t respond. And he would often walk on the tips of his toes — a characteristic more common in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Some of these behaviors made starting school particularly challenging. 

Sims-Williams said she told Savion’s Columbia, South Carolina, school as early as pre-K that he would need extra help. But instead of having him evaluated for an IEP they repeatedly removed him from school — both formally and informally — and ultimately relocated him to a transitional program, though not one for students with disabilities, she said. 

“His pre-K year it got so bad, he was out of school more than he was in,” she said, estimating Savion was suspended for at least 30 days that year. 

Ultimately, Savion was diagnosed with ADHD and autism by clinicians outside of school, but still he wasn’t evaluated for an IEP, which meant he went through his kindergarten year without the same protections around school removals as other students with disabilities. 

As a kid with a suspected disability, though, he should have still had access to at least some of those guardrails, according to Morrison, the South Carolina attorney, who later filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Sims-Williams family.

And so, Savion had another year filled with so many removals his mom lost count. 

“At some point it was like they were on a mission to get rid of him,” she said.

In November of his kindergarten year, Sims-Williams filed a formal written request for an in-school evaluation, but his IEP wasn’t developed until May or implemented until the following August.

“It took two years of me fighting and pleading in order for him to finally get an IEP and be heard and seen as he should,” Sims-Williams said. She believes if that IEP had come along sooner, her son’s early years in school could have looked a lot different.

“No child’s experiences in their education should have been as bad as my son’s,” she added. “They ruined his good years of school. They ruined it.”

Much of this was confirmed by the state’s response to the family’s lawsuit. The South Carolina Department of Education found that the district had violated a number of Savion’s rights as a student with a suspected disability — including by not evaluating him for an IEP in a timely manner and not officially recording removals or creating a behavior plan once he hit 10 days of removals. These failures ultimately led to even more suspensions, according to court records shared with The 74.

Since extra supports were implemented, school has been significantly better for Savion. He’s been on honor roll, won awards and no longer cries when she drops him off each morning.

Still, “he’s had some bumps here and there,” she said, noting the now-7-year-old was suspended out of school for about eight days throughout first grade, but “compared to 20 or 30, that’s progress to me.”

“I’m hoping next year we’re down to five. Or none.”

Savion’s race, gender and disability status all make him particularly likely to be suspended, as does the fact that his family also lives in South Carolina. The Palmetto State leads the nation in , as well.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act provides protections to students who have been removed from school for more than 10 days, but much of the enforcement is left up to schools, districts and states, leading to a patchwork landscape, according to interviews with over two dozen advocates, experts, parents and attorneys. 

“Schools don’t seem to have any incentive to improve their processes and procedures because there isn’t anybody holding them to task,” said Mike Mathison, a juvenile justice resource attorney at the Children’s Law Center at the University of South Carolina Law School.

And in certain cases — like Savion’s — even if a student has a documented disability, it can be challenging to get schools to provide an IEP in a timely manner, leaving vulnerable kids unprotected. 

The disproportionate removal of students with disabilities — especially for boys and those who are Black — experts told The 74 is the result of a confluence of systemic issues including discrimination, teacher and school counselor shortages and a dearth of training in positive behavior management techniques, like establishing strong relationships with students and clear routines. Added to that are administrators not understanding or enforcing students’ IEPs or the law, parents not knowing their kids’ rights, a return to top-down “zero tolerance” disciplinary policies and a lack of federal accountability.

This trend of disproportionality is well established: In the 2017-18 school year, 9% of students with disabilities were suspended, compared to 4% of their general education peers, according to a 2022 from the Learning Policy Institute — largely based on analyses of four years of Civil Rights Data Collection. For Black students with disabilities, that figure was even higher: 20% were suspended. 

Students with disabilities are also more likely than their peers to be punished for “broad and subjective categories” of behavior like defiance, according to a 2024 investigation by  .

“There’s disadvantages of being Black when it comes to disciplinary outcomes, and there’s a disadvantage of being a student with a disability as well,” said Richard Welsh, associate professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University and author of “You can times that together … and that’s the definition of intersectionality.”

While disparities are cause for closer inspection — and can be evidence of discrimination — they alone are not proof of bias, cautioned Paul Morgan, director of the at the University of Albany. That being said, he added, even when controlling for differences in behaviors, Black students appear to be more frequently suspended than their peers. And a recent GAO report determined that Black girls are more likely to be removed from class than their white female peers for similar behaviors in the same schools.

Regardless of whether or not active discrimination is at play, the disparities are at least “a sign of weak systemic practices” and “a call to action,” said Coco, from The Center for Learner Equity.

Despite this, in April, President Donald Trump released an saying he intended to roll back Biden administration discipline guidance, which encouraged school districts to collect, analyze and adjust their policies in light of disproportionate racial outcomes. Trump argued that approach actually weaponized federal civil rights laws in ways that discriminated against white students.

Critics have the executive order, titled Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline, will only further widen disparities for students of color and students with disabilities, especially as  more than consider a return to stricter student discipline policies, including four that have already done so. 

“Common sense is students in school every day learning, and students can’t learn if they’re not in school,” Coco said. “I recognize we need to keep schools safe, so to me a common sense investment is saying, ‘How do we ensure that schools are a place where students are getting access to what they need to thrive and be successful, both in terms of education and wraparound supports?’”

Trump has also been systematically working to dismantle the Education Department, which could mean even less federal accountability and data collection moving forward, said Dan Losen, senior director of education at the National Center for Youth Law.

“We’re in the Wild Wild West of civil rights enforcement,” he said.

A ‘huge oversight’ in IDEA enforcement

The federal law defining the rights of students with disabilities was first passed in 1975 and then updated and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1990. IDEA mandates a “free appropriate public school education” for eligible students ages 3-21. In the 2022-23 school year that included or 15% of all those attending public schools — a two percentage-point increase from the 6.4 million students covered under IDEA a decade ago. The federal guidelines provide baseline regulations that states must follow, but some — like New Jersey — have implemented stronger protections as well. 

Under IDEA, states must submit annual data about students who receive special education and related services to the Education Department, including the data analyzed by The 74.

And the law provides certain protections around disciplinary removals: If a student with a disability is removed from their classroom for more than 10 days, IDEA mandates a process called a Manifestation Determination Review, a hearing during which a group — including the parents and the student’s  IEP team — meets to determine if the child’s behaviors were either related to their disability or the result of a failure to implement their IEP. 

If the answer to either of these questions is “yes,” the school can’t move forward with the removal and has to instead make a plan to provide updated support.

Experts and parents told The 74 that once a student is diagnosed with a disability, schools tend to become particularly cautious about hitting that 10-day mark and triggering the legal review process. In some cases, that means educators pay closer attention to implementing a student’s IEP. But, in others, schools attempt to skirt the system by suspending students “off-the-books.” 

And when schools do implement the hearing process, they don’t always do so thoroughly or with intention, sometimes just “doing [it] to check the box,” said Morrison, the South Carolina attorney.

A recent , for example, found that New York City’s public schools routinely flout these federal guidelines by not properly considering a student’s disability during hearings. 

It can be challenging to hold schools and districts accountable for faithfully implementing these hearings, since the federal government isn’t collecting data around them, according to Losen, from the National Center for Youth Law.

“For monitoring the enforcement of these supposedly important protections, we don’t get to see any of that data,” he said. “Nothing. And I think that’s a huge oversight.” 

Carter, the South Carolina student suspended multiple times throughout his school career, is now leading his own IEP meetings and learning to control his behaviors, his mother told The 74. 

Tissot said he made it through the past school year without any suspensions — a first for him — and this fall he’ll start high school. His mom describes the teenager as a sweet, talkative kid who loves to try new foods — “He’s a little foodie!” — play video games and make people laugh.

While Tissot is proud of Carter’s progress, she also worries he’s still not where he needs to be academically, and his history of repeated suspensions has heightened his anxiety at school. 

“He has told me that he tries so hard to control himself that he’s unable to concentrate,” she said.

And she worries for other students with disabilities who don’t have the same resources Carter has — like a mom who’s an advocate in the field — a fear that’s only intensified under the Trump administration.

“The future is not looking good for kids with disabilities who require IEPs,” she said. “It’s very scary because they’re taking away the federal oversight right now so really relying on parents to enforce it. And, I mean, that’s not going to work at all.”

Yet in their quest to close the department, President Donald Trump and U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon have said they plan to move special education administration to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and push as much overall responsibility for education as possible to the states. 

Backers of this shift advocate allowing states and districts to use the money as they see fit. “Most IDEA funding should be converted into a no-strings formula block grant targeted at students with disabilities and distributed directly to local education agencies,” the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 recommends. 

One of the red state education leaders pushing to be freed of spending rules, Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters has even said he wants to use IDEA to fund vouchers for children with disabilities to attend private schools.

Families who use vouchers for private school choice lose IDEA protections for their children. 

Like many of the new administration’s edicts, critics say, much of what has been proposed is likely illegal. And yet, by gutting the agency responsible for enforcing special education laws, Trump and McMahon may get their way. 

“Part of the really challenging moment we are in is on one hand reminding everybody of what’s in the law and what should happen, and then recognizing that we’re living in extrajudicial times where saying, ‘Well it’s in the law, so that can’t happen’ clearly isn’t enough,” says Jennifer Coco, interim executive director of the Center for Learner Equity, which advocates for high-quality special education. “There’s been a pretty broad pronouncement that this administration is thinking about moving [special education] anyway.”

Concerns about those plans fall into two broad areas.

First, moving responsibility for students with disabilities to HHS means taking oversight away from experts in specialized instruction and handing it to an agency ill-equipped to administer non-medical programs. With its own mass firings under the direction of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who continues to promote a disproven link between vaccines and autism — HHS will be hard-pressed to adequately attend to children’s health, much less their education, say disability advocates.

Second, advocates predict that states and districts, freed of oversight and rules about spending IDEA dollars, will consign increasing numbers of disabled students to segregated special education classrooms. This raises fears of a reversal of decades-long efforts to integrate students with disabilities with their general-education peers whenever possible and returning to the pre-IDEA norm of isolation and institutionalization. 

It could even mean “making some determinations that we just don’t think [some kids are] capable of learning,” says Coco. “Even if the law says you can’t do that, we have enough examples in our history where decisionmakers have a tendency to go back to that in a way that’s really harmful to kids.” 

Currently, the Education Department oversees the distribution of about 10% of school funding nationwide. By law, most of that money goes to states to pay for specific services. Title I funds help offset the cost of educating children from low-income families, for example, while other grants pay for instruction for English learners and teacher training. 

It is unclear whether McMahon to deviate from requiring funds to be spent according to established guidelines. The legal guardrails on IDEA funds may be the toughest to skirt. If the secretary ultimately loosens the rules, advocates fear state and local officials will be quick to segregate many more special education students from their general-education peers. 

Before the department’s creation in 1979, children with disabilities were the purview of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, says Weade James, senior director for K-12 education policy at the liberal Center for American Progress. 

They were typically denied the opportunity to learn in regular classrooms — and often could not attend school at all. No one monitored the quality of instruction. 

“We’ve been down this road before,” says James. “When you leave this up to the states, those things go unchecked. Reverting back to that reverts back to segregation.”

Today, two-thirds of special education students spend 60% or more of their school day in classrooms with their non-disabled peers where, as the law intended, they are most likely to receive grade-level instruction. Keeping them in what IDEA terms this “least restrictive environment” often requires parental advocacy and legal oversight. 

Congress has never funded special education anywhere near the level it promised when it passed IDEA, leaving states to come up with the lion’s share of the money. Most school systems still have to divert general education dollars to make up shortfalls. 

Because of this — and despite federal requirements that they not reduce special education spending, except in narrow circumstances — states and districts are frequently on the lookout for ways to cut costs. 

One example: In 2016, a Houston Chronicle found that Texas education officials had for years threatened to sanction districts that identified more than 8.5% of their students as having disabilities that merited an individualized education program, the legal document spelling out how their needs would be met. Nationwide, some 15% qualify for services. 

Advocates complained about the number of children — including students who are blind, deaf, hearing-impaired or medically fragile — going unserved. But until the Chronicle’s investigation, the department failed to intervene. In recent weeks, the division that investigates complaints when students’ rights are violated has been . 

Also stripped to bare-bones staffing were the parts of the agency dedicated to researching strategies for educating disabled students and training their teachers. This, too, is likely to fuel segregation because poorly equipped educators often resort to sending a challenged student out of general education. 

“It is easier for the adults involved to remove children with disabilities when they can’t or won’t support those kids,” says Carrie Gillispie, senior policy analyst at the think tank New America. “If the adults in the room don’t have the resources they need, it’s easier to remove the child.”

Other endangered services include Medicaid reimbursement for in-school therapies and health care for children who are medically fragile or have chronic conditions; early childhood services that diagnose youngsters at ages when interventions are likely to have the most profound impact; and vocational programs to help older students become independent and enter the workforce.

Unable to get local or state officials to enforce their kids’ rights, and effectively shut out of the department’s complaints process, affluent parents will increasingly turn to the courts, Gillispie predicts. 

“But for the families with fewer means and less social capital, it’s going to be especially hard,” she says. “Every month is a big time period for kids. A little kid waiting a month or two for education, accessible education, can mean a big difference for really young kids.” 

While some capitalize on the independent schools’ flexibility to rearrange elements of the classroom day as needed, and many have developed teacher hiring and retention strategies, the report’s author says the main takeaway is that the most promising developments are the result of cultures that hold general and special educators jointly responsible for the success of all students. 

“It comes back to the idea that the whole school owns the experience of students with disabilities,” says Chase Nordengren, director of research for the nonprofit organization, which focuses on improving disabled children’s outcomes. “They make sure general education teachers feel as prepared to meet the needs of students with disabilities as special educators.”

This stands in marked contrast to the way special education services are typically delivered, with students with disabilities pulled out of regular classrooms to receive instruction and therapies that general educators frequently know little about. Though experts this approach, which flies in the face of showing disabled children achieve more in integrated classrooms than when isolated, charter and district-run schools often resist becoming more inclusive. 

To that end, the new report makes recommendations aimed at helping charter schools — which typically enjoy a high degree of autonomy in exchange for meeting academic and financial performance targets — address persistent inequities in how students with special education plans are served. 

Charter authorizers — the organizations that grant schools permission to operate and oversee their performance — should consider offering the schools they supervise technical assistance and specialized expertise that standalone schools may struggle to acquire, such as teacher training and a central hiring pool. All schools, regardless of type, should find ways for general and special education staff to collaborate and collect and analyze data about students with disabilities, the researchers recommend.

Disability advocates have long complained that while over the last decade charter schools have become more accessible to families whose children need alternatives to traditional classrooms, little effort has been invested in identifying systemic improvements. 

Since 2008, the number of children with disabilities attending charter schools, which have historically enrolled fewer than their district-run counterparts, has risen steadily, from less than 8% to 11.5% in 2021, according to data from the Government Accountability Office and the U.S. Department of Education. Throughout that time, charters have enrolled 2% to 3% fewer special education students than traditional schools.

But even as enrollment has increased, outcomes for children with disabilities have barely budged, the center’s researchers concluded earlier this year, following a two-year investigation. On the whole, charter schools do not outperform their district-run counterparts, even though they exist in part to develop effective ways of meeting the needs of historically underserved students. Almost no special education students are given access to college-readiness classes and programs, for example.

Following the July release of a report on those poor outcomes, the center turned its attention to a survey of schools that, intentionally or not, enroll higher-than-average numbers of students with disabilities.

The new report describes some promising strategies. One 10-year-old Atlanta-area school enrolling grades 6 to 12, Tapestry Public Charter School, was founded on the principles of a longstanding but little-used strategy called universal design for learning. 

Broadly described, this means educators provide instruction in a variety of forms to enable all students — disabled or not — to engage with it. Staff have two hours a day to plan together and to collaborate with therapists, behavior specialists and other service providers. 

Half of Tapestry’s 266 students receive special education services, and all core classes are co-taught by a special educator and a general ed teacher. This allows for personalized, small-group instruction in which educators can identify and address individual skills gaps. 

“This both makes sure kids get the specific help they need and [aren’t] called out or singled out as needing it,” says Nordengren. “Everybody gets the support.”

A Washington, D.C., school serving 221 Black and low-income boys in grades 4 through 7, Statesman College Preparatory Academy was designed to provide structure for all of its students, including the 29% who need special education services. The school also employs a therapist who works one-on-one with staff.

“We can do personal development better than we can do professional development,” founder Shawn Hardnett told the center’s researchers. “And what we find is that people are better professionals because we’ve done personal work.” 

In New York City, Mott Haven Academy is a pre-K-8 charter school founded to meet the needs of students impacted by the child welfare system. One in four students has a disability, and a third lack stable housing. Drawing on mental health and behavioral supports, the school uses the same instructional approaches with all 451 pupils, whether they qualify for special education or not.  

Mott Haven uses its flexibility as a charter school to structure staff time to allow educators and disability service providers to collaborate. One example: Instead of pulling a single student out of class for extra help, a speech-language pathologist helped the child’s teachers redesign their instruction — strengthening the general education teacher’s skills. 

Other common strategies include hiring general ed teachers who want to work with children with disabilities and special educators, and investing in ongoing training. 

The 29 schools surveyed landed on similar strategies, but for the most part did so independently, as they sought ways to address their students’ varied challenges, Nordengren says. “What surprised me more than anything is how different these schools look from each other,” he says. “Each found a way to identify the particular needs of its students.” 

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided financial support to the Center for Learner Equity for this research and provides financial support to The 74.

Some panelists argued the move — long a goal of conservatives —  would be disastrous while others testified it would be largely symbolic.��

“The elimination of the Department Of Education would do significant harm to the teacher shortage and particularly for our students with disabilities,” testified Tuan Nguyen, an associate professor at the University of Missouri whose team runs one of the only on teacher shortages. 

“The Department Of Education is largely responsible for making sure we follow the laws and to divest funds, and if we don’t have a Department of Education to oversee what we’re doing … we’re going to have a free-for-all in terms of who we’re going to put in the classroom,” Nguyen added.

Fellow panelist Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution had another take: “I don’t think that eliminating the Department of Education would do much.”

While he’s concerned it might jeopardize the collection of data and funding of research, ultimately Hanushek said the department is largely responsible for dispersing funds, a role another department could take on. 

“I think it’s largely a political statement,” he added.

Jessica Levin, litigation director at the disagreed. “The DOE is not just a pass-through [of funds],” she said. “The DOE has expertise in the complicated distribution of those funds and the enforcement of the civil rights guarantees that go along with them.”

She added that “eliminating it would be not just on a practical level extremely harmful but part of an attack on institutions that protect civil rights in this country,” making it a “dangerous proposal both on a practical and symbolic level.”

Both state and federal governments are responsible for ensuring that the rights of students with disabilities are met through the The law, initially passed in 1974 but amended and renamed in 1990, proposed that federal funding would cover 40% of the average costs of special education, a directive that has yet to be met in the 50 years since. Experts noted that when special education isn’t fully funded, district leaders are forced to reallocate money from elsewhere, ultimately harming all students.

The federal held Friday’s briefing to better understand the impact of teacher shortages on students with disabilities nationwide. A final report on their findings is anticipated in fall 2025, Stephen Gilchrist, the lead commissioner on the report, told The 74 before the briefing.

“Having been involved with some of this in my own home state of South Carolina, we’ve seen many issues where students who were entitled to these federal accommodations were not receiving them at all in school districts,” Gilchrist said, a dilemma he noted is only worsened by teacher shortages.

An appointee from Trump’s first presidency, Gilchrist expressed optimism that the incoming administration will help lawmakers “think differently about how … we deliver education to students in America … without there being such a bureaucratic process.”

His observations and the debate at the briefing over the education department’s fate comes amid a firestorm over a series of controversial Trump appointees this week. Trump has yet to name his education secretary and it’s unclear whether what critics see makes the department’s possible demise more likely.

Friday’s briefing focused on a persistent problem in K-12 education — the shortage of special education teachers — that was exacerbated by COVID. As of October 2023, of public schools said they were not fully staffed in special education, and 51% reported having to move teachers around to fill a variety of vacancies. 

In 2024, 72% of public schools with special education vacancies struggled to fill the position with a fully certified teacher, according to Brittany Patrick, senior policy analyst on education at the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.

That being said, there is a lack of specific and reliable data, according to Nguyen, who noted that while almost every state has indicated shortages, there’s no information on the magnitude. “Knowing there’s a shortage is not particularly helpful if we don’t know the extent of the problem,” he said.

In the face of these vacancies, some states have issued thousands of provisional and emergency licenses, filled positions with substitute teachers, lowered teaching requirements, or sent the National Guard into classrooms, all of which means students are being instructed by under-qualified teachers, Nguyen argued.

Panelists across the spectrum noted the particularly challenging circumstances in which special education teachers currently work, marked by low pay, large caseloads and class sizes, inadequate support and political divisiveness — all of which appear to be driving them out of the classroom. At the same time, there is a dearth of new educators in the pipelines. 

Together this means that special education students don’t receive the services they’re entitled to, “a pervasive issue, exacerbated by decreased professionalization and the mental health effects of COVID,” said Amanda Levin Mazin, senior lecturer at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Even pre-pandemic, a number of these students were falling

The boy is dyslexic and has a disorder that prevents his eyes from working together — a combination that requires intensive and specialized therapy and instruction. Since kindergarten, Garcia has toted medical records and other documentation of Vincent’s needs to meeting after meeting. But the district never found him an appropriate school, so eventually Garcia did that herself. 

Now, here was an anonymous auditor confirming that despite a fistful of favorable decisions from the people who preside over special education disputes — known as independent hearing officers — the district had all but entirely failed to reimburse her thousands of dollars for Vincent’s private school tuition. 

Garcia, whose name and the name of her son have been changed to protect the child’s privacy, says that at first she thought the email was fake. “It was the first time anybody ever said anything that had happened was wrong,” she says. “Everyone up until then had just been like, ‘Oh, well.’ ”

She felt a glimmer of optimism, Garcia says, but also steeled for it to be one more episode of false hope.

Special education is notoriously fraught in many school systems, but the magnitude of the problem in the nation’s largest district, New York City, boggles. The department is supposed to educate nearly a quarter of a million children with disabilities — a population that in 2019 was larger than the entire student body of all but seven U.S. school districts. In 2020-21, nearly 21% of New York City’s schoolchildren received special education services, compared to a national average of 15%. 

By all accounts, the Department of Education every year fails to meet even basic obligations to tens of thousands of children with disabilities. Stretching back two decades, numerous lawsuits and have flagged the same problems over and over. Just this week, it was — or close to 37% of NYC preschoolers with disabilities — did not receive all of their required services, and in March, it was revealed that did not.

Because very little has changed, parents are forced — typically after years of neglect — to seek out everything from specialized instruction to intensive therapies on their own. They and their service providers are entitled to reimbursement.

The Garcias are just one of thousands of families stuck in a narrow Sisyphean outgrowth of the dysfunction. Even with fat files of documentation and legal orders in their favor, they can’t get the department to actually cut the requisite checks. The more families who, denied services, flood into the due process system, the more bogged down it gets.

Currently, there are who won their cases in front of an independent hearing officer only to have the Department of Education fail to comply with the resulting decisions. 

The NYC Department of Education did not respond to The 74’s multiple requests for comment for this story. Lawyers and advocates who have followed the district’s attempts to improve its due process pipeline say it recently has added staff in an effort to clear the backlog, but basic failings persist.

The system was already at a standstill, say critics. But now, whose confirmed or suspected disabilities went unevaluated and unserved during the pandemic threatens to overwhelm it completely. The department struggles to find, heat and cool, and staff enough rooms to hear waiting families’ cases, much less process their reimbursements.

Vincent was years from being born when a court first ordered the district to revamp its handling of the hearing officers’ orders. In 2003, a nonprofit that works on behalf of disadvantaged NYC children, filed a class-action lawsuit, L.V. v Department of Education, over the problems with the hearing officer system. The suit originally encompassed nine students and now includes the thousands who are essentially in the same predicament as Vincent.

“All I can say is that I have been doing this since 2012 and there’s a new problem every year,” says Bonnie Spiro Schinagle, the special education attorney who represents Garcia. “It doesn’t seem like anyone has really put organized thought into this, identified problems, identified solutions and then figured out a pathway to implementing them. They just haven’t.” 

The litigation was supposed to force the DOE to begin complying more promptly with orders issued by hearing officers. There has been little progress though and in March, a special master — a court-appointed overseer tasked with tracking the district’s compliance — issued a 127-page report containing 75 recommendations and a warning: The overhaul still would take years to complete. 

Unstopping the bottleneck will require such wholesale transformations, the report says, as the department moving a process that now often involves handwritten documents online and making itself a more attractive, competitive employer — not just to the special educators and therapists who are in desperately short supply — but to the administrative staff who process hearing orders and invoices.

It’s the latest in a to impose timeliness, responsiveness and efficacy on a system with a protracted history of being resistant to all three.

‘The reality is people have been waiting for years’

Garcia knew very little of this context when she received the December email that seemed too good to be true. The auditor, whose appointment was part of the 20-year-old class-action lawsuit, suggested that she ask her attorney to file a federal lawsuit. The email included an attachment the auditor said would serve as evidence substantiating her claim. Garcia called Spiro Schinagle, who said she was already preparing civil complaints for a number of families who had received similar emails. The lawyer added the Garcias to her list.

Well-worn federal civil rights law is clear regarding situations like theirs: If a school system can’t serve a child with disabilities, it must pay for a program that can. Vincent’s mother enrolled him at a private school in Queens serving a small number of children with learning disabilities like her son’s.

His tuition changes from year to year, but has hovered around $44,000 a year, according to court documents. If that sounds steep, it includes the cost of services school districts frequently struggle to provide in a cost-effective manner.

So far, in each school year the family has been forced to pay some or all of the tuition, pending a response from the DOE bureaucracy. Not including the 2022-23 school year, the Garcias are owed at least $27,324, plus attorney fees, according to court filings 

As the U.S. Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act requires, the district is supposed to serve children who need special education services along a continuum ranging from individualized help in a regular classroom to the kind of specialized placement Vincent requires. NYC students whose needs can’t be met in a typical school are often referred to District 75, a portfolio of separate DOE schools created to offer more intensive support. 

When there is a disagreement about a student’s proposed Individualized Education Program — the legal document spelling out their required services — the dispute goes . An impartial hearing officer — someone trained and paid by New York state — must be assigned within two days and the case heard in two weeks or less. 

The entire process should take no more than 75 days. But Garcia’s experience of having it drag on is common. 

“The reality is that people have been waiting for years to get the orders to get the services their children need,” says Rebecca Shore, director of litigation at Advocates for Children. “It’s not an issue of resources being available. It’s an issue of kids getting the services they need.”

Advocates and attorneys who represent special education families in New York City are quick to assert that the bottleneck — getting the DOE to comply with orders issued as the result of a single type of due process hearing — is a symptom of the much bigger problem. 

In 1979, a group of families , alleging that it failed to obey federal laws requiring the evaluation of all children with suspected disabilities and to provide them with appropriate services. Because the system has never been able to keep up with the need, pressure from that lawsuit resulted in a decision ordering the district to pay for a private school for the children it can’t serve. 

One outcome, according to Michael Rebell, a professor and the executive director of the Center for Educational Equity at Columbia University’s Teachers College, has been enough demand to fuel the creation of a large number of private schools offering specialized programs for children with disabilities.

“Because we have this gargantuan system, for years the department has had problems hiring enough teachers and offering enough programs,” he says. “There’s a paucity of services. And there’s also a large number of middle-class families who would prefer their kids go to private schools.” 

Recognizing that indeed some parents might try to game the system, the rules say families must prove to an independent hearing officer that the district has left them no alternative. Unless the department appeals and wins, the hearing officer’s decision goes into effect. 

There are two massive, resulting problems: A backlog of cases needing to be heard and the department’s inability to pay the parents, schools and providers who the hearing officers determine are owed money. 

In 2007, Advocates for Children and the department settled L.V., which took aim only at the issues involving the hearing officer process, with the district agreeing to take a series of steps to speed things up. For the next decade-plus, an outside auditor — the same progress monitor who flagged the Garcias’ numerous unfulfilled hearing orders — periodically to the court. 

Twelve years later, with her son entering third grade and three years of fruitless attempts to secure an accurate diagnosis and an appropriate school placement for him, Garcia asked for her first impartial hearing. She would leave one frustrating part of the special education system only to enter another.

For Garcia, the last straw

From kindergarten through second grade, Vincent bounced from school to school. Like lots of bright kids who struggle to read, he was initially dismissed as lazy, his mother says. 

“He’s always been able to participate verbally and in presentations, but not able to read a paragraph,” recalls Garcia. “People kept telling me, ‘Oh, he’s not trying hard enough. He’s so articulate.’”

The boy confounded the evaluators, his mother said. The first time Garcia had him assessed, the psychologist doing the testing came out to the waiting room to say she was ending the session because Vincent could not stop crying. “She’s like, ‘This isn’t good for him.’”

He was diagnosed as dyslexic, but it quickly became apparent that specialized literacy instruction wasn’t enough to address his needs, says Garcia. Extensive testing revealed that despite 20/20 vision with glasses, Vincent was literally not seeing the right letters in the right sequence. 

He had a condition called , which means his eyes do not track the same things. Because of this, he literally could not see lines of text. Letters appeared out of sequence and above or below the line. 

His eyes needed training to work together, rather than presenting him with different, jumbled images. And he needed assistive technology — chiefly simple text-to-speech apps — to make sense of written words. 

In response, his mother said the district placed Vincent in a school it operates for children with intellectual impairments, such as Down’s and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The program sent him back, pointing out that the DOE had misclassified the boy, placing him in a category of student the school did not serve.

But despite several months of back and forth over whether the district would accept its own diagnoses and come up with what it thought was an appropriate school, nothing happened.

For Garcia, it was the last straw. That’s when she hired her attorney, Spiro Schinagle, and started the process of having Vincent referred to a private school. In January 2020, the family sent the city education department saying that, because the district had failed to offer the child an appropriate placement, they were enrolling him in the Queens school they had found themselves. 

At a cost of almost $21,000 for the spring semester — which Garcia, who works for another part of the NYC schools, paid from savings — Vincent spent the rest of the year starting to catch up at his new school. In May 2020, an independent hearing officer ordered the district to reimburse the family. But it wasn’t until this spring that Garcia got reimbursed for the 2019-20 school year.

With the district failing to come up with an alternative, Vincent has remained at the private school ever since. Each year, Garcia has had to demand a new impartial hearing and then wait months for it to take place. After every favorable decision, the family waits for the district to comply with the new order.

In August 2021, facing the prospect of fronting more tuition payments, Garcia agreed to a $12,500 settlement for the 2020-21 academic year — money she has yet to see.

As the orders requiring the district to pay stacked up, Vincent was placed in a category where the city was no longer disputing his placement and now owed the tuition money directly to his school. It’s unclear from court documents how much of that money the school has been paid. The school did not respond to a request for comment.

The advent of the 2021-22 school year meant the opening of yet another case. This round took until mid-April for the hearing officer to issue an order obligating the district to pay — directly to the school this time — for the year that was then about to conclude. In turn, Garcia said the school was supposed to reimburse her $4,400 she had gone ahead and paid, but said it could not because the district did not supply the school with some required paperwork. 

“They knew that this child belonged in this particular school,” says Spiro Schinagle. “And the district time and time again refused to listen to its own [evaluator]…. So the parent had to lay out money year after year, and had to retain me, year after year, and go to a hearing, year after year. That, in and of itself, is outrageous.” 

‘The goal of this lawsuit was to change the system’

The bottleneck that’s trapped the Garcia family is growing, according to of the . In November 2021, it reported, there were more than 16,000 pending impartial hearing cases, a 34% increase from the year before. Some 9,000 cases had not even been assigned to a hearing officer. 

New York City, a separate analysis found, is responsible for 96% of all of the impartial hearings requested in the state. The number of pending cases had not budged by January 2022. Attorneys and advocates predict that the COVID backlog will further overwhelm the system, as the parents of children who may not have gotten needed therapies for years file cases. 

The council’s summary of the problems is straightforward: Because families still aren’t getting the services their children are entitled to, cases continue to be filed. Beyond that, there are not enough hearing officers and those that exist get delayed pay. 

Some officers have untenable caseloads; one had a docket of pending cases, as of January 2022. The Brooklyn facility where the hearings are held has no heat or air conditioning and no waiting areas or photocopiers. 

The “next steps” identified by the special master hint at how far from resolution those basic problems may be. The department, its report to the court suggests, should form a steering committee and appoint people to oversee “the areas of people, process and technology.”

Two pages of acronyms for various parts of the DOE bureaucracy precede 75 recommendations ranging from figuring out how to put accounts payable online so outside service providers can get paid to streamlining onerous civil service rules that complicate hiring enough people to handle the payments. 

The document is in fact so complicated that Advocates for Children, which represents the plaintiffs in the 20-year-old case, translated those recommendations it agrees with into plain English and put them onto a simple chart along with suggested timelines for implementation. 

The judge must now decide which recommendations to adopt, and how to hold the department accountable for progress. There is no deadline for that decision.

“We need this to happen in an expeditious manner,” says Shore, Advocates for Children’s litigation director. “The goal of this lawsuit was to change the system so that families whose children were not getting services could get their needs met.”

As it stands, Spiro Schinagle says, the amount the district is spending to pay for due process proceedings just continues to climb. “I don’t know how much it would cost to really assess different categories of kids who really need to be served and to put together credible programs,” she says. “They’re hemorrhaging money… that they could have been spending on all sorts of things.” 

The ongoing wrangling over the class-action suit isn’t likely to help the Garcias anytime soon. Vincent’s 2022-23 academic year started the same way as the three before it: with the DOE not paying its bills. 

With the auditor’s email as evidence, the family’s lawsuit finally seemed to get the district’s attention. In May, the DOE emailed Spiro Schinagle a document agreeing to pay the school directly for the academic year that just finished and to pay for Vincent to return in the fall. 

Garcia says she is still waiting on reimbursement for the settlement she agreed to for the money she laid out for the boy’s fourth-grade tuition, as well as some other payments. If the district pays everything she is owed, Spiro Schinagle says she will withdraw the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Vincent is thriving, his mother said. He started at his new school at age 8 reading at a kindergarten level and, now finishing sixth grade, has mastered third-grade literacy. He gets occupational therapy for his eyes at school, which means he and his mother no longer have to make a weekly trip to Manhattan from the Bronx for private care. 

Far from being lazy, as his past teachers suggested, Vincent works hard, his mother says, diligently doing his homework and signing himself up to be in the school play and serve on the student council. 

“He’s thriving. He has friends,” Garcia says. “His school loves him.”

These advanced learners, who may also receive special education services, can languish academically, their skills overlooked. The same holds true for children, and those learning to speak English. 

Experts say most teachers have only limited training in gifted education and tend to focus on students’ limitations rather than their strengths, leaving twice exceptional learners particularly vulnerable. 

In some cases, these students’ disabilities can mask their aptitude. In others, their accelerated nature can hide their challenges. 

In both instances, they often go without the support they need and may come to feel unintelligent as their confidence wanes.  

ages 3 through 21 were served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 2017-18, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. They represented but only 2.8 percent of the 3.3 million children enrolled in gifted programming that year, the last for which such data was compiled by the U.S. Department of Education. That figure jumped to , or 15 percent, in 2020-21. 

Experts say schools’ failure to help these students reach their potential amounts to a loss not only for the child themselves, but for the community and nation. 

“If they are not identified and supported properly, gifted students are often in classes below their abilities,” said Megan Cannella, family services manager at the , a Nevada-based nonprofit dedicated to profoundly gifted students age 18 and under. “The work can seem redundant, boring and slow. In these situations, students are typically not learning new information or growing their skills. Over time, this becomes discouraging, and they may underachieve … by rushing through work, doing the bare minimum or refusing to do work.”

Roughly 8% of the 846 students identified as gifted in the McAllen Independent School District in South Texas are twice exceptional. They have either a 504 plan, which provides for support services and accommodations, or are enrolled in special education classes, a district official said. 

Broward County Public Schools in Florida reported a slightly higher rate at 8.4%. Of the 1,364 students in Denver Public Schools’ gifted or highly gifted program in grades K-5, 131 have special needs, bringing the percentage to 9.6.

Children with either 504s or Individualized Education Plans, special schemes to help disabled students succeed in school, made up 10% of the 6,666 students in Florida’s Hillsborough County Public Schools gifted elementary school program, officials said. Orange County Public Schools in that same state came in at 9%.

Baltimore City Public Schools has made a concerted effort to include under-represented children in this group: It came in at the highest level with 358 of its 3,114 elementary-aged gifted and advanced students having a learning disability — nearly 11.5%.

Gifted and talented offerings across the country have been under fresh scrutiny since former Mayor Bill de Blasio moved, in October 2021, to end the program at the elementary school level because it perpetuated decades of discrimination against Black and Hispanic children. Eric Adams, who struggled in school himself with dyslexia and replaced de Blasio in January, decided to preserve and , despite its  

Deborah Alexander, of Astoria, Queens, recalls the frustration she and her son, Augustus, endured when he was in the first grade.

“He wasn’t learning to write letters properly,” she said. “His hand strength was not there. We had him evaluated by the school and they told us, erroneously, his grades were too good to qualify for services.”

Alexander, who has served on the Community Education Council for District 30 for a decade, is also a member of New York City’s or PLACE, which is currently investigating how twice exceptional children are being treated.

She asked, back when her son was young, if he could type on a computer rather than write by hand, but the request was denied. 

Augustus’s grades started to slip, but that all changed when he was allowed to type on a tablet in middle school. 

Augustus, diagnosed with “disorder of written expression,” a learning disability, and obsessive compulsive disorder, said the accommodation transformed his educational experience: The 15-year-old rising sophomore at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science said he no longer worries about his work being illegible. Finally, he could share all he knows, he said, adding that every child should be given the tools they need to succeed. 

“It’s really important that everyone can learn, not just for the larger benefit of society, but because it develops you,” he said. “Even just last year, if I had to write by hand, I don’t think I would be as prepared for next year or for college.”

Brandon Wright, editorial director at the , a conservative education policy think tank, understands this population.

“​​I had a bad stammer and was also gifted,” he said. “My school offered me a speech therapist, giving me the tools I needed to thrive in the classroom.”

But he knows not all children have this opportunity, which is why he advocates universal screening in which all students’ test scores are examined for standouts. 

But test results should be only one element, said Wright, who just launched a bi-monthly newsletter, , to chart the progress of gifted education in America. Teachers should be better trained to spot these students and they should be admitted on a rolling basis with “constant on-ramps,” giving children multiple opportunities to join such programs as their skills develop. 

Yet Nielsen Pereira, associate professor of Gifted, Creative and Talented Studies at Purdue University, who instructs educators, said many of his students, including those who have been in the classroom for years, “are surprised these types of students even exist.” 

Many college and university programs don’t mandate proficiency on the topic: An educator’s exposure might amount to a single lecture buried inside another, unrelated course. 

A lack of funding for these programs, which are not mandated at the federal level, helps explain why they are available in some locations and not others — and why their quality varies so widely, he said. 

“We focus so much on making sure everyone is meeting the minimum standards that we forgot about how to bring kids … to their highest potential,” he said. 

And there are other characteristics among twice exceptional children that can make them hard to spot. Not all have high marks: Disillusionment with school coupled with the challenges of their disabilities can cause them to give up, further camouflaging their talents.��

Felicity Ross, who teaches mathematics to gifted children inside Baltimore City Public Schools, said it’s easy for teachers without proper training to correlate low test scores to low skills. 

“It can take years to diagnose kids with disabilities — and years to identify them as being gifted,” she said. “This is particularly tough for new teachers.”

But, she said, there are tactics that can help: When it comes to evaluating those children who have trouble writing, for example, educators should consider other factors.

“We need to listen to them verbally,” she said. “What they can tell us and explain might be at a different level than what they can write down or show. For math kids, they can’t explain it … but produce a correct answer.”

The problem there, she said, is that current standards around mathematics require students to show their progress and explain the strategy. 

“But that doesn’t align with their skills and abilities,” she said. 

Megan Roddie, 25, graduated high school two years early, earned two master’s degrees and enjoys a thriving career in cybersecurity. Diagnosed with autism at age 12, she didn’t recognize her own abilities for several years and the teachers in her Houston-area schools didn’t know how to handle her. 

“I talked a lot … and out of turn,” she said. “I was ahead of the curriculum I was given … and when I got bored, I acted out. They decided I wasn’t paying attention and that was an issue.”

But why pay attention when she already knew the answers, she reasoned.  

And, she said, her teachers didn’t always recognize her needs: When she scored stellar marks in mathematics in middle school, they moved her to the back of the classroom so the struggling kids could sit up front. 

“I felt like I was being punished, taken away from my favorite spot,” she said. “Especially as an autistic kid, you don’t mess with my routine.”

It takes time and communication for teachers to learn what their students need. And, experts say, teachers should remember children do not have to be advanced in all subjects to be considered gifted. 

“Some kids would benefit from advanced math but may not benefit at the moment from an advanced English class — though that could change in the future,” the Fordham Institute’s Wright said. “We don’t want to have exclusionary gifted services, but a spectrum of increased intensity that meets as many kids as possible where they are.”

Homero Chávez, the Early College Program director at Gadsden Elementary School District No. 32 in San Luis, Arizona, at the nation’s southern border, relies heavily on student test results to identify those who are gifted in mathematics. 

The highest scoring on standardized exams at each campus in the 5,000-student district are invited, starting in the fifth grade, to join a program that allows them to take for-credit college-level courses — and the ACT. 

Disabilities are not considered in the admissions process although students are accommodated as needed, Chávez said. 

“If they wish to be in a high-level class and they excel, why not?” he said. “They do have the right to be there.”