We Didn't Get Here Overnight, Special Education Has Been Broken for Decades
There's a lot of noise, with plenty of people writing and talking about the “gutting” of U.S. Department of Education. Instead of adding to the noise, let's look at the silence.
Instead of writing, I’ve spent the last few days swallowing bile, fielding texts/calls from parents, and trying to wrap my head around the moral outrage on display—and my own feelings about the state of U.S. Department of Education (USDOE). Every time I read or hear the word gutted (as in, Department of Education has been gutted), the bile starts to rise and I flash back to COVID, the last time journalists and politicians were so vocal about special education, when our most vulnerable population became the hook on which outrage, headlines, articles, interviews, speeches, and elections were hung.
Yesterday, I watched a major network news host say special education advocates are “sounding the alarm”. What alarm? The one that’s been blaring non-stop for decades, because special education has been broken for decades? That the host (or her writers) thought “sounding the alarm” was appropriate says everything about how little attention they’ve paid.
Where were the elected officials, journalists, and all others previously? They show up for spikes in attention (COVID and now the furloughs and RIFs), but vanish when clicks and views drop off.
We didn’t get here overnight. The biggest difference between last week and today is that more people are talking about it.
So yes, I find the current moral outrage disgusting. I’m back to swallowing bile and shaking my head, wondering when the finger-pointing and posturing will stop, when will people put their differences aside and work together, and when a long-broken system will be fixed.
Still reading? The above anger didn’t turn you off? Good. Here are a few things to consider.
50 Years of Failing to Fully Fund IDEA
Where’s the moral outrage about this?
In the last fifty years, the federal government has never fully funded Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA).
From Congressional Research Service:
“In 1975, with the enactment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142), it was determined that the federal government would pay up to 40% of APPE to assist with this excess cost.123 This 40% of APPE is often referred to as “full funding.” In FY2024, the Part B grants to states appropriation of $14.2 billion provided approximately 10.9% of APPE.124”
No political party has ever ensured full funding. Democrats, Republicans, and everyone in between have failed for 50 years—and don’t get me started on all the news outlets that have failed to cover this, too. (BIG thank you to Education Week, which has repeatedly covered this issue.)
What’s crazy is that ensuring IDEA is fully funded isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s politically smart. I’ve watched politicians go after one voting group after another for years, yet a large one is sitting right in front of them waiting to have massive needs addressed.
Just looking at Dyslexia alone, the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity reports:
“Dyslexia affects 20 percent of the population and represents 80–90 percent of all those with learning disabilities. It is the most common of all neuro-cognitive disorders.”
Let’s be blunt: On Dyslexia alone, more potential voters who have Dyslexia are born and/or reach voting age every day, and that 20 percent of voters is potentially larger once you include parents and others who aren’t always among the 20 percent, who will support Dyslexia being addressed. Even if politicians don’t care (although, I hope they do), that’s a lot of voters to have support you.
Parents Don’t Care if USDOE is “Gutted”
Yes. Some parents don’t care if USDOE is gutted. They’re not happy about furloughs and RIFs, and don’t wish anyone ill will and/or the loss of their job, but many parents already felt the USDOE failed them long ago.
Why?
Because USDOE failed to consistently hold states accountable under IDEA. Instead of protection, families watched irreparable harm done to their children. Parents divorced. Students graduated without having their needs met. Some fell into addiction, others dropped out, ended up in jail, and/or attempted suicide. Parents drained savings, maxed out credit cards, and did everything else they could to support their children.
It is hard to feel sympathy toward an agency that failed to stop your state’s noncompliance while your child suffered. Many parents provided OSEP staff with evidence and testimony, only to see no finding of noncompliance, findings that took years to correct, and/or silence altogether.
Let’s look at Texas and Virginia as one example.
Texas Circa 2016
In 2016, Houston Chronicle published its groundbreaking series “Denied: How Texas keeps tens of thousands of children out of special education.” Texas Education Agency (TEA) practices resulted in a cap on special education enrollment, denying services to thousands of children to save money. During that time period, a friend’s daughter was repeatedly denied services in Texas to address Dyslexia, so Houston Chronicle’s series didn’t come as a surprise, but it was nauseating just the same. (BIG thank you to Houston Chronicle for doing what parents nationwide wish their papers of record would do.) My friend’s daughter, possibly the sweetest-natured child I’ve known, started hating school, crying, and routinely vomiting due to the anxiety of going to school where she was treated as a problem. Her “negative” behavior, rather than her need for immediate interventions to address Dyslexia became the school district’s focus.
As Houston Chronicle pointed out, my friend and her daughter weren’t alone. Parents statewide knew there were problems and fought hard—and finally USDOE investigated and started issuing Differentiated Monitoring and Support (DMS) findings.
At the time, Kimberly Richey, the just-confirmed Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, served as Acting Assistant Secretary/Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), which oversees OSERS. My understanding is that the TEA investigation was the largest investigation into a state at that time.
Three years after OSEP released its initial DMS findings, TEA had yet to come into compliance. October 1, 2021, OSEP issued two more DMS letters to TEA, addressing the state’s continued noncompliance. In its letter regarding the state’s corrective action response, OSEP stated:
“Over the last three years, OSEP has communicated with TEA about, and reviewed documents regarding, TEA’s continued noncompliance with IDEA requirements related to child find, the provision of a free appropriate public education (FAPE), and the exercise of TEA’s general supervision and monitoring responsibilities. OSEP has carefully reviewed the actions TEA has taken toward correcting the identified noncompliance . . .
“Based on this, OSEP concludes that the State has not completed all the required actions necessary to address the findings of longstanding noncompliance. . . .
“As a result of the longstanding nature of the State’s noncompliance with these critical IDEA requirements, OSEP is designating TEA’s FFY 2021 IDEA Part B grant award as subject to specific conditions, pursuant to our authority under 2 C.F.R. 200.208 and sections 603 and 616(g) of IDEA.”
In its letter regarding the maintenance of state financial support of special education, OSEP formally reduced Texas’s future IDEA allocation by $33.3 million for failing to maintain state financial support:
“Texas is not eligible for a portion of a future section 611 grant under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), in the amount of $33,302,428, because it did not meet its obligation to maintain State financial support for special education and related services in State fiscal year (SFY) 2012. 20 U.S.C. §1412(a)(18)(A)–(B) and (d)(2). The purpose of this current letter is to inform you that the determination is now final, and the Department will reduce Texas’s IDEA section 611 award in a future Federal fiscal year due to the State’s failure to maintain State financial support for special education and related services in SFY 2012. The issuance of this final determination was delayed because of discussions between the Department and the Texas Education Agency (TEA) regarding TEA’s settlement proposal, which had initially included the SFY 2012 shortfall.”
Meanwhile, in Virginia . . .
It was exciting when Houston Chronicle’s series hit in 2016. I remember forwarding the stories to friends, especially those with kids who have Dyslexia, and our “what-if” discussions about the same thing happening in Virginia. What if the Washington Post or NPR or another major outlet local to Northern Virginia in particular did a deep dive like Houston Chronicle? What if OSEP issued a DMS report about Virginia? What if Virginia Office of the State Inspector General got involved? What if? What if? What if? The possibilities were endless.
And then nothing happened. 2016 went by. 2017 went by. 2018 went by. 2019 went by, but included extraordinary work from NPR’s Jenny Abamu on Fairfax County Public Schools’ (FCPS) egregious restraint and seclusion practices. (BIG thank you, Jenny. You made a difference.) However, the national outrage that should have followed didn’t. FCPS’s restraint and seclusion practices should have made national news and should have resulted in major leadership changes within FCPS, but that didn’t happen either. The same goes for all the work organizations such as Decoding Dyslexia have done. Texas isn’t the only state in which the identification of Dyslexia is a problem. It’s been an uphill slog for the parents and yet the number of children going unidentified and/or whose unique needs still are going unmet is inexcusable.
In 2020, things changed. COVID hit and FCPS’s failure to launch its online learning platform was so spectacularly awful that you’d have to be living under a rock not to hear about it from all the news outlets that picked up the story. A county with massive amounts of money and resources screwed the pooch not once, and not really even twice, but instead over and over as problems with the platform continued to persist.
That same year, Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) and OSEP released three reports between the two of them, in a matter of about six months. See: JLARC’s Reports K-12 Special Education in Virginia and Operations and Performance of the Virginia Department of Education, as well as The U.S. Department of Education’s Differentiated Monitoring and Support Report on Virginia
VDOE’s response to OSEP’s findings was to dispute them in a ten-page letter instead of committing to immediate compliance. It was a move that suggested the state would not have self-corrected without federal pressure. (Thank you, Virginia Mercury, for your coverage.)
January 2021, within weeks of the JLARC report’s release, OCR announced it opened an investigation into FCPS and three other school districts over “‘disturbing reports’ involving school districts denying students with disabilities equal access to education during the pandemic.”
Things got exciting again. Change could possibly be on the horizon. And yet . . Problems persisted. The 2021 OCR investigation should have made headlines. No such luck. Politico ran the story on its portal that has a paywall attached, so the distribution was limited. November 2022, OCR released findings, but problems continued because FCPS refused to implement IEPs developed in response to OCR’s findings with FCPS in a timely manner. In 2024, a state complaint resulted in FCPS being found at fault for systemic noncompliance regarding its failure to implement IEPs in a timely manner. Rather than OCR staying on top of the issue, parents had to file state complaints. Early 2025, a FOIA request reflecting information on OCR’s monitoring of FCPS resulted in documentation supporting that, more than two years after OCR’s finding, FCPS continued to struggle to fully implement its November 2022 resolution agreement with OCR.
Reduced Funding in Texas, but not Virginia, and Noncompliance Everywhere
After three years of failing to come into compliance, OSEP reduced TEA’s funding. Yet, when VDOE reached a similar three-year mark, it didn’t face the same fiscal consequence. Why?
The inconsistency highlights a broader problem: IDEA enforcement varies widely by state. In 2025, OSEP found Massachusetts out of compliance for issues similar to those cited in Virginia five years earlier. The question remains, why are similar, and often identical, violations recurring across states despite years of monitoring?
Military families in particular experience it. Virginia has a large military population. Imagine families facing noncompliance in Virginia, only to move to another state and face the same noncompliance, even though OSEP finally addressed it when they were still in Virginia. Or, imagine having services for your child in one state and then moving to Virginia and being told by the school district that it will not provide those services, does not believe the services are needed, or needs more information. It’s devastating.
Parents Don’t Want States in Full Control of Special Education
A look at OSEP’s DMS reports since 2018 shows that federal monitoring eventually made real impact in places like Texas and Virginia, something those states had resisted for years.
Parents know the idea of a “small federal footprint” in special education is a joke. Left to their own devices, many states will not fix their own noncompliance, which is something supported by Texas’ and Virginia’s actions/inactions alone.
Back to Journalists
In 2021, I ended an article about Texas and Virginia with this:
“COVID sparked outrage about the state of education in Virginia, but we need more. Parents in Virginia must advocate. They must make their voices heard. They must be loud. And, they must NOT be afraid. . . . And to the journalists in the area: We need you. We need you to dig deep. We need your help.”
Where have you been since 2021? Where have you been since 1975?
For the Advocates and Parents
If you limit yourself to one political party, one type of voice, or one group of allies, you limit your ability to help children. You don’t have to like someone to learn from them. We become better when we are exposed to different perspectives.
A small example:
This past week, I found out a special-education law firm reposted more than a dozen of my articles on its social media page without attribution. When I contacted the firm and asked for credit or removal, the advocate who responded said they liked my articles, but had been contacted by some followers who didn’t like me, regretted I wasn’t seen as an ally, and that the articles had been removed. The advocate didn’t specifically state, “We ran your articles without attribution because a few of our followers don’t like you,” but that was my takeaway. Felt like gaslighting, like being blamed for someone else doing the wrong thing. After multiple emails from me advising the firm 1) to remove or add attribution and 2) that it hadn’t removed all of my articles as it said it did, the firm removed them.
What bothers me most isn’t lost credit or how others feel about me. I’m bothered because it was a missed opportunity to model integrity and unity in a field built on trust, and during a time that needs more if both. If you value someone’s work enough to share it, give credit, no matter who created the work. Stand tall. Use your backbone. Prioritize sharing important information above fearing judgement.
And, frankly, how can we expect kids to properly provide attribution if the adults model a different standard? Attribution isn’t optional. It reflects respect, transparency, and fairness, all of which matter deeply in advocacy work.
Words are hollow without actions
Actions not Words
Circling back around to where I started . . . I’m mad and I’m disgusted. Plenty of people are writing about the “gutting” of USDOE, so I won’t add to that noise.
Instead, I want to point out the silence.
Fifty years of failure is what silence looks like in special education. For fifty years, elected officials, journalists, and parents have had daily opportunities to be outraged and to work together to fix the system. Yet, here we are.