The government has abandoned its commitment to an equitable education for all children—if it ever had one.

November 1, 2025, 7 AM ET

The Trump administration has taken the government shutdown as an opportunity to end federal oversight of the education services offered to more than 8 million children with disabilities in America. Last month, the Department of Education attempted to fire nearly every staff member left at the Office of Special Education Programs—an action now stuck in litigation. The department had already canceled millions of dollars in grants to provide teacher training and parental support for students with disabilities, and it is now “exploring additional partnerships” to move special-education services elsewhere in the government. Ostensibly, these cuts and administrative changes are part of a broader effort to empower states. But whatever the motive, the result is clear: The government has abandoned its commitment to an equitable education for all children.

This attack did not come out of nowhere. Over the course of five decades, Congress has repeatedly weakened the transformative law that has governed education for disabled students, putting it in the precarious and dysfunctional position it was in when Donald Trump took office.

President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act into law on November 29, 1975. It mandated that all children with any form of disability must be provided a free public education and that they be educated alongside children without disabilities “to the maximum extent appropriate.” This landmark legislation has improved the lives of generations of children with disabilities. In 1970, only one in five children with disabilities were educated in America’s public schools. Some states had laws explicitly excluding those whom schools deemed “uneducable.” Many of those children spent their lives in institutions. Others were homeschooled or received very little formal education at all. Today, 15 percent of public-school students are served by the law, which was reauthorized and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act in 1990.

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Although a right to an education is not explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment established that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the laws.” IDEA is an effort to uphold that guarantee. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 called for the racial integration of public schools and other institutions, but it left disability discrimination unaddressed. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 did not require states to educate students with disabilities; it did, however, establish funding grants to states that provided services. The Education of the Handicapped Act of 1970 solidified the core grant program that provides funding to states and school districts and is still part of IDEA today. What is remarkable about IDEA is that it combined tenets from all these precedents. IDEA isn’t just a declaration of the right of students with disabilities to an education. It’s also a funding policy—a shared financial partnership among federal, state, and local governments—to provide an appropriate public education to all students with disabilities.

For states to follow this mandate, the federal government knew it would need to share the costs of well-trained teachers, support staff, and the educational equipment needed. In a version of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act introduced in 1972, New Jersey Senator Harrison Williams explained what Congress was taking on. “It is hard to argue to the States that the federal government is serious about full educational opportunity for all handicapped children when we are not willing to invest money to make this goal a reality,” he wrote. “We will have to put our money where our mouth is.”

The law originally said that the federal government would contribute up to 5 percent of the average per-pupil expenditure by 1978 and would increase its share incrementally to up to 40 percent by 1982. But Congress’s commitment to funding the law has been tepid since the beginning. Access to education for the nation’s children with disabilities was not a priority for Ford, who chose to sign the bill into law without any formal ceremony. In a message accompanying the new law, he admitted that he had signed only reluctantly. “Even the strongest supporters of this measure,” he wrote, “know as well as I that they are falsely raising the expectations of the groups affected by claiming authorization levels which are excessive and unrealistic.” The bill, he believed, was promising more than it could deliver.

Congress’s backtracking on its initial commitment began almost immediately. The law had established a maximum authorization of 40 percent, which permitted Congress to perennially allocate less. Funding has fluctuated, but it has never been near that maximum share. From 2004 to 2006, the federal contribution was its highest, at 18 percent. We are now a long way from the partnership that Senator Williams envisioned. Last year, federal funding for IDEA was 10.9 percent of the average per-pupil expenditure.

At the same time that Congress has reneged and reneged, the costs of special education have risen dramatically. As diagnostic practices and screenings have improved in the past 50 years—and as the diagnostic criteria for autism in particular have expanded to include a wider range of symptoms—the number of students served by IDEA has increased. In the past decade alone, the number of students served by IDEA has grown 17 percent. “We’re not cutting any of the IDEA funding,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon claimed at a Senate appropriations subcommittee on June 3. Technically, she’s right—but that money is covering an ever-smaller share of the nation’s costs.

As the federal government cancels funding streams and fires the employees in charge of overseeing special-education programs nationwide, the result will be an uneven, state-by-state patchwork of special education. Kids with disabilities in some states will get the support they need to learn alongside their peers and earn a high-school diploma. Kids in other states will be kept in segregated classrooms without any preparation for a prosperous future when they age out of the public-school system. That future is already playing out across the country to some extent, but it’s about to get even worse.

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To receive federal funding, each state must submit an annual performance report. This year, more states were labeled “needing assistance” in following IDEA for school-age children and young adults than were “meeting requirements.” Even in states such as Texas that are meeting requirements according to this report, parents fight an uphill battle with school districts to get their kids what they deserve. Carol Caron’s daughter, Ellie, has Down syndrome and is in fifth grade in the Aledo Independent School District, near Fort Worth. The district insists that Ellie belongs in a “functional academics” classroom, learning an alternative curriculum that, according to Carol, drastically underestimates what Ellie is capable of achieving. Carol has filed several complaints with the Texas Education Authority about Ellie’s placement. She wants Ellie to be educated in a classroom with her nondisabled peers. Among other benefits, this would ensure that Ellie is being appropriately challenged. But the school district has repeatedly refused.

Texas is one of several states with a track record of violating IDEA regulations. In 2018, the TEA submitted to the Office of Special Education Programs and the Department of Education its plan to correct a state-imposed limit that discouraged school districts from identifying more than 8.5 percent of students for special-education services. Texas saved billions by ignoring the medically diagnosed disabilities of tens of thousands of students. By this summer, OSEP had determined that the TEA had removed these restrictions. But without federal staff, there will be no way to continue monitoring compliance in Texas or in any other state.

In response to complaints filed by Carol and other parents, the TEA directed the Aledo School District to review its placement and assessment of students with disabilities, like Ellie. But Carol doesn’t believe that the district will change course. “What is practiced is different from what the school district puts on paper,” she told me. “There are no sanctions with teeth.” Carol filed a complaint with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights last spring, but she doubts that her concerns will ever be addressed. Ellie’s classroom placement hasn’t changed, and without any federal oversight, she is running out of options.

Like Ellie, my daughter, Louisa, has Down syndrome. But we live in Ohio, not Texas, and Louisa’s educational trajectory looks remarkably different. Now in eighth grade, she has learned beside peers with and without disabilities since preschool. Ohio is far from perfect; I wouldn’t say that it has an exceptional commitment to serving students with disabilities. But Louisa has benefited from a more inclusive and academically rigorous approach to special education than Ellie. With the Office of Special Education Programs a shell of its former self, this disparity—a child’s education and future determined by where she lives—will only deepen. It demonstrates how ending federal oversight of IDEA isn’t about giving control to the states. It is about denying the civil rights of all students with disabilities. Whether students like Ellie and Louisa have access to education will not be determined by law, but by chance.

About the Author

Pepper Stetler is the author of A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother’s Reckoning with the IQ Test and a professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

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