What The Hell America!

Time and again, the U.S. Department of Education has been the last resort for parents who say the state of Idaho has failed to educate their children. The federal agency in 2023 ordered Idaho to stop blocking some students with learning disabilities, like dyslexia, from special education. That same year, it flagged that the state’s own reviews of districts and charters obscured the fact that just 20% were fully complying with the federal disability law. Last year, it told the state it must end long delays in services for infants and toddlers with disabilities, which could include speech or physical therapy.

Now President Donald Trump has pledged to dismantle the department.

Idaho’s superintendent of public instruction Debbie Critchfield has celebrated the proposal. She insisted that the move would not change the requirement that states provide special education to students who need it. That would take an act of Congress.

But parents and advocates for students with disabilities say they are worried that no one will effectively ensure schools follow special education law.

“Historically, when left to their own devices, states don’t necessarily do the right thing for kids with disabilities and their families,” said Larry Wexler, a former division director at the federal Office of Special Education Programs, who retired last year after decades at the department.

Former federal Education Department employees who worked on special education monitoring said oversight measures would likely be hampered by the layoffs, which included attorneys who worked with the special education office to provide state monitoring reports.

Gregg Corr, a former division director with that office, said that without the group of attorneys who were focused on enforcing special education law, it will be “really difficult for staff to finalize and issue these reports to states.” He added there may also be a reluctance to take on more complicated issues without running them by attorneys.

“What might have been, you know, inconsistent with the legal requirements six months ago may be fine now — it just depends on how it’s interpreted,” Wexler said.

Before Federal Law, Millions Denied Services

For parents who have been fighting for services for years, the federal oversight has been critical.

After Ashley Brittain, an attorney and mom to children with dyslexia, moved to Idaho in 2021, she realized a key problem: Idaho’s criteria for qualifying students with specific learning disabilities such as dyslexia or dysgraphia was so narrow it disqualified some eligible students from receiving services, she said.

Together with Robin Zikmund, the founder of Decoding Dyslexia Idaho who has a son with dyslexia and dysgraphia, Brittain has spent years trying to get the state to acknowledge the disability and provide services to dozens of kids who needed help.

“We’re at the table time and time again, at the eligibility table, where school teams wouldn’t qualify our dyslexic students,” Zikmund previously told the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica. “And it was like, ‘What is going on?’”

Brittain called state officials and told them they were breaking the law. State officials disagreed. No one took action, she said. In 2022, she wrote to the Office of Special Education Programs. In the letter she sent to the federal department, she said the Idaho Department of Education, under former superintendent Sherri Ybarra, was “refusing to entertain any conversations” about changing the way it determined which students were eligible for special education. Ybarra could not be reached for comment.

Before Congress passed what is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975 and created the U.S. Department of Education as an agency under the Cabinet about five years later, Brittain would have been on her own.

At the time, nearly 1.8 million students with disabilities weren’t being served by the public schools, according to estimates. Some states had laws prohibiting students with certain disabilities from attending public schools, according to the federal government’s own history.

The law granted students with disabilities access to a “free appropriate public education” — fitting the individual needs of the student — and gave money to states to fulfill the promise. Now, the law also guarantees infants and toddlers with disabilities access to early interventions, such as physical or speech therapy.

The U.S. Department of Education has since been responsible for making sure states follow the law, providing reviews of state performance, distributing money and offering technical assistance to help states improve learning outcomes for students in special education.

The department conducts an annual review of each state, and a more intensive one that’s supposed to be completed roughly every five years. The annual reviews look at discipline numbers, graduation rates and test scores to identify problems and help states to fix them. A five-year review includes a visit to the state and a look at state policies, student data and annual reports. When states need to take corrective action, the federal special education office monitors that they are making the changes.

Idaho is one of about a dozen states currently being monitored, according to the most recent updates on the federal agency’s website.

Parent complaints can also trigger a review, as was the case with Brittain in Idaho. After Brittain alleged that the state was wrongfully keeping kids with dyslexia and other disabilities from special education, she waited over a year before she got an answer from the Office of Special Education Programs: She was right. Idaho, it turned out, accepted a lower percentage of students with specific learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, into special education compared to other states — about half the national average, according to the most recent data reported to the U.S. Department of Education from the 2022-2023 school year.

By then, Idaho had a new state superintendent of public instruction, Critchfield, for whom Brittain campaigned. The Office of Special Education Programs told Critchfield in 2023 that the state needed to demonstrate its policies complied with federal law or update them.

In response, the Idaho Department of Education has updated its special education manual, which has since been approved by the Legislature. It has also directed school districts to review every student found ineligible for special education since 2023 to determine if they needed to be reevaluated.

Parents in Idaho celebrated the victory, which could make it easier for some kids to qualify in a state that has one of the lowest percentages of students who receive special education. But they acknowledged the fix wasn’t perfect and left out students who may have been found ineligible for special education before the federal office identified the problem. The state isn’t tracking the number of students who have since qualified due to the change.

Nicole Fuller, a policy manager at the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said a case like this, in which some students are being missed, “truly underscores the need for federal oversight, and, of course, holding states accountable for accurately identifying disabilities.”

Federal oversight isn’t perfect. By the time Idaho addressed Brittain’s complaint, the state had been out of compliance since at least 2015. States that fall out of compliance can be at risk of losing federal funding, although that penalty does not appear to have been used in decades.

The federal government has never fulfilled its promise to fund 40% of each state’s special education costs, but Idaho relied on federal funding for about 18% — around $60 million — of its special education budget during the 2022-2023 school year, state officials said. The rest is made up by the state or by local school districts through referendums. A recent report by an independent Idaho state office estimated special education was underfunded by more than $80 million in 2023.

But U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, appointed by Trump in March, has said that closing the department wouldn’t mean “cutting off funds from those who depend on them” but would eliminate the “bureaucracy” and regulations associated with them.

Critchfield, Idaho’s superintendent, said on Idaho-based The Ranch Podcast that teachers involved in special education spend a lot of time filling out paperwork instead of “focusing on how to help that child be successful.” The changes are about “removing the bureaucracy.”

But Critchfield acknowledged that cuts at the federal level could pose challenges if states have to take on more of an oversight role.

“As much as I am a champion of states doing that, the reality is there would be implications for Idaho and our department,” she said in a statement to the Statesman and ProPublica. The state is looking at what it can do to prepare and “where gaps would exist” should more responsibilities fall to the states.

Zikmund, the advocate who praised Critchfield for being responsive to parents and having an “open-door policy,” said that parents could be better off after the changes with good leadership at the state level, but without it, they could face a “train wreck.”

One test will come in June, when the Office of Special Education Programs is expected to release reports telling states how they performed in their annual reviews. The layoffs and restructuring under Trump are making some advocates question if the federal government will truly hold states to account.