Timothy Allison, a collaborative special education teacher in Birmingham, Ala., works with a student at Sun Valley Elementary School on Thursday, Sept. 8, 2022. The school district is struggling to fill around 50 teaching spots, including 15 in special education, despite $10,000 signing bonuses for special education teachers. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves)
When Congress passed what was then the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, it made a historic commitment: every child with a disability would receive a free appropriate public education. In exchange for federal funding, states agreed to guarantee procedural protections, individualized programming, and access to the general education in the least restrictive environment.
Historically, the Individuals with Disabilities Education or IDEA Act has been a bipartisan priority. Yet today, this covenant is being tested in ways that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago.
Since its last reauthorization in 2004, IDEA has operated in a state of legislative limbo. Congress has continued to appropriate funds under its existing framework, but the law has not been meaningfully updated to reflect the realities of a post-pandemic educational landscape — one marked by increased staffing shortages, growing identification rates, and an explosion in the complexity of student needs.
Unlike the Science of Reading movement, which has generated bipartisan enthusiasm and forward momentum, special education finds itself on the other side of the policy ledger: vulnerable, underfunded and increasingly exposed.
The federal government has never fulfilled its original funding promise under IDEA. When the law was enacted, Congress pledged to cover 40 percent of the excess cost of educating students with disabilities. It has never come close. For decades, federal contributions have hovered, by some accounts, near 18 percent, leaving states and local districts to absorb costs that continue to climb. Now, with sweeping federal budget proposals targeting education spending and the ongoing restructuring of the U.S. Department of Education, the gap between promise and practice threatens to widen further.
The current administration’s posture toward the Department of Education raises particular concerns for students with disabilities. The Office of Special Education Programs, long the federal sentinel responsible for ensuring state compliance with IDEA, has seen its capacity diminished through staffing reductions and organizational restructuring. Monitoring, enforcement and technical assistance — the very mechanisms through which the federal government holds states accountable for serving students with disabilities — are being hollowed out at precisely the moment they are most needed.
At the same time, the rapid expansion of school choice and voucher programs creates a parallel tension. When students with disabilities use public funds to attend private schools, IDEA protections do not always follow. Private schools are not necessarily required to provide the procedural safeguards that have defined special education for half a century. The result is a growing population of students with disabilities navigating systems that have no legal obligation to meet their needs — funded, in part, by the same federal dollars that were designed to protect them.
A clear pathway for addressing these challenges can be seen in the Science of Reading Act, which seeks to align federal literacy funding with evidence-based practices “to ensure state literacy plans reflect these evidence-based approaches.” However, there is no “Science of Special Education” movement generating bipartisan legislation. There is no House committee unanimously passing a bill to strengthen IDEA’s core protections. Instead, there is silence — or worse, erosion.
States, meanwhile, are left holding the bag. Some have stepped up, investing state dollars to fill the federal gap. Others have not. The result is a patchwork of protections that varies wildly depending on where a child with a disability happens to live. This is precisely the inequity IDEA was designed to prevent. The staffing crisis compounds the challenge. Across the country, districts report critical shortages of special education teachers, school psychologists, speech-language pathologists, and related service providers. Caseloads have ballooned. Timelines for evaluations are missed. Individualized Education Programs are written but not implemented with fidelity. And in too many cases, the procedural protections that remain on paper have become aspirational rather than operational.
For families, the lived experience of special education in 2026 often feels like navigating a system designed to say no. Due process remains available in theory, but in practice, it is expensive, adversarial, and inaccessible to the families who need it most. The asymmetry of power between school districts and individual families has only grown as federal oversight has receded.
This is not a call for nostalgia. IDEA is imperfect and always has been, but the current moment demands honest reckoning: the federal infrastructure that now undergirds the rights of 7.5 million students with disabilities is being weakened — not through dramatic repeal, but through quiet disinvestment, deregulation and institutional neglect.
If Congress can find the bipartisan will to define how children should be taught to read, surely it can summon the same resolve to reaffirm how children with disabilities should be educated. The students IDEA was designed to serve cannot afford to wait any longer.
About the Author:
Ashley White is an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison with the Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education.
