Two major functions of the Department of Education are funding and enforcing education for students with disabilities. I tackle these next in our series about what to do with different US education jobs as the department ends. Andrew Gillen first covered student loans, and then I wrote about the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
A lot of what the Education Department does for students with disabilities is civil rights enforcement, particularly under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) but also under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014. As discussed regarding all OCR functions, enforcement of civil rights for students with disabilities should be moved to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which is already tasked with civil rights enforcement for people with disabilities in education and beyond. If the DOJ believes it needs more resources to take on work formerly done by the OCR, it should make the case to Congress.
Civil rights enforcement is a proper federal role under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Providing funding for students with disabilities, while well-intentioned, is not.
Ideally, all funding, in both formula and discretionary grant forms, would be phased out. But if it is not, responsibility for distributing education funds, such as the $14.2 billion in formula grants to states under the IDEA, should go to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Workforce and rehabilitation funding should go to the Department of Labor (DOL). The HHS has its own disability services—not to mention its Office for Civil Rights—while the DOL already works with people with disabilities.
It would also be wise, if they are not eliminated, to consolidate the many discretionary grant programs into block grants that states can distribute according to their particular needs. It is also worth looking into curbing incentives to overdiagnose disabilities. While many factors likely play into the increases in reported disabilities that we have seen over the decades (shown below), it is notable that while physical disabilities do not appear to have grown, diagnoses of specific learning disabilities, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism—disabilities that are difficult to detect, unlike, say, blindness—have increased considerably.
Federal disability funding and accommodations create an incentive for students to receive such diagnoses. Parents might push for a diagnosis to ensure their children are not penalized relative to their peers who are given additional time for schoolwork and exams. And schools might overdiagnose to secure additional funding or accommodations for students in test-based accountability regimes. Such overdiagnosis would be a wasteful use of resources and could reduce support and services for students who truly need them.
Finally, federal disability law creates a “lawyers’ playground”—an inherently legalistic, conflictual system in which parents who think their children need particular services or educational approaches must battle school districts. A better solution is education choice, with money following children to diverse educational options, an approach we have seen explode in the past few years. Often, it is a change in pedagogical approach, not treatment for a disability, that a child needs.
More freedom and parental power, not bureaucratic federal promises, should be the focus of assisting students with disabilities.