In its quest to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, the Trump administration wants to let states police themselves when it comes to educating students with disabilities, a move many teachers and parents fear will strip away crucial federal oversight and deny vulnerable children the services they’re guaranteed under law.
In October, the Trump administration fired nearly all the employees in the U.S. Department of Education office that’s responsible for enforcing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the landmark federal civil rights law that guarantees students with disabilities the right to a free and quality public education. A federal judge blocked the layoffs a few days later, in response to a lawsuit filed by federal workers unions.
In addition to making sure states and school districts follow the law, the office distributes billions in federal funding to help states educate students with disabilities such as autism, deafness, developmental delays and dyslexia.
The court ruling halting the layoffs is likely just a temporary setback as Trump proceeds with his broader mission of closing the federal department. Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon have said their goals are to reduce bureaucracy and return more education responsibilities to the states.
Neither the Department of Education nor the White House, which are operating with fewer communications officers because of the government shutdown, responded to Stateline requests for comment.
Congress has never fully funded special education at 40% per-pupil costs promised to states under IDEA. Funding has fluctuated over the years; in 2024, it was about 10.9%. Federal IDEA funding is expected to continue, though without federal oversight from the Education Department.
Disability rights and education advocates worry that most states don’t have the resources — or, in some cases, the will — to adequately police and protect the rights of students with disabilities.
Some states in recent years have failed to provide adequate special education services, prompting investigation from the feds. Just 19 states meet the requirements for serving students with disabilities from ages 3 through 21, according to the most recent annual review from the Department of Education, released in June.
“Shifting all of that to the state and away from the feds is not something we’ve been able to wrap our heads around,” said Quinn Perry, the deputy director of the Idaho School Boards Association.
“Our state education department are excellent people, but that is a huge, drastic shift in workload they’d have to do on compliance,” she said, adding that Idaho is already facing a budget shortfall.
In Iowa, Democratic state Rep. Jennifer Konfrst, the former House minority leader, said she’s concerned that without federal oversight, the state would not hold schools accountable for providing special education services. She pointed to state lawmakers’ willingness to pass Iowa’s relatively new school choice program, which directs taxpayer funding to private school tuition but does not require private schools to provide services to students with disabilities.
“There are no provisions with private school vouchers that they have to provide special education,” she said. “Those kids are left at the public schools, which have been underfunded.”
FUNDING GAPS
IDEA passed 50 years ago this month. Before then, education for children with disabilities depended entirely on where they lived.
They were often refused admission to public and private schools that lacked the resources or the will to properly educate them. Some had to forgo education entirely, while others were shut away in poorly equipped institutions that prioritized containment over learning.
In 2022-2023, about 7.5 million students — 15% of the kids in public schools — received special education services under IDEA, according to the most recent data available from the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal agency that collects education data.
The law requires public schools to provide a “free appropriate public education” in the least restrictive environment from birth through age 21 to children and youth with disabilities. That education includes services such as additional time to complete school work, assistive technology, or even a one-on-one aide.
Some supports, such as providing large-print materials or giving a student extra time to complete a task, are low-cost. But others can be expensive for schools to provide. For example, an American Sign Language interpreter might cost $50,000 a year, said Perry, of the Idaho school boards group.
And a recent Idaho state report noted that it costs upward of $100,000 per year to educate some special education students.
Educators there are already pushing for additional funding to help fill a gap — $82.2 million in 2023 — between available state and federal funding for special education and the amount that school districts actually spend.
The state report also found that, unlike the neighboring states of Oregon, Utah and Washington, Idaho doesn’t provide additional state funding for special education beyond the base per-pupil amount allocated by the state.
The federal government currently covers less than 12% of the costs of special education services nationwide, leaving state and local governments to foot the rest, according to the National Education Association, a labor union representing 3 million educators nationally. Without federal oversight, critics fear, nobody will hold states and school districts accountable for not spending enough.
In some states, limited state funding means a disproportionate financial burden lands on individual school districts. On average, local districts are responsible for $8,160 per special education student per year, according to a report released last year by education nonprofit Bellwether that studied funding across 24 states.
The situation is so dire in Idaho that the state superintendent made special education funding her key issue for the state’s upcoming legislative session. She requested $50 million to help close the special education funding gap.
It’s an issue affecting school districts across the nation, said Perry.
“Just because [the feds] are shifting responsibility to states does not alleviate the fact that we still have a federal mandate to provide services to these kids,” Perry said. “IDEA is still the law of the land and your school district is still mandated to meet this law, but with perhaps a sprinkling in of chaos and, in a state like ours, still a gap in funding.”
At times, that funding gap has prompted some states to cut corners.
RATIONED SERVICES
After a 15-month probe, the U.S. Department of Education found in 2018 that Texas had effectively rationed its special education services, capping the share of public school students who could receive those services at 8.5% of a district’s population, regardless of need and in direct violation of IDEA.
The feds also found that some Texas school districts intentionally identified fewer children as eligible for special education services if the number of those students exceeded the 8.5% threshold.
Though Republican Gov. Greg Abbott subsequently released a statement criticizing local school districts, educators and advocates blamed state legislators for recommending the caps as a way to control special education costs.
“Texas had about 5-7% of students who needed special education but were unilaterally denied it because the state decided that was too expensive,” said Lisa Lightner, a special education advocate and the mother of a student with a disability.
“Without this federal oversight, who’s to stop them from doing that again?”
Just last year, the Department of Education released Virginia from an ongoing investigation it had been under since 2019 for repeatedly failing to resolve complaints by parents of special education students.
The feds found the state had no procedures to ensure a timely resolution process for the complaints, leaving parents with little recourse when their students weren’t receiving needed services.
The federal monitoring ended in December 2024 after Virginia’s education department took corrective measures, including creating its own monitoring division, requiring additional educator training, and changing how the state handles complaints.
This year, states including Indiana, Iowa, Kansas and Mississippi were cited by the Education Department for not having systems in place that are “reasonably designed” to identify districts not complying with IDEA.
“No state gets it perfect all the time, but some states are better at it than others,” Lightner said.
Her home state of Pennsylvania has robust state oversight of special education, she said, but added that parents in some other states are panicking.
“There’s a societal mindset in some places that kids who need special education are never going to amount to anything, that they’re a drain on resources. Some people even think [allocating additional funds for their education] is giving them an advantage over other kids,” she said. “It’s an old-fashioned mindset that still exists in a lot of state leaders.”
STATES TAKE NOTICE
Some state lawmakers, troubled or encouraged by the Trump administration’s stance toward public education, have already filed their own legislation.
Republicans haven’t talked much about special education oversight, but even those at the state level have embraced the larger goal of shrinking the kind of regulation embodied by the Department of Education.
In Texas, state Rep. Andy Hopper, a Republican, filed a bill in February to abolish the state’s education agency.
“President Trump has called upon every level of government to eliminate inefficiencies and waste,” Hopper said in a statement announcing the bill, which later died in committee. “Texans pour billions into this state agency with the expectation that it will somehow improve education, but have been consistently and profoundly disappointed in the results.”
Alabama state Rep. Barbara Drummond, a Democrat, filed a bill in March to study how the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education would affect public education in Alabama.
Alabama parents are among those who sued the federal agency earlier this year over cuts to its Office for Civil Rights, claiming that investigations into alleged civil rights abuses in schools against students with disabilities and English learners have halted since Trump took office. Drummond’s bill also died in committee.
Since August, McMahon has been on a ” Returning Education to the States” tour of all 50 states. She began it in Louisiana, the only state whose recent fourth-grade reading scores showed a significant increase compared with pre-pandemic levels, according to a large, congressionally mandated survey of educational progress across the states.
“There’s no one-size-fits-all in education,” she told reporters during her stop at a Baton Rouge school in August. “What works in one state may not work in another state.”
Federal law already gives states and local districts exclusive control over their own curriculum and education standards; the U.S. Department of Education can’t tell states what to teach, nor how to teach it.
Louisiana U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, a Democrat, expressed concern that the dismantling of the Department of Education would remove the kind of federal oversight that has, in the past, protected students’ civil rights when state and local governments didn’t. On his podcast in August, he pointed to the need for federal intervention during the Jim Crow era when Southern states tried to maintain segregation in schools.
“We were protected to be able to have an education because of the federal government,” said Carter, who is Black. “When you start taking those protections away, that’s damning for our country and it’s a huge step in the wrong direction.”
Lightner, who has 182,000 followers on her Facebook page, said parents who comment on her posts often debate the merits of the Trump administration’s shift on special education.
But Lightner said she hasn’t seen evidence of a cohesive plan to improve special education.
“If you blow up a house, even if I gave you a few hundred thousand dollars to build a new one, that doesn’t happen overnight,” she said. “This destruction, it’s going to be years until we’re back to normal. And even ‘normal’ missed a lot of kids.”
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Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollersstateline.org.
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Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.