America’s support system for disabled pupils is broken
ew policy reform commissions draw up a list of recommendations only to implore lawmakers to ignore them. Yet that is where Minnesota’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Special Education finds itself. Facing a multi-billion-dollar budget shortfall, state lawmakers asked the commission to identify $250m in savings on special education, where spending is expected to swell by nearly $1bn between 2022 and 2027. In August the commission released provisional recommendations and unanimously urged the legislature not to enact any of them, warning of harm to pupils.
Minnesota’s paralysis reflects a national dilemma: educating disabled children is a popular policy, but the sums required under current laws are eye-watering. Across the country, school districts are pulling money from general-education funds to pay for services for pupils with special needs. Even as school enrolment declines, the number of students in special education across the country is rising. Between 2014 and 2023 it grew by 1.4m, from 11.6% of all pupils to 14.7%. In several states—including Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wyoming—that figure is higher still at roughly one in five. As costs rise, states are confronting fraught questions about who should pay, how well programmes work and what must be pared back to cover the bill.
Fifty years ago, it was estimated that over half of the country’s disabled children received an insufficient education. To remedy this, in 1975 Congress passed what eventually became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), one of several laws that together guarantee disabled children a “free appropriate public education”. Each eligible child receives an Individualised Education Programme (IEP) specifying the services a school district must provide. These range from occasional speech therapy to a classroom aide or placement in a specialised school, which can cost districts hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
