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WASHINGTON, DC—In response to the Trump administration’s plans to move special education and civil rights programs out of the Department of Education (ED), Carrie Gillispie, Project Director, Early Development & Disability, issued the following statement.

The Trump administration’s decision to move special education out of ED to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will turn back the clock on decades of progress and weaken protections for millions of students with disabilities.

Administering the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) demands deep, education-specific expertise, robust oversight, and consistent guidance to states and school districts. HHS is not structured to provide that support and is already struggling to serve people with disabilities in its own domains of health and human services due to the Trump administration’s severe staff reductions and program cuts.

Separating programs for students with disabilities from all other education programs harkens back to our nation’s ugly past of othering, institutionalizing, isolating, and segregating the more than 15 percent of youth with disabilities. Before the establishment of ED, only one in five children with disabilities in the United States attended school. Today, ED holds states accountable for providing education to all students with disabilities. For more than 50 years, students and parents have fought to gain the rights they deserve. Today’s announcement threatens to rewind our systems to when federal oversight was absent, and states and school districts failed to uphold the civil rights of students with disabilities.

Housing special education in a separate agency sends the message that these students are somehow apart from other students, rather than recognizing them as multifaceted learners who belong with their peers. To be sure, students with disabilities are not a monolith. Nearly 12 percent are English learners, and roughly half attend Title I schools, yet these programs will now be administered by different federal agencies. Timely access to services for babies, children, and young adults with disabilities is now mired in a labyrinth of red tape. 

A key role of ED is to ensure that states use about of federal funds appropriately so that funding gets to the students who are eligible for special education. Moving special education to HHS puts this accountability at risk. At the same time, moving ED’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) removes a key family resource for addressing the record-high level of complaints of discrimination and abuse of youth with disabilities. Instead of discrimination cases being addressed by OCR staff with experience working toward school system improvement, DOJ staff will choose which cases to investigate while operating under and policy changes likely to decrease investigations and enforcement.

When the leader of HHS makes alarming —such as claiming that children with autism “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date”—it demonstrates why specialized education expertise within the agency that serves all students is so critical. Serious professionals, like those fired from ED last year, know that only with well-funded, high-quality special education and protected civil rights can students with disabilities achieve their goals and flourish.