New Report from The Century Foundation on Students from Low-Income Families and Special Education

New Report from The Century Foundation on Students from Low-Income Families and Special Education

This past July, the Department of Education under the Trump administration made a controversial move to delay regulations to address disproportionality for students of color in special education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).¹ The original regulations—dubbed the “Equity in IDEA” regulations²—required that states use a consistent method for tracking and identifying districts where students of color are disproportionately identified for special education, placed in substantially separate settings, and disciplined at higher rates than their white peers. The Obama administration initially issued these regulations after the Government Accountability Office released a report³ highlighting considerable variability in states implementation of the provisions in IDEA to address disproportionality. Specifically, the GAO found that, in 2010, twenty-one states did not identify a single district as demonstrating significant disproportionality in special education. This finding raised concerns that these states were failing to effectively implement the disproportionality provisions in IDEA to track and address inequities for students of color.

Now, with the delay from the Trump administration, several organizations and policymakers are concerned that school districts will do even less to address equity in IDEA.⁴

To justify the delay, the Department of Education noted: “The Department also believes that the racial disparities in the identification, placement, or discipline of children with disabilities are not necessarily evidence of, or primarily caused by, discrimination...