23 Jun Why Moving Special Education Out of the Ed. Dept Will Not Help Students (Opinion)
On June 16, the U.S. Department of Education announced agreements moving special education oversight to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and shifting civil rights enforcement to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Education Department officials moved quickly to reassure families: The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act still stands. Individualized education programs will continue. The right to a free, appropriate public education remains intact.
I spent years as a regional director of special education. I know what oversight actually does and I know why “nothing will change” is the wrong thing to celebrate.
Oversight is the bridge between a right written on paper and a child’s ordinary Tuesday. The monitoring visits, the annual performance determinations, the technical assistance, the accountability no parent ever sees: That machinery is how a federal guarantee first enshrined in 1975 becomes an education for a real student today. When it works, a family never has to think about it. When it fails, a child loses a year they do not get back.
So, the question is not whether the law survives this reorganization. The question is what happens to the meaning underneath the law when the file moves between federal agencies and the complaint routes through a courtroom.
Here is my worry, and it is not a partisan one. Housing special education inside HHS invites a subtle reframing. It nudges us toward seeing a child as a diagnosis to manage rather than a learner whose potential the system exists to develop. Special education was won as an educational right. We can’t allow it to be redefined as a medical service.
The difference sounds academic until you sit in an IEP meeting and watch which language wins. A medical model asks what is wrong with this student; an educational model asks what this student is ready to become.
Picture a child behind in math. An educator using a medical model might log a “number-sense deficit” and prescribe a specific ed-tech program to close the gap. That child is sent off to a screen instead of taught. An educator working from an education model would ask what math looks like when the child sees it, taking the time to make him understand he can master anything he can picture. Same child. Different childhoods.
The Education Department’s office for civil rights was built as a front door for families. A parent could file a complaint at no cost, without a lawyer, and the office would have had to look into it. The Justice Department was built to litigate, not walk one parent through one concern about one child. The law does not change, but the path to using it might narrow just to those families who can afford counsel. A right that you can reach only through a lawsuit is not available to everyone on equal terms.
A student with a disability is not a caseload. That student is a person carrying both a real difficulty and a real gift, often in the same hour. The work of special education has always been to name the difficulty honestly and then refuse to stop there.
This is the part no interagency agreement can address and the part educators cannot wait to solve as responsibilities are reassigned in Washington. When the structure around us gets reshuffled, the temptation is to manage downward. We tighten compliance, protect ourselves, and treat the child as a file to process cleanly so no one gets sued. That instinct is understandable, and it is exactly wrong.
When oversight moves without an operating plan, we will need more than reassurances. It is the adults in school buildings who will ultimately either fill this accountability gap or ignore it.
So no matter which agency holds the file in the months ahead, everyone from the teacher at the table to the district administrator who signs the IEP will have a critical role to play to guarantee our students are protected in this new landscape.
We must protect the relationship first.
A reorganized bureaucracy can slow a service or muddle a complaint. It cannot change whether a teacher knows a student’s name, notices the gift hiding under the difficulty, and builds toward it on purpose. The conviction that a child is more than a deficit is not federal property. It lives in the people who choose it every morning, and no reorganization can sign that away.
Keep the language education-focused.
When educating students with disabilities, insist on the question a medical framing of special education skips: What can this child do, and what is he ready to do next? A unanimous Supreme Court chose that approach in 2017, when all nine justices unanimously voted that every child deserves the chance to meet “challenging objectives.” Honor that right at your table, even if it is no longer defended in Washington.
Document as if the federal oversight still exists.
If the monitoring that once came from one expert office is now scattered across two agencies still working out who does what, then the discipline must live inside our own practice. That looks like the case manager who flags a stalled goal instead of copying and pasting last year’s plan or the administrator who refuses to rubber-stamp it.
The file can move to Health and Human Services Department. The civil rights complaint can route through Justice. The grant dollars can flow through a new payment system. All of that is logistics, and logistics can be rebuilt. A lost education can’t be.
Years ago, one of my special education students stopped me in a strip mall. He is a commercial pilot now. He said, “Thank you, Mr. Hill, for never giving up on me.” Then he told me he wants to help kids like him do the same thing.
No interagency agreement gave me that moment. No grant system, no payment platform, no reorganization chart. A student who was once a case file became a pilot because somewhere along the way the adults around him refused to see him as a deficit to manage. That decision was never in Washington’s hands. It was always in ours. The reorganization only makes that more obvious, and our answer matters more.