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How abolishing the Ministry of Education could impact children with disabilities

How abolishing the Ministry of Education could impact children with disabilities

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A federal hearing on the special education teacher shortage culminated in a debate about how the potential elimination of the U.S. Department of Education will affect students with disabilities.

The exchange, which took place Friday during a public briefing from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, speaks to how the election of Donald Trump is already shaping discussions about education policy amid widespread uncertainty about how his proposals might play out.

Trump promised this during his campaign he would dismantle the federal Ministry of Education and transfer more control over education to the states. The federal law guaranteeing students with disabilities the right to a free and appropriate public education dates to 1975, before the Department of Education existed as a standalone entity. That law would remain in place even if the department were disbanded, but it is less clear how funding would change or who would be responsible for protecting students’ rights.

Eliminating a federal department would require an act of Congress. Trump has not laid out exactly how special education funding or governance would change if that happens, but some have made suggestions.

Project 2025, a political playbook written by former Trump White House officials, for example: calls for making most federal funding available for special education in “no-strings” grants for school districts, distributed by another agency: the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump has Robert F. Kennedy Jr.a vaccine skeptic with no training experience, to run that agency.

Project 2025 also calls for moving the Office of Civil Rights and all “assets” within the federal Special Education Office that deals with discrimination to the Department of Justice. There, civil rights enforcement would take place through lawsuits, and not through investigations, as is currently done in the Ministry of Education.

During the briefing, Commissioner Mondaire Jones, a Democrat and former congressman, asked questions to a panel of experts whether eliminating the Department of Education would impact students with disabilities and the shortage of teachers to teach them.

Several panelists said the federal government should still fund education even if the Department of Education no longer exists.

Eric Hanushek, op leading educational researcher of school finance and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said he thought the proposal was more of a “political statement about how much we want Washington to intervene in state education policy,” and that it wouldn’t actually change much for students with a disability.

It would still be Congress’s job to decide how much money would be spent to fulfill the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Hanushek said, even if the funding were disbursed through another agency, such as a revamped Health Department and Human Services.

“I don’t think this has any obvious impact on IDEA funding,” Hanushek said. “Personally, I think the federal government should have greater responsibility in the area of ​​special education financing.”

But he warned that students with disabilities could receive less immediate attention without an education secretary drawing attention to their needs from the pulpit. Eliminating the department and moving its work elsewhere could also jeopardize data collection and research on students with disabilities, Hanushek said.

William Trachman, the general counsel at the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm suing the Biden administration over its Title IX rulessaid the answer would depend on what replaces the Ministry of Education.

“It will not happen that there is no federal role whatsoever in special education,” he said. Whether the Justice Department takes over civil rights enforcement, or whether special education moves to HHS, or whether states get special education grants, “much of the impact of what happens will be revealed by those details. ”

Others said eliminating the Department of Education would have serious consequences for students with disabilities.

Tuan Nguyen, an associate professor at the University of Missouri who studies teacher labor markets, said he worried that without a federal education department to pressure states to require certain standards for education, who would end up working with students with disabilities go to work, a ‘free-for-all.”

“Years of evidence has shown that when states don’t have a mandate to ensure our teachers are licensed and credentialed, they put whoever they can into the classroom,” Nguyen said.

Amanda Levin Mazin, an associate professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said she worried that without an education department, incentives that help people enter the special education teaching profession would be cut. The Department of Education has the authority to award various grants to school districts, universities and others to support teacher recruitment and pipeline development.

Jessica Levin, litigation chief at the Education Law Center, a nonprofit that advocates for students with disabilities, said she worried that disbanding the department would harm enforcement of students’ civil rights. Historically most federal civil rights complaints in education related to a student’s disability.

“The Department of Education and the experts within it play a critical role in enforcing these civil rights for students with disabilities across the country,” she said. “This is an incredibly dangerous proposal, both on a practical and symbolic level.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at [email protected].