In The Politics of Autism, I write about social services, special education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 7.5 million children 3 to 21 years old received services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in AY 2022-23.
About 980,000 of them were autistic, up from 498,000 in 2012-13.
Educators, researchers and employees at the Department of Education say that the Trump administration’s slashing of federal bureaucracies and workforces has significantly weakened special education enforcement and killed programs meant to help students with disabilities.
Last week, Tamara Linkow, the senior director of the American Institutes for Research’s education evaluation studies program, told The Independent that she learned that the federal government canceled funding for Charting my Path for Future Success. The program was meant to help students with disabilities learn about programs to transition to adulthood.
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“The instructors had just started working with students,” Linkow said. “They were about a month and a half in depending upon the district, working with their students, and they had to stop overnight.”
The program was funded as part of a $45 million grant entitled “Evaluation of Transition Supports for Youth with Disabilities,” which was meant to evaluate the best programs for students with disabilities based on “strengthening students' goal setting, planning, and self-advocacy skills and helping them apply these self-determination skills to their transition objectives,” according to the grant’s website.
“This project was so powerful because it was both getting students access to services, getting school districts access to trained instructors to deliver effective services, and we were going to learn a lot about effective services as well so that we could inform the future of what schools and teachers are doing,” Karrie Shogren, a professor of special education at the University of Kansas, said.
