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.
Dan Stewart, the managing attorney for education and employment at the National Disability Rights Network, a legal-advocacy group, told me that, through these executive orders, “this Administration is engaging with education at the micro level as well as the macro level. It’s looking at curriculum, which is traditionally in the power of the local schools and the state, at the same time that it’s looking at different ways of moving public dollars out of the system.”
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“The vast majority of I.D.E.A. rights only apply to public-school students,” Jessica Levin, who is litigation director at the nonprofit Education Law Center, told me. I.D.E.A. mandates certification requirements for special-education teachers and shields students from being punished for manifestations of their disability. It also enshrines parents’ rights to be involved in developing their children’s education plans and to argue for more or different services, which can range from speech-language or occupational therapy to assistive technology. “These rights are all lost when a student goes to a private school,” Levin said.
Project 2025 proposes rolling federal Title I and special-education funding into block grants, which states can administer without extensive federal oversight. “The states would no longer have a check on how they are complying with I.D.E.A. or other federal laws,” Stewart said. The likely scenario for kids with special needs, he went on, is “fewer teachers, fewer funds, delayed funds, and less certainty.” Of course, according to the school-choice movement, parents who are dissatisfied with their child’s cash-strapped public school should have the opportunity to choose a private one in a thriving educational marketplace. In reality, Levin said, “private schools are legally allowed to not accept students with disabilities or serve them appropriately, and so you end up with a higher concentration of higher-needs students in schools that now have fewer resources.”
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Public and private schools alike, Stewart told me, are incentivized to view students with disabilities as “a drain on their resources.” Underfunded districts in red, blue, and purple states routinely fail these students, whether they are illegally capping the percentage of children who can receive services or willfully keeping parents in the dark about their constitutional rights. I.D.E.A. is perhaps a law too aptly named, as its protections often seem more theoretical than concrete....Trump and Musk’s public statements are instructive here. In 2023, Musk fired a longtime employee of his who has muscular dystrophy and then ridiculed him on Twitter, falsely claiming that he “did no actual work.” (Musk later apologized and indicated that the employee could remain at Twitter; he did not.) As for Trump, according to a memoir written by his nephew, the disability advocate Fred Trump III, the President once commented that some disabled people “should just die,” and said, of Fred’s own son, who is nonverbal and uses a wheelchair owing to a rare genetic disorder, “Maybe you should just let him die.”
