"Send it to the States"

It is emblematic of the times we are living in that major pieces of the staggeringly inept and horribly impactful order to "eliminate" the Department of Education have already been blocked by the courts, before I could even write about it.  

Too many issues to fit into a single post.  But as a lifelong special education professional, I think I have something to say about some of those issues.

How about two issues?

One:  

Whatever is left of the Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) is apparently headed for what's left of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), headed up by, God help us, RFK Jr., he of the "benefits of measles" policy.  RFK Jr. aside, however, this is a bad idea, and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the whole issue.  Are we surprised?

HHS currently administrates the 504 program, which assures that all students will have access to public schools.  If your child sustains an injury that limits his mobility, a 504 plan needs to be developed to make sure that all pieces of his daily educational program are available to him.  This is the kind of thing that HHS should be doing, as it supports the provision of a basic right - in this case, education. Section 504 is part of the reason that schools are wheelchair-accessible.

OSEP, on the other hand, administrates the actual educational rights of children with a disability, ensuring that they receive a "free and appropriate public education."  This is vastly more complex than access, for it deals with the  nuts-and-bolts, day-to-day instruction and assessment of all students with a disability across all subjects and disciplines.  The Feds write the laws and regulations that states are required to include in their laws and regulations; the Feds set the baseline, which states can improve upon but cannot go below.  

And the DoE's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) will sue states and school districts on behalf of parents and/or advocates who feel that the student(s) with a disability that they represent has been denied a free and appropriate public education.  

Education - learning, teaching, cognitive, academic, behavioral and emotional skills - is complex.  It needs to be done, at all levels, by educators.  Special education cannot be done - at the instructional, regulatory or civil rights level - by anyone who is not a professional educator.  This cannot be found at HHS, because this is not what HHS does.

Of course, no one in power right now cares anything about this, because of Issue #2.

Issue #2 can be called "send it back to the states where it belongs."  If we were to write a book about American conservative political policy for the last fifty years, there would be many chapters about sending regulatory and funding power, now located in the Federal government, back to the states.  It is the Republican fever dream.  Of course, a good deal of what the Federal government manages is stuff that the states have been unable or unwilling to do. Special education is some of that stuff.

The reason why conservatives want the states to manage all this stuff is so that they will be allowed to discriminate against whoever they want to.  State legislatures would, in the perfect conservative world, be able to unravel fundamental freedoms we all take for granted.  Rights would no longer be decided by a comprehensive consensus of all the states; a right-wing state could make whatever laws they want, and disenfranchise whoever they wanted.  These are the states that, even now, make a stillbirth a crime, make gun ownership available to mentally unstable people, prohibit gender-affirming medical care to trans youths, suppress voting rights of minorities, and advance a bill that would allow people to legally shoot and kill undocumented migrants, or anybody, who crosses their land.

It's no surprise, then, that they want to send control of education - and education funding - to their state legislatures.  These are states which would have no problem rescinding the rights of students with disabilities.  They enthusiastically follow a leader who has said that it would be easier if disabled children would just die.  It won't be long, in some of these states, until disabled students are just kept home - as they were within the lifetimes of many of us, until Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Act in 1975.  For the first time in US history, all states were required to educate all children.

All of that will disappear, in many states, if we "send it back to the states."  Children with disabilities will join people of color, women and LGBTQ+ people as second-class citizens, if that.

By the way, It should come as no surprise to anyone at this point that red states receive significantly more federal aid to education than do blue states, as things stand now.  With the DoE gone, they will have a lot less money to take on the entire job of educating their children.  Red states generally do a poorer job of educating their children than blue states, so that gap can only widen.  And it is the red state leaders both in Congress and at home who are in favor of a smaller Federal government which does not contain a Department of Education, so they've brought it on themselves.  Just sayin'.