Website down: When a privatizer takes over the Department of Education

What if special education just stopped in the U.S.?  What if all the services our students with disabilities need went away?

Rather than dismiss this as yet more apocalyptic rhetoric coming out in the early days of the Trump regime, consider this: for over a week, the Department of Education (DOE) website for American special education (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA) was down, and nobody knew why, or was sure if the Trump administration cared.

{mosads}The story, as with much of what’s happening now in Washington, is murky and weird. Here’s what most news reports agree on: as controversial new Education secretary Betsy DeVos was being confirmed by the Senate, the IDEA website went down; instead, the site redirected visitors to a more basic page that listed information on IDEA but lacked the detail that parents, advocates and researchers had relied on to use to apply special education legislation to their specific schools and children.

The site problem was blamed on “technical issues,” and sat unaddressed for over a week after the original site went down, all while special education advocates and two Democratic senators demanded the site be restored.  

Meanwhile, what is also pretty clear is that DeVos, the person now in charge of the DOE, doesn’t know much about IDEA, and maybe doesn’t care to. In her confirmation hearing, there were crickets when Secretary DeVos clearly didn’t understand that IDEA is a federal law that trumps (pun intended) state laws and needs to be enforced throughout the country.(She also didn’t understand the difference between student growth and proficiency, and thought that guns in school were a good idea, but hey, she had a tough day and still got confirmed by the slimmest margin ever for a new Cabinet nominee).

As someone who has worked as a school social worker for 14 years and now studies school mental health across the country, I am no Pollyanna about the federal role in education.

The most the feds usually do is set a broad policy agenda, fund specific components of the K-12 system (including IDEA and other programs for at-risk youth), and otherwise bloviate a lot about how they believe children are the future, teach them well and let them lead the way, blah blah.  

The problem is that based on her record of blitzing education in Michigan and funding the charter and school choice movements wherever she and her network of wealthy donors felt like, DeVos has a track record of more than 20 years of erasing the “public” in public education wherever she goes. And there’s every indication that she and her lackeys would like to do the same thing for something as expensive and complicated and necessary as special education.

Think this is extreme? Think that an education “reformer” like DeVos, who would like to continue to see public schools privatized any which way she can (charters, vouchers for parochial schools) wants to embrace the costly world of special education and actually fund it at the rates that are needed?

Kids covered under IDEA don’t fit within this brave new education world that DeVos and her allies envision, and that’s the real reason that she didn’t know much about special education, and probably also part of why she was in no hurry to get that IDEA website back up.

Kids under IDEA cost a lot to educate, and many of them are not going to be attractive to the kind of charters and private schools that DeVos will seek to promote as DOE Secretary.  

All but two Republican senators voted to confirm DeVos, eager for her brand of education reform to go into overdrive, preferably safely under the radar of all the other commotion that a Trump regime will stir up. They want public education upended, teacher’s unions undermined, and where possible, public school dollars (via vouchers) made available for parents to use at their parochial school of choice.  

This has been standard Republican orthodoxy since Reagan, along with abolishing the DOE. Now they have their chance and they’re going to go for it. And kids in special education won’t be very important in all those privatization efforts.

For the rest of us that aren’t thrilled at these prospects, the ones who have worked with kids with special needs (me), or who are parents of kids with special needs (also me), the path is clear: We have to continue to resist, and we have to make that resistance count.

After all, the activism of teachers, parents and progressives almost got DeVos’s nomination scuttled, and we are bloodied but also fired up for more battles. My guess is that DeVos hasn’t really had to deal with special education advocates period, and definitely not fired-up parents of kids covered under IDEA.  

We have to make sure that DeVos knows that we expect IDEA gets the attention it needs, that we’ll continue blocking her, just like those teachers did at the door of a D.C. school she tried to visit after her confirmation.  

Michael S. Kelly, Ph.D., LCSW, is associate professor and director of the Family and School Partnerships Program at Loyola University Chicago’s School of Social Work and a Public Voices fellow. 

The views of contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.