Bruce Lesley is the head of First Focus on Children. In this post, he points out just how wrong it was to move oversight of special education to the Department of Health and Human Services.
On June 16, the Trump Administration did the thing children’s advocates have spent more than a year warning against. Through four new interagency agreements, the Department of Education announced it would move the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) — the office that administers the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for more than 8 million students — to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), while shipping civil rights enforcement off to the Department of Justice.
The Administration calls these “partnerships.” In reality, they are the latest and largest step in a campaign to dismantle the Department of Education without ever asking Congress, which is the only body with the power to abolish it.
With this move, more than 8 million students with disabilities now face a fragmented federal system in which special education, civil rights enforcement, and other educational programs are scattered across multiple agencies with overlapping authority and limited expertise.
Since the Department of Education still has the authority to administer these programs, the Administration has created overlapping, duplicative bureaucratic structures that will lead to confusion and conflicting lines of accountability. Administration officials insist nothing will change, which begs the question as to why it is being done, but you cannot create a duplicative authority in an agency that has no education expertise, force school districts across this country to now have to deal with several different federal agencies (some on the same topic), and argue that students and families will be unharmed.
For the child with dyslexia who needs reading supports, the teenager with an intellectual disability preparing for adulthood, or the child whose parents are fighting for speech therapy, this is not a bureaucratic debate. It is about whether the people overseeing their education understand schools, teaching, and learning.
Unfortunately, HHS lacks the educational expertise or orientation needed to administer IDEA effectively, and the people who do have it are being eliminated.