The 74

A first grader reads an entire page on her own after months of specialized instruction. A middle school student with autism delivers his first classroom presentation. These moments are not medical breakthroughs, they are educational ones. Unfortunately, our history — and too often our present — shows that many students still do not experience classrooms where educational expertise and civil rights protections work together. When a student with a disability is singled out and ridiculed because of disability-related behaviors, or when students with unevaluated disabilities are suspended instead of receiving assessment and support, their rights to educational opportunity are being denied in ways our nation’s laws have long prohibited. Every delay in identifying and correcting these failures deprives students of educational opportunities they cannot recover. Students cannot afford confusion about who is responsible for protecting those rights. The Trump administration’s agreement to move responsibility for administering the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act from the U.S. Department of Education to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is based on the mistaken assumption that educational rights can simply be transferred between agencies as an operational function. In reality, doing so risks weakening the protections IDEA was designed to guarantee…