Disability, IDEA, and the Impact of Federal Cuts

Taryn Williams is a nationally recognized scholar, expert on disability employment policy and currently serves as Senior Fellow for Disability for the National Partnership for Women and Families. We recorded this interview on November 4, 2025. It has been abridged and edited for clarity.

The 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was last year, and a lot has changed for students with disabilities since its passage. Do you see IDEA as a law that protects students' civil rights?

Absolutely, I see the law in that way..When I think about IDEA and what it was like for students with disabilities back in the 70s, there was just no expectation or right for a student with a disability to attend school. It really took the advocacy and the organizing of parents and students with disabilities themselves, or people with disabilities, to really make the case … that students with disabilities, not only they deserve access to the classroom, but also that when it came to accessing that that classroom, they needed the supports and services in order to be integrated into the classroom and to have an educational experience that, in sort of layman's terms, is on par with those students without disabilities. ….

Oftentimes when we think about legislation, it is about the floor of our expectations of what we think is needed. And often, when I think about IDEA, I don't think about it as a statute that says, “Thou shalt do this” and we just assumed that education would be transformed for students with disabilities. We knew then, as we know now, that there was a need for technical assistance, there was a need for enforcement, and absolutely, there's a need for resources. That is the context I think of not just when it passed, but the arc over the last 50 years, and what it has really meant to make the promise of IDEA an actual reality.

Historically, students with disabilities haven't received what they need to be on par with students without disabilities. Is it because of a lack of resources? Is it because of lack of will? Is it a combination of all of these things?

There is no single factor. One is under resourcing, like chronic underfunding of the services and supports. And for IDEA and its implementation, that is not exclusive. It's sort of how we think about the educational enterprise overall across the United States..Underfunding is not just a theme, it's a foundation of our public school system. That chronic underfunding means that we might know what it takes to ensure that a student has the supports that they need: the curriculum in the classroom, any sort of wraparound, or the technologies that they need in order to be successful in the classroom, but absent the resources to support that, then we often can be setting them up for for failure. And I think the most important part of the classroom are the teachers, but, of course, there are also staffing shortages that exist. So even if you are in an environment where you have the resources to better support students with disabilities, oftentimes you will hear from educators that they just don't have sufficient capacity in the classroom or within the district to address all of the needs of students that are there.

Another factor is bias and sort of the attitudinal barriers that exist for people with disabilities in every aspect of their lives. Certainly, I think stigma exists, but the language around disability has evolved and continues to evolve now, from what I experienced when I was in school …. I know so many advocates who really dislike the word special, even though we think about IDEA and the Office of Special Education Programs. But they dislike the word special because at some point, special was used in a way that was a form of bullying, or it was weaponized to mean different or less than, or something that was a barrier to a student feeling belonging in the classroom or in their community.

Another piece of this is to also think about it at a macro level. Even though laws exist at the federal level, at the state level, locally, our systems are very fragmented. We have systems for education, for health care, for any support that one needs. And we do not make it easy for parents, family members or youth or children with disabilities to navigate those systems. We don't make it easy for a parent or student with a disability to understand what their rights are. And if you couple a complex, fragmented system with underfunding or under resourcing of staff and you end up with the reality of what many families face in this country, which is like the inability to sort of control their schedule or shape their lives in a way that can fully support and advocate for their child in the classroom and in their school district. That leads to poor outcomes too.

We make it hard for students with disabilities to get what they need.Even though I don't love this language, it means absolutely that there are students who fall through, I won't call them cracks, because they're much wider than that. They fall through the gaps. They're not equipped with the supports that they need to navigate the system, which is why sometimes you see significant disparities in the outcomes for students with disabilities based on class and based on the ability of one of their parents or caring adults to ensure that they get what they need.

We've seen rollbacks of funding and protections from the current administration.. What does that mean for students with disabilities and their educational needs, and especially when it comes to civil rights?

The first is the ways in which we set up systems to support students across the country. We understand that, yes, there's under-resourcing or gaps that exist within districts or communities. We also know that disparities exist from state to state and that despite the rhetoric that we hear today, the federal government and the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services has played an important role in ensuring that there is consistency in the enforcement of the provisions of IDEA across the country. [The work of that office] t is based on a premise that we have not ever met in our country, which is that where you were born, or the community in which you live, should not have such an impact on the quality of the education you're receiving or the extent to which you are receiving the resources to which you're entitled under the law. But the fact is that does happen. We know that there are communities where students with disabilities fare more poorly, and that tends to correlate to states and communities that are relatively lower in their income.

Then there's the federal oversight with respect to enforcement across the country. We're losing the monitoring directly related to that. I could probably talk all day about data, but I think that we have done in the last 10 to 20 years something that needed to be done from the very beginning, which is to collect data to better understand the educational outcomes of students and to further disaggregate those data by race. Disaggregation of data, as we know, peels back whatever veil might be in place that could obscure the fact that some students with disabilities are going to fare much more poorly than their peers from a different background. Without those data, we might see or suspect that there is a trend in reduced performance of students without disabilities, but we won't fully understand the extent of what is really happening there. And I think that's to our disadvantage, because we know that there is no one way or best way to teach every single student. Students need individualized services. I know that individualized services can be resource intensive, but individualized resources and individualized education can make the difference in the extent to which a student can thrive. So we're losing that oversight. We're losing the data or the mechanism that we use to better understand what's happening with students across the country.

What will be the effect of the cuts to the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education?

The cuts in the Office for Civil Rights are a big deal. It is unfortunate but true that a number of cases that the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) handled were related to services and supports for students with disabilities, or, more accurately, the lack of services or a student is not receiving the services that they need in order to thrive. Without a functioning OCR to continue to investigate claims, students and family members don't have redress. They are really on their own, unless a state is able and willing to step up and fill in those gaps. And even if they are able to and willing to, the fact is that a state can never replace the federal government in the resources that it provides. So losing OCR, I think, is a big one.

I will also point to losing the technical assistance. I’m thinking about students and family members and the ways in which they navigate special education [through] PTACs (Parent Technical Assistance Centers).. The PTAC exists to equip parents with the knowledge of their rights and the knowledge of how to most effectively advocate for their students, their family members and oftentimes, the students with disabilities in their school. It provides a network, it provides ongoing resources and supports that can often make the difference in the likelihood of a student with a disability successfully transitioning through their K– 12 education. States cannot provide the level and intensity of technical assistance that the federal government can.

States also can't replace something that is an overarching reality of many things related to disability rights and the advancement of people with disabilities in every aspect of life, and that is our growth and knowledge in technology, and an understanding of what it really means to be inclusive. AI is absolutely, absolutely controversial, and we are actively figuring that out. But I don't want to figure out the potential impact of artificial intelligence, both the opportunities and the peril, without federal oversight meant to more deeply understand what's happening across the country as AI is being leveraged and deployed. So the investments that the federal government makes, not only in enforcement, not only in technical assistance, but in science and research to better understand what curricula, what technology and other supports are needed for students with disabilities to thrive, that's a loss too, that I don't think is easily replaced or turned back on.

In what ways can states step up? And aside from states, what about advocates and people who care about education and students with disabilities? What can they do to step up at this moment?

I'll start with the second question. In my mind, if you look at the current landscape, it is bleak. It can be very easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of harm that we see happening at the individual level all the way up to the federal government. But oftentimes, when I get in that mood where it's very difficult to see a way through, I think about what it must have been like 50 years ago. I think about stories that I've heard from family members about their civil rights journey. I think about what I've learned from the disability community, which I continue to learn every day, and that is they have fought and fought and fought. And the ways in which they have protested have taken different forms throughout the decades, but without them we would not have an IDEA. We would not have an ADA. We would not have a Section 504 of the Rehab Act. Without effective organizing and leadership, particularly in this moment, I think the leadership of individuals with disabilities themselves. So that gives me a reason for optimism.

You can erase on paper the dollars, the investments, the assistance, and to be sure, that is an erasure of progress, but you can't take away people's history. You can't take away the knowledge and the reality that we were somewhere else just a year ago. Like still fighting, but talking about the advancements and what was still possible. So I think this is a moment when we have an opportunity across class, race, geographical, certainly political lines, to say, like, what type of country, what type of education do we want for students and children with disabilities, people with disabilities in general. That gives me hope.

I think organizing is very important at every level. At the local and state level, parents are an effective voice in their districts. They are an effective voice at the national level, certainly in some cases. They can be more effective than those associations or organizations or even organized labor as they advocate for the same thing. So parents and family members are particularly important.

I also think that there are things that states can do. Consortia or regions of states can come together to provide or invest in technical assistance in a way that no one state can do on its own. Certainly from a legal standpoint or from a judiciary standpoint, we've seen organizing by Attorneys General, typically of a single party, really coming together to say, “this is something that we need to challenge in court.”

Also many of the models of success that we have, exemplars for what it looks like to do special education well, to implement IDEA? Those haven't gone away either. And so there is an opportunity, and I recognize that it's challenging to do this in an environment where all of the funding is cut, but there is still an opportunity to organize and ensure that information is being shared, and that it's not dependent upon the federal government being the facilitator.

Is there anything else that you would like to share? Is there anything that you want the people to know?

I am thinking a lot now about the preservation of knowledge. There was a time when people were fighting for, at the state level, the introduction of disability rights into schools and an understanding of what the disability rights movement is. As someone who didn't grow up understanding the disability rights movement, I knew who Martin Luther King was, I knew who Rosa Parks was, but Disability Rights wasn't its own curriculum. So I mention that because as we think about preserving knowledge, as we think about the power of oral history and the role of traditional media, which I'm skeptical of, but also social media, I think there is a community and a history that exists for students with disabilities and for their family members. I want to ensure that that continues to be generated and preserved. That is an aspect of how we move forward so we don't lose our history.