Trump’s shutdown firings hollow out special education office

Geoff Bennett:

And we're going to focus now on some of the particular layoffs that were announced this weekend at the Department of Education.

On Friday, the Trump administration fired most employees at the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. That office is tasked with protecting the rights of some 7.5 million children with disabilities across the country and ensuring they get a fair education.

For more on this, we're joined again by Laura Meckler, national education writer for The Washington Post.

Thanks for being with us.

Let's start with the basics. Help us understand what this office does and why people are so concerned about the loss of so many staff members at this office.

Laura Meckler, The Washington Post:

What this office does is administers a very important federal law called IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

And what that does is, it provides funding and it has requirements for school districts to provide a free and appropriate education to students with disabilities. So it's a $15 billion program, something that a lot of school districts really rely on. And that money is still flowing, as far as we know.

But the point of this office is essentially to oversee this program. It's a very big program to make sure that states and school districts are following the law, to answer questions when — states have about, can we do this or can we do that, and essentially to provide oversight.

So, essentially, the money is still going out, but without the kind of guarantees and controls that we're used to being in place when we're talking about billions of dollars.

Geoff Bennett:

So give us a real-world example of how these cuts would affect students, families, educators in the classroom.

Laura Meckler:

I mean, it takes — it's a little bit removed from the direct impact.

But one way you could see it is, you can imagine, say, a school district that is sort of systematically not providing a certain type of service that students need. Let's say they need a certain kind of technology in order to communicate, students who are nonverbal, for instance, and this district just isn't doing that.

Well, it's the responsibility of the state to make sure that the districts do this. But let's say the state isn't forcing them to do it, isn't doing its job. Well, then that's where the federal government comes in. They do audits. They look at data. They look at reports. They go in and they sort of look over the shoulder of the states and a sample of the districts to see, what are you up to?

And if they find that there are gaps like this, then they work with the states to essentially force them to comply with the law. So, in our example here, maybe there would be a student who was not getting an iPad that she needed to communicate and, after this work was done, maybe she gets it.

Geoff Bennett:

You're reporting also found layoffs within the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights. What more have you learned about that?

Laura Meckler:

Yes.

And this really goes hand in hand, in a way, with what we were just talking about, because the Office of Civil Rights is where people complain when they feel like their rights are not being respected or being violated, when they feel they're being discriminated on the basis of race, sex or disability.

And this office has just been absolutely decimated. Earlier this year, we saw about half of the workers laid off, seven of 12 regional offices closed, and then just last night there were another round of layoffs, of reductions in force that were sent out to workers at the Office of Civil Rights.

So, for instance, the Seattle office, one of the survivors in the first round, many, many people, a large percentage of those workers and attorneys who handle cases there were let go. This is an office that was — already had more than it can handle. Then it absorbed all the cases from the San Francisco office and was dealing with the entire West Coast, and now they have just a skeleton staff left in place once these RIFs are carried out.

So it really raises the question of whether they will be able to do their congressionally mandated function of investigating potential violations of civil rights.

Geoff Bennett:

The Trump administration has long sought to push more education responsibilities to the states. What's the worry about how states might interpret federal law and what's ultimately at stake for students and their families?

Laura Meckler:

I think that that's really the question here is sort of like, who do we trust to follow the law, to follow the rules?

I mean, advocates including some of who I spoke to today said that, hey, states weren't doing it, and that's why the federal government came in. These kids were not being served before we had a federal law. And now they are more or less being served. So the risk is that, when you leave it to the state, some states will do a good job and some states won't.

You know, we don't know. I think that argument that people who don't think that there should be a big federal role in education would say is that we can trust the states. They're going to do a fine job. They care about kids just as much as bureaucrats in Washington do.

But, for many years now, we have had the safeguard of a federal oversight. And I think, when we're talking about such a large federal program such as these special education programs, there are a lot of people who would expect there to be some oversight attached to that.

Geoff Bennett:

Laura Meckler of The Washington Post.

Laura, thanks to you.

Laura Meckler:

Thanks for having me.