Fewer states are meeting their obligations under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, federal officials say, with most deficient multiple years in a row.
The U.S. Department of Education said that just 19 states qualify as “meets requirements” for serving students with disabilities ages 3 to 21, down from 20 last year. The agency labeled all other states as “needs assistance.”
The determinations, released late last month, are the result of an annual review that’s mandated under IDEA. The Education Department is required to assess each state’s progress in meeting the law’s expectations and assigns them to one of four categories — meets requirements, needs assistance, needs intervention or needs substantial intervention.
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If states do not achieve the “meets requirements” status for two or more years, the Education Department must take enforcement action, which can include requiring the state to access technical assistance or directing funds to the areas deemed inadequate, among other things.
This year’s determinations are based on information from the 2022-2023 school year.
Of the states that failed to achieve the “meets requirements” designation, 30 states were identified as “needs assistance,” all but three of which qualified for that label for two or more years. Washington, D.C. received the even more dire designation of “needs intervention,” but no state was identified in the “needs substantial intervention” category.
The states designated as “meets requirements” include Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
A separate rating of IDEA programs for children from birth through age 2, found that 30 states and Washington, D.C. qualified as “meets requirements,” while 16 were labeled “needs assistance” and four were designated “needs intervention.”
Candace Cortiella, director at The Advocacy Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on improving the lives of people with disabilities, cautioned against reading too much into the determinations.
“While this appears to be dismal news (regarding) the state of special education, this process is riddled with issues,” she said.
In particular, Cortiella noted that scoring does not factor targets in state performance plans or how students with disabilities perform on state assessments. In addition, she said that because scoring is based on a rank-ordering of states, it is not mathematically possible for all states to achieve the “meets requirements” status.
The Advocacy Institute noted that just 44% of students with disabilities are in states with a “meets requirements” determination this year and only six states have received that rating for each of the past 12 years. Those states are Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
