This year on November 29th, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—our nation’s promise to children with disabilities—turned 50. I also turned 50 in November. Unlike the IDEA though, I did not require Congressional reauthorization to get here, though some days my knees might argue otherwise.
It’s a strange feeling sharing a milestone birthday with a federal law. When IDEA was born in 1975, students with disabilities were routinely excluded from public schools. My biggest worry at the time was keeping my birthday cake intact while my older siblings plotted its early demise. Half a century later, IDEA has matured into a civil-rights cornerstone that serves approximately seven million children nationwide.
And yet, like many 50-year-olds, IDEA is now experiencing what can only be described as an existential crisis.
Under the current federal landscape there is renewed talk of “letting the states decide.” As a lawyer who spends his days battling school districts that already interpret “free appropriate public education” as “the cheapest option possible,” I can assure you: shifting more control to the states is the policy equivalent of handing your 1996 Honda Civic to a 15-year-old because “they’ll figure it out.”
States already have enormous discretion under IDEA. Some use that discretion well. Others use it the way I use my treadmill: as a decorative piece suggesting good intentions. Education budgets are tight, political divisions are sharp, and special education is an easy target for legislators who have never attended a Planning and Placement Team meeting, never read a functional behavioral assessment, and certainly never sat with a parent whose child has been suspended for behaviors that are a direct manifestation of their disability.
And let’s be honest—IDEA has never been fully funded. Congress promised in 1975 to cover 40% of special education costs. It has never reached even half of that. If I had made and broken the same promise every year for five decades, I’d have no clients left and probably a bar complaint.
So what happens to IDEA at 50? If the federal government continues stepping back, the burden will increasingly fall to states, courts, and—most of all—parents. Special education families have always been the engine keeping this law alive, demanding schools follow it even when policymakers forget why it exists.
I’ve sat in thousands of meetings with parents who want nothing more than for their child to learn, to be included, and to be supported. These families don’t care about federalism debates. They care about whether their child gets the reading instruction they were promised, or whether their teenager with autism is given a real transition plan instead of a copy-and-paste worksheet.
IDEA at 50 is not a law in decline—it’s a law in need of recommitment. If Washington won’t do it, the states must. If the states won’t, the courts will. And if all else fails, parents—backed by people like me—will continue enforcing the rights that Congress declared non-negotiable in 1975.
IDEA may be turning 50, but the fight for special education is still very much in its adolescence. And as any parent of a teenager knows, this is when you really need to pay attention.
So happy birthday, IDEA. Here’s to the next 50—may they be funded, implemented, and respected better than the first.
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Jeffrey Forte is a Shelton-based lawyer with a focus on Special Education