As for the attack on public education means for children with disabilities

President Donald Trump, winner of Battle of Billionaires At Wrestlemania 23, close ties with Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, have maintained for decades. In the first period of the president, she served for two years as head of Small Business Administration and stepped down in 2019 to lead America First Action, a Pro-Trump Super PAC. Now McMahon Trump’s nominated to run the US education department, though she may seem to be missing conventional Bona Fides for the position. (She spent a year in the Connecticut Board of Education, although it later appeared that she did not have a degree in education as she had claimed.)

If McMahon is confirmed by the Senate, her odd task will be to take responsibility for an agency to kill it. “I said to Linda,” Linda, I hope you do a good job and put yourself out of a job, “” Trump saidon February 4th. His administration wants to abolish the Department of Education-AS would require a congressional or at least to shrink his transfers that include the federal student-loan program, title I-financing for low-income districts, special education services for students with disabilities, civilian Rights complain and more.

In fact, this demolition work is well underway. Members of Elon Musk’s slash DOGE Squad has been inside the agency in the last week, placed employees on paid leave and, According to to Washington Postthat feeds “sensitive data from across the education department to artificial intelligence software to investigate the agency’s programs and expenses.” AI may have informed the agency’s decision on repeal Nine hundred million dollars value of existing contracts related to educational research. NBC News reported that the agency will conduct An internal review aimed at “ensuring that departmental grants do not finance discriminatory practice – including in the form of DEI.” On February 7, Democratic members of Congress tried to enter the Department of Educational Building, only to get a security guard to block their path. When one of the congress representatives posted at X on the incident, Musk replied, “There is no such department in the federal government.”

The Department of Education, provided that it exists, has the smallest staff in any cabinet agency, and its duties are not necessarily well understood by the public; Descriptions of its mission tend to rely on words such as “manage” and “supervision” – terms that feel sticky with bureaucracy. It does not decide how K-12 students in public schools are taught and evaluated-it is mostly the purpose of individual states and local school districts. In most of these districts, the federal government gives a relatively modest percentage of a school’s budget, usually in the ballpark of thirteen percentage, although it varies the state by state. Trump often speaks with regard to “sending all education and education work and needs back to the states”, but most of the work on public education is already performed at the state and local level.

Still, turning off the agency would give a terrible blow to public schools, especially in rural areas and in high density, low -income urban areas that receive greater shares of their funding from the federal government. Attorneys also fear that the settlement of the Ministry of Education would have an immediate and tangible influence on students with disabilities.

McMahon’s mission is in line with school choice (or education freedom) movement that opponents say to erode people’s confidence in public schools by starving them by resources-most tangible through support from charter schools and voucher programs and by whipping destabilizing controversy about critical racial theory and gender ideology. The weapon that the school choice movement exerts in its attacks on public schools can be seen in two executive orders issued by President Trump on January 29.

One of these orders instructed cabinet agencies to review how states can use federal funds to “support families choosing educational options for state units, including private and tro -based opportunities.” In other words, the Trump administration wants to nationalize the K-12-Voucher programs already offered in seventeen states where public money is redirected to parents who want to set them towards teaching at a private or parochial school or against Homemade Education Costs. The second executive order that addressed “to end radical indoctrination in K-12-schooling” threatened to withhold federal funding from any school that foister “anti-American, undermining, harmful and false ideologies on our country’s children”, including “Steering students against surgical and chemical mutilation” and “demanding liberation to ‘white privilege’.” It also instructed the leaders of several agencies to devise plans to monitor and punish such schools.

Dan Stewart, the CEO of Education and Employment at the National Disability Rights Network, a legal-advocacy group, told me that this administration through these executive orders: “This administration engages in micro-level education as well as the macro level. It looks at the syllabus, which is traditionally in the power of the local schools and the state, at the same time it sees in different ways to move public dollars out of the system. “

There is ample evidence that voucher programs have negative educational results and place a huge burden on state budgets. They are also not popular in the ballot. In the latest election cycle, Kentucky voted almost two to one against change 2, which would have allowed the state legislator to put tax dollars against charter schools and vouchers; Inituating, the measure did not receive a majority in a single county throughout the state. Pro-School election polls Measures also failed in Colorado and Nebraska.

Still, both the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), the public-political think tank, such as McMahon chairs and the Heritage Foundation, where Project 2025 sprouts, supported the Education Choicing Act for children who would introduce a federal tax credit to incite welfare donations for voucher- Programs. AFPI estimates that the bill would “enable 85-90 percent of students in the nation to take advantage of school choices through scholarships” and appointed Arizona’s Voucher program as a successful model that has “saved taxpayers’ money and get under the budget.”

This is a thinking endorsement from McMahon’s think tank. According to NonProfit Save Our Schools Arizona, the state’s school election program cost nine hundred million dollars during the 2023-24 financial year, exceeding its budget by three hundred million dollars; It now accounts for almost half of Arizona’s overall budget deficit. Most of the families who signed up for the program did not move their children out of public schools – the coupons instead serve as a discount on the private teaching they already paid, and as SOS Arizona put it, ”represents a whole new cost for the state. “

Even the marketing of the bleak financial burdens imposed by Voucher programs, there are many families for which freedom of education does not offer much in the way of school choice. Some of these families live in rural areas (and often Republican dominated) communities where opportunities for private school are limited or non-existent, and where public schools are large local employers; Voucher programs only bleed their budgets. Other families cannot afford to make up the difference between the “scholarship” that their child receives through a state voucher program and the actual teaching accused by local private schools. And yet others have children with physical, intellectual or social-emotional disabilities whose rights in school are guaranteed in the federal law known as people with disabilities, or idea

“The vast majority of idea rights only apply to students in public school,” said Jessica Levin, litigation director at the nonprofit education law center. IDEA Mandate Certification requirements for special education teachers and shield students from being punished for manifestations of their disabilities. It also diminishes parents’ rights to be involved in developing their children’s educational plans and arguing for more or different services that may vary from speech language or occupational therapy to help with technology. “These rights are all lost when a student goes to a private school,” Levin said.

Project 2025 proposes rolling federal title in and financing special education for block grants that states can manage without extensive federal supervision. “The states would no longer have a control of how they comply with the idea or other federal laws,” Stewart said. The probable scenario for children with special needs, he continued, is “fewer teachers, fewer funds, delayed funds and less security.” According to the school choice movement, of course, parents who are dissatisfied with their child’s cash tape public school had to have the opportunity to choose a private in a thriving education market. In reality, Levin said: “Private schools are legally allowed not to accept students with disabilities or earn them properly, and so you end up with a higher concentration of students with higher needs in schools that now have fewer resources.”

A gloomy irony at the intersection of school choices and special education is that not even the most hard supporter of public schools will argue that the system is currently working well for children with disabilities. Currently, the federal government only supplies around thirteen percent of the average cost per year. Students for special education services under the idea-down from the original promise of forty percent half a century ago when the idea was first passed in the law. The vast majority of states do not fully finance special education and let the districts cover the gap by diping down their general education budgets. Or not – often they do not provide the legally mandated services at all.

Both public and private schools, Stewart told me, is incentives to see students with disabilities as “a drain on their resources.” Underfunded districts in red, blue and purple states routinely fails these students, whether they are illegal cover the percentage of children who can receive services or intentionally keep parents In the dark about their constitutional rights. The idea is perhaps a law that is also named, as its protection often seems more theoretical than concrete.