The dumping ground | 3

Before 1975, there was no legal guarantee that a child with a disability could attend public school at all. Kids were hidden in attics and basements, sent to state institutions, or simply turned away. Rosemary Kennedy’s family concealed her intellectual disability for decades. It took a movement of parents, teachers, and advocates — like Rosemary’s sister Eunice — to build the legal rights families depend on today.

Now, the Trump administration is dismantling the Department of Education and shifting special education oversight to Health and Human Services. In this episode, Anya Kamenetz speaks with Jonathan Butcher of the Heritage Foundation, the organization behind Project 2025, about his vision for the future of education. And she talks with Ann Turnbull, a special education pioneer who helped shape the law now known as IDEA. Anya asks what today’s families stand to lose, and whether history is closer to repeating itself than anyone expected.

• Read: The history of special education: From exclusion to IDEA

• Read: 6 options for resolving an IEP dispute

Anya Kamenetz: Just a heads up that this is a historical episode, and so it has two instances of outdated language referring to people with a disability.

April 1938, the front page of "The New York Times" featured a story about Hitler's 49th birthday party. On page 20, there was a small item about two teenage sisters, Rosemary and Eunice Kennedy, traveling on an ocean liner to join their father, Joseph P. Kennedy, the ambassador to London. Rosemary was 19. Along with her younger sister Kathleen, known as Kick, she would be presented to the king and queen as a debutante.

In a photo, Rosemary has a pearly white smile, a silver spangled dress, and ostrich feathers in her hair. Nobody was supposed to know that she had intellectual disabilities. Back in 1918, when her mother Rose was in labor, the family doctor had been busy attending to Spanish flu patients and was late to the birth. The baby, Rosemary, was deprived of oxygen. She learned to read and write but never at more than a fourth-grade level. As Rosemary got older, her behavior and her moods got more unmanageable. She ran away from home and frequently hit people when she was upset.

Within a few years of her flashy debut to London society, her father, Joseph Kennedy, sent her to have a lobotomy, a now-banned brain surgery that was supposed to make her more docile. It reduced her mental capacity to that of a two-year-old. She would be packed off to an institution, where she would spend the rest of her life.

I'm Anya Kamenetz, I'm an education reporter, and you're listening to "Zero Reject: The Uncertain Future of Special Education" from Understood.org. This is Episode 3, "The Dumping Ground".

We know that there was a time before special education was protected in the law. What did that look like? It was dark. For centuries, many children were considered unable to be educated. They were warehoused in basements and attics or sent away to institutions, even wealthy people at the top of society, like the Kennedys. These institutions could be truly horrific places. But a movement of family members stood up and fought for the system of rights and protections we have today.

It was the tragedy of Rosemary Kennedy that transformed her younger sister Eunice into the most famous face of that movement, starting when her brother John F. Kennedy was president in the early 1960s and carrying through to the passage of what's now called the "Individuals with Disabilities Education Act" in 1975, and a whole system of legal rights and protections and research and teacher training programs.

As we've heard in the first two episodes, this system is far from perfect today. It's underfunded, there's a lack of staffing, a lack of support, and the adversarial structure sets up an ongoing struggle for many families to get the services they need. But a question we're faced with now is, what if it all went away?

The Department of Education is being dismantled. Far fewer federal employees are now working to oversee the civil rights of students. And some of the folks who wrote "Project 2025", which seems to be the blueprint that this administration is following in all kinds of ways, aren't even ruling out the idea of phasing out public education altogether. Whether or not there should be a public education system in each state is a conversation worth having. More from that guy later.

(04:49) Ann Turnbull discusses her early experiences in special education and the impact of teacher advocacy.

But first, I wanted to speak to someone who could tell me about what life was like for kids in what is now called special education before IDEA, meaning before special education was a guaranteed thing. And how we got the system we have now. It turns out that story is in the living memory of a lot of people. One of them, who I was able to reach on a video call at her home in North Carolina, is Ann Turnbull.

She worked as a teacher, a professor, a researcher, and an advocate for individuals with disabilities, their families, and their teachers. In fact, in the early 2000s, a group of disability rights organizations named Ann and her husband Rud Turnbull to a list of the 36 most important people worldwide in the history of special education.

Ann Turnbull: I majored in special education as an undergraduate student, graduating in 1968, and taught students with mild intellectual disabilities in a public school for a couple of years before going to graduate school. And I worked in a housing project with very vulnerable children with major learning needs a couple of days a week, and I realized that I didn't have the patience to work with the privileged children. And so it was in a sense maybe a calling for me to work with students who were vulnerable.

Anya Kamenetz: What did a special education classroom look like back then?

Ann: The classroom really had every type, every disability. The phrase that came to mind was a dumping ground, and I hate to use that, but if any student had a challenge, then they were sent to this classroom. One student I remember was sent from maybe the fourth grade where he'd had a lot of learning problems, and he had received F-minuses for the whole year. And I wondered why in the world would any teacher give a student an F-minus? Was that minus really necessary?

So with these students, they were in a sense the outcast. And I remember one of the first things I did my first year, and it was really brave, was to put on this Thanksgiving program for the whole school where the students had to memorize lines, and they had songs and poetry. And there was one little guy that had no words, and he was a little pilgrim, and he learned to say, "Hi," and that was his role. And the students kept coming backstage during the play saying, "All the teachers are crying, they hate our play." And I kept saying, "Keep on, go on." And what happened is these were the teachers who had failed them, and they were crying because they could not believe that these children had the capability of doing this. And the kids really became much more respected in the school, and we got lots of letters from classes about how wonderful the program was. And that was like coming out of the closet.

Anya: Ann had taken these kids who were hidden away and she'd put them on stage in the spotlight. Within a few years, Ann had started teaching other special ed teachers in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Then she met Rud and fell in love. And their partnership transformed the course of not only her life but many other lives.

Ann: I was living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, met my husband at a meeting of the local association for what was then called the Association for Retarded Children. The R-word is not used anymore, and so now that organization is called The Arc. But he was the president, and he had a child with significant intellectual disability.

Anya: Ann's soon-to-be husband, Rud, was a lawyer with a master's degree from Harvard. And the birth of his son Jay had inspired him to dedicate his life to the rights and education of people with disabilities. Jay's mother had schizophrenia, and Jay had been institutionalized from a very young age.

Ann: Rud and I married and brought him home to live with us. He was seven. Here we were in Chapel Hill with a major state university, but we knew that the services were limited because his IQ was below 50. And so we went to see the school superintendent, and we were told that there were no classes for Jay, no services. His magnanimous offer was to have the custodian clear out the storage room in the administration building that had no other children and had no windows, that he would provide space if we would find the salary, find the teacher, find the children. And we did. I mean, what choice did we have?

(09:52) The legal and historical shift from institutionalization to public education rights.

Without the protection of law, Ann and Rud had to do absolutely everything themselves, including writing a grant to the State Department of Education to fund the classroom and finding and hiring the teachers. And their son would still be segregated from other kids.

Ann: For children with IQs below 50, it was just considered a privilege for them to walk in the same school door as other children. At the beginning of this, the school bus would come down our street and not stop at our house. And that was so crushing. It was really painful.

Anya: Ann and Rud soon realized they were not alone. They were part of a national wave of parent leaders, teachers, and other professionals pushing for the educational rights and inclusion of kids with disabilities and against their being excluded and hidden away from society.

Ann: It was a glorious time of civil rights. It was a sense of power that we can make this happen.

Anya: The work, Ann said, had started a couple of decades before. In 1946, Joseph Kennedy had established the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation in memory of his oldest son, who was killed in World War II. On the urging of his daughter Eunice, that became the first private foundation dedicated to intellectual disabilities. And in 1950, as Ann mentioned, parents founded The Arc, which grew within a decade to almost a thousand chapters.

Ann: The parents on whose shoulders Rud and I were standing were parents from the 1950s. They had gathered with other parents, and they had started programs for their children in church basements and in community buildings because the schools would not accept their children. And they became very committed to the fact that children with significant intellectual disability could learn. Because what I was taught in special education in the '60s was children with IQs below 50 would never learn to read. And we know now that is totally false.

Anya: The way that these parents were showing that their kids could learn was basically by trying to teach them, just like Ann did in her first classroom when she put on that Thanksgiving play. Giving kids opportunities, time with peers, and improvising ways to help them communicate. And they also began to make legal arguments.

Here, parents were building on the 1954 Supreme Court decision of "Brown v. Board of Education". That landmark decision found that under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which provides equal protection under the law, "separate but equal" schools segregated by race were unconstitutional. A pair of 1972 cases, one called "Mills v. Board of Education of the District of Columbia" and the other "PARK v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania", both followed Brown in citing the 14th Amendment. Their argument was that if free public education was provided to typical children, it was unconstitutional to deny that education to children with disabilities.

Ann: And so these parents took that finding of "Brown v. Board of Education" to the disability field.

Anya: Racial segregation during Jim Crow meant separate schools, separate restaurants, sometimes whole separate towns. When it came to people with disabilities, starting in the 19th century, there was a different kind of segregation. It meant keeping people in basements, in attics, or sending them away to group institutions, just like Ann's stepson Jay. At the peak in the 1960s, there were 110 state facilities nationwide housing between 150,000 and 200,000 people. One of the biggest was a state facility for mentally and physically disabled people in New York State called Willowbrook.

Geraldo Rivera: Robert Kennedy went to Willowbrook in 1965, almost 10 years ago. He found a snake pit and he demanded change, but there would be no change.

Robert Kennedy: My visit at the state institutions for the mentally retarded, and I think particularly at Willowbrook, that we have a situation that borders on a snake pit and that the children live in filth.

Anya: This is a TV news report on Willowbrook. The screen switches from the clip of Kennedy when he was the senator from New York and shows a man with long, thick, wavy hair parted in the middle, a three-piece suit, and a handlebar mustache, standing in what looks like a courtroom. It's Geraldo, Geraldo Rivera, the future talk show host.

Geraldo: In 1972, we went to Willowbrook for the first time. These are the conditions we found. The first building we went into was Number 6, the B ward. Now I was totally unprepared for what I found there. In the large bare room, there was one attendant and perhaps 50 or 60 seriously and profoundly retarded young boys. Many of them were naked, some were smeared with their own feces, all were just rocking back and forth or smashing their heads against the floor and walls.

Anya: Rivera's Willowbrook report came out in 1972, the same year as the PARK and Mills cases. And it was a national scandal. So it was both the court cases brought by the families, based on "Brown v. Board of Ed" and the 14th Amendment, and the media coverage about the shocking conditions inside institutions that led to the passage of state laws guaranteeing a free appropriate public education to children in their communities whenever possible. Ann's husband Rud is credited as one of the drafters of the North Carolina law and eventually IDEA as well.

And I want to make an important point here as we continue with our history. Special education, of course, has changed and grown a lot since those early days. So much so that this talk of kids warehoused in institutions might sound hard to imagine. Partly this change is because of the work of the Kennedys and other advocates in pushing for investment in medical research. Some forms of serious developmental disability became less common because of better prenatal care, better nutrition, better care for premature infants, and DNA testing.

Another change was that as the law was updated in Congress over the years and also through different court cases, both the number of people covered by special education and the government's obligations to those people expanded. Specific learning disabilities like dyslexia were included in the original law in 1975. In 1990, autism was added, and in 1999, attention disorders like ADHD.

These days, as we mentioned in the first episode, there are close to 9 million young people in special education and growing. That's 17% of all school kids. More than half of students in special education today have what are often called invisible disabilities, like dyslexia and ADHD. And if it were back in the 1960s, these kids likely wouldn't be in Ann's basement classroom. They might find a teacher who was patient enough to help them, or they'd be struggling in the back of the regular classroom, or maybe they'd be leaving school to work. We have higher expectations these days in terms of how much formal education everyone is supposed to get.

Still, all of the rights of all these millions of kids today to access and accommodations and services — all these rights originate in the battles parents fought on behalf of some of the children with the most complex needs. I want to underline this point because talking to Ann really brought it home to me. Special education has always been a parent- and family-led movement. Starting in the mid-20th century, parents of kids with very different kinds of disabilities made the decision to form coalitions and fight together for their rights. Ann and Rud actually published social science research analyzing the testimony given in lawsuits and public hearings and confirming how important family advocates were to establishing the laws and the rights to special education.

Ann: There are many committed professionals, but parents provided a lot, I would say the great majority of the passion, and the vision, and the tenacity to make as John Lewis said "good trouble," to push this initiative forward. It was momentum, they brought momentum. And they had so much skin in the game, it mattered so much to what would happen for their children over a lifetime.

Anya: Can you speak a little bit about the role of the Kennedys in that?

Ann: President Kennedy was absolutely instrumental. He had a sister Rosemary, who had an intellectual disability and was institutionalized. He had a sister Eunice Shriver, who was passionate to the nth degree. And Eunice or Mrs. Shriver as I called her, Mrs. Shriver caught the vision. President Kennedy likely would have been inclined in the direction of advocacy, but she made sure that it happened.

Anya: After years of the family not talking about exactly what happened to Rosemary, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, that was her married name, started telling the truth in 1962. She published articles in national magazines like "Parade" and "The Saturday Evening Post", and went on television, and ran a camp for kids with disabilities on her family farm. She used all the fame and glamour of the Kennedys to reduce the stigma around special education and to shine a light on these children, just like Ann had done with her Thanksgiving pageant. As Ann says, thanks in large part to Eunice, her brother President John F. Kennedy signed legislation creating centers for academic research into causes and treatments of intellectual disability, something that universities had really neglected up to then. He also funded centers for training teachers and providing information to families.

This research was fundamental in helping establish that students with disabilities could be taught, that they could learn. That was a necessary step in order to argue that these kids had a right to be in school. And the even more important argument families were making was that these children deserved equal treatment simply because they were human beings.

(14:52) Current policy debates and proposals for the future of special education.

With all of Ann's wealth of historical experience, I wanted to know how she was thinking about what's happening now. Ann told me that the threats to special education now are the worst that she's ever seen in her long life. The situation reminded her of what was going on in the early 1980s during the Reagan administration.

Ann: Because it's the closest thing we have to what's happening now, although it wasn't nearly as bad. But when Reagan came into office, he wanted to dismantle a lot of the Department of Education. And he wanted to roll back IDEA and send some of it to the states as the Trump administration is doing.

Anya: And it was brand new then, it was only five years in.

Ann: Yes. So he had a Secretary of Education named Secretary Bell, and he was the one in charge of doing this rollback. And Secretary Bell and my husband Rud were on the "McNeil-Lehrer Show", and they were debating.

Anya: On the news show, Secretary Bell advocated for just what Trump has been saying: giving more authority for special education back to states and the local school board, and having less oversight by the federal government. The host, Robert MacNeil, asks Rud what that will really mean. Rud says:

Rud Turnbull: I think the real meaning is that we're going to re-establish that system of dual citizenship, double-class citizenship that we had for handicapped people before the law went into effect. I think we will have one kind of education for one kind of person, and a different kind of education for somebody who's less able and less worthy.

Anya: And Rud also made clear, for him, this was personal.

Rud: I had a situation where my child could not go to school, where I had to institutionalize him and deinstitutionalize him only after the law began. What I see is that my whole assumptions about his life and about my life are right on the cutting edge of these regulations.

Anya: Ann and Rud and their comrades won that round, and the special education movement didn't go backwards. So here we are, it's 45 years later. There is a Republican administration actually dismantling the Department of Education. They say they're going to give responsibility back to the states and local districts, making the same argument as in Reagan's time: that it will give more local control and flexibility at a level that is closer to students. At the same time, by the way, they're also making cuts to federal funding. The "Big Beautiful Bill" cut a trillion dollars from the programs that cover the health and long-term care needs of nearly half of all people with disabilities and more than half of children with special healthcare needs. And the Trump administration has canceled special education grants, including a billion dollars for mental health, more than 600 million dollars for teacher training, and others for research.

So how is this likely to work out for kids with disabilities? I wanted to talk to someone who could explain the thinking behind the Trump administration's position. Do you mind just start by introducing yourself and telling me about your position?

Jonathan Butcher: Sure, I am Jonathan Butcher. I'm the acting director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation.

Anya: The Heritage Foundation, the organization that published "Project 2025". Here's a quote from "Project 2025": "The Department, that's the Department of Education, is a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel. For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states." Jonathan Butcher is listed as a contributor to this chapter. The author is Lindsay Burke. In June 2025, President Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon appointed Burke as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Programs at the Department. Neither have responded to my requests for an interview. Of the folks who work on education within Heritage, Jonathan is the one who's done the most writing on special education specifically. So I thought he'd be a good person to talk to. What's gone wrong specifically with what we call special education?

Jonathan: Well, special education is the most litigious area or sector of the K-12 world. I think parents will go to their school and have an expectation that they can write an IEP in conjunction with teachers and the IDEA staff in the district. They will have the services outlined that their child is going to receive, and then those services will then be carried out. But if either they can't agree on the IEP or that once the IEP is finished it's not fulfilled the way that parents expect, parents have little recourse. You can go back to the table and try to have another conversation with the district officials, but this has happened over and over again, and you'll wind up going round and round with officials that parents resort to getting a lawyer and filing a lawsuit.

Anya: Jonathan didn't mention that most families in special education are able to resolve any issues at the school level. And if there is a problem, families do have other recourse besides hiring a lawyer, namely the Office for Civil Rights. At least they did. But I could take his point that special education can be highly litigious. One of the lawyers I interviewed for this podcast told me that special education was the most adversarial area of the law, period. And this is a guy who had defended murderers. Then he got to this:

Jonathan: What I would argue is that today, if we closed the Department of Education, which I am in favor of, and move the oversight of IDEA to another federal agency or another cabinet-level agency such as Health and Human Services, I don't think that we would be reverting back to where we were in 1972 or the early 1970s. I think we're in a different landscape now where parents are aware that they have more options available to them, and I think that changes the dynamic of how we think about what policy solutions should look like in terms of updating IDEA.

(21:40) Examining the potential impact of organizational changes on special education.

Did you catch the part where Jonathan Butcher talked about handing the oversight of IDEA to Health and Human Services? I interviewed him before this was official, but in June 2026, the Department of Education indeed announced that the functions of the Office for Civil Rights would go to the Department of Justice, which we'll discuss in a future episode, and the rest of the federal implementation and oversight of special education, which includes giving out the 12% of special education money that comes from the federal government, would all go to HHS. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is, of course, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of Eunice Kennedy and Rosemary Kennedy.

So let's zoom in on that for a minute. Unlike his Aunt Eunice or his uncles Jack or Teddy or his father Robert, RFK Jr. seems to be on board with the idea of sending certain children away from society and being extremely pessimistic about their life chances. He's floated the notion of taking children off ADHD medication and "re-parenting" them on what he calls "wellness farms". He's consistently flirted with discredited ideas about what causes autism. And in an April 2025 speech, he said:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Autism destroys families. These are children who should not be suffering like this. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children, and we need to put an end to it.

Anya: Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii addressed this attitude in a public hearing in August of 2026, where she unfortunately had a case of laryngitis.

Mazie Hirono: Handling that responsibility to the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, proves that this regime really doesn't give a hoot about students with disabilities. HHS has a zero experience dealing with IDEA, and with HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. publicly calling autism an individual tragedy that destroys families, he certainly doesn't think of children with disabilities as a group of students who under IDEA should get the educational support they need.

Anya: Besides the personal views of RFK Jr., besides the lack of expertise in the Department, another big point people make about why it's a problem to move federal special education oversight and funding under Health and Human Services is that a health agency shouldn't be overseeing any aspect of education, period. These kids are first and foremost students, not patients. They deserve to be viewed for their potential and not as a diagnosis. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia introduced a bill in the Senate in the summer of 2026 that would prohibit this move.

Tim Kaine: To make sure that the Department of Education is not cannibalized and that services for special ed stay within the Department of Education. Making sure we treat our kids, especially kids with special needs, the way they ought to be treated.

Anya: The bill even has two Republican co-sponsors, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, but it was thought to have little chance of passing, let alone being signed by President Trump, since it directly contradicts his administration's own policies. I wanted to hear a response from Jonathan about these objections to moving special ed oversight and implementation to HHS. I know what from speaking to families with children with disabilities and their advocates, that there's a lot of concern about the kind of rhetoric that's come out of this administration as well as specifically from the Secretary of Health and Human Services about people with autism, people with ADHD. What's your opinion on that kind of rhetoric?

Jonathan: If you're talking about where it comes from, right, what causes it, is that what you mean?

Anya: Yes, the discredited science that's been promulgated.

Jonathan: Vaccines and things like that.

Anya: Yeah. But number two, it's just the disparaging language that's been used. So for example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. making statements about people with autism will never play baseball, they will never graduate.

Jonathan: I won't speak for Washington. Heritage is not funded with public money. We are an advocacy organization, and so I have, you know, I am related to individuals that have special needs, and so I would be very cautious about what I say about what they can or can't do. I hope that we would have high aspirations for these young people, whatever their needs may be.

Anya: But just in terms of like people trusting that this is the right place for their kids.

Jonathan: Do we think that Health and Human Services is going to do it well? I mean, my hope is certainly yes, and I can tell you that it hasn't been effective at the Department of Education.

Anya: The solution that Jonathan Butcher gave for fixing special education without needing as much federal oversight is universal school choice. While the federal government would still provide some funding for special education through IDEA, the state would also take money out of its public education budget and give it directly to families. And families could spend this money on private school tuition, or even stay home and homeschool and use it to pay for therapists and iPads and things like that. This idea was first proposed by the right-wing economist Milton Friedman in 1955 on the argument that market competition will make all schools better. Since the pandemic, it's more popular than ever. More than 30 states have passed some form of private school choice program, sometimes called "Education Savings Accounts". Some are specifically dedicated to students with disabilities. And in the "Big Beautiful Bill", Trump included for the first time a federal private school choice program that takes effect in January 2027. But there's just one problem.

Jonathan: The goal here for public schools as well as private schools is to find the great services for the children. So we at least want to give parents options.

Anya: I guess the big difference is that private schools are not required by law to serve students and public schools are.

Jonathan: True, but again, if you go back to the result and what brought us here in the beginning of our conversation is that there are problems with IDEA and implementation, and that there's widespread dissatisfaction with the way that the system is. So if public schools were doing a bang-up job that was satisfying parents, we wouldn't have to be talking about this.

Anya: Yeah, I think it's a real big question, but I think you sort of started by making the assertion that we're not going to go back to where we were before. And I guess I'm not sure why we wouldn't. Jonathan told me he has people with disabilities in his family, and he thinks that IDEA should be upheld, that we shouldn't go back to the days where the school bus did not stop at little Jay's house because there was no place for kids like him.

I thought of Tristan, Allison's son with autism, dyslexia, and ADHD and behavioral disorders in the last episode, and the fact that the school district in Indiana wanted to send him away at age five to a residential program and at one point was offering him just one hour of instruction a day, away from his classmates. As imperfect as the system clearly is, the question I'm left with is the one that Rud Turnbull raised in 1982: how education can in fact remain a civil right if it's not guaranteed or overseen by the federal government and if it's no longer provided by default for free to everyone by public providers.

In Indiana, as a case in point, there is a voucher program. But in Allison's small town, there is exactly one tiny Catholic school and one tiny Christian school. Neither one would necessarily be prepared to accept her kids with their behaviors. Nor could she afford to pay the difference between the tuition they charge and what the voucher provides. Research shows that in Indiana, as in most other places, vouchers primarily go to subsidize families that could already afford private school. Jonathan's arguing that as long as families know that they have the right, they can use the magic of the market to access education. In my mind, the math wasn't mathing.

We'll talk more about this in the next episode when we visit a private school that is doing amazing things with kids with learning disabilities, but it also is extremely expensive. But there was a more basic point my editor Neil asked me to follow up on, so I called Jonathan back. Good afternoon. Hi, thanks for being willing to hop back on. This won't take long.

Jonathan: Sure.

Anya: So I was going over the recording with my editor and there were just a couple places where he wanted me to get a little more clarification. One was about sort of I mean you kind of talked about like it's been 50 years, IDEA's not working that well for families, there's a lot of adversarial back and forth. I guess the question that he wanted me to kind of just get you on the record on is like why not try to fix the Department of Education instead of dismantling it?

Jonathan: Because we have. I mean, we're well into a trillion dollars or more over the life of the Department of Education, multiple administrations on both sides of the aisle, and per-student spending has really only increased consistently. I mean, we've never had a sustained period of downward spending.

Anya: You cite the increased spending as a sign I guess that it's not working. Is education supposed to get cheaper over time?

Jonathan: No, but the money should equate to improved results. If you look at the nation's report card, again, reading scores and math scores are at or near historical lows right now. And they were on a downward trend even before COVID.

Anya: In saying that we have tried to fix special education at the federal level, Jonathan didn't mention that Congress has failed to fully update IDEA since 2004. Nor had the increased funding to meet the obligations in the law. Again, the federal government pledged to pay 40% of the costs for special education, but it currently only covers 12%. So while the Trump administration has placed blame on the Department of Education, others blame Congress for neglecting special education all this time.

I think me and Ann and Jonathan and anybody who takes a fair look at the special education system we have can agree on some things: that too many families have to struggle to get the services they need, that it's adversarial, slow, and unresponsive. But the difference is that some people want to help families by working to improve the existing system, and some, including the people in power, want to scrap it. I was curious just how far that impulse might go. The concept of school vouchers, like I said, was first proposed by Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning conservative economist, in an extremely influential paper in 1955. Friedman elsewhere called for fully privatizing and getting the government out of education altogether. So I asked Jonathan if he agreed, and honestly, his response surprised me. So you're not taking the Milton Friedman idea that we don't really need public schools and shouldn't have them?

Jonathan: Whether or not there should be a public education system in each state is a conversation worth having. I mean, I think the reality is in the world that we live in, we do have public schools and students are required by law to attend a school of some type, right?

Anya: Yeah, but I mean, we're also in a time of a lot of changes and a lot of upheaval, and so I feel like it's worth asking what is the ultimate outcome that you think would be ideal? Do I think shutting down every public school in the United States would be good policy?

Jonathan: I think it would be a significant logistical and legal project.

Anya: Jonathan is essentially saying that closing all public schools would be a big hassle, not that it's a bad idea. Ann Turnbull is retired now, but she still keeps in touch with many of her former students, people she mentored, even some of the people who were recently let go from the Federal Department of Education and who are now organizing to fight back.

Ann: They think of themselves as the resistance. And so it's encouraging. I mean, I'm so thankful for the opportunity to have worked in the disability field and to work on making a difference. And I was so privileged to have a partner who was there every step of the way in advocacy. And very sadly, Ann and Rud's son Jay died. Rud died in March. He was 87. But he was such a partner, and I miss him so much. But in his eulogy, which one of our daughters wrote, it was just the week that there was word that the Department of Education was going to be on the chopping block. And so his eulogy ends with "raise hell," his dying wish that advocacy would fight the good fight. 

Anya: Can I just ask you, is that a picture of Rud behind you? 

Ann: Oh, thank you for asking, that's Jay.

Anya: Oh, that's your son.

Ann: Our son. And Jay had what we call an enviable life.

Anya: Thanks to Ann and Rud and all the people who fought for and alongside people like him, Jay was able to work as a clerical aide at the research center Ann and Rud started, and to live in his own home with support from housemates. He died of a heart attack at 41.

Ann: And what gives me comfort now is that Jay and Rud, they were just best buddies. And I love to think of their spirits together.

Anya: In our next episode, you'll meet a family that has done exactly what Jonathan Butcher would suggest: take their kid to a private school where he's getting more specialized education for his dyslexia and making great progress after years of struggle in public school. The only problem is it costs 90,000 dollars a year. That's next time on "Zero Reject".

"Zero Reject: The Uncertain Future of Special Education" is written and reported by me, Anya Kamenetz, and edited by Neil Drumming. Sound design by Cody Nelson. Briana Berry is our production director. Anne Rothschild is our senior producer. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis. Additional production help from Erica O’Day. Ezgi Kaya is our legal counsel. Our music was composed by Marcus Bagala. Justin D. Wright mixed the show. Footage courtesy of ABC News Video Source. 

This series was brought to you by Understood.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people navigate the realities of neurodivergence. From Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key and Scott Cocchiere. Additional editorial support from Jordan Davidson, Andy Kahn, and Janet Decker. Special thanks to all the families who shared their stories with us. If you want to help Understood continue this work, consider making a donation at understood.org/give.