Keeping the lights on | 6

After tracing what’s broken in special education — and why — Anya Kamenetz closes the series by asking what’s actually working.

She reconnects with Beth Gellman-Beer, the former federal civil rights attorney from episode one, now a year into life after the Department of Education. Beth gives her honest read on what’s happened to the Office for Civil Rights, and her hopes for what it could become. 

Anya also talks to Stephanie Cosey, a longtime special educator in Southern California, about a very different approach to the adversarial relationship between parents and schools — one built on coaching and collaboration instead of legal threats. 

And she meets Roberto Rivera, a father in San Francisco who turned his own fight for his son’s speech therapy into grassroots advocacy, and who’s now helping build a tool that translates dense IEP paperwork into plain language for other families.

• Need another podcast? Everyone Gets a Juice Box: For Parents of Neurodivergent Kids 

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Anya Kamenetz: How often in life do you get a real full circle moment?

Beth Gelman-Beer: It was definitely the closure that I needed.

Anya: Back in episode one, you met Beth Gelman-Beer. She used to work for the federal Department of Education in the Office for Civil Rights, defending the rights of students, including those with disabilities.

When I was finishing up reporting this podcast, I caught up with Beth again. She and her former colleagues had gone back exactly one year later to the same restaurant where they had been when they found out that their regional office was being eliminated.

Did you have a toast? Like, what was the mood?

Beth: It's so hard to put into words what the mood was. It's such a mix of emotions. There will always be that sense of grief.

It was also, you know, a look, let's celebrate. It's a year later. We made it. My colleague and I built this business together and it's successful, and yay us. And the people that remain, yay them for keeping the lights on at OCR and finding some purpose and meaning in the chaos. But there's always this tinge of sadness with it as well.

Anya: I'm Anya Kamenetz. I'm an education reporter, and you're listening to "Zero Reject" from Understood.org.

Across these episodes, you've been hearing stories of families struggling to get their kids a free, appropriate public education. And you've been hearing about changes underway in the second Trump administration threatening an already fragile system — for example, laying off people like Beth, and even dismantling the Department of Education altogether.

As we've built a deeper understanding of some of the challenges of special education, going all the way back to when it was founded, I've started to also bring you stories of people who are committed to making it better. Because when everything is up in the air, the really bold thing to do is to imagine something completely new.

So this final episode is going to be in three distinct parts, and in each part there's a little bit of optimism to be found — even if just from the fact that so many people care so much about improving kids' lives and are determined to keep fighting.

First, we catch up with Beth to hear what's happening both inside and outside the Department of Education, and her hopes about what special education at the federal level could look like one day.

For the second part, we move to the district level and hear from a longtime special educator who changed how I thought about the adversarial nature of special ed.

And for the third and final part, we'll be taking it back down to the level of an individual parent who's advocating for his own kids, and everyone else's too.

Roberto Rivera: In order to make a tangible change, you had to understand the system.

Anya: So this is episode six, "Keeping the Lights On." Part 1: What's happening at the federal level?

(02:48) Tracking changes and civil rights investigations at the federal level.

When Beth and hundreds of her colleagues were let go in early 2025, approximately 25,000 outstanding complaints were left in limbo. Allison's in Indiana, who you met in episode two, was one of them.

Starting in late 2025, the federal government ordered some of Beth's colleagues back to work. Beth went back briefly, but she decided she couldn't stay.

Beth: Linda McMahon has made very clear that she intends to eliminate the department, so why would you come work at a department for which she keeps saying she wants to eliminate?

Anya: Linda McMahon, of course, is the Secretary of Education. And in mid-2026, she testified before Congress that she had a, quote, "clear mandate to sunset a 46-year-old, $3 trillion failed federal education bureaucracy."

In June 2026, it was also announced that as part of this plan, the Office for Civil Rights will move to the Department of Justice, while the other programs that have to do with special education would be moving to Health and Human Services.

As we mentioned in episode three, there has been some noise in the Senate about stopping this sunset, or at least slowing it down. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia introduced a bill in July with two Republican cosponsors, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, to stop the transfer of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and other functions out of the Department of Education. Although, this bill doesn't mention the Office for Civil Rights.

The bill has little chance of becoming law at this point, since it goes directly against the Trump administration's policy, but it calls back to the many decades when support for students, including students with disabilities, was bipartisan.

And in that way, it indicates that there might be a future, after this presidency, where politicians come together again not only to restore what's been lost, but maybe even to imagine something better.

In the meantime, however, the remaining staff at OCR still have a job to do. It's just kind of different than it used to be.

This year, OCR and the Department of Justice formed a joint task force to target antisemitism, and a special investigations team to target school policies that are inclusive of transgender students.

I went to the OCR page at Ed.gov and reviewed all 68 press releases that they put out between March 2025, when Beth and her colleagues were let go, and April 2026. Almost all of them were about transgender students, eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion, and antisemitism. Just three mentioned students with disabilities.

Recall we said in the first episode that 70% of the complaints OCR receives are about students with disabilities. Beth says that with this new focus from OCR, these students are being left out in the cold.

Beth: The volume of complaint resolutions is significantly lower as compared to any other year of OCR's existence — significantly.

Anya: Senator Bernie Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate committee that oversees the Department of Education, released a report in April 2026 that said, thanks to the layoffs and the office's closing, the number of OCR complaints resolved in 2025 fell to its lowest point in 12 years. That included a 79% drop in resolutions involving students with disabilities.

I asked Beth about moving the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division. She wasn't into it.

Beth: That would be a horrible idea.

Anya: For one thing, they don't have the staff anymore. They've been gutted as well in the past year. For another, they don't have the same job.

Beth: The Department of Justice, their primary function is to litigate. So they take only the best of the best cases, whereas OCR is required to evaluate every single case that comes through the door.

And the bulk of the work that OCR does, as I said before, is disability discrimination — cases where a student is entitled to, for example, speech therapy services, and they don't receive a month of speech therapy services because of staffing shortages. The Department of Justice is never going to take a case like that. OCR would.

Anya: Basically what you're saying is that they're going to apply a different standard. They're not going to review every case in the way that OCR did, and particularly cases that might involve one or two students, but not a full district and big, big patterns of behavior.

Those kids are going to be out of luck if it's just like, "Sorry, it's just you, and yes, your rights might have been infringed, but we're not making a federal case out of it, literally."

Beth: Exactly. And when you think about the bulk of the processing by OCR is for those little cases — hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands — what happens to those cases?

Anya: I have been talking to those families. I found a family with an open complaint in Indiana, and so her office, she originally made the complaint to, was closed. It was transferred to Colorado. Now she's out of luck. I mean, really, she hasn't money to hire a lawyer. That's it. That's the end of the line for her.

Beth: It's incredibly unfortunate. The advice that I give to families like that is to explore the state-level agencies that may be able to provide some kind of relief. But, you know, in that scenario, it's going to depend on your zip code. Some states do have really strong state agencies that have enforcement power over these laws, and some states don't.

Anya: This was a concern we've been talking about throughout this podcast: that with less oversight on the federal level, outcomes for students will be more dependent on where in the country you happen to live.

Beth's life's work has been all about improving special education after things go wrong. One bright spot about her new chapter is that as an entrepreneur, she can use her skills to work with school districts proactively to improve their compliance with civil rights law.

And I was surprised to hear that being in the private sector is also giving her some ideas about how OCR could be reinvented.

Beth: As a business owner now, I had to purchase case management software, and I purchased the lowest-level case management software. And within 24 hours, my mind was blown at how amazing it is. And it reduces the time for me, because I can just search for something very easily. I can store my documents very easily.

The technology that we were using was horrible. So if there's an opportunity to come in and modernize the technology that OCR was using to process cases, to track cases, that would make it so much more effective and efficient.

Anya: I know we're talking about business software, but I found this moment kind of moving. Beth has left the federal government in the rearview mirror. That place broke her heart, and yet she can't stop herself from still thinking about ways that OCR could get better.

Beth: Even if I'm not part of it, I think that it serves a really critical, important function for students, and I would love nothing more than to see it rebuilt to its full capacity.

Maybe, you know, it's an opportunity to rebuild it in a way that we never imagined. There were certainly flaws in the system always. And so if this means that we can rebuild it in a way that it's more efficient and effective, great. Wonderful.

Anya: Maybe one day.

(09:47) A special educator's perspective on inclusion and teacher coaching.

For the next part of this episode, I wanted to talk to someone who's trying to screen out all this noise on the federal level. She's working on the school district side toward improving inclusion for students with disabilities and all students.

Stephanie Cozy: I thought I would go into teaching as a temporary kind of gig, and then go to law school. And 22 years later, I'm still doing it.

Anya: This is Stephanie Cozy, a longtime special educator and a mom of children with IEPs, who now works for a public school district in Southern California.

Stephanie is dedicated to improving lives for students, and that starts with increasing respect for their teachers. She knows firsthand what it feels like to be disrespected as a special educator.

Stephanie: Often times, when I would tell colleagues, friends about the students that I taught and what I did, I would get very patronizing responses, like, "Oh, you're so patient," "Oh, how sweet," as if what I did was not as valuable as what they did, teaching students who did not have formalized IEPs.

So when people talk to me about the tasks that I do, working with students with disabilities, it's often personified —

Anya: Mm. As though you're like their mom?

Stephanie: Right. Right, and not an educator.

Anya: I'm hearing that you believe something very different. I just wonder if you could spell out for me, what is the alternative worldview?

Stephanie: So the alternative worldview is that the students that I have worked with have the same value as anyone else.

Anya: I'm just going to add to that that another alternative worldview is that skilled special education teachers are among the most highly skilled teachers of all.

A long time ago, I interviewed Lani Guinier, an educator and civil rights scholar, and she told me something I've never forgotten. She said that in the medical profession, the doctors who get the most respect are the ones who work with the most serious and difficult cases.

But in education, often times it's the opposite. The teachers who get the most respect and the most money are often the ones who teach students with the most privilege and the highest levels of academic achievement already.

In her public school district, Stephanie's working with educators who are trying to improve how they serve kids with disabilities. And at the same time, she's trying to bring some of the insights from the special education world and use them to improve all of education for everyone.

This is a similar approach to some of the reforms that Ashley Jochim was talking about in the last episode. One term of art to refer to this concept is Universal Design for Learning, or UDL.

Stephanie: In its simplest form, UDL is taking away barriers to learning.

Anya: A UDL classroom can be thought of as a charcuterie board that is laid out with different options for everyone to choose from. There might be materials that are visual, auditory, hands-on. And from a social and emotional perspective, UDL teachers do everything they can to welcome students, to promote belonging across different identities.

A very common example of universal design out in the world are curb cuts, the little slopes at the corners of sidewalks. They're designed to provide access for wheelchairs, but they also help people with strollers, delivery people with dollies, and kids on scooters.

UDL, by the same token, is intended to make classrooms more inclusive and more individualized in a way that benefits everyone, whether you're identified as having a disability or not.

Stephanie: IEPs are written on a deficit model. It's about what the students can't do. And so I tried my best to create an environment for my students to feel like they had a connection, and that people believed in them, and valued them, and saw them as whole.

Even students who have a lot of limitations have the capacity to be able to be challenged. And most people don't give them that space to be able to do that, to give them opportunities to learn and grow.

Anya: Another key component in UDL is expanding how teachers get students to show what they know. Stephanie pushes the teachers she's coaching to rethink standardized, fill-in-the-bubble testing. She wants them to ask themselves:

Stephanie: What are you looking for? What is the outcome? And based on your outcome, how can we give different ways for that student to show their learning?

They could do a video. They can do a slideshow. They could act it out. They could do art. There are so many different ways that they can show their learning, cuz really, does the student understand the concept? That's what we're determining. We're not determining can you take a written test. So that's one example of UDL.

Anya: That made me think of how ChatGPT and generative AI has forced teachers all over the world to rethink assessments. Maybe they can't just assign papers in the same way, so how can they get an authentic sense of what students know? These are the same questions that teachers ask when they're trying to assess a student who's nonverbal, for example.

Stephanie: Sometimes we get buried in the details. And I think being a person who's taught students with the most need has taught me how to look through the lens of: What do they really need? What is the essential part of this?

Anya: This is really an expansion outward from the core concept that is the title of this podcast. "Zero Reject" means universal inclusion. Stephanie practices UDL on the teacher level as well. She doesn't just coach teachers in special education. She works with teachers in general education, most of whom will have a student with an IEP in their classroom at some point, and she works with support professionals too.

Stephanie: I really firmly believe in coaching. If we coach and we maintain that relationship with them, provide them with opportunities to feel like they belong and they're included, then that, more than just having a professional learning opportunity, impacts the classroom.

Anya: I asked Stephanie about how she uses coaching to make classrooms more inclusive for all students.

Stephanie: It's a lot of psychology into play in coaching teachers to be open to students. So I'll give you an example. I had students in my classroom who I wanted to go to the community college, and I put them in a dance class. I had about seven to eight students. And after the first day, the dance teacher sent me an email and told me exactly why none of them should be there.

Anya: She mentioned physical limitations, she had behavior concerns.

Stephanie: It was a very long email. "They don't fit," basically what she said. "They don't fit."

Anya: Here's what Stephanie didn't do next: insist on her students' legal rights.

Stephanie: It's a delicate situation, cuz we could come in and say, "I have an IEP, and this is what has to happen," right? I've done it myself, where I'm like, "I'm just going to write in their IEP, now you got to do it." And that doesn't engender a teacher welcoming that student into their into her environment or feeling like they belong.

Anya: Instead, Stephanie started her reply email with humility and gratitude. She thanked the teacher for being willing to consider including her students.

Stephanie: Number one, I told her she was a great professor. I built her up. And then I had to kind of move her along to why I felt like this was the best environment.

Anya: Stephanie came to visit the class at the next session. She offered what teachers are always saying they're looking for: not just instructions on what to do, but advice on how to do it, and also more people to help.

She spoke with the professor about how much the students liked the class, and she offered to help her work on including them. The professor decided to have the community college students pair up with Stephanie's students so they could engage in the class together. Stephanie also sent in some instructional assistants.

By the end of the semester, the professor said she loved having Stephanie's students, and their classmates agreed.

Stephanie: That's how we all saw it, right? Like, this is their peers. I think that they appreciated having that opportunity too.

Anya: So it sounds like you're really — you're really trying to have a growth mindset for everybody who's coming to the table.

Stephanie: I, as best as I possibly can, try to see things in a way that honors where people are, but also challenges them to move forward if they're open to that. A lot of it is talking and being vulnerable myself and allowing space for the teacher to be vulnerable, cuz often times it's they're questioning themselves that has nothing to do with the student.

Anya: A huge lightbulb went on at this point in my conversation with Stephanie. You know, this entire time I've been listening to families who are trying to improve their children's experience in school, and they're doing that by helping and encouraging and pouring love into their kids. And on the other hand, they're also confronting educators and reminding them constantly of their students' rights.

And there are very, very good reasons that parents can feel adversarial here. There are real injustices and real injuries happening. And yet, talking with Stephanie reminded me of something that maybe should have been obvious: almost every human being responds better to help and encouragement than they do to threats and demands. And everyone has the power to change and learn and grow, and that has to include teachers and education leaders too.

There's a practical reason to take this approach, not just a touchy-feely one. A core element of the crisis in special education is special ed teachers leaving the profession because they feel unsupported and burnt out. And that also leaves more students with IEPs in the classroom with teachers who have little or no special education training.

Working with all teachers and encouraging their growth like Stephanie's doing, that's likely to be the best way to help all students. Not to mention, it's only by recognizing the humanity and the vulnerability of everyone in the process that you can hopefully make a deeper change.

(19:41) A father's journey into community organizing and advocacy for special education.

In the third and final part of this episode, I wanted to bring you an example of parents and students coming together and collaborating with school districts, researchers, and educators to make special education just a little bit better, even in the face of some pretty big challenges.

Roberto: Yesterday in the morning was kind of raining early, then it was really sunny and hot. So I was boiling. Today was cold all day, foggy. We having a misunderstanding between me and San Francisco, because it has been very moody.

Anya: This is Roberto Rivera. He emigrated from Mexico City to California when he was 17 — not for the weather.

Roberto: Looking for the American dream, you know, having a better life. You know, since I was small, I was dreaming about having property and having the house with the white picket fence.

Anya: He's a carpenter now, and he's married with three children: a boy named Che, after Che Guevara, and boy-girl twins who are a couple of years younger.

Che, the oldest, was recommended for speech therapy starting in kindergarten, but he missed a whole year of therapy sessions during the pandemic. When school reopened, he caught his therapy eventually in first grade, but then in second grade, he started to miss sessions again.

San Francisco Unified School District, the state of California, and the country as a whole are all facing critical shortages of special educators. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, in January 2025, families in the district were notified that students had missed a combined 9,100 hours of services like speech therapy that were mandated in students' IEPs.

Roberto and his wife were working a lot of hours, as always, and they didn't realize what Che was missing until one morning at drop-off.

Roberto: One day, I went to drop him in the morning and they were having a coffee with the principal, and they invite me. And I was, "Okay, okay, maybe I can take some time and be late at work." So I stayed.

And when I went inside, someone grabbed me and said, "Look, they having a meeting about speech therapist in this other classroom, and your son is part of it." I didn't have no idea, you know?

Anya: The person who grabbed Roberto was a parent liaison who worked at the school and helped translate for the many parents who spoke Spanish. And she clued Roberto in about a meeting being held at the school by a nonprofit that organizes parents in California to have more of a voice in their public schools.

Roberto: So I end up going to that room, and it was about 20 parents sitting down. And it was someone talking to them, "The kids, they didn't — they missed many months of speech therapist, and nobody was doing anything about it." And I didn't know that either.

Anya: This is the first Roberto was hearing of this. He got mad.

Roberto: We work and we work all day and we work hard, and we believe that when you drop your kids at school — we in the greatest cities of the world, San Francisco, one of the most expensive, the richest cities in the world. You know, so you believe that they going to get quality education and they going to get all the services, but that wasn't the case this time.

Anya: As all this sank in, what Roberto didn't realize is that his life was about to change. He was about to join the ranks of parents tasked with carrying forward the cause of special education, generation after generation.

In California, there are a few different nonprofits that use a community organizing model to get working-class families involved in improving their kids' schools. Organizers bring together parents to work collaboratively with teachers and districts to lobby school boards for better policies.

Coleman Advocates was the name of the organization holding the meeting that day, and Roberto now works with a similar one called Innovate Public Schools.

For Roberto, this transformation into an activist started small, with the organizers helping him draft an email. Next thing he knew, he was being asked to testify at a school board meeting.

Roberto: I was like, didn't really want to go, you know?

Anya: Why?

Roberto: Because, you know, I've never done anything like that. I didn't even know what a board meeting is. I was tired, I came from work, I had to go cook. I do all that stuff for my kids while the mother is working.

Anya: The organizers were persistent. They came up to him and asked him again when he was in his car in the parking lot, getting ready to drive the kids home.

Roberto: I was like, "Okay, let me ask the kids," okay? And I asked the kids because I thought that they were going to say no. So I said, "Hey, whoever wants to go to the board meeting, raise your hand." And they all raised their hands. They put me in the spot.

Anya: When they got to the meeting, things moved quickly.

Roberto: Someone filled up a card for me, and suddenly they call me, they call my name. And I was like, you know, not used to speaking in front of people like that. But I did my little speak, and seems like it make a dent, because after that, we get a speech therapist two weeks later. And that just got me excited about it, and I started advocating after that.

Anya: You had an early win! You're like somebody who starts to gamble in Vegas and they win right away.

Roberto: Yes, exactly.

Anya: Roberto was hooked. He'd become an activist, at a particularly tough time for people like him to be speaking up and sticking their necks out.

So how did your son do when he got his speech therapy? How is he doing now with his language?

Roberto: Well, he's doing a lot better, you know? He's doing a lot better, but in the way, we find out that he has dyslexia. Right now, he's being evaluated for ADHD. Now he's getting more services.

I'm starting to understand a little bit more of what he was going through. That information is not available to you. You have to dig for everything. You had to fight for services, you had to fight for everything, you know? And the people that don't fight for everything, they don't get it. And it's not right that the system works that way. You know, that information, those services should be available for everybody to grab them.

Anya: What does it mean to fight for everything? What do you have to do?

Roberto: You got to go and speak with different people to be able to get your kids evaluated. You have to sit down and you have to understand all the paperwork that you have to sign, and you have to read. And to be honest with you, sometimes it's frightening, you know? Especially for parents that don't speak the language fluent, or they don't understand, you know? To get a translator, that takes a long time — months, sometimes.

Anya: I want to unpack this a little bit, especially that word Roberto used: "frightening."

Special education, as you've been hearing throughout these episodes, depends so much on parent involvement and advocacy. That can be empowering. It can also create inequities, as we've heard over and over during this podcast.

If you have learning disabilities of your own, if you work a lot of hours and don't have much time, or you're experiencing homelessness and moving often between school districts, it can be so much harder to engage in the way that the system requires. And yet another factor that makes things harder for families, especially right now, is being an immigrant.

Roberto: It's real. You know, being scared is real. When Trump was sending ICE to San Francisco, a lot of kids stopped coming to school.

Anya: To your school?

Roberto: Yes. So, you know, it's real. Yes, people are afraid, even when they legal here. So they're afraid to speak sometimes.

Anya: Public schools are open to every child, regardless of immigration status. And about one in four children in American public schools has at least one parent who's an immigrant.

With Trump's mass deportation program, two-thirds of public school principals are saying in surveys that children from immigrant families are not showing up.

Before Trump was reelected, parent leaders organized by Innovate, who are overwhelmingly immigrants, worked with educators at San Francisco Unified to create a policy funding more interpretation and translation services for IEPs. Together, they lobbied the school board, which passed the new policy unanimously in March 2022.

I spoke to an organizer for Innovate, and she said that they've had to move some meetings onto Zoom because some of the parents they work with are now afraid to leave their houses.

Yet even with their very justified fears, she told me immigrant parents are still just as motivated as ever to keep lobbying for their kids' rights in school, because better access to education is one of the main reasons they came here in the first place.

(28:15) Developing an AI tool to make IEPs accessible and actionable for families.

And more recently, Roberto and Innovate have been working with other families to make the IEP process easier to navigate in an unexpected way.

Innovate Public Schools teamed up with a nonprofit called GovLab and Northeastern University in Boston to help build a tool called AI-IEP — like artificial intelligence plus IEP. It uses AI to translate Individualized Education Programs not only from English into Spanish or Vietnamese or Mandarin, but from jargon into plain language.

Roberto: The IEP tool has made everything possible for a lot of parents that don't speak the language, especially when the tool just translate automatically your child's services and who is giving the services. So it's a wonderful tool.

Understanding the language, simplifying the language — the jargon that they use in documents, they made for teachers. You know, the language is made for professional people that went to college and graduated, you know? We need a simple language, and they make it simple for us to understand it.

Anya: One of my favorite concrete examples is that it's typical in an IEP to present services like speech therapy in terms of thousands of minutes per year. Remember earlier in the episode when I said students had missed 9,100 hours of services? That sounds like a lot, but it's hard to tell.

The AI-IEP translates the number in the IEP into how most people would describe it, like two half-hour sessions per week. Simple, but effective.

Roberto has been helping recruit other families to co-design AI-IEP through testing and feedback. Together, they shaped a program that turns a dense, sometimes 50-page document into something simpler, more transparent, and — this is important to Roberto — actionable.

Roberto: You upload your child's IEP and the tool just disclose everything in folders and sections, you know? And you don't have to read the whole entire thing. You can go to different places, whatever you want to go. If you want to understand who's giving your child's therapies, you can go to that section, you know? If you want to know how to complain, you can go to the complaint section so that you can find all the phone numbers and places where you can complain.

(30:36) Reflections on community, systemic change, and the future of special education.

Anya: I started this podcast with a big bang: the Trump administration's attack on the Department of Education. I'm not ending it with a big bang. I haven't identified a silver bullet that can fix everything about special ed in one go. The system didn't arise overnight, and it's not going to be reinvented overnight.

But what I have found is people all over the country, in all different kinds of roles, who are committed to a better future for all young people. And to do that, to stay committed, they have to believe in the possibility of change.

Ashley Jochim's work that you heard about in the last episode is about evidence-based teaching to help all students learn better. Stephanie Cozy's work is a painstaking, one-person-at-a-time process, getting teachers to believe that Universal Design for Learning will, in fact, benefit everyone, and actually getting them excited about inclusion. And AI-IEP is a modest, technical fix that puts more power in the hands of parents.

It's that last piece, parent empowerment, that strikes me as the real essential resource, the wellspring that US special education has drawn on since the beginning, and that has created a system that, despite all its flaws, is still considered a model for the world.

Roberto echoes this. That's exactly why he brings his kids along to take part in advocacy alongside him. He says actually part of the education he wants them to get growing up in America is to know their rights, to be civically engaged, to be part of a bigger cause than themselves.

Roberto: I believe in destiny, and you know, it's a reason why all this happened to me and my kids. You know, now I believe that my kids are my legacy. They're my heart walking outside my body, you know? And I want them to be able to understand and to advocate for their community, you know?

So they come to board meetings with me, they come everywhere where I go. They have spoken in board meetings before. So, yeah, now my focus is bringing my family out, all my families out, spreading information, you know, everything that I learned.

Because I believe that when families realize that it's okay to speak out and not to be afraid, we can be able to change the system and make sure that the system worked for us, you know, like it's supposed to. It's supposed to work for everybody.

Anya: "Zero Reject: The Uncertain Future of Special Education" is written and reported by me, Anya Kamenetz, and edited by Neil Drucker.

Sound design by Cody Nelson. Briana Berry is our production director. Anna Rothschild is our senior producer. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis. Additional production help from Erica Aude. Ezgi Kaya is our legal counsel. Our music was composed by Marcus Bagala. Justin D. Wright mixed the show.

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.