Reduction in force | 1

Beth Gellman-Beer spent her whole career fighting for kids with disabilities — first as a student written off as “lazy,” then as a federal civil rights attorney who found her dream job protecting students like her younger self. But on one ordinary night, a phone call changed everything: Her entire office had been eliminated.

In the premiere of Zero Reject, reporter Anya Kamenetz traces Beth’s journey from an unfair fourth-grade classroom to the front lines of a sweeping overhaul at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights — the agency families turn to when a school isn’t meeting their child’s needs. Anya breaks down the reduction in force that gutted OCR’s staff, what it means for the 25,000 families still waiting for a response to their complaints, and the plan to dismantle the Department of Education altogether. With fewer people to enforce the law, what happens to the students the system was built to protect?

• Read: What is HHS, and what does it have to do with special education? 

• Read: What is the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), and what’s its role in special education? 

Anya Kamenetz: When Beth Gelman-Beer was in kindergarten, her mother, Estelle, told the principal that she thought she might have some kind of learning disability. The principal said not to worry. This is Estelle.

Estelle: The school seemed to be afraid to tell you that there was a problem. They were afraid you'd get all upset and say, "Oh, you know, how could you say there's something wrong with my child?"

Anya: Beth had some amazing teachers, like her first grade teacher, who worked hard to get Beth reading. Others were not so amazing, like her fourth grade teacher.

Beth Gelman-Beer: And I do remember the teacher saying to my mother, "Beth does not have a disability. She's just lazy and disorganized."

Anya: Beth's mom, Estelle, happened to be an expert on kids' learning, a professor of special education at Hofstra University. She was not having this.

Estelle: I was upset. I was angry. I mean, she should have been more knowledgeable and more understanding.

Anya: It took until the fourth grade for Beth to finally receive what's called her Individualized Education Program, or IEP. IEPs are a written agreement between the student with disabilities and the school district. They make everything official and in writing so everyone is on the same page: the student's specific identification, their individual goals, and what the school promises to do to help the student meet those goals.

In Beth's case, the school promised to pull her out of the classroom a few times a week and give her special one-on-one help to catch up. So far, so good. But not everyone was on board. Her regular classroom teacher that year, for one — the same one who had called her lazy and disorganized in front of her mom. What was the deal with this teacher? Did you like her?

Beth: I hated her. She tortured me for the rest of the year. She would make fun of me. I have this vivid memory of her holding up an art project and saying to the class, "This is what we worked on while Beth was in her special class, and Beth didn't get to work on it," in front of the whole class.

Anya: Wow.

Beth: She was something else. And so, you know, kids take their cue from the teacher, and I started to get made fun of. The students used to call me names. And so it lived with me.

Anya: I'm Anya Kamenetz, I'm an education reporter, and you're listening to "Zero Reject" from Understood.org. "Zero Reject" is a key phrase in special education law. It stands for the principle that every single kid must be included in public schools. Zero reject.

This is a podcast about what it takes for families like Beth's to get their kids included in that education that is guaranteed by federal law. It's about changes under the second Trump administration that might further undermine that guarantee. It's about a system that too often pits families and dedicated educators against each other. And what might actually work to meet the needs and the potential of every single kid in the country.

In this episode, episode one, Beth grows up and gets her dream job. Then it all grinds to a halt. The reason Beth's mother was able to get her services, eventually, is that Beth happened to be born in 1975. That was the year that what is now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, became law. Together with other federal laws, like Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, IDEA is supposed to mandate fair treatment and inclusion for students with disabilities.

And I'll be totally honest with you. I have covered this field for 20 plus years, reporting in classrooms from pre-k through higher ed, and there is a lot I still didn't know about special education before I started reporting this podcast. Special ed is too often treated as an afterthought, even within the world of education, except for people who have a personal connection to it.

And if you don't know much about special ed either, you might be picturing kids who are in wheelchairs or have hearing aids or ride a special bus to school. Special ed does include all of those students. But more than half the children in the system have what are sometimes referred to as invisible disabilities, like Beth. These include ADHD and specific learning disabilities, like dyslexia. And some have what is called a 504 plan because of mental health or medical conditions. All in all, this is not a small number of people.

When you add together the kids with IEPs and those with 504 plans, it's 17 percent of all public school children and growing — close to nine million children. That is who we are talking about when we say special education for the purposes of this podcast. Federal laws mandate that all these students receive a free appropriate public education. One more time, that's free and appropriate public education, or FAPE. It's a key principle in IDEA, a central concept in special education, and you're going to be hearing it a lot throughout this podcast.

The A in FAPE, appropriate, means that all students have the right to make meaningful, not just minimal, progress toward their goals. But Beth's experience was that even when you go to a school with a lot of resources in a wealthy suburb on Long Island, and even when your mother is a literal professor of special education, it can still be tough to get the inclusion and the services you deserve. The bullying Beth experienced became a major motivating force in her life.

Beth: For the rest of my educational career, even now, I felt like my whole purpose in life was to disprove this theory that I was lazy and disorganized. Everything I did from that moment forth was try to disprove that.

Anya: Beth fought to get into advanced classes at her elite high school, but everyone there still thought of her as the kid with learning disabilities. It wasn't until she left home to go to college that she finally felt like she had a fresh start.

Beth: I didn't claim my disability. I did not ask for accommodations. I just went in raw dogging it and did quite well.

06:33 Beth describes her dream job at the Office for Civil Rights and the sudden mass layoff of her entire office.

Anya: She went on to graduate from law school. Around 2007, she was working for a boutique law firm in Philadelphia when a job listing came her way. It was for something she'd never heard of: the Office for Civil Rights of the Federal Department of Education, or OCR. Beth had zero relevant professional experience. She applied anyway. In her cover letter, she told her personal story — the truth about her struggles with learning disabilities and the discrimination she'd experienced. She got the job.

First a team attorney, then rising through the ranks to chief attorney, and finally a regional director for Philadelphia, one of 12 OCR offices around the country.

Beth: It was my dream job. I thought I was going to stay there forever. I loved everything about it. Under every administration, I didn't care which administration I worked for. Serving the public and serving it to enforce civil rights in the education setting was just a dream come true.

Anya: If you are, like Beth was, unfamiliar with the Office for Civil Rights within the Department of Ed, its mandate is to guarantee the civil rights of every single one of the 75 million or so students in the country from preschool through higher education. It's like having a special high tribunal for everyone who feels they are being discriminated against in a classroom for any reason: race, sex, disability, all of it.

The way OCR works is if a student or their family thinks their civil rights are being violated at school, they can go on the website and file a complaint. OCR lawyers like Beth and her colleagues will investigate and give their finding. They reach agreements with districts and colleges and monitor them to make sure they're following those agreements. OCR can even enforce its own findings by withholding federal money. And all of this, every step of the way, is totally free for families. You don't have to pay for a lawyer or an advocate; you just fill out the complaint form online and they do the rest. Or at least that's how it used to work.

Beth loved it. It was as if her entire life had led her to this.

Beth: There's one case that really lit a fire under me. We had a student who had not learning disabilities, but behavioral disabilities. And when he was acting out in class, he was supposed to be referred to the guidance counselor and sent to the guidance counselor. And I guess the teacher got frustrated. And one day, instead of sending him to the guidance counselor, the teacher had a large cardboard box for a smartboard that had arrived in the classroom. And in front of the whole class, wrote in big letters, "Bad Kid Fort," and surrounded the kid in this box in class.

Anya: He was mortified and embarrassed. He laughed and went along with it because he felt so embarrassed, but then he didn't go to class for like a week after that and felt horrible about himself. And I could completely relate and understand how that student felt.

While she had a lot of empathy for students like this, it's important to note that Beth and her colleagues didn't see schools or teachers or districts as the enemy. They often took calls from districts that wanted help understanding their obligations under the law. And their findings were designed as instructions to help districts do better. Beth says she was surrounded by colleagues at OCR who were there for more than just a paycheck.

Beth: We all loved working at OCR. We all loved working with each other. It was such an honor and privilege to serve the public, but also to work with such amazing, passionate, deeply giving, intelligent human beings.

Anya: Beth was out with three of these like-minded colleagues one evening when it all came crashing down. It was March 11th, 2025.

Beth: We went out for dinner. My birthday was coming up in two weeks. And I got a call from a union representative in my office. I left the restaurant and I went outside because it was very noisy. And all I remember is her reading the names of everyone in the office, just going alphabetically. And she said, "These are the people on the list." We realized pretty quickly it was the whole office.

Anya: In total, almost 300 employees, just over half the staff of OCR, were put on paid administrative leave and seven of its 12 regional offices were closed, including the office Beth ran in Philadelphia. Her fun night out took a turn.

Beth: Happy 50th birthday to me. I'm not a big drinker, never have been, but I don't really remember much of the rest of the night. I know from speaking to them the days after that they had to call my husband to come retrieve me. I usually take the train; they did not want — they knew that he needed to come get me. It was downtown Philadelphia; it's not easy to park. I apparently refused to come out to the car, made him come in. He sat with — I have no recollection of any of this. He came in, he sat with us, and then I remember us driving home.

And I remember my phone ringing off the hook from reporters, from the "Philadelphia Inquirer," which really pissed me off. So I remember being sad, crying, angry. I remember stopping on the way home to get french fries because I needed to fill my stomach. I did not — needless to say, I did not celebrate my birthday for my 50th birthday. It was no mood to celebrate.

12:41 Donald Trump's plans for the Department of Education and the political history of the agency.

Anya: Beth and her colleagues were among hundreds of thousands of federal employees let go in the first year of Trump's second term, many en masse under something called a Reduction in Force, or RIF. It was big news at the time, hence the reporters calling. The Department of Education was hit especially hard. Roughly 1,300 employees across the whole department were told they'd be placed on administrative leave on that one spring day. That number included the 300 of Beth's colleagues, plus many other employees outside OCR who helped states understand special education law and administer the federal money that helps pay for special education.

Beth: This is where I thought I was going to end my career. I thought I was going to retire from OCR. I was blindsided. And looking back, I shouldn't have been; the writing was on the wall. But I was blindsided, as were all of my colleagues.

Anya: During the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to close the Department of Education altogether.

Donald Trump: We are the party of common sense. That's what we are. We want to move the Department of Education — we're ranked at the bottom of the list — and I'm going to close the Department of Education and move education back to the states. And we're going to do it fast.

Anya: Now, just to give you some background, the Department of Education was founded as its own department under President Carter in 1979. And when Reagan took office two years later, he promised to close it and send responsibility for education back to the states.

Ronald Reagan: One of the things that I think is a must is to get the federal government out of the business of trying to run the local schools.

Anya: Many Republican presidents since then have made noises about this. None of them had actually done it. But when Trump took office in 2025, there were signs that this time might be different. For one thing, Trump issued several executive orders attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion. Beth and her colleagues knew that OCR's work on sexual assault, racial and sex discrimination would likely be coming under scrutiny. But most of their cases were not about those issues. Beth told me that 65 to 70 percent of the work that they did was about students with disabilities. So Beth tried to stay focused on those cases.

Beth: We just dug into the disability work anytime there was all this political noise going on around our heads.

Anya: You basically believed that special education would stay apolitical, right?

Beth: Always believed that, always hoped that. Because it had bipartisan support. We all know people on both sides of the aisle that have their own disabilities or have children with disabilities.

Anya: But that kind of bipartisanship is harder and harder to come by these days. And Trump, frankly, has a long track record of disparaging people with disabilities. Many people might remember all the way back in 2015 when Trump appeared to mock a reporter with a disability. Trump has also used the R — word, including on social media. And in 2026, he said this about Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has dyslexia and is widely believed to be running for president in 2028.

Donald Trump: With a low-IQ person — because Gavin Newsom has admitted that he has a learning disability. Honestly, I'm all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president.

Anya: Trump said this not at a private dinner, but to a bunch of reporters in the Oval Office. Beth can't know if her office was just the collateral damage of a broader campaign against anything associated with DEI or civil rights across the federal government, or if Trump was expressing a special animus against people with disabilities. But the outcome was the same.

After going through what she called the seven stages of grief, Beth started to pick up the pieces. She was the breadwinner in her family with a kid in college, so financially she had to figure something out fast. She started a new business with one of the former colleagues who had been at her ruined birthday dinner, helping school districts comply with civil rights law. And then the next thing she knew, Beth was being called back to work. While their cases were moving through the courts, the federal government decided to reinstate some of the people they'd riffed back in March.

Beth: I was getting physically ill at the thought of going back. I wasn't sleeping, I wasn't eating, I had like the worst stomachaches. It was just awful.

Anya: So Beth put in her resignation for good and posted maybe the most emotional LinkedIn status of her life. She wrote, "A part of my soul is undoubtedly cracking and may never fully repair. Anyone who knows me knows that my work at OCR was never just a job. It was my life's passion."

16:51 Christine shares her success story of advocating for her son Frank through an OCR complaint.

Anya: Okay. Now, I want to step away from Beth's story for a bit in order to demonstrate how OCR worked under the best of circumstances. Because I want to show you what's at stake as we face these uncertain changes in civil rights enforcement and in the Department of Education writ large for students with disabilities. So, here's Christine.

Christine: His kindergarten and first grade teacher — actually all the teachers — they're amazing.

Anya: Christine is a mom in Denver who filed a successful OCR complaint on behalf of her seven-year-old son in 2024, when the office was still operating. Her son, we'll call him Frank, had had an IEP for years with an identification of autism. He was making very little progress though in reading or math. He was feeling really bad about himself, too.

Christine: He was struggling so much. I mean, it was heartbreaking. He would say, "I can't read, I'm stupid, I'm dumb. Everyone else can read but me, and I'm never going to be able to read."

Anya: Back in kindergarten, Christine had asked the school to evaluate Frank for specific learning disabilities. The school resisted, saying that autism explained his problems learning to read and do math. Christine didn't agree. She and her husband paid for a private evaluation at the local children's hospital in December of second grade.

Christine: When we did the learning evaluation, that evaluation, when he did the math section of it, it went so quickly because he couldn't do it. She's like, "It's done." She's like, "I can only do so much," and she's like, "He's struggling with it so much that it's painful for me to have him go through it further because he just can't do these things."

Anya: Christine got pretty upset on the phone with me just thinking about how the school had seemingly overlooked her son's needs for years. He received multiple diagnoses at that point: not only autism, but ADHD and dyslexia and dyscalculia, a specific math disability. She wanted to hold his charter school to account for not accurately recognizing all the disabilities her son was dealing with, for not keeping her and her husband informed about what they were doing, and for not following his Individualized Education Program, or IEP. She wanted to do this, she said, not only to help Frank, but to help the other kids at his charter school.

So she went to meetings for parents and educated herself on the law, and as she dug in she found--

Christine: I'm like, "This is not only not right, but it's illegal."

Anya: She ultimately ended up filing both a state complaint in Colorado and a federal OCR complaint in the fall of 2024. She heard back from OCR within six weeks that they were looking into her case.

Christine: The OCR officer was amazing. She was amazing. I mean, she was really forthcoming and honest with us about our options, so that was helpful.

Anya: According to Christine, the district was really responsive as well. They gave Frank a new evaluation. They paid Christine and her husband back for the private evaluation they'd had done to prove that the school was missing something. They gave the staff at his charter school training in special education. And they helped Frank transition to a new public school. The new school, Christine says, is like night and day.

Christine: So he feels completely supported. He feels trusted. He can take breaks whenever he needs them. He can go and sit in the front office and just do some box breathing if he wants to. If he needs to take a lap around the school building to cool off, they're okay with him doing that. Also, his reading has improved drastically. His math has improved a lot.

Anya: And he feels better about himself, Christine says. Recently, when he was in a tutoring session--

Christine: He was so proud of himself because he saw how great he was at math. And he didn't think he was good at math. He's like, "I know this stuff." And I'm like, "Of course you know this stuff. You're smart."

Anya: And this is Karina Kim. She is the special education teacher at Frank's new school, and she really loves her job.

Karina Kim: I think something I love the most is that I get the same students year over year, and I get them in small settings, so I get to know them really on a more personal, close level. I get to have really amazing relationships with the families and be very close with them over time. I get to make sure that they have a space in the school where they feel like they can be themselves and they can be comfortable.

Anya: Watching students like Frank develop their confidence is the best part.

Karina: A lot of them are pretty aware of their difficulties with education and reading and behaviors and things like this. I think it's very rewarding for me to get to watch them grow and seeing the confidence that grows with them.

21:55 The challenges families face when filing complaints and the growing backlog at OCR.

Anya: Frank's story shows how OCR is supposed to help the special education system self-correct. A lot of things had to line up for that to happen. Frank had a mom who stayed on top of things, an OCR officer who was responsive, a school district that heard their concerns, and a timely resolution. The outcome is a much happier kid at a school suited to his needs where he's learning. But of course, OCR was never perfect. In fact, some of the advocates, attorneys, and families I spoke to around the country said its complaint process wasn't even a last resort. It was too slow. Too unresponsive. Christine said that while they ended up with a good resolution--

Christine: So the worst part is waiting, not knowing what's happening until someone reaches out to you. Like, that's probably the worst part of an OCR complaint is not having like an actual visual to see what's going on.

Anya: That brings us back to Beth, the former OCR attorney. I checked in with her about this point of OCR being kind of slow, because I'd heard it from a lot of people. And she told me something surprising. She confirmed that over the time that she worked there, OCR gradually got more overwhelmed and fell behind more often. Partly that's because of something that happened in 2011 under President Obama.

Beth: When I came into OCR, no one knew that OCR existed. We didn't receive complaints. But then with the 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter addressing Title IX sexual assault, it kind of propelled OCR to the forefront. There was a lot of press and news about OCR, and that has just continued through the years.

Anya: So to decode what she's saying a little, President Obama's head of the Office for Civil Rights published what is called a "Dear Colleague" letter in 2011, a few years after Beth joined. This was a strong public statement that schools, colleges, and universities had the obligation to address sexual assault and sexual harassment as civil rights violations under Title IX, the law that covers sex discrimination. This had little to do with disabilities, but several years before Me Too, this memo got a lot of news coverage, and that shone a spotlight on OCR. I covered this memo for National Public Radio at the time, and I think it was the first time I heard of OCR. Beth said because of all this new publicity, OCR started to get more complaints. But they didn't necessarily have more people to investigate them.

Beth: I really appreciated that OCR was put in the forefront because students then understood what their rights were and could file complaints with OCR instead of having to spend the money to go to court. But at the same time, complaints were increasing, staffing levels were not commensurate with the high volume of cases. And so if you don't have the staff to process this high volume of cases, it's going to lead to cases not meeting timeframes.

Anya: OCR cases are supposed to be resolved in six months, as Christine's was. That's already a long time in the life of a child. But more and more of them were going over that timeframe. So Beth says the "Dear Colleague" letter was at least partly responsible for OCR's growing backlog. She also believes it may have contributed to the brewing backlash.

With this development of OCR being so closely associated with Obama, do you believe that there's people within the Trump administration who are like, "We need to reverse this Obama thing?"

Beth: 100 percent. That was the start of this extreme pendulum swing and politicization of our office. And now, here we are.

25:34 Beth and Anya discuss the dismantling of the Department of Education and what it means for the future of civil rights.

Anya: By the end of 2025, according to reporting by NPR, there were an estimated 25,000 pending OCR complaints. And since then, only a tiny number have been investigated and resolved — the lowest number in 12 years. Beth herself was responsible for over a thousand cases in total in various stages at the time she was let go. Beth says she couldn't even email those people to give them a heads up. All she can do is track what the remaining department staffers post on the website.

Beth: It's a trickle compared to what it normally is. My best guess is that the low-hanging fruit, the easier cases, are probably getting processed. The more complex ones are getting put aside.

Anya: On November 18th, 2025, Trump announced a plan to formally dismantle the Department of Education and give away its functions to other agencies, just like he said he was going to do. The department announced a series of so-called interagency agreements, gradually handing off all of its functions to other departments, like Justice, State, Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services. Special education implementation and funding is supposed to go to Health and Human Services, and OCR to the Department of Justice, which itself has been gutted and is understaffed. In March 2026, the remaining education staffers were forced to vacate their own headquarters in the Lyndon B. Johnson building and move to a smaller office elsewhere in Washington, DC.

A version of Beth's story has been repeating across the whole civil service. By the end of 2025, around 317,000 federal employees were already gone, either because they'd been fired or taken early retirement or resigned. That is a lot of mission-driven people. Many of whom thought, like Beth, that they might spend their whole careers working to serve the public. And it's a lot of institutional knowledge that is just scattered now. But what does it mean for families?

Federal bureaucracy is big, and it's slow, and it's sometimes redundant. It might take time for individual families to feel the effects of taking apart the Department of Education. And even if they do feel an effect, they can't necessarily say that what happened to them is just because of someone like Beth getting let go. School districts that used to call the federal government for advice might not understand their obligations under the law. State-level authorities have already started to get many more complaints about special ed that might have otherwise gone to OCR, but they have the same or fewer resources to respond to them. Without fearing an OCR officer coming to call, some districts might be less likely to cooperate with a family like Christine's because there's no tribunal, no big boss ultimately looking over their shoulder making sure they do the right thing.

For now, it's all basically a big question mark. Beth said she hopes families will still fill out the form for complaints to at least create a record and show the need for the office to exist. But they shouldn't hold out hope for an answer anytime soon.

Beth: So you have fewer staff members and triple or quadruple the caseload that they had under the Biden administration. So they are not processing complaints that are received in the door in as timely a manner as we would like to see.

Anya: In the rest of this series, we're going to take a closer look at what's happening to special education now and how things got this way. The sudden pulling of the plug on OCR is a big shock in one way, but in another way, it exemplifies a system that often leaves families feeling abandoned, like they're struggling on their own. Not only to get services or access, but struggling in a more basic way, to get the system to see their kids as worthy of an education, and to get those kids to see themselves as worthy too. Like this mom, Allison, who you'll meet in the next episode.

Allison: They're like, "Oh, she's just a bad kid." I'm like, "She's not a bad kid."

Anya: Would they literally say your kid is bad?

Allison: Yes. The principal literally told me my child was bad.

Anya: The story here isn't just about attacks by one administration. It's about what happens when the bottom falls out of a system that already had a lot of serious problems. You're going to be hearing more in the next five episodes from educators, experts, and families like Allison's and Beth's and Christine's about what it takes to get kids the right services, what could make the system work better for all kids, and what keeps parents going.

Estelle: The thing that I'd always said is it's not just my kids I'm fighting for.

Anya: 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. Anna Rothschild is our senior producer. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis. Additional production help from Erica Audi. 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.