Ashley Jochim is an education researcher with a PhD, four kids, and two decades of experience studying what makes schools work. None of that prepared her for the day her daughter Evelyn was diagnosed with ADHD and a learning disability — or for how little Ashley actually knew about special education.
That experience sent Ashley down a research rabbit hole: a first-of-its-kind, 50-state database tracking special education identification and outcomes over the past 50 years. What she found raises hard questions about who qualifies for services and who’s left out. And whether the growing number of kids identified for special education is actually making things better or just spreading already-thin resources even thinner.
In this episode, Anya Kamenetz digs into Ashley’s research and her proposal for reimagining the system — one that looks less like gatekeeping and more like good teaching for everyone. But when Anya brings in another perspective, from a longtime disability rights attorney, something else comes into focus for Ashley: that for a lot of families, the fight isn’t over which services their kid gets. It’s over whether their kid gets to go to school at all.
For more on this topic
Read: School choice and special education: What to know about public, private, and charter schools
Explore: IEP Guide for Parents
For a transcript and more resources, visit Zero Reject on Understood.org. You can also email us at podcast@understood.org.
Episode transcript
Anya Kamenetz: So tell me about what you remember about your first school.
Evelyn: It was very fun. Most of my memories are literally me building, like, forts in the woods with my teachers. I did a very good job. I found weird stones covered in, like, glass or something, and I, like, made houses.
Ashley Jochim: I chose that school because it had all the sort of high points of what I imagined a wonderful school would look like.
Anya: Evelyn, who's 13 now, and her mom, Ashley Jochim. Ashley thought she knew a lot about what made a good school good. She has four kids, for one thing, and for another thing, she's an education researcher with a PhD. She spent her entire career crunching numbers, poring over test scores, and thinking about how to make schools better.
So she was pretty confident when she picked a progressive private school for Evelyn in Washington State, where they live.
Ashley: It was so joyful. It was a wonderful community. They were on a beautiful campus that had a forest and lots of hands-on learning, all of those sort of buzzwords. And it felt really good. And then, as I dug deeper into the academics, everything kind of fell apart.
Anya: Do you remember getting feedback about your academics in those years?
Evelyn: Not really, no. I remember one time I missed a test, and they didn't have me retake it. I ended up not taking the test at all, which made me pretty sad.
Anya: I'm Anya Kamenetz, I'm an education reporter, and you're listening to "Zero Reject" from Understood.org. In this podcast, you've been hearing stories of families struggling to get their kids a free, appropriate public education.
And you've been hearing about changes under the second Trump administration that might be making an already fragile system function even worse, like dismantling the Department of Education altogether.
With this podcast, I reached out to sources in all 50 states. I found that often the special education experts and teachers I talked to were most focused on defending the system, which is understandable because they feel like it's under threat. Parents and the lawyers were just as understandably interested in fighting the system, making it work for students.
But I was getting hungry for some fresh thinking about changing the system, because everybody can agree that there were big problems before the new political realities came in. Everything's shifting now, and things are up for grabs. As scary as it is, it also maybe presents an opportunity to rethink things in a big way that hasn't felt possible before. So why not use this chance to imagine a better future?
So I was googling around on a Friday afternoon to find some more voices, more ideas. And I came across Ashley Jochim, who'd been on a special education research journey of her own. I saw that she'd analyzed 50 years of data on special education and put out a whole series of papers about — let's see — "Unlocking Potential." "Special Education Is Broken. Our New Database Can Help Spark a Way to Fix It."
I got excited. I could tell this is a wonk on fire. This is someone who has dug into the numbers enough to have big ideas about redesigning the system that we've been talking about. And I came to find out that she's part of a whole movement of people who are thinking this way.
When I reached out to Ashley, I learned all her research kicked off with this personal experience that she'd had, that she's still having, with her daughter Evelyn, and finding out that everything she knew was wrong.
Ashley doesn't have all the answers now, and she doesn't claim to, but she's knowledgeable, thoughtful, personally invested, and willing to question her own assumptions. We spoke a few times as I kept getting more curious and asking her about more of the issues I've been digging into for this podcast.
So here's some of our conversations, in three sections. First, what Ashley didn't know about special education. Second, her vision for fixing it. Third, the hard part that still needs to be figured out. This is episode five, "The Waterline."
What Ashley didn't know about special education? In a word, everything.
Evelyn's teacher at the school that was mostly forts finally flagged that she was having some serious learning challenges. Up until then, Ashley had little idea just how behind her daughter was. Instead of report cards or test scores, Evelyn was bringing home these beautifully handwritten two-page reports that said she was doing great.
Ashley took Evelyn to a neuropsychologist, who diagnosed her with ADHD and specific learning disabilities. As a self-described education expert, she'd chosen what she thought would be a great school for her kids: a private school with an open, exploratory approach, one that a lot of parents with resources might prefer for their kids.
But when she got the news that her child had learning disabilities, Ashley realized that public school might actually be the better option, because of the federal protections for kids with disabilities and also because of the much more structured approach to teaching. Ashley decided to act fast.
Ashley: I ended up withdrawing her mid-year, ceding our tuition and everything else, and moving her to a public school. And that was really just to stem the academic bleeding. I felt like the longer she stayed, the more ground she was going to lose.
Anya: Sorry, like, in terms of the conversation about, "Oh, your child has a learning disability" —
Ashley: That was not accompanied by, "And here's what we're going to do to fix it." I mean, in a private school setting, you do not have an IEP or any of the federal protections. But this was certainly a place that I think had an openness to, and even a reputation for being a good place for, kids with learning and behavioral differences, in part just because of its more flexible kind of learning environment.
But none of the things that they proposed actually remediated what I saw as the core problem, which is their core curriculum and sort of core academic components of the day were not well-designed to support learning.
Anya: When Ashley told Evelyn the plan, she was not on board.
Evelyn: We were sitting down in my kitchen, and my dad was there. And she was like, "You're getting way too behind in your grades. You're kind of failing in math right now." And I was like, "So you're making me switch schools?" I was just like, "What? No!" And I was so mad.
Anya: Ashley, like I mentioned, works at an education think tank called the Center on Reinventing Public Education. CRPE is known for being nonpartisan and is affiliated with Arizona State University. They've been influential for two decades in promoting school reform ideas that are sometimes controversial, like charter schools and high-stakes testing.
There's reason to believe that policymakers at high levels are listening to the work that Ashley and her colleagues put out. Although education had been her focus for her entire career, Ashley says until Evelyn got diagnosed, she'd never given serious thought to special education. Neither, she claims, had a lot of people in her field.
Ashley: Special education, in most education policy researchers' models — we know it exists, but they don't really know anything about — like, what is special education? There's very little research that asks, is this the right way to be delivering services to a kid who has been identified with a disability?
I was an education researcher before I had this experience with my daughter, and I never once thought about special education. And I just realized, oh my gosh, like, this is huge.
Anya: As an education journalist who's covered this field for 20-plus years, in my experience, she's right. Special education is too often treated as an afterthought, even within the world of education, except for people who have some kind of personal connection to it. Even though this is several million kids we're talking about.
In the middle of fourth grade, Ashley took Evelyn out of her progressive private school and enrolled her in a public school. Some of her skills got better right away because of the more traditional types of lessons and practice they were doing in her public school classroom.
Ashley: When you started having to do weekly spelling tests, you were so excited about spelling tests. She loved spelling tests, and spelling was, like, a big struggle point for her. She really struggled with spelling, and then all of a sudden she was getting, like, 100% every time.
Evelyn: Whenever I got it, I would be so excited, and I would always get 100%, and I would get a piece of candy.
Anya: But Ashley and Evelyn soon discovered that special education in a public school was not solving all their problems. Despite her progress on reading and spelling, Evelyn felt singled out there as a special ed student, so much so that she would refuse to go to her pullout services.
Evelyn: I had been bullied most of my time through fifth grade, sixth grade, and part of seventh grade. It was just a very toxic setup there.
Anya: So socially, it was not great. And in math, things were getting worse, not better, Ashley says.
Ashley: I actually have seen her test scores every year. She's, like, from a percentile basis, she's going on this downward trajectory in math. And this is despite even everything I know now and all the resources I've thrown at the puzzle.
Anya: Ashley hired private tutors on top of the pullout time Evelyn was getting during the school day. But Ashley came to believe that her daughter's math help was not focused enough on the very particular skills Evelyn had missed in her first few years of school.
She felt the problem was there wasn't enough connection between what the special ed teacher and the outside tutors were doing and what was happening in the general ed classroom.
Ashley: The instruction you're getting from your regular classroom teacher, that's obviously, for most kids, the bulk of their school day. And so if you try to add on some small-group instruction to help a kid who might be struggling, that's ultimately a drop in the bucket compared to all the instruction they're getting from the classroom teacher.
Anya: For what it's worth, I heard something similar from Korina Kim, the special education teacher I talked to in Denver, who you heard from in some previous episodes. She told me —
Korina Kim: I would love to be able to collaborate with gen ed teachers more and do more of what they're doing in their classrooms. But a lot of the time, what happens is that these smaller pieces of the puzzle are missing. But I think the way that our curriculums work isn't super supportive to kids that need more time or need more practice with the foundational skills.
Anya: At this point, Ashley was feeling really frustrated. She had put Evelyn through the disappointment of leaving a school that they both loved, and through getting an outside diagnosis and special services, and her kid still wasn't improving as much as they wanted her to.
Ashley: I don't know a single mom [inaudible] by special education that says, "Oh yeah, things are great." Because it's set up to be adversarial, right? Like, you're fighting. Even when you win, you don't win. This is the thing that I just think is so crazy. Like, they can comply. I mean, your kid still loses. And this is the limits of the legal model.
Anya: Ashley told me she's been radicalized into questioning whether this legal model — of handing out specific services as entitlements to specific children based on specific disabilities — is the best way to set up the system at all.
Ashley: I often tell people now that I've been radicalized. Why I feel like we need to talk about this stuff and we need to ask the hard questions is because, like, I've seen my own children suffer in this system.
Anya: The hard questions Ashley is asking: Who belongs in special education? What even is a learning disability? Are we teaching all kids the best way we could be? And are we using limited resources the best way we could be?
She started a project at her think tank to digitize half a century of special education data. They created the first-ever 50-state database with visualizations that lets you track special ed identification rates and test scores over time.
The first thing she realized was that the percentage of students identified for special education has doubled since IDEA was first passed 50 years ago. This is largely because the criteria, the rules for who is eligible to be covered by special ed, keep being expanded.
Ashley: Special education eligibility criteria are like the waterline for the iceberg. So when you apply criteria, some group of students who are struggling today become visible.
Anya: As we discussed in a previous episode, the waterline moved down in 1990, when autism and traumatic brain injury were added to the reauthorization of IDEA. That revealed a new set of students to the system. In 1999, it happened again. ADHD was added under the category of other health impairment.
And in addition to IDEA protections, a growing number of students now have what are called 504 accommodations because of mental health or medical diagnoses. These entitle them to things like extra time on tests.
15% of all students nationwide have IEPs. And when you add in the 504-only students, special ed goes up to about 17%. And it's not too surprising that these numbers are growing, because an official identification is valuable. It earns you a legal right to extra services and support.
But Ashley got concerned that growing the category of special education this way is setting schools up to fail to serve both the students who are identified and the students who are not. There has never been enough money to serve all the students in special ed or meet all their needs.
As we mentioned in a previous episode, when IDEA was passed, the federal government promised to pay 40% of the cost to educate kids in special education. At the moment, they're actually paying only 12% of costs.
With the growing numbers, school systems have gotten ever more overwhelmed. And as we've heard again and again, families complain schools are pushing back or slow-walking them requesting evaluation for services, because they don't have the resources to serve more kids. This is how you get phenomena like wait to fail.
Ashley: So we have designed a system that is optimized around gatekeeping.
Anya: A study Ashley found from back in the early 2000s calculated one in five dollars we spend on special education is going just to determine who is eligible for special education.
Ashley started to wonder: Is it really fair that kids who manage to get identified with a disability win legal rights to extra money and support, while there might be other kids who haven't been identified yet, or who maybe are just below the waterline on the iceberg, who don't get any?
Take a hypothetical classroom where two students are having trouble with math. One student is a newcomer to the country. His parents are both working two jobs. They might not even know what it means to get the kid an individualized education program. And a second student has parents who are able to pay thousands of dollars for a private determination of ADHD. [inaudible]
Ashley: Is that fair, given limited resources and a lot of kids who are struggling?
Anya: Speaking of how many students are struggling, now that Ashley had realized just how much special education has grown, she started comparing the 17% number to another important number that describes how students are doing in general.
About 37% of fourth graders in the U.S. are performing at the lowest level, below basic, in reading on a test called NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation's Report Card. It's about 24% in math.
Some of these students are in special ed and some are not. Maybe they're learning English. Maybe they were hungry the day they took the test. Maybe they have an undiagnosed learning disability. Maybe they could be taught better, or all of the above.
Ashley, as I mentioned, did a big national survey of teachers and found, no surprise, that they would like more help teaching all their students.
Ashley: Teachers are burned out. They're overwhelmed by the demands of their classrooms. And yet we can't take even a single dollar of what we spend on special education and say, let's invest in a dedicated paraprofessional to support small-group instruction in this classroom, which would support kids identified with a disability, but also everyone else in that classroom, and the teacher.
Anya: So Ashley found out that we're spending lots of extra money on a growing number of kids in special education, money that's not available to help all the other kids who are struggling. The next thing Ashley discovered is that we are not getting much to show for all that money.
One of her studies looks at 15 years of scores on NAEP, the Nation's Report Card. Students across the board are declining on NAEP in both subjects and at both grade levels. That's in reading and math in fourth and eighth grade.
Ashley: But students served under special education have declined much more than their peers.
Anya: Let's take a random but representative example, the state of Maryland. According to Ashley's analysis, between 2009 and 2024, gen ed fourth grade reading scores in Maryland dropped 5 points. During that same time, the scores for students in special ed dropped 30 points.
Arguably, then, whatever we're doing with kids in special ed, we're getting worse at it, at least as measured by these tests. And at the same time, there's other kids who are not in special ed who are also falling behind.
Ashley: So if we have kids who are struggling, how do we align resources with the needs of those kids? And right now, I think we have a system where it's very misaligned.
Anya: Ashley's identification of the frustrations in special education matched up with what I'd been hearing from other sources and from families. There aren't enough resources to go around. You may have to fight for services, and sometimes, even when you win, you don't win. Your kid doesn't make progress the way you hoped.
But given all that, I was excited to find out: What ideas does Ashley have for improving special education? How do you align the money and the people with the needs to help not only the 17%, but every kid?
It turns out the core of her answer is, what if special education wasn't so special? For the second part of the episode, we'll unpack what that means.
As I mentioned, special education has always been a bit of an afterthought to many people, even within the education world. Ashley is asking, what if we turned that around and changed all of public education to be more like special education?
That would mean designing goals to match what each kid needs to learn, giving everyone more individualized attention, and simply just planning for the fact that students are different and they need different things — not gatekeeping special treatment just for a certain group of kids.
Ashley: My larger goal with this work is that for as long as public education has existed, we have relied on a delivery model in the general education classroom that is designed for uniformity, processing, even though it's always been true that learner variability is the norm.
And you can start to look at our existing system and say, have we built a system designed to respond to learner variability? And the answer is no. And that is true in both the gen ed classroom, and it is true in special education.
Anya: What Ashley is suggesting is not necessarily original. In fact, she's part of a growing movement to reach diverse learners. Many schools have adopted what's called a multi-tiered system of supports, or MTSS, where tier one is for everybody, and tier two and tier three are more targeted interventions, either for learning or behavior.
There's also a lot of talk about universal design for learning, which is a big philosophical approach we'll get into in the next episode. But among other things, it means offering all students multiple different ways to engage with lessons and also to express what they've learned.
Evidence-based direct instruction is also gaining ground right now, especially in the early grades. This roughly means more phonics, more spelling tests, more structured, explicit teaching of math concepts, more practice problems, and often more tutoring and small-group instruction. Ashley compares this to how you get better in sports.
Ashley: When you have a child who's a soccer star and they're working to get better at soccer, how do they learn to get better at soccer? They spend more time doing drills, more time practicing their moves. It's a basic fact of human learning and advancement, right? Like, how you get better at something is someone shows you how to do it, and then you practice, practice, practice.
Anya: Ashley points to two examples of emerging evidence that we could be teaching all kids, including kids with learning disabilities, better than we are.
For one, there's a set of states — most famously Mississippi, as well as Alabama, Louisiana, and the city of Washington, D.C. — that have overhauled how they teach reading and math in the last decade or so. They have moved toward the soccer drills model.
And while there's plenty of nuance and caveats to the picture, what we can say is that these states are bucking the national trend over the past 15 years. In Mississippi, according to Ashley's analysis, kids in special education gained 10 points in fourth grade reading in that time. That means they grew even more than kids who were not in special education.
Ashley also points me to a second piece of evidence for the soccer drills idea. This was a study comparing students in Boston who won the lottery to get into one of the city's charter schools with students who were otherwise the same, who applied and didn't get in. This is what you almost never get in education: a randomized natural experiment.
Charter schools are publicly funded and free to attend, but compared to a district public school, they have more freedom to experiment, from staffing to curriculum. The charter schools in this Boston study, for the most part, follow the soccer drills model.
They had lots of tutoring available for everyone, longer school days and a longer school year, strict behavior standards, and high expectations. And they used a lot of data, including online assessments, to target lessons to each student. They also, and this is interesting, spent 44% less money on special education services per student.
And the study found, after enrolling at a charter school, far more students went from having an IEP to not having an IEP. Whether they kept their classification or not, the students who started the charter school in special ed were more likely to advance academically by almost any measure.
They were more likely to meet a key high school graduation requirement, to become eligible for a state merit scholarship. They scored higher on the SAT. They took more Advanced Placement exams than similar students who stayed in the regular school system.
I'm going to just quote from this: "Findings show that it is feasible for many students with specialized needs to make large academic gains in a high-quality general education program without access to specialized services. Districts and schools deciding how to invest their resources may find that an increased focus on overall school quality can improve outcomes for all."
It's a tantalizing idea. Improved outcomes for all. If schools offered the equivalent of soccer drills for reading, math, and behavior — small-group work and targeted tutoring — then maybe all kids could learn more easily, and you could spend less time and money identifying them.
Because it doesn't necessarily matter whether they officially have, say, dyslexia or ADHD or not, whether they're above or below the waterline. The point is, if students need help, they should get it.
Ashley eventually found something like this kind of school for Evelyn. When we spoke, Evelyn had just started at a new public middle school where they live in suburban Seattle. It's called a choice school, which is a similar concept to a charter school. Both are public schools, but they are allowed to run a little differently than the traditional district school.
And so tell me about the school you just switched to.
Evelyn: It's a really cute school. Like, I think 83 kids in total. All the teachers are amazing. We only have, like, three teachers or four teachers for all of our periods. For math, we have it three times a week, but on those days, it's an hour and 40 minutes long. And then on the rest of the days, we have interventions, which is where our teacher makes us work on homework and stuff.
And then kids with special needs — there's a specific room for kids who need academic support. It's called Room 106. You can go there. You can literally walk straight out of class. The teachers won't ask you questions, and you can just, like, walk in and just get help.
Anya: Small classes, lots of personal attention, readily available extra help for everyone. It sounds in some ways like the Gow School, the top-of-the-line boarding school for kids with dyslexia that we visited in episode four.
What Ashley's proposing sounds kind of utopian — that there could be a way of doing school that not only could be more effective, but also more fair and more inclusive, to serve all kids better. If it could even be cheaper in some cases, that would be amazing, of course. And if it were less adversarial, families could spend less time fighting for what they need. I think everyone would like that.
But there was one point in our conversation where I really disagreed. And this is part three, the piece I think Ashley is still missing.
Part of what Ashley and others who are asking similar questions are advocating is to free public schools from some of the red tape requirements of IDEA. This would unlock resources that schools could use differently to serve the students in front of them.
So you could spend that time and money on instruction instead of spending it on identification, lawyers, and mediators. Maybe even make it a goal to declassify more students out of special ed, as happened at the charter schools in the Boston study. It sounds like this could help more kids grow and make progress in a way that's meaningful for them.
There's [inaudible] all of what we've been hearing about in this podcast: marathon IEP meetings, Office for Civil Rights complaints, and due process hearings. All of this takes time and costs money. In order to use that money instead on, say, small-group instruction for everyone, it could mean spending fewer resources on identification and maybe, in some ways, limiting families' rights.
At one point, Ashley was talking about finding efficiencies and scrutinizing spending on special education, and how that's been a taboo idea.
Ashley: The reason why we don't talk about costs is a legacy of the historical worries that talking about costs somehow can be used as a justification to deny educational opportunities for the kids with the most complex needs, who are the most expensive, because that was certainly the case in the '70s.
But I don't think it's justifiable today when you look at the fact that, like, two in three of the kids in special ed today are kids with a learning disability, with ADHD. I don't think any child is at risk of being excluded in the ways they were in the 1970s. And I think we have —
Anya: Wait, wait, wait. You don't think any kid is at risk of being excluded?
Ashley: Not in the way of, like, in the 1970s, where we just denied kids access because their needs were complex.
Anya: I have talked to advocates in South Carolina, in Maine, and in West Virginia who have told me that they have clients that have been offered part-time school or no school because of shortages of staff.
Let me explain why I interrupted Ashley right there. I wanted to bring you my conversation with Atlee Reilly.
Atlee Reilly: I'm a managing attorney for Disability Rights Maine, which is Maine's protection and advocacy agency for people with disabilities.
Anya: What are the kinds of cases that come across your desk most often that have to do with special ed?
Atlee: I've been doing this work close to 20 years in two different states. And the answer to that question has been relatively consistent over time, and that is kids just trying to access school.
Anya: Atlee, who has since left his position, and his colleague were, at the time of our interview, the two full-time special education–focused lawyers for the whole state of Maine. He said he had a growing caseload of —
Atlee: Kids just trying to access school all day, every day, preferably the same part of the school that everybody else gets to access, and not some dumping ground program in the basement or across town or in a portable building, because the approach generally seems to be triage with regard to children with disabilities.
And the acuity of those problems, I would say, has worsened over the — especially the last five to seven years, as far as children just being pushed out for longer and in more significant ways. But for the most part, it's really about access. And the first thing is access to the school day.
Anya: Atlee told me about a recent case he dealt with of a kid whose family was experiencing homelessness.
Atlee: They were moved to a new shelter and a new school district. They just took one look at him on paper and said, "We can't meet your needs here, so we're not gonna even try." And they called the family and just said, "We have to have an IEP meeting," and they changed the child's placement to a two-hour, you know, "when we can find somebody" tutoring.
And they just expected, I guess, that the family wouldn't find their way to one of the handful of attorneys that do this work, right?
Anya: Thanks to Atlee's office, a few months into the school year, they finally found their son a seat in a classroom. Not an ideal fit, just a classroom.
Atlee: And I'm just seeing more and more of that. This kind of, like, brazen — families are basically told, "We don't have staff for your child. We're not going to be able to support your child." I mean, 50 years after the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, what schools are really saying is, "We haven't designed our schools. We haven't planned our budget. We haven't designed our whole program with inclusion of children with disabilities in mind."
Anya: The biggest gap, he says, is staffing. Maine is a rural state, the population's getting older, and things have gotten even worse since the pandemic.
I heard the same thing in Indiana, as we talked about in episode two, when nine-year-old Tristan was at one point offered just an hour of tutoring a day after the regular school day. I even had an advocate in New York City, the biggest, highest-spending school district in the United States, tell me about medically fragile students who couldn't go to school because they needed a nurse and there wasn't one available.
In Maine, Atlee said —
Atlee: [inaudible] can make as much or more working at a fast food restaurant than they can in kind of the entry-level jobs supporting children with disabilities. We have a structural problem that we haven't taken the steps to address.
And I don't think that these schools feel like they have other options, right? I wanna be really clear there, but I also wanna make sure that there's no part of that that's clipped to, like, make it seem like I'm excusing this. I'm just saying, like, things have gotten to be so acute that kids have these legal rights, but there aren't practical remedies available.
Anya: Not turning any kid away — in other words, zero reject — is the principle in the law, but it has never been a reality in this country. There's a gap between what the law says and the resources on the ground. And it creates agonizing dilemmas for school districts and for families, too.
Ashley was a little taken aback when I brought up all this.
Ashley: Wow. I had not heard about that particular phenomenon. And that — I mean, I suppose it doesn't surprise me. When I was doing this other project two years ago now, I know I had a parent who had enrolled her child in a charter school tell me that her child, who had autism, was really struggling because the district basically said, "We don't have any paraprofessionals."
I think that's a fair point. And I guess what I was trying to say is that there is opportunity to preserve protections for students, like civil rights protections, while expecting more for the money.
Anya: I agree that it should be possible to both protect civil rights and look at the way the money's being spent. There should be a way to look at what's effective without throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to protections.
And the question of whether this system has evolved to spend too much time and resources on gatekeeping, through the process of diagnosis or identification, is something I'm still sitting with.
What this moment underlined again for me is that kids in special education are all very, very different. And we can't leave any of them out when we're making decisions about the program. And this is just my opinion, but it's a little too soon to say that if we relax the rules, we won't go backward.
Did you catch that Atlee used the phrase "dumping ground"? It's the exact same phrase that Ann Turnbull used to talk about her pre-IDEA classroom in the late 1960s.
I don't think that's what Ashley is advocating for. I believe she wants to make the system better, not take it apart. Her motivation is really similar to the other moms you met in this podcast: Allison and Christine and Kelly. She started caring about this because she was personally affected.
In that way, she's kind of part of the family insider movement in special ed that started with folks like Ann and Rud Turnbull and Eunice Kennedy. And while she has her proposals and her research reports, it's not like she has a magic wand to change the system.
Ashley: With the work I'm doing on special education, this is really hard. It's really controversial. The things that I've said to you even in this conversation, when you say them to people, I think — people can feel defensive about it. And it's because they're fighting for their kids the same way I'm fighting for my kids.
We can change the way these institutions look, the ways in which we deliver services to kids. None of it is fixed. A lot of it is just artifacts of history.
Anya: It was a lot to [inaudible]. I just had one more question for Ashley's daughter, Evelyn. Considering the twists and turns her education has taken, I wondered if she regretted starting out in the way that she did, or if she saw that time as teaching her valuable life lessons.
I also wanted to know what Ashley thought about that, because the model she's advocating for looks very different from the one she originally picked for her kid.
This is kind of a tough question, but if you could go back, like, would you want to not go to that first school?
Evelyn: The little school?
Anya: The one that you started at, with all the outdoor time and everything.
Evelyn: Honestly, it set me back, but it made me a really good person. It really set my personality on who I wanted to be, and, like, how I wanted to be a good person, how I wanted to take care of things. And it just, like, made me overall more socially prepared for my other schools that I went to. But just, like — not, like —
Anya: Interesting.
Evelyn: So it's, like, kind of in between, I guess.
Ashley: No, I mean, I feel the same way. And I always say, like — and I've told this to the administrators at that school — that, like, you shouldn't have to choose.
Anya: In the final episode, we catch up on some new developments with the Department of Education. And we look at another small fix that could make special ed a little bit better. It involves the two letters on everyone's mind these days.
"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.
Host
Anya Kamenetz
is an award-winning journalist and author who has spent much of her career covering education, including as an education correspondent for NPR.
