Federal teams charged with making sure states are doing right by students with disabilities appear to have visited fewer than half of the states originally scheduled for review in 2025 and 2026.

That information comes from U.S. Department of Education documents compiled and analyzed by the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a group that supports students with disabilities and their families, as well as additional review by Chalkbeat of publicly available monitoring schedules.

If federal reviews of state special education systems continue at this pace, each state would be reviewed only once every 25 years, COPAA said in a . That would mean many students would go their entire school careers without federal oversight of state systems.

“The new administration has quietly rolled back their state oversight,” said Chris Roe, COPAA director of state policy. “We are worried that this sends a signal to states and eventually to local schools that this is not important, and they don’t need to be concerned about it.”

Drawing on nearly a dozen state monitoring reports based on reviews that started under the Biden administration, the COPAA report also raises concerns about states’ capacity to adequately monitor school districts’ compliance with special education requirements as the Trump administration pledges to “return education to the states.”

The Trump administration has taken steps to dismantle the Education Department by assigning key duties to other federal agencies. Most recently, the department announced that , a change that has drawn and some bipartisan skepticism.

U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a Republican who chairs the Senate education committee, has on that change later this month. By itself, a committee vote won’t reverse the Trump administration’s actions, but a vote against it would represent the strongest formal objection from Congress to date.

COPAA opposes having another government agency handle special education oversight. The group’s report calls on Congress to intervene.

A spokesperson for the Education Department said COPAA’s “entire premise is false,” without describing any specific errors in the findings. The department pointed to — the same ones that COPAA reviewed for its analysis — as evidence the department continues to keep tabs on states.

Citing previous remarks by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the spokesperson said the partnership between Health and Human Services and Education would improve coordination and benefit families and students, and “ensure states are in compliance with federal law.”

“Students will not lose any rights, including their right to a Free Appropriate Public Education,” the unnamed spokesperson said. “No agreement can alter the rights that students with disabilities are afforded under federal law.”

But Roe said the flaws identified in the monitoring reports show that students and families might struggle more to defend their rights without federal involvement.

Meanwhile, Politico this week to meet their goals for serving students with disabilities.

“When they say let’s return education to the states, there’s an assumption that states will backfill those responsibilities,” Roe said. “The case that that is not going to happen is pretty strong.”

Federal oversight finds gaps in special education protections

The Biden administration had previously urged states to take more responsibility for ensuring school districts meet their special education obligations. But according to monitoring reports, auditors repeatedly found shortcomings.

These included lax fiscal oversight; limited supervision of school district practices; states allowing districts to pick which student files they wanted reviewed; states not investigating parent complaints in a timely manner; and states either not informing parents of their rights or giving them incorrect information.

Roe said this system isn’t perfect. COPAA’s reviews of federal monitoring efforts over the years have found many cases where auditors identified problems, but there was limited follow-up and the problems continued. Nonetheless, the reports provide an important tool for advocates and lawmakers to press for changes, he said.

“Without them, we definitely face more of an uphill battle to getting systems in place to support our students,” Roe said.

The Education Department spokesperson said the department is “on track” to complete monitoring visits to all states by 2028, in keeping with a schedule established in 2022.

However, the spokesperson did not provide a schedule that showed how monitoring teams would visit roughly half the states in the next two years. The identifies only four states, Puerto Rico, and a few Pacific island territories for monitoring during the 2025-26 cycle and none thereafter. One of those states, Georgia, was supposed to be reviewed this spring, but monitoring visits have been pushed back to the fall, the department said.

During the Biden administration, the Education Department set a goal of monitoring 10 states a year, creating a five-year cycle for regular monitoring, in addition to off-cycle visits to address specific issues. COPAA found the Education Department monitored eight states in 2023 and 10 in 2024. A shows the department previously had plans to monitor nine states plus the territories in the 2025-26 cycle, and another 10 the next year.

It’s not clear why states previously identified for monitoring were removed from the schedule. However, the Education Department has laid off large numbers of workers. A published last month raised questions about whether the department could carry out its responsibilities at current staffing levels.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

“The thing that really struck us as we looked across all of the data points … [is] there’s just a disproportionate impact for those [special populations of] students across the board,” said Robin Lake, director of the at Arizona State University.  “What I think really came through to us — especially in the parent interviews we conducted this year — was parents were experiencing a system that wasn’t functioning even before the pandemic effectively for them.”

At a press conference Tuesday, Lake called the report’s findings a “warning bell for systemic reform.” 

Disadvantaged students continue “bearing the brunt of slow and uneven recovery” from pandemic-era school closures, Lake said, and their struggles come at a time when their numbers are growing.

There was a surge of roughly 343,000 students identified for special education from the 2020–21 to the 2022–23 school years a trend which appears on track to continue. There are variations across states and student groups, with Black and Hispanic students being identified at higher rates.   

Lake said researchers are still trying to determine if this is just normal catch-up following under-identification during school closures, or if something more is going on.

The 2024 State of the American Student Report builds on two previous annual reports, which detailed the impact of COVID on students’ academic performance and well-being. Last year’s research focused on older students with little-to-no time left in the K-12 system, who saw what the organization described as “shocking declines” in college and career readiness. This year, CRPE interviewed parents and dug into data around particularly vulnerable student populations.

The academic impacts on students with disabilities and their rate of recovery varied from district to district, according to a CRPE-commissioned analysis by Georgia State professor Tim Sass. This, they believe, shows that what schools and districts did during and after the pandemic had real impact, but more research is needed to learn what kind of mitigation and recovery strategies proved most effective.

More than four years after COVID emerged, the average student who experienced school closures is still less than halfway to a , but Lake emphasized that averages can obscure particular students’ nuanced experiences. “Under the hood of average,” she said, she saw reason for both optimism and concern.

The good news: Students are bouncing back in some areas. The average student has recovered about of their pandemic-era learning losses in math and a quarter in reading.

Evidence-based practices, such as tutoring, high-quality curricula and extended learning time, are starting to get baked into school systems, she said, which she hopes will last beyond stimulus funds. 

Yet, many of these practices still aren’t reaching nearly enough students.

For example, across four major, urban public school systems in 2023, 8th graders with disabilities and English language learners continued to score significantly lower than their peers in English Language Arts. In New York City, 61% of all students demonstrated proficiency, while only 29% of students with disabilities and 9% of English learners did.

Chronic absenteeism also disproportionately plagues special populations, according to Sass’s analysis. And parents expressed frustration that during school closures their kids weren’t getting access to their legally required interventions. Simultaneously, they were concerned that expectations for their children were being lowered, while communication was dwindling.

“One of our researchers started referring to this as ghosting,” said Lake. “That the parents were being ghosted by their schools … [and] not getting information about how their kids were doing academically.” 

Ultimately, they felt blindsided when they found out just how far behind their children had fallen. As students have returned to school buildings, more have been flagged as having special learning needs and requiring special education, after a dip during the pandemic. 

Especially when looking at “COVID babies,” those who didn’t necessarily get access to preschool or typical socialization, Lake wondered, “Are they being funneled into special education as a solution or do they really have a disability that needs to be addressed in special education?” And, she added, “Is special education equipped to deal with this influx?”

CRPE’s analysis found that special education identification rates varied greatly across school districts in Massachusetts, which reports more detailed data than most other states. For example, the rate of identification in kindergarten in Boston grew from 14% to 18% between 2018 and 2024, while about an hour away in Worcester, the pre-K identification jumped far more, from 26% to 38%. Lake said this variation demonstrates that the approach to identification matters, but still “there are more questions than answers on this front.” 

Lake emphasized that while special populations may be struggling more acutely, many of the issues they face in the classroom are similar to those of their peers. 

“While we’re seeing a lot of kids moving into special education right now, maybe we need to flip the narrative and think about solving for the kids with the most complex needs,” she said. “And if we can figure out how to do that, making sure that all kids can be successful.”