Everybody acknowledges that public education across the United States is in dire straits. But establishment politicians continue to overlook the particularly deep crisis in special education, on which over 6.5 million students depend.

The extent to which students with disabilities remain invisible to policy makers was most glaringly evident in the January 2017 confirmation hearing of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education. When questioned about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the landmark federal law that over forty years ago set out to protect students with disabilities, DeVos erroneously claimed that states could decide for themselves to comply with the law. Only after Senator Maggie Hassan informed her that the IDEA is in fact a federal law did DeVos concede that “I may have confused it.”

Unfortunately, DeVos is not the only leader to overlook the importance of special education, despite the fact that it serves 14 percent of students in this country. The IDEA, the original iteration of which was passed in 1975, mandated the federal government to cover 40 percent of the cost of educating children with disabilities. Yet as a comprehensive 2018 report from the National Council on Disability explained, the federal government is currently paying less than half of its originally promised per-pupil funding. As Bernie Sanders pointed out when sponsoring a 2008 amendment to increase the special education budget by $10 billion, “kids with special ed needs are not getting the attention they deserve.”