The Phones Went Silent: Inside the Special Ed Oversight Vacuum.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the federal law that guarantees students with disabilities the right to a free and appropriate public education, hasn’t changed. But the machinery that makes it work is under strain.
Right now, families and educators don’t know who to call. Federal oversight staff have been cut. State special education directors are unsure who’s reviewing plans or ensuring compliance. For many families, the silence feels like a vacuum, and that confusion is real.
But let’s not pretend the system was working flawlessly before this. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has been warning for years that special education oversight is thin and inconsistent — and it hasn’t conducted a major review since before COVID:
GAO-10-519 (2010): Widespread exclusion from extracurriculars.
GAO-14-848T (2014): Too few staff to verify compliance.
GAO-18-94 (2018): Uneven enforcement of IDEA and ADA.
The message was clear long before 2025: the law is strong, but the infrastructure is brittle.
At the same time, Michigan is trying to move the needle, but it’s an uneven picture. The Autism Alliance of Michigan (AAoM) has been leading important budget-reform work to modernize reimbursement structures so money actually reaches students. Yet the same week families were watching federal oversight unravel, the state cut funding for the MiNavigator program, one of the only statewide lifelines for autism families navigating services and school supports. (Autism Alliance of Michigan statement, Oct. 2025).
From AAoM’s own statement:
“The operations of the MiNavigator program have historically been supported under the Michigan state budget. With the passing of the most recent state budget, the funding for this program has been eliminated. Because of this, we must pause new service requests for MiNavigator.”
For families, this means the phones just went silent at both ends: federally and locally.
It’s worth remembering that Michigan helped inspire the IDEA framework in the first place. In 1971, the state passed one of the first laws in the nation guaranteeing public education for children with disabilities, a model that directly influenced the federal Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, which became IDEA.