Disabled students, in 2014, have a 40% national drop out rate and are not graduating with the skills that American compulsory public education promises every child. Disabled children are all too often left behind despite the promises of No Child Left Behind. Many students face unique sets of disabilities requiring individualized services and systematic treatment to ensure success in school and produce functional adult behavior. All too often, special needs students are thrown into one-size-fits-all programs providing instruction that many students are not able to benefit from and systematically denied procedurally lawful treatment in order to save school districts money. 

It is a fact that Special Education budget money, unspent at the end of a fiscal period, may lawfully be transferred to the general education budget. Furthermore, the average suburban district spends upwards of $350,000 annual on attorney fees to fight parents from getting requested placements, services, and remediations for their children. One parent, interviewed in Rogers (2005) dissertation, noted that “the district is using my tax money to keep my children from getting the help they need.” The budge provided  to help disabled children is often used to harm them. 

In the preamble of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and its predecessor The Education for All Handicapped Act, the law is based upon the assumption that school members of the IEP team, and districts themselves, tend to make decisions that favor school budgets at the expense of individual children. Therefore, the IDEA makes the parent the child’s advocate, assuming the parent is the one person in the group most likely to look out for the child’s best interests. However, parents find themselves working against professional school staff and administrators who make decisions in favor of bureaucratic budgets, while telling parents the school plan is most appropriate for the child. 

Parents are often ill prepared to advocate for their children. Brenda Rogers dissertation research  found that most parents whose children had an IEP were not able to identify their child’s exact disability. How is a parent to advocate for a child when the parent often doesn’t know why the child is failing in school? Furthermore, parents who had some experience advocating for their child within an IEP explained that they were only successful at getting help for their children when attorneys were involved. The vast majority of children have parents who cannot afford attorneys to ensure that their children receive lawful treatment in school. In fact, Rogers found that until parents felt that the school was actually doing something wrong to their children, parents were not likely to disagree with the IEP team and take on the role of advocate. Therefore, it is easy to see why so many children with disabilities drop-out of school prior to graduation. 

School failure often results in drop-outs. School failure and dropping out of high school are the highest ranked correlates of crime, imprisonment, welfare recipiency and poverty. Jean Stewart and Marta Russell report that “Rates of learning disability are spectacularly high among prisoners; in studies conducted among incarcerated juveniles, learning disabilities have been estimated to occur in up to 55 percent of youth nationwide; in one single-state study, 70 percent of youth qualified for special education. As for mental disabilities, in California anywhere from one-sixth to one-fourth of prisoners are believed to have diagnosable “serious mental disorders.” Most stunning of all is a four-state study which examined juveniles imprisoned for capital offenses; virtually 100 percent of those studied were multiply disabled (neurological impairment, psychiatric illness, cognitive deficits), having suffered serious central nervous system injuries resulting from extreme physical and sexual abuse since early childhood” (2001, Volume 53, Issue 03 (July-August)/Disablement, Prison, and Historical Segregation). Furthermore, According to Caroline Wolf Harlow Ph.D., Bureau of Justice Statistician, 68% of state prisoners do not have a high school diploma, 59% of all prisoners have a speech disability, and 66% have a reported learning disability. 

Are schools are creating future prisoners and welfare recipients? When children attending compulsory education insitutions do not get the help they need from the adults entrusted to lawfully deliver a Free and Appropriate Public Education to children with disabilities,  futures are shaped that funnel children into adult roles as participants in government corrections and social services institutions.