by Joshua Defibaugh, UVM's Office of Research On the campaign trail in 2020, President Joe Biden promised to fully fund the federal government’s $38 billion obligation to pay for special education for students with disabilities. In its first two years of office, the Biden-Harris administration took steps toward fulfilling this promise by increasing education federal funding by 15.6%. While increasing federal funding for special education may seem like a positive direction, a research team led by University of Vermont professor Tammy Kolbe suggests that federal support for special education is not going where it’s most needed.
A new working paper published by the Annenberg Center at Brown University — coauthored by UVM’s Kolbe (CESS), Elizabeth Dhuey from the University of Toronto Scarborough, and Sara Menlove Doutre from WestEd — found that the formula used to distribute federal dollars to states for special education programs creates large and concerning disparities.
“There's been a long-standing conversation about the fact that the federal government should provide more money for special education, and the Biden-Harris administration is responding to this need,” Kolbe said in an interview. “Our argument is: Adding more money is important, but so is ensuring that the dollars get to places where they are most needed.”
Kolbe is an Associate Professor in the College of Education and Social Services, with a research focus on the resources and costs associated with effectively implementing policies and programs in PK-16 educational organizations.
“A focus of my recent work is federal and state funding for special education programs, which is essential to how we pay for services and support for students with disabilities in schools,” Kolbe said. “The new paper is part of an effort to evaluate how the federal government provides funding to states and districts for special education.”
Kolbe and her team analyzed the Individuals with Disabilities (IDEA) Act, legislation that ensures students with disabilities are provided education tailored to their needs.
The paper, “Unequal & Increasingly Unfair: How Federal Policy Creates Disparities in Special Education Funding,” found that, on average, “states with proportionally larger populations of children and children living in poverty, children identified for special education, and non-White and Black children receive fewer federal dollars, both per pupil and per student receiving special education.”
“At a minimum, we would hope that all states received similar amounts of federal funding per student, and ideally, funding is allocated progressively, ensuring that more dollars go to places with higher levels of need and cost, ” Kolbe said. “The existing federal formula does neither. States get very different amounts of federal funding per pupil, and places that have higher levels of need do not receive proportionally more funding."
The IDEA Act, which was signed into law in 1990 and reauthorized in 1997, hasn’t had its formula updated since 1999. The federal government currently uses population data from 2005. The study shows that revisions to the formula in 1999 resulted in a more unequitable distribution of federal special education funding.
“When the formula was redesigned, they moved from allocating dollars based on the count of children in a state that qualified for special education to what they called population-based measure, which was a census-based count of children and count of children in poverty,” Kolbe said. “The revised formula also included protections for small states that might have lost funding under the new population-based formula. However, when they did that, funding no longer was tightly linked to differences in need among states.”
The recent paper offers several policy simulations that could be used to improve the fairness of the IDEA Act’s formula. The simulations take into account adjusting federal funding to states based on differences in education costs, the counts of students receiving special education in a state, and allocating funding entirely based on the extent of economic disadvantage in a state.
Kolbe and her team have been active in generating other policy-relevant research for special education funding, including in Vermont. A 2017 report published by Kolbe and her CESS colleague Kieran Killeen culminated with changes to Vermont’s special education funding formula that are set to go into effect in 2023.
Ultimately, Kolbe wants to inform the national conversation surrounding how we ensure schools have sufficient resources to serve students with disabilities.