Source: https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/education_law/special-education/
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 16:17:52+00:00

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Difference creates challenges. Treating people who are different the same can be unfair; treating people who are similar differently can be unfair. The trick is determining what fairness requires under given conditions.
Special education inevitably demands this determination. Under federal law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (20 U.S.C. §1400 et seq.) or “IDEA,” schools that receive federal support must provide a “free appropriate public education” or “FAPE” to students with disabilities. But just what is “appropriate” – how much a school must do to support a disabled student – has been a subject of controversy for many years.
Last week the Supreme Court waded into this area for the first time in decades in Endrew F. v. Douglas County School Dist. RE-1. The unanimous opinion was cogently analyzed in a prior post produced virtually instantly by Professor Mark C. Weber at DePaul University College of Law; this follow-up reflects on the implications of the Court’s words.
The justices decided explicitly for the first time that students whom IDEA aims to assist must receive a benefit that is more than “minimal.” The Court held that the lower courts, which had ruled that the public school defendants had provided an adequate education to the plaintiff because he had made “some progress” – i.e., any progress – had used the wrong standard to reach their conclusion.
Perhaps because Endrew F. could have come out very differently, Education Week reported that advocates for children with disabilities viewed the Court’s opinion as a “clear win.” The Court could have espoused the view that any amount of progress, however small, constituted progress and thus would satisfy the FAPE mandate. Certainly that is the direction the majority opinion in Board of Education of Hendrick Hudson Central School District v. Rowley, 458 U.S. 176 (1982), the Court’s last tussle with IDEA, pointed.
From this language, it is easy to see how the lower court judges who heard Endrew F.’s case might have thought that any benefit at all satisfied the Rowley standard.
While the Court’s opinion in Endrew F. provides clarification and reassures that a standard higher than de minimis does apply, it does a bit more besides. Most importantly, the justices appear to have accepted Rowley’s limited aspiration; the Court has accepted that requiring perfect equality of opportunity is too much to ask.
There are practical reasons not to require schools to take whatever steps, provide whatever support, is necessary to give a child with a disability or multiple disabilities the same opportunities as a student who lacks them. The Court could have alluded to this practical constraint, instead of suggesting that the (unattainable) target sought through the law should be lowered, and then struggled with the question of how close schools must get to the ideal. The justices did not take this path.
The path that they did choose looks like it may give schools more say in determining when a student receives an adequate education. Why? Because officials at the school are best placed, the Court instructs, to assess what progress is appropriate in light of a child’s circumstances.
If lower courts hearing parents’ challenges to schools’ proposed individualized education plans do show schools greater deference, it seems likely that those challenges will become more difficult and more expensive. Children whose parents are less sophisticated, less well-off, and/or have less access to expertise may be correspondingly less able to mount a successful challenge.
Now we will see what the lower courts do with Endrew F. on remand.
On March 22, the Supreme Court decided Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1. The Court overturned a lower court decision that had applied a “merely more than de minimis” test to the duty to provide appropriate education to children with disabilities in public schools. The case involved a child with autism whose parents placed him in a private school because they were dissatisfied with the progress he was making under his fourth grade individualized education program (IEP) and thought he was unlikely to achieve much more under a similar IEP proposed for fifth grade. He continued to have severe behavior problems in his public school setting, including screaming in class, climbing over furniture and classmates, and running away, and manifested extreme fear of commonplace aspects of his environment. His parents believed his academic progress had stalled. In the private school, he made rapid progress with a behavioral intervention plan, and the improved behavior allowed him to make academic gains. His parents sought tuition reimbursement, as permitted under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which requires that states receiving federal funds for special education guarantee each child with a disability a free, appropriate public education. The administrative law judge, the district court, and the Tenth Circuit all ruled against the parents. The Tenth Circuit interpreted the Supreme Court’s sole case on the appropriate education standard, Board of Education v. Rowley, 458 U.S. 176 (1982), to require simply that the child be offered some educational benefit, interpreted as merely more than de minimis.
The Supreme Court vacated and remanded. In a unanimous opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court read Rowley as steering a middle course between no enforceable appropriate education standard at all and the standard endorsed by the lower courts in that case, an education affording the child an opportunity to achieve her full potential commensurate with the opportunity provided children without disabilities. The Endrew Court stressed Rowley’s language requiring a substantively adequate education as well its proviso that its analysis was limited to the facts of that case and did not establish a universal test. Endrew said that Rowley pointed to a rule that the school has to offer an IEP reasonably calculated to enable the child to make progress in light of the child’s circumstances. Though this focuses on the reasonable, not the ideal, the standard keys into student progress; moreover, the program must be individualized to afford progress given the child’s unique needs. The Court reaffirmed Rowley's conclusion that for a child being educated in the general education classroom, passing marks and advancement from grade to grade through the general curriculum will ordinarily satisfy the IDEA standard (though the Court cautioned in a footnote that “This guidance should not be interpreted as an inflexible rule,” to be applied automatically). But it rejected the standard of the Tenth Circuit and courts like it that for children not in the regular classroom, offering merely de minimis progress is enough.
The Court rejected the parents’ position that in light of amendments to IDEA since Rowley, children are entitled to an education that affords opportunities to attain self-sufficiency and contribute to society substantially equal to opportunities afforded children without disabilities. The Court did not see the amendments to the Act over the years as adopting the proportional maximization standard that Rowley rejected. The Court also cited a need for deference to school authorities’ educational judgment. Nevertheless, parents, their advocates, and many other observers are likely to be pleased that the Court has rejected the low standard applied by the Tenth Circuit and many, many other courts and clarified that the law imposes a more demanding standard oriented towards the child’s progress and the child’s individual needs.
Just how much must a school district do to support the educational opportunity of a disabled student? Just enough to enable that student to get something, anything, out of the education provided? Or enough to enable that student to thrive, to excel?
[A] “free appropriate public education” consists of educational instruction specially designed to meet the unique needs of the handicapped child, supported by such services as are necessary to permit the child "to benefit" from the instruction. Almost as a checklist for adequacy under the Act, the definition also requires that such instruction and services be provided at public expense and under public supervision, meet the State's educational standards, approximate the grade levels used in the State's regular education, and comport with the child's [individualized education program – more on that below]. Thus, if personalized instruction is being provided with sufficient supportive services to permit the child to benefit from the instruction, and the other items on the definitional checklist are satisfied, the child is receiving a "free appropriate public education" as defined by the Act.
The Court’s language suggests that any benefit is sufficient to satisfy the requirement that schools provide FAPE; Justice Rehnquist, who wrote the majority opinion, took a very literal and formal approach to the language of the law to reach this Court’s conclusion.
Congress imposed the FAPE mandate in the Education for all Handicapped Children Act of 1975, Public Law 94-142, subsequently re-enacted as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”). The meaning of FAPE is before the Court again this year.
The plaintiff in Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE 1 was diagnosed at age two with autism and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (“ADHD”). As a result of these conditions, he “struggles with the ability to communicate personal needs, emotions and initiations [sic], and does not engage or interact with others in social routines or play.” Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE 1, 2014 WL 4548439, *1.
During his fourth grade year, his parents removed him from his public school in Douglas County, Colo., and placed him in a private school specializing in education of children with autism. His parents sued, claiming that the school district in prior years had failed to provide the boy with a FAPE and demanding that the district reimburse them for the cost of attending the private school.
An administrative law judge ruled against Endrew F.’s parents, finding that he received a FAPE, and so concluded that his family was not entitled to reimbursement of expenses. The trial court judge, who reviewed Endrew F.’s progress in public school before he switched, concluded that Endrew F. had received some educational benefit under the individualized education program (“IEP”), the kind of plan called for under IDEA. The district had developed Endrew F.’s IEP in an effort to comply with the FAPE mandate.
What is the level of educational benefit that school districts must confer on children with disabilities to provide them with the free appropriate education guaranteed by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 20 U.S.C. §1400 et seq.?
IDEA seeks to “to ensure that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education that emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their unique needs and prepare them for further education, employment, and independent living,” 20 U.S.C. §1400(d)(1)(A). But how are we to know that a given level of support has leveled the playing field for a disabled student?
Answering will only grow more difficult as we recognize students’ incredible diversity; students’ ability to take advantage of educational offerings lies along a spectrum. So the assumption that a one type of education serves nearly all will become one type serves some, and then, one type serves a few. Whether schools’ offerings evolve in response will likely be a political question rather than a doctrinal one.
Still, depending on how broadly the Court rules, the decision in Endrew F. could have far-reaching consequences, imposing clearer obligations on school districts to support disabled students or putting another hurdle in the way of parents seeking the best for their children. By June we will know whether a majority of the justices prefer the limited and formalistic interpretation of the majority in Rowley or a more idealistic interpretation that may impose greater costs on schools and would afford appropriate benefits to students.

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