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For five years running, the District of Columbia has failed to uphold parts of the federal law that governs the education of students with disabilities, according to the federal Department of Education’s ratings of the district and other states and territories.

In particular, the district can’t seem to get a handle on evaluating and re-evaluating students identified as having disabilities, a problem that is more than a decade old. (You can read more about some of those problems here, and about a more recent problem with special education services in the district.)

(The findings about each state are delayed by a year, so the most recent ratings of whether states are upholding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act reflect the 2009-10 school year.)

In 2010, the school district only managed to evaluate 17 percent of the children who were waiting for special education examinations.

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At a dinner party, you’re not supposed to talk politics or religion. Although Miss Manners never forbid it, chatting about how to save money in special education may as well have been included in that list of taboo topics, too. After all, cost can’t be a consideration when deciding what services a student with a disability needs.

While the rules about keeping views on religion and politics to oneself were abandoned long ago, the unofficial gag order on talking special ed funding held—until recently.

In a story earlier this year, I wrote about how one Massachusetts company is encouraging school districts to strive for more efficiency in special education. L

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With the Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives calling for a $557.7 million cut to special education spending in the current year, it’s hard to complain about President Barack Obama’s modest $250 million boost to the program in his fiscal year 2012 budget proposal.

The President’s plans include adding about $200 million to IDEA Part B, which serves students age 3 to 21. That would fund IDEA at about 17 percent, according to the Council for Exceptional Children. Building toward funding IDEA fully, i.e., with 40 percent of the contribution coming from the federal government, would mean increases of a few billion dollars a year, Deborah Ziegler, the Council’s associate executive director for policy and advocacy services, told me.

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After two decades of decline, education litigation appears to be on the rise, with special education leading the way, according to an analysis from Lehigh University professor Perry A. Zirkel, an expert in special education law.

Zirkel’s paper on his findings will appear in full in an upcoming issue of West’s Education Law Reporter, but he walked me through the findings.

Using West’s Key Number System, Zirkel tabulated state and federal court decisions by decades, starting in the 1940s. In the 1970s, state and federal education decisions combined reached a high of about 7,600 decisions, but dropped to about 7,300 decisions in the 1980s and under 7,000 decisions in the 1990s.

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A confession: releasing an article out into the world can sometimes be a little nerve-wracking. That’s especially true when the topic is special education funding, which I wrote about for this year’s edition of Quality Counts, Education Week‘s fine analysis of education nationwide. (The full table of contents can be found here, and I encourage everyone to read these articles.)

Special education funding is a particularly touchy subject. Advocates have argued for a long time that special education is underfunded by the federal government, and that their children are taking the blame for straining school budgets.

That’s not such a crazy fear to have.

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