In 2024, The Boston Globe launched an unprecedented investigation into Massachusetts public schools, uncovering haunting stories of special-needs students’ parents attempting to navigate the education system. These parents, who sought only to ensure their child was receiving the specialized education they needed, were instead faced with a black-box system that offered secrecy in place of solutions. The Globe found that parents who succeed in acquiring better educational resources for their child are required to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with their school district while many other parents are unaware of what assistance options are available for their children. These agreements are known as “special education settlements” and are far from unique to Massachusetts public schools.
Although every student has the right to public education in the United States, students with disabilities overwhelmingly lacked access to appropriate educational services until 1975. That year, Congress passed the landmark Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in order to enshrine access to Free Appropriate Public Education for special-needs students into law. IDEA, which pertains to approximately 15 percent of all students across the United States, requires educational services to be tailored to fit the special education needs of each student. Under IDEA, an Individualized Education Program (IEP) is developed in tandem with the school and parents, outlining a personalized plan of learning for the student.
In theory, if parents of these students are dissatisfied with the suitability of the education their children are receiving, whether it be with the terms or implementation of an IEP, IDEA grants them the right to a due process hearing. In practice, however, countless school districts distribute millions of dollars per year in special education settlements to avoid such hearings and bury contests to appropriate education deep in their ledgers. For these districts, hiding behind a settlement is much easier than making thoughtful reforms to their special education infrastructure. Thus, an ever-increasing reliance on settlements is no surprise.
Nonetheless, this practice diverts funding away from long-term special education investments, devastates districts’ financial capabilities, and further entrenches inequality for one of the most vulnerable student populations. Moving forward, special-needs students writ large must be placed at the forefront, rather than the tail end, of special education.
The Globe’s probe into special education settlements exposes the secrecy with which their terms are reached. Broadly, these deals involve out-of-district placements, where the student is transferred to a school, often private, that is better equipped to handle their learning needs, with tuition and transportation partially or wholly covered by the district. But because parents who settle with their districts typically sign an NDA, the terms of previous district payouts, such as tuition reimbursements, almost never reach the public. For parents, choosing to settle and sign an NDA saves them time and money, since enduring a lengthy hearing process often induces legal costs and draws the improved education of their child further out of reach. Although more costly in the long run, settlements offer districts the easy way out: Instead of deliberately improving programming and properly managing budgets, districts only need to spend money to resolve immediate issues.
Additionally, this secrecy creates informational asymmetry that gives districts the negotiative advantage to dictate settlement terms and prevent parents from using their knowledge of other deals to bargain for more in their own cases. In the district’s eyes, if parents had this information, more would clamor for better terms, leading to greater payouts that would cripple school budgets and lead to “financial ruin.” The normalization of NDAs that has emerged from these settlements reproduces inequalities among students, undermining the principles of equitable education that motivated the original purpose of IDEA.
This backward model of regulation makes parents, rather than the government, responsible for enforcing IDEA by pursuing legal action against a district. The logistical and financial burdens of doing so are high: Not only do parents need to be aware of their rights and the rights of their children, they also need to have the resources to take action and the luxury of being able to wait. As such, wealthy parents can hire lawyers who will draw out more cash from the district, whereas parents of lower-income households are not able to enter into favorable settlements—or do not take legal action to begin with. There are regional disparities as well. Although specialized private schools have stepped in to fill district gaps in the Northeast, other areas of the country, particularly rural ones, have fewer private schools—and thus no infrastructure to send special-needs students anywhere. As settlements stumble onward, we stray farther and farther away from the ideal of IDEA.
Reliance on these settlements produces a vicious cycle that further incapacitates districts to improve their special education infrastructure, leading to even more settlements. Novel journalism efforts to uncover records of settlement agreements from districts have revealed just how much these settlements are costing. In 2024, The Boston Globe discovered that over $1 billion is spent annually for out-of-district special education placements across Massachusetts public schools. The Philadelphia Inquirer obtained cost charts from districts in Philadelphia’s collar counties, of which the top four districts spent a combined $22.7 million in special education settlements from 2021 to 2024. In 2024, New York City school districts spent nearly a whopping $400 million on special education settlements, a 31 percent jump from the previous year. In many of these districts, settlements are engulfing their special education budgets, and their terms are only trapping districts into recurring costs with no room for institutional reform.
The standardization of settlements benefits neither families nor districts, begging the question of why districts continue to rely on them. When interviewed, some district officials have argued that these settlements do not reflect “failures in district programming,” but rather that they are an optimal way to ensure appropriate education for some special education students. The latter may be true—but these arguments are not mutually exclusive. Although the settlements may enable some students to finally receive appropriate education, in many cases, students have to be transferred elsewhere because of school district programming flaws. In Brookline, Massachusetts, for example, an overreliance on settlements appears to stem from financial mismanagement and insufficient in-district infrastructure.
But not all the blame can be placed on districts. There is a crippling shortage of special education staff nationwide, with over half of schools across the country reporting difficulty filling special education positions. Additionally, IDEA has never been fully funded by Congress and is missing its own 40 percent benchmark by more than half. Current federal funding covers an abysmal 12 percent of the excess cost of special education, which is a shortfall of nearly $40 billion. It is evident that reforming this system requires stratified intervention.
For one, it is grossly improper for the federal government to blast an underfunded mandate without further aid. Solving issues of transparency and resource capacity requires the federal government to increase funding to and oversight of IDEA. For districts, one can hope that if they learn to reprioritize their own students, this will translate to long-term infrastructure investment in special education, rather than a reliance on secretive settlements. With a combination of increased oversight, funding, and district reprioritization, we can begin to address the structural inequalities that plague the current special education landscape. In the meantime, a first step could be to expand legal aid to parents of lower-income special education students to somewhat level the playing field.
Districts desperately need a reframing of priorities. They are forgetting that their primary responsibility is to provide free and appropriate public education—and no, it is not about the money. Journalism efforts cannot go unnoticed; they ought to spark further efforts to obtain settlement information across the country and inspire mobilizers to hold districts accountable for settling. The worst possible outcome is settling for the status quo.