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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reporting on the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education. The news on that front has been chaotic — a draft executive order to close the department was leaked, then walked back by the Trump administration, and newly minted Education Secretary Linda McMahon has pledged to guide the department through its “final mission” without providing specifics on what that mission is or how it is final.

Then, on Tuesday, the department announced the firing of more than 1,300 workers, bringing the department staff to about half the size it was before Trump took office.

Amid the upheaval, one thing is clear: Any plan to shut down the Education Department — and, indeed, the cuts and layoffs that have already happened — will disproportionately hurt students with disabilities. That includes kids who receive special education, but also those in general education classrooms who get supports or accommodations to learn, from speech therapy to sign language interpreters to counseling. Any kid who has an Individualized Education Program (IEP) or 504 plan through their school could be affected by what’s going on at the Education Department.

That’s a huge group of kids. As of 2022–2023, 7.5 million students — 15 percent of all those enrolled in public school — received special education or related services (like speech therapy) under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. The most common reasons were specific learning disabilities like dyslexia.

I know a lot of students and families are concerned about what the Trump administration’s actions could mean for education. So to dig more specifically into some of these issues, I reached out to Sara Nović, whose work has helped me make sense of the administration’s impact on students and on disability rights more generally.

Nović is an author and translator, and she’s also the co-founder of Disability Rights Watch, a site that shares news about disability advocacy in the current moment. “As a deaf person and the mom of a deaf kid, I’ve always had a vested interest in disability rights and education,” she told me in an email. But her “villain origin story for broader organizing” happened in 2023, when she organized against an ACLU-Delaware complaint that could have harmed deaf children. “This was an example of an ill-informed group trying to ‘help,’ but being co-opted by special interests and not listening to actual deaf/disabled people and experts in the field,” she said.

The experience taught Nović a lot about organizing, lessons she’s now putting into practice on a nationwide scale as changes in the federal government potentially threaten access to learning for millions of kids. Today, Nović is a go-to source for what’s going on with the Trump administration’s education........

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