The Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund condemns the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) continued rollback of protections for Black and brown students with and without disabilities.
On August 18, 2026, the Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague letter,” forbidding public schools from considering race when making decisions related to student discipline. The letter is an about-face from previous guidance that recognized that if a school district disciplines students of color at higher rates, the policy should be examined even if it is not school district policy.
This new guidance follows a series of signals from ED that it will no longer address the compounding issues and high rates of discipline for students of color. On July 23, 2026, the Department published a final rule, which removed the disparate impact provisions from Title VI of the Civil Rights Act regulations. Disparate impact analysis identifies harmful effects a policy or actions have on different groups of people, including people of color. In June 2025 the White House issued Executive Order 14281 which made it policy for federal agencies to eliminate the use of disparate impact analysis “in all contexts.” Together, these federal actions dismantle key tools for protecting students from unlawful discrimination.
The grave harm caused by these actions will be felt most acutely by students of color with disabilities. Data collected by federal agencies over the past decade has consistently found that students with disabilities are more likely than students without disabilities to be suspended in K-12 settings and are suspended for longer duration. Disabled students of color have been found to experience the highest rates of exclusion. Black disabled students have been suspended at roughly three times the rate of white disabled students. In the Department’s 2021-2022 Civil Rights Data Collection, 81% of disabled students in public schools were subjected to physical restraint (20 times more than non-disabled students) while 31% were subject to seclusion compared to 2% of students without disabilities. Research and the experience of families both point to disabled students facing discriminatory and excessive punishment often related to behaviors that are a result of their disability, and students of color face punishment and violence at higher rates.
DREDF’s work representing students with disabilities in school districts across California displays consistently disturbing data patterns and underscores the critical need for important legal tools to protect students from being unlawfully and discriminatorily excluded from their education. In 2024, a federal court found one school district violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act by maintaining discriminatory policies of referring disabled students and Black disabled students to police for disability-related behaviors and allowing children as young as 10 to be repeatedly handcuffed and restrained. During the 2019-20 school year, students with disabilities in that district were 8.9 times more likely to be restrained than their non-disabled peers, and Black disabled students in that district were nearly 4 times more likely to be restrained than their non-disabled peers.
In another DREDF case from 2021, the school district suspended or expelled Black students at more than twice their rate of enrollment and referred Black students for involuntary psychiatric holds at nearly three times their rate of enrollment. Black and multiracial disabled students in the District were disciplinarily excluded from school at twice the rate of their peers.
While these federal actions take significant steps backwards in protections for students of color, a district that punishes a disabled child for disability-related behavior is still breaking federal law today. Nothing in the Dear Colleague letter changes what Section 504 and Title II of the ADA require of schools. These regulations still prohibit criteria and methods of administration that have the effect of discriminating on the basis of disability.
In addition, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) still provides students with procedural safeguards, like the requirement for a manifestation determination review before a disciplinary change in placement. States are still required to identify and address significant disproportionality in discipline by race and ethnicity. The Department’s July 2022 guidance on discipline under Section 504 and the IDEA remains in effect. The Dear Colleague letter also does not touch the important protections students of color have under state law, and does not excuse school districts’ responsibilities under state law to report and remedy racial disparities.
The discrimination disabled students of color experience in school settings is not new, nor is our advocacy. While recent federal guidance is designed to make discrimination easier to hide, schools should continue to collect and publicly report discipline, restraint, seclusion, and law enforcement data to track impacts of policy on students. A rich body of evidence supports the use of interventions over exclusion: functional behavioral assessments and behavior intervention plans, school-wide positive behavior supports, staff trained to de-escalate rather than restrain, and adequate numbers of counselors, psychologists, social workers, and nurses instead of police.
All children deserve a school environment where they can learn and grow. DREDF urges school districts, state Departments of Education and policymakers to continue to identify and address race and disability-based barriers to a safe and equal education for all students.
