Who Leaves? — a Students’ Neurodiversity Community Coalition report. Seven years of state data show students with disabilities leaving New York public schools for homeschooling at persistently higher rates than their peers, with the widest gaps in well-resourced districts and at the start of high school.

Who Leaves? (PDF)

Who Leaves? Methodology Appendix

Data File

I am following up on Who Leaves? with a much more comprehensive data request from NYSED. This will include the various exit paths students with disabilities take, whether they return, and how long they maintained their classification before leaving. It will also reveal important differences by district need level, race, and economic status.

While NYSED has this data, extracting it at this level of detail requires custom programming, which I have personally paid for to enable deeper analysis.

My goal is to uncover patterns among students with disabilities who leave a district, whether they’re homeschooled, enrolled in private schools, transferred to another district, or gone. We need to understand what happens, why it happens, and how we can improve.

Explorations at the Margins is my Substack with essays on special education, disability rights, and the machinery of school systems, from state data to lived experience.

I suggest starting with:
Where Civil Rights Go to Die — the structural enforcement-gap argument where each agency points to the next, and no one investigates
Your Child Has Special Education Rights — what stonewalling looks like and practical steps parents can take
The Requirement to Fail — the pattern at the student level: IDEA requires progress, students deteriorate and exit, and nobody asks why
Uninvestigated and Unappealable (Article 89) — why the NYS complaint process needs statutory reform

Uninvestigated and Unappealable: New York Special Education Families Need Legislative Reform is my case for amending Article 89 in New York State Education Law.

Millions of children pass through the American educational system, yet we do not know how they fare. Who Protects the Kids? will show how our systems fail to protect children and their families, and it will advocate for solutions.

Part One describes how schools treat children and families: categorization, removal, declassification, and daily interactions that leave families fighting alone. Part Two explains how these patterns are maintained, starting with the 1975 agreement that linked services to a deficit label and shifted all enforcement responsibility to parents rather than public authorities. Part Three names the system’s defenders and what they stand to lose. The closing will identify what can change without waiting on Congress.

Until we expose the structural roots and track real outcomes, every family keeps fighting alone, one case at a time, at great expense. Settlements with nondisclosure agreements hide the patterns.

As I develop the chapters, I will be looking for stories that illustrate what happens. As the chapters unfold, I will make requests and post individual survey forms.

Insured to Fail EDU is a podcast that covers the financial and political incentives behind failures in American education.

Students’ Neurodiversity Community Coalition’s Facebook page, where some of this New York State work is shared.