Fact Check: Education head Chris Reykdal dead wrong on disabled students

Washington State Superintendent Chris Reykdal has been earning the ire of some lately. This week, he offended many (including yours truly) with his horrific comparison between Nazi Germany and the Trump administration on Twitter. But in his defense, he made a claim that caught my attention.

Rantz: Reykdal runs from criticism over Nazi tweet

While defending his ill-advised tweet, Reykdal claimed Secretary of Education Betsy Devos “…maybe rolling back some protections for students with disabilities… There is a growing bit of momentum here by this administration to do things that look a lot like propaganda and manipulation of language, and I just think it’s a slippery slope.”

Is DeVos rolling back protections for students with disabilities? It’s a popular claim coming from her political opponents, but it is not true.

Fact Check: Reykdal misunderstood another story

Like his misreading of the so-called “banned” CDC words report, Reykdal misunderstood a recent move by the Department of Education. As far as I can tell, he’s referring to news from October that the DeVos phased out 72 policy documents for disabled students. Reykdal borrows the term “rollback” from a Washington Post story, it seems.

But if Reykdal even casually dug into the topic, he would have realized the phasing out was of documents that are outdated. If he spent just 30 seconds more, he would have found the documents in question.

One was from 2006, explaining the rights of disabled students in private schools. Yes, it would be horrible if they simply rolled that document back until you realized they got rid of it because they created an updated one in 2011 with new language, rendering the old one useless.

In the Washington Post, they detailed some of the partisan response to this decision – partisanship Reykdal is casually participating in without backing up his claims. But:

Professor Bill Koski, director of the Youth and Education Law Project at Stanford University, said he reviewed many of the documents on the list and did not believe the move would effect how schools accommodate students with disabilities.

“It does look like housekeeping to me more than anything else,” Koski said. “I don’t know that it will change practice in any way.”

Reykdal seems to believe this is an affront to disabled students, but it’s him weighing in, again, on something he doesn’t understand and his position is to inform with his ideological bigotry, not any action that legitimately hurts anymore. I’d love to know how Reykdal views it harmful to remove the “OSEP Memo 85-9 Grantback arrangements” from 1985. It’s one of the 72 documents being nixed.

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