The first time a fellow parent told me they were hiring a lawyer to sue their school district for tuition to a specialized private school (in their case, one that would help their child with dyslexia and ADHD), she told me about it in whispers. She had never before been involved in any form of litigation, and as a staunch public-school supporter, she had never expected to be in this situation. There was a sense of fear, shame, and awkwardness in the air as she explained it to me, and I felt deeply empathetic. The process sounded grueling and stressful, and I presumed that the predicament was unusual. This was about ten years ago — back when it actually was unusual. But in the past five years or so, I’ve heard the same kind of story many more times, talked about much more openly. In New York, moving a child with learning disabilities to a state-of-the-art private school and suing the city to pay for it has become a relatively common practice, particularly among parents with the resources and know-how to navigate a lawsuit. In the 2023–24 school year, according to federal data, New York State accounted for nearly 70 percent of all special-education due-process claims filed in the United States — and in 2021, 98 percent of these cases came from New York City. It costs the Department of Education well over a billion dollars annually. In her eye-opening and moving feature, education writer Anya Kamenetz examines this trend — how it began and grew so quickly, why families with children who are struggling view it as a critical lifeline, and why the process is rife with inequity.
—Julia Edelstein, features editor, New York
