Supreme Court outlines test for judging IEP's in student disability cases

Student disability claims brought under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) are quite common. Generally speaking, disabled students are entitled to an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) that outlines personalized educational goals for the student. If the parents don't like the IEP and challenge it at a due process hearing, they can recover reimbursement from the school district for the costs of sending the child to a private school. The question is this: how do we know the IEP satisfies the IDEA? The Supreme Court clarifies that question.

The case is Endrew F. v. Douglas County School Dist., decided on March 22. As usual, the IDEA does not provide much guidance on this issue. Congress likes to leave the statutory language vague and allow the courts to deal with its meaning. In this instance, the Supreme Court in 1982 said that the IEP should be "reasonably calculated to enable the child to achieve passing marks and advance from grade to grade." That was the Rowley case. The Court in Rowley declined "to establish any one test for determining the adequacy of educational benefits conferred upon all children."

Post-Rowley, the federal courts have applied different standards governing the adequacy of IEP's. The Second Circuit said in 2008 that "a state need not maximize the potential of handicapped children, but the door of public education must be opened in a meaningful way, and the IEP must provide the opportunity for more than only trivial advancement." That sounds like a low bar. In the Endrew F. case, the Tenth Circuit had a similar test: the IEP must provide "some educational benefit" and the IEP is adequate if it confers an "educational benefit that is merely ... more than de minimis."

A unanimous Supreme Court rejects this "good enough" test and says the IEP must provide an "educational program reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child's circumstances." This test will not be easy to apply, as the IEP will depend on the individual student, and all students are different. As Chief Justice Roberts says, "the adequacy of a given IEP turns on the unique circumstances of the child for whom it was created. This absence of a bright-line rule, however, should not be mistaken for an invitation to the courts to substitute their own notions of sound educational policy for those of the school authorities which they review." In other words, school officials are still entitled to some deference in preparing IEP's.