While intended as a universal benefit, educational support for children with disabilities is significantly segregated by class, according to a paper released in January. The decade-spanning analysis of state and federal data found that wealthy families were twice as likely as poorer ones to be granted accommodations under the federal law Section 504.
A similar split was present in the vast architecture of special education offered through individualized education programs — though in that case, the dynamic was reversed, with IEP recipients much more likely to come from low-income families than well-off ones.
Nick Ainsworth, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, and the paper’s lead author, said his interest in the topic was stoked during the COVID era, when evaluations for special education fell dramatically in schools around the country. While studying trends leading up to the pandemic, however, he and his colleagues noticed how differently rich and poor households access the federal government’s two biggest sources of disability services.
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“We looked across the income distribution and started to see these large differences,” Ainsworth said. “We had some hypotheses about what that would look like with respect to 504 plans, but we did not expect to see those differences favoring high-income students.”
Those findings may have come as a surprise to the research team, but they validate long-held suspicions among education observers that 504-mandated aid — considered less comprehensive than those provided by IEPs, but subject to fewer legal requirements — are directed disproportionately toward the affluent.
In 2019, a pair of investigations by Wall Street Journal and revealed that school districts with higher average incomes enrolled conspicuously larger numbers of students with 504 plans. Eligible pupils are typically given extra time to complete assignments and tests, raising concerns that some parents exploited the program to gain unneeded academic perks for their kids.
Such cynicism is perhaps inevitable amid the furious competition waged for top scores and coveted admissions slots. And the jostling for position doesn’t even relent with the arrival of college acceptance letters: Record numbers of undergraduates at America’s most prestigious universities now say they experience conditions like anxiety and ADHD, which can confer special accommodations. But experts say it is unclear whether the system is being gamed, or if its design simply leaves needier children underserved.
Ainsworth and his colleagues created the study by gathering academic records for millions of Oregon students between the 2008–09 and 2018–19 school years, then linking them to IRS tax files over the same period. The combined data allowed them to see not only which students were classified as needing IEP vs. 504 services, but which specific disability they reported.
In all, one-quarter of the most disadvantaged students had an IEP, a portion more than three times greater than that of the very wealthiest students. Meanwhile, nearly twice as many students from families near the top of the income scale were assigned a 504 plan than those near the bottom (2.9% vs. 1.5%).
Paul Morgan, a professor at the University of Albany whose work focuses on disability classification, said those patterns reflected important distinctions in how the two offerings are used.
IEPs provide specialized instruction geared toward each student’s learning goals, sometimes including placement outside general education classrooms. By contrast, 504 plans only require schools to make the requisite modification to give students equal access to learning opportunities. Their looser eligibility standards may allow parents with the resources and wherewithal to access support on behalf of children who aren’t obvious candidates for IEPs, Morgan remarked.
“These are benefits that don’t come with a lot of costs. Your child is typically not leaving the classroom,” he said. “They might be seen as beneficial without much downside in terms of tradeoffs.”
The laws’ tradeoffs
To a large degree, the tradeoffs families face when choosing between an IEP and a 504 plan are shaped by the laws governing each policy. Differences in those statutes mean that many don’t perceive a choice at all.
IEPs were created by the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, which lists 13 specific categories of disability — from deaf-blindness to traumatic brain injury — that make children eligible for special education. Congress disburses annual grants to states (more than $15 billion in FY 2025) that pay for the provisions included in each student’s IEP.
The calculation is different with 504 plans, which are not attached to any federal funding. Under the eponymous Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the plans establish students’ rights to reasonable accommodations for a much broader array of conditions. Yet in the absence of a federal subsidy, the assistance provided usually takes the form of cost-free interventions like extra testing time, preferential classroom seating, and even reduced homework burdens.
Schools are legally obligated to find and evaluate children who may be have disabilities, but in practice, many are never referred for services. Christopher Cleveland, an assistant professor of education at Brown University and one of Ainsworth’s coauthors, said the incentives for schools to initiate the 504 process are “probably less clear.”
“Many school leaders feel that they’re in a high-pressure situation to figure out the resources of special education versus local, in-state dollars,” Cleveland added. “Whereas the 504 plan decisions seem like they’re more subject to advocacy on the part of families.”
The parents best equipped to wrangle the needed paperwork and prod school staffers toward a resolution are those with sufficient time, mental bandwidth, and experience dealing with bureaucracies. Since the outcome of 504 evaluations can hinge on diagnoses for disorders like social anxiety or attention deficit, it also helps to be able to afford the kind of expensive neuropsychological evaluations that insurance doesn’t always cover.
Miriam Nunberg is a former attorney for the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights who now works as an education rights consultant in New York City. She said parents are obliged to be proactive in seeking accommodations, especially for high achievers whose performance at school tends to conceal learning difficulties. For guidance, they can turn to a cottage industry of lawyers, professional advocates, tutors, and clinical evaluators.
While each of them bill at healthy rates, the expense could be unavoidable in New York. As in many other jurisdictions, disability evaluations conducted through the school district have faced irksome delays in the past due to staffing shortages.
“When kids are pulling As and Bs, school staff generally aren’t referring them to assessments, whether for 504s or IEPs,” Nunberg said. “So it really has to come from the family — and that’s where you need to have the ability to educate yourself, or hire someone to help you with it.”
Help on the SAT
Still, the mere fact that financially comfortable families are well positioned to hire that help doesn’t reveal anything about their motives.
Ben Lovett, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said he thought the “valuable” study’s finding that poorer students are likelier to be assigned IEPs was plausible because poverty and disability are correlated. On the other hand, he wrote in an email, the overrepresentation of 504s at the high end of the income scale was “harder to understand.”
Some combination of three factors had to explain what was going on, Lovett continued: Either moneyed parents are pushing schools to issue 504 plans that are not educationally necessary; their children are particularly susceptible to conditions, such as mood or anxiety disorders, that aren’t usually addressed through special education; or the families of the neediest learners are more challenged than others in navigating the system.
“Only additional research that audits 504 plans and investigates the evidence of disability for each student can really determine the degree to which these three factors explain the disparities,” he wrote.
One suggestive detail is that the socioeconomic divide estimated in Ainsworth’s paper actually grew slightly as students entered middle and high school, when academic demands escalate. The lure of extra time on college exams could be a powerful inducement to grab any available edge.
A different study, published in March by Princeton doctoral candidate Tiffany Liu, discovered a measurable uptick in 504 plan enrollments in 2017 after the College Board began a policy of automatically honoring test takers’ school-based accommodations when they took the SAT. The increase was sharpest in wealthier schools.
Nunberg agreed that the elevated academic stakes of high school likely motivated some parents to have their sons and daughters evaluated for disabilities — especially after seeing them underperform on, or become anxious about, tests like the PSAT. But while conceding that some parents in New York always search for unwarranted advantages, she argued that it was more common to encounter intelligent kids juggling real problems of focus and executive function.
“What I see much more often are kids who are brilliant and have a lot of pressure put on them by their parents, or themselves, or the system at large, and who are literally staying up all night to achieve high grades,” she lamented.
The University of Albany’s Morgan said he believed there was substantial unmet need for disability services in K-12 schools. What’s more, he concluded, it was “not unreasonable” to think that people would use the methods at their disposal to push their offspring to the top of the pile.
“I imagine there is abuse or manipulation of the system, including by parents who view it as a way for their child to get additional support. Especially for some selective colleges, things have gotten so extremely cutthroat that you’d want to give your kid any benefit you could.”
This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.
