You sign the IEP, you sit through the meetings, and you tell yourself that once the services start, things will get better. Michigan’s new bipartisan Special Education Committee is built on the same instinct — finally, the state is paying attention. But the first-ever Michigan Special Education Benchmarks Report, released this year by the Autism Alliance of Michigan, lands a harder number: students with disabilities graduate at 61 percent, twenty-five points behind their nondisabled peers, a gap wide enough to be a crisis. The committee’s early focus is expanding inclusion in general-education classrooms. Inclusion is not the wrong idea. It is answering a different question than the one those graduation numbers are actually asking.
Michigan’s bipartisan special education committee is asking real questions about a real gap. Here is the science behind what the graduation data is actually pointing to — and the question every parent should bring to their next IEP meeting.
Common questions
What is Michigan’s new Special Education Committee trying to do?
Does “more inclusion” mean less support for my child?
My child is in special ed. How do I know if they’re getting the right kind of help?
What should I ask at my child’s next IEP meeting?
Michigan special ed students graduate at 61%, 25 points behind peers. A new bipartisan committee is forming. The question it needs to answer: is each service building the skill, or replacing the expectation that it will?
What Michigan just did
On June 9, 2026, the Michigan State Board of Education voted to form a bipartisan Special Education Committee. The four-member panel includes Dr. Pamela Pugh, a Democrat who will serve as chair, and Tom McMillin, a Republican who will serve as vice chair, alongside board members Ellen Cogen Lipton and Dr. Judith Pritchett. Initial planning will begin this summer; visits to local school districts are expected to start this fall. No new funding has been approved yet.
The committee was formed in direct response to a troubling data picture. The Autism Alliance of Michigan’s first-ever Special Education Benchmarks Report found that 40 percent of students with disabilities miss 18 or more school days per year, 60 percent of their parents say schools do not facilitate meaningful involvement, and 77 percent of seclusion and restraint incidents involve students with disabilities. State and federal funding covers 44 percent of Michigan special education costs, leaving local districts to absorb the rest.
The inclusion data adds context. Michigan’s own numbers show students who spend 80 percent or more of their time in general education graduate at 68.5 percent, compared with 52.6 percent for those in gen ed 40 to 79 percent of the time, and 15.2 percent for those in gen ed less than 40 percent of the school day. The committee’s response: prioritize expanding inclusion.
Why the question behind the data matters more than the answer being offered
The inclusion correlation is real, and the committee is not wrong to notice it. But a correlation has a confound: students who spend less time in general education tend to have more complex needs. Moving a child into a general-education classroom does not automatically close the gap that placed them in a separate setting to begin with. The harder question is what happens to the underlying skill once the placement changes.
Special education’s own research has a precise name for the failure mode. The “differential boost” finding shows the right support, at the right moment, lifts a struggling learner more than it lifts a typically-developing peer — that is a scaffold doing exactly what it should. The same research describes what happens when a support is provided because it is easier than closing the actual skill gap: the incentive to build the underlying skill quietly disappears, and dependence sets in. A graduation gap that has held at roughly 25 points for years, despite more services and steady spending, fits that second pattern more than anyone would like to admit.
The system that produces this outcome is not malicious. It measures success by services delivered — evaluations completed, hours logged, placements made — rather than by skills acquired. That is the instinct the committee’s district visits need to examine directly. Closing a gap requires building the skill underneath it, not a more comfortable environment around it.
Key takeaways
- The gap: Only 61 percent of Michigan students with disabilities graduate — 25 points below their nondisabled peers, with a dropout rate twice as high.
- The science: Special education research describes a "differential boost" — the right support lifts struggling learners more than typical peers; the wrong support, delivered in place of skill-building, quietly produces dependence.
- The question for your IEP: "Is each support in this plan building the skill it compensates for — and what does the plan look like when my child no longer needs it?"
What this means for your child’s IEP this fall
The committee’s district visits start this fall. The visit will be useful in proportion to the questions it asks. For every service in a student’s plan, the right question is: is this building the underlying skill, or compensating for it without a plan to reduce the need for that compensation over time? A support that helps a child access grade-level content while building the skill it compensates for is the model. A support that only works around a gap — with no timeline for closing it — is worth asking about.
Parents do not need to wait for the committee. Bring the question to your child’s next IEP meeting: “For each support in this plan, what does progress look like — and when would my child no longer need it?” That shifts the conversation from services received to skills built, which is the only measure that shows up in graduation statistics twenty years later.
The bipartisan formation is a good sign. A committee that includes both parties and plans to actually visit classrooms has more credibility than a report sitting on a desk. The work ahead will be determined by which questions guide those visits — and whether the answers are honest about what services are building versus what they are replacing.
Every parent of a child in special education wants the same thing: a plan that builds their child up, not around them. The system that produces a 25-point graduation gap is not cruel — it is optimized for the wrong metric. It counts services delivered instead of skills acquired, placements made instead of gaps closed. That instinct, more than any shortage of funding or inclusion seats, is what the committee needs to name out loud. The brain your child has today is not the brain they will have in six months of the right kind of practice — that is not a slogan, it is what the neuroplasticity research actually shows. The Learning Success All Access program gives you the framework to ask better questions at every IEP meeting — and the skill-building tools to start closing gaps at home, today, without waiting for a committee visit.
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References
- Michigan Department of Education — Michigan State Board of Education Announces Bipartisan Special Education Committee (June 9, 2026)
- Bridge Michigan — Michigan fails its students with disabilities, first-ever report finds
- Michigan Advance — State Board of Education forms special education review committee (June 10, 2026)
- WNEM / WILX — Michigan education leaders working on new special education initiative (June 23, 2026)
