Illustration: Richard A.Chance
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Last winter, as her anxiety reached a new zenith, 7-year-old Hayley would often stop on Eighth Avenue in Park Slope and lie down on the sidewalk, staging a full-body protest against attending second grade at her zoned public school. “I’m not going,” she would wail, red-faced and sweating. “I hate it. I hate you! You can’t make me!” Instead of a ten-minute walk to school, negotiations could last up to two hours with her mother, Diana, alternating incentives with threats. At night, after bedtime, Hayley often lay in bed crying and clutching her stuffed sloth with the lights off for hours. (Diana and Hayley’s names have been changed to protect their privacy.)
Hayley is a sensitive, imaginative child who gives some of her allowance money to the food pantry. Cognitive tests have shown that she has a high IQ but also that she struggles with reading and spelling. Her kindergarten teacher chalked this up to COVID-era learning loss — Hayley had turned 3 in March 2020, so she’d missed part of 3K and attended pre-K part time in a mask. “But then she got into first grade, and things were really not clicking,” says Diana, “and the teacher was like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, because I can tell that she understands the ideas, but none of it is showing up in her written work.’”
Diana wanted me to know, first and foremost, that she is a huge proponent of public school. Her older daughter is on the autism spectrum and in a public school. She has family members in the city who taught in public schools. She was even elected co-chair of the school-leadership team at Hayley’s public school, a group of staff and parents with input on decision-making from curriculum to budget. She tells me all of this right away because, she says, she doesn’t want me to get the wrong idea about her. “I believe that public education has an enormous, innate value,” she tells me. But, she admits, it didn’t work for her younger child.
And so, like tens of thousands of other families in New York City, she has hired a lawyer and is filing a “due process” claim against the Department of Education. These lawsuits are referred to as Carter cases, following a 1993 Supreme Court case that gave parents nationwide the same recourse. If the city settles, or the family wins in a hearing, the DoE will be liable for the cost of services, transportation, evaluations, and/or tuition at a specialized private school. In Hayley’s case, the payment will include an annual tuition of nearly $90,000. The city may also be required to pay the parents’ legal fees — typically in the four- or five-figure range — incurred to file the suit each year.
Although parents across the United States can sue their school districts for private-school tuition, no one is as likely to opt for this route as a New Yorker. The rate of claims per student in New York State is ten times higher than the national average. In the 2023–24 school year, according to federal data, New York State represented 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. According to New York’s Independent Budget Office, the city’s total spending on these cases has more than quadrupled in a decade, from $234 million in 2015 to $1.1 billion in 2025. For 2027, the city has budgeted approximately $1.5 billion for private-school tuition, private services, student transportation, and lawyer costs. That’s about 4 percent of the city’s entire education budget.
There is no single explanation for why New York City has so many of these cases. One factor is that under New York State law, but not in other states, not only can you enroll in a specialized special-education private school and sue the city for tuition, but you can also enroll in a regular private or parochial school and sue the city for outside special-education tutoring and therapy that the private school doesn’t offer. But the experts I interviewed, including Christina Foti, the city’s deputy chancellor in the Division of Inclusive and Accessible Learning, also gave a systemic rationale.
Over the past decade, New York City has grown what you might consider a Carter-case industrial complex with an unusually dense geographic concentration of high-end, specialized private schools; tutors; therapists; educational lawyers; advocates; and evaluators who all know and recommend each other and who help families navigate the system. “There’s an entire economic infrastructure around due process,” says Foti. “That ecosystem has included inflated costs.”
Many of the private schools that parents use DoE money to pay for could be considered luxurious with facilities, faculty, and curricula that rival those of the city’s elite nonspecialized private schools like Dalton and Trinity — and with even higher tuition. An incomplete list of private special-education schools where many or most students use due process to pay tuition includes Winston Prep, which has daily one-on-one remediation and where students have gone on backpacking and canoeing trips ($75,000 per year); Churchill, where elementary-school students study printmaking, ceramics, and fashion design ($79,000 per year); the Windward School, where eighth-graders recently enjoyed a private talkback with the cast of The Outsiders on Broadway ($79,600); the Gateway School, which has Singapore math and a team of on-staff therapists ($80,500); Mary McDowell Friends School, a Quaker school that sends all of its tenth-graders to Europe for a week ($90,000 a year); the Lang School, which has a makerspace and offers each student at least 30 minutes of formal counseling with a school psychologist each week ($104,800); and the IDEAL School, which, for $176,912 per year, pairs students who need it with a full-time one-on-one teacher.
Although the DoE pays many students’ tuition at these schools, their student bodies do not reflect the diversity of the public-school system. Last school year, 71 percent of children who won private-school-tuition payments from the city were white; by contrast, just 12.5 percent of all students with disabilities in the city’s public schools are white. And according to the conservative Manhattan Institute, in 2021, the Upper West Side recorded approximately 14.8 Carter cases per 1,000 students, while the entirety of Queens averaged fewer than one case per 1,000 students.
Mayor Eric Adams’s first school chancellor, David Banks, said in 2022 that Carter-case families had figured out how to “game this system” and blamed them for education-budget shortfalls that made it harder to fund other services. Parents of Carter-case kids, including Diana, told me that they feel vilified. They counter that their children are suffering in public school and losing out on critical instructional time, which could ultimately prevent them from earning high-school diplomas. They say egregious system failures have left them with no other choice.
In the Supreme Court decision that established this process, Florence County School District Four v. Carter, the Court held that families are entitled to tuition reimbursement for a private school of the parent’s choice if a three-part test is met: First, did the district fail to offer a free, appropriate public education (or FAPE, for short)? Second, is the private school the parent chose an appropriate setting for this child? The third test, “equitable considerations,” was explained to me by special-education lawyers as, essentially: Did the family cooperate and act reasonably during the process? For example, did they show up to the meetings required to approve the child’s Individualized Education Plan? Did they make a good-faith effort to check out the public school that was offered?
The seeds of Hayley’s lawsuit were planted when her public school was slow to diagnose her learning disabilities. A teacher at Hayley’s school told Diana that the city would likely not test for dyslexia until the end of second grade, even though Hayley was displaying clear symptoms earlier, and suggested that Diana hire a private tutor to help instead. “She told me she would get in trouble for saying this, but she was like, ‘Something’s up,’” Diana told me.
Advocates for Children of New York is a nonprofit that, among its other services, provides pro-bono legal representation in due-process cases to working-class children. Randi Levine, its policy director, told me that in her experience, the Department of Education has at times discouraged its public-school teachers from using the term “dyslexia” with parents. “We hear stories of families who are requesting help, who are being told, ‘Give it more time, give it more time,’” she says. Within the special-education world, this tendency is known as “wait to fail” and its tentacles can be far reaching. Levine shared stories of high-school juniors and seniors contacting her organization directly for help because they had never fully learned to read and had also never been evaluated for a learning disability. “We help them get an evaluation, and they’re diagnosed with dyslexia, and their IQ scores show that they absolutely have the ability to learn to read; they just haven’t been taught in an effective way,” she says. When I mentioned this to Foti, she claimed the city screens all students from kindergarten through ninth grade for risk of dyslexia three times a year.
And to be sure, the percentage of kids in New York City public schools who are being flagged for special education has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic and is higher than the national average. But advocates say there are still many children who need help and aren’t getting identified. Levine said spotting dyslexia, the most common learning disability, can take even longer for students whose first language is not English (150 languages are spoken inside New York City public schools). The city’s response is that they are prioritizing hiring bilingual evaluators.
Diana and her husband hired a private tutor for Hayley, just as her teacher recommended. It cost them $150 for an hour once a week, and it helped: Hayley’s reading reached grade level by the end of first grade. But the gains were short lived. Soon after second grade began, her academic struggles — now present in both reading and math — returned, and school refusal took root. In an in-person meeting with her elementary school’s principal, Diana verbally requested a formal evaluation for learning disabilities, but the evaluation was never scheduled. She escalated the situation through every channel she could think of: She spoke up at an SLT meeting, she called the district families services coordinator, then the superintendent.
Eventually, Hayley got off the wait list for a private neuropsychological exam, arranged without the DoE’s involvement, which cost her parents $6,500. In May 2025, Hayley was diagnosed with dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia (a math disability), social pragmatic communication disorder, and ADHD. Finally, Diana thought, we have the documentation we need to get an Individualized Education Plan. But it wasn’t until a full year later that her public elementary school scheduled an IEP meeting to determine what services Hayley would get. The DoE is considered at fault if an IEP meeting doesn’t happen within 60 days of the initial written request.
Diana says her decision to hire a lawyer and tour private schools was spurred largely by the neuropsychologist who evaluated Hayley. He advised her that the DoE might not have an appropriate placement for her daughter’s combination of serious learning disabilities and high IQ. “She’s going to be with kids who are not her intellectual peers. Like, there are nonverbal kids in those classrooms,” Diana told me as she described her understanding of the city’s offerings. The neuropsychologist provided her with a list of special-education lawyers so she could start a due-process claim.
Winning a Carter case can take months to years. First, a family needs to obtain either an IEP or an outside evaluation to establish the student’s specialized needs. Then they have to find a spot in a private school — a lengthy process that can involve written responses, interviews, tours, and testing, plus application fees. And then, once admitted, they have to pay the tuition while simultaneously hiring a lawyer to fight for their reimbursement, which, some parents say, can take years to come through. A typical financial investment for legal fees is $7,000 for a case that settles and more if a hearing is required. For lower-income families, there’s yet another variant of Carter cases, called Connors funding, which means the DoE pays the tuition to the school directly. But if a family requesting Connors funding ultimately loses their case, the school will have to tap its own financial-aid funds to cover the child, and they may not be willing to do that. There are ways around the legal fees, too, but they are limited, and you have to be in the know: In addition to Advocates for Children, the nonprofits Legal Aid and Brooklyn Defenders take on some of these cases pro bono as do some private attorneys.
Special-education law is a growing practice specialty in New York. Ask any parent in the throes of the process, and they’ll tell you the top firms: SkyerLaw in Brooklyn Heights, which has about 20 attorneys on staff, and Neal Rosenberg, downtown, which has around 16. Attorneys I interviewed said that in addition to these two powerhouses, there are more than two dozen attorneys in solo or small group practices. They also told me that most cases they take on are winnable. “We lose pretty infrequently,” says attorney Jennifer Ratcliff. Marc Gottlieb, another education attorney, told me he’s lost just two or three cases out of about 1,500. In around half of his cases, he says, he finds a procedural error — a bright-line, open-and-shut mistake by the city, like not calling an IEP meeting or not offering a child any seat in a classroom at all.
This is at least partially because, despite being the largest public-school district in the country, and spending more per student than anywhere else, the city frequently fails to offer FAPE. There are shortages, especially post-COVID, both in specialized staff and in the settings that a diverse student body needs. Last year, the city’s teachers union reported 1,400 unfilled positions for paraprofessionals, the teachers’ aides who provide crucial behavioral and academic support and who have a starting salary of just $34,000. A bill to give them a raise is trudging through the City Council.
The Nest, Horizon, and AIMS programs — small public-school classes designed for students with autism — are oversubscribed. In addition, more than a third of preschoolers with IEPs are not getting all of their legally mandated services, according to DoE testimony before the City Council from March 2026. Levine says she has seen cases of medically fragile students where “the student cannot be in school safely without a nurse, and so the child has just been sitting at home.” Foti told me the DoE has recently hired hundreds of additional paraeducators. Earlier this month, the mayor’s office also announced that two new District 75 schools will open this fall in Queens and the Bronx. (District 75 is the city’s public-school district devoted solely to special education.)
When second grade ended and Hayley still didn’t have an IEP, Diana decided to apply to a specialized private school in Brooklyn. It has small classes, and every teacher on the faculty is trained in special education. The school’s website states that most families file due-process cases to cover tuition.
Hayley’s parents waited until the middle of the summer to apply, hoping that the IEP process would go through and public school would work out. By the time Haley received her acceptance, it was almost the end of August — and the new school year was weeks away. Her parents rushed to file the proper paperwork — called a “ten-day notice” — to get a due-process claim for tuition reimbursement rolling. “Many offices were not willing to take our case, not because the case wasn’t winnable but because of the timeline for them,” Diana says.
Hiring an attorney is a nonnegotiable aspect of the Carter-case process, but even in “slam dunk” scenarios there is risk involved for the family paying the retainer. Diana hired a solo practitioner who seemed compassionate and responsive and frequently represented other families at the school. But after she paid his $5,500 retainer, he stopped responding to her calls and emails. “He just kind of, like, disappeared,” she told me. Other clients of this lawyer told me they had similar experiences; they had paid hefty legal fees they couldn’t afford and now might never get back.
Diana was reeling, but she scrambled and hired a second lawyer for $8,000. The school granted the family $25,000 in financial aid; Diana paid the rest of the bill by taking money out of Hayley’s college fund and charging credit cards. She and her husband are hopeful that their case will be settled and they’ll eventually get all of their money back. And after an incredible third-grade year, she says she is willing to do whatever it takes to keep Hayley at her new school long term. “I was very skeptical of the whole system until we got here, and now I’m like, No, thank God this is here,” says Diana. “It’s like night and day … She’s so happy to go to school, she’s so proud of her work, she’s really learning. She’s excited to do her homework.”
Their daughter’s mental-health relief, she adds, is as important as her academic progress. Research shows three in ten students with learning disabilities have co-occurring mental-health issues including depression and anxiety, which can show up as school refusal just as it did for Hayley. “I mean, it’s really remarkable how much her life has changed because of this school,” Diana told me. “Sorry, I’m crying.”
Over the past 20 years, New York’s mayors have taken contrasting approaches toward Carter cases. Michael Bloomberg hired a fleet of city lawyers to try to fight parents’ claims. Bill de Blasio went in the opposite direction; he sought to make it easier for parents to navigate the reimbursement process, encouraging the DoE to settle more readily. Foti told me that it was at this point — around 2014 — that the influx of due-process claims started to become a deluge. Eric Adams, himself dyslexic, vowed to serve students better within the public-school system, including by opening two small specialized public schools dedicated to dyslexia and improving reading instruction for all students. In his executive-budget proposal released on May 12, Zohran Mamdani said he plans to reduce due-process cases and save $149 million by expanding public special-education programs and improving program management.
“Due process needs to be in place when public schools are not the right option — it’s an important safeguard that should always be in place,” explained Foti. But she also acknowledged its most fundamental problem: “We cannot build an inclusive public-school system through litigation.” Foti says the path forward is not to stand in the way of anyone’s due-process rights but to offer better options within the system and build families’ trust. Whatever the plan, it will likely have to transpire as overall public-school enrollment continues its decline. And each year, more than a billion dollars will continue to flow to private schools and providers able to optimize the educational experience for some of the city’s more privileged families.
Due process is essentially a triage system, one with profound built-in inequities. It functions as a safety valve almost exclusively for the in-the-know and well-resourced parents who find it — and whose exit from the public-school system lessens the active parental pressure on changing and improving it. “What we want is for the New York City public-school system to provide an excellent education for every student, including every student with a disability,” says Levine. Every time we file a due-process request, it’s a failure. It means that the New York City public-school system has not provided a student what they need.” She told me it pains her that Advocates for Children can represent only a small percentage of low-income students who would benefit from private-school instruction.
The inequity troubles some parents, too. For Damien, whose son is attending a specialized private school after three years in public school, it is top of mind. He grew up in New York and excelled in its public schools despite having dyslexia. “I’m an immigrant — we figure it out,” he told me.
His wife, Sara (also not her real name), by contrast, grew up in Manhattan, attended private school, and benefited from private speech therapy as a child. Raising their son, Stephen, has been a practice in mixing their backgrounds and values. They moved to Windsor Terrace specifically because they wanted to enroll him in a diverse, well-regarded public elementary school. Soon after, when Stephen’s progress in reading stalled, his teacher told them he would catch up and just needed more time. Unwilling to wait, they brought on a private tutor twice a week and met with a neuropsychologist, who diagnosed Stephen with dyslexia in August just before second grade. Stephen finally got an IEP halfway through that school year. The school offered to move him into an ICT classroom — one that mixed general-education and special-education students. He made little progress.
Sara felt “gaslit” by the school’s faculty, who kept telling her that Stephen was doing fine. Damien saw it differently: “My feeling wasn’t: This bad school failed my son. It was: This really good school couldn’t help him to do this thing.” Stephen’s reading tutor advised them to consider private school and referred them to a lawyer to start the Carter-case process. Their lawyer, in turn, advised them on how to pass the three-pronged test for due process. He told them not to ask for amendments to the IEP. If you want to win a due-process case, you need to show that the public school is failing to meet your child’s needs, and altering the services to better suit your child could negate that. They were also advised to stop working with Stephen’s private tutor to ensure he didn’t make too much progress. But Sara couldn’t bear to do that. “It was horrible to send him to school every day knowing he was going to fail,” says Sara.
Meanwhile, they started touring specialized private schools. When they received a spot at the one they liked best, their lawyer told them to keep the news a secret. If word got out at school, it would damage the third prong of the Carter-case test: “equitable considerations.” Applying to private school amid an IEP process could be viewed by the DoE as not working in good faith to improve Stephen’s experience at his public school.
This past fall, Stephen started third grade at a private school in Manhattan for kids with specific learning disabilities and he is thriving. He’s making friends, progressing in reading, and always shooting his hand up in class. “There’s no question in my mind that this was a life-changing, transformational decision for him and that he’s in the right place,” says Sara.
Damien and Sara told me they make a good, if variable, income, but they have borrowed tens of thousands of dollars from family to pay for their son’s education: about $200 per week for tutoring sessions, $20,000 (so far) in attorney fees, $7,500 for Stephen’s first neuropsych exam, $1,500 for his assessment for due process, and $75,000 for tuition. They expect to be paying for fourth grade before third grade is reimbursed. If they lose their case for reimbursement — they expect a verdict in a few weeks — they can’t realistically afford to keep him at the school after that. Even with that risk, says Sara, “It 100 percent feels worth it.”
But Damien is still conflicted and parsing through layers of guilt. “I’ve given him my kid Blackness, I’ve given him dyslexia, I’ve given him hard stuff, and my white wife gets to give him all the access and resources because she knows how to navigate this system,” he says. “That felt really disempowering. Going through a court case also felt weird because the legal system wasn’t made for bodies like mine.” He told me he also feels guilty when he thinks of all of Stephen’s classmates with dyslexia whom they left behind at his public school. Sara says all of the families in Stephen’s class at his new, predominantly white school are suing the DoE. “Including multimillionaires,” she adds. “And winning.”
I recently visited the midtown Manhattan campus of iHOPE, one of two highly specialized private schools run by a nonprofit called YAI. The schools are for children ages 5 to 21 who have severe disabilities, including traumatic brain injury. There are 150 students enrolled at the one I toured. Most of the families are working class and many are immigrants. And 100 percent of their tuition, up to $200,000 per year depending on the services needed, is paid for by suing the city.
During my time there, a little girl with a bright grin and a ponytail was being wheeled up and down the hallway, exercising her legs on the pedals of a mobility device. A classroom was engaged in a lesson on fire safety; a child with visual impairment was handed a fire helmet to touch. The school’s amenities include a pool for aquatic therapy and a mock studio apartment, with a kitchen and bathroom, so students can practice the tasks of daily living. Every student here has their own personal aide. Executive director Shani Chill says she has testified in thousands of Connors- and Carter-case hearings, and, to her recollection, only two or three families have lost.
Miriam Franco is the mother of a 16-year-old named Kevin, who started here in first grade. He’s a social, outgoing, “happy guy” who loves Broadway musicals. “He doesn’t have a bad day. I don’t think that exists for him,” she told me. Kevin has a rare genetic disorder that causes a global developmental delay and seizures. The family lives in Washington Heights; Miriam’s husband, a porter for a building downtown, doesn’t speak much English, so all the school advocacy falls to her.
Kevin started his education in a District 75 public-school classroom, but, Miriam says, he wasn’t making progress on any of his goals for reasons that seemed hard to address within the public-school setting. For example, his class consisted of a dozen students, one teacher, and four aides, and the bathroom was down the hall. This setup precluded the school from working with him on toilet training, Miriam told me. (Foti says that’s not policy: “As an assistant principal of a school for students with multiple disabilities, toilet training was an inherent part of our program.”) The 30-minute physical-therapy sessions they offered were barely enough time for him to get his orthotics off. And Kevin was constantly sick — he was out of school more than he was in school.
Miriam heard about iHope by chance from another family. Most of its placements come through word of mouth, and there is a long waiting list. The school explained to her what going through due process would entail and recommended one of the lawyers they work with, who helped her get her paperwork in order, including a request for Connors funding.
She found the initial hearing intimidating. “I was questioned all the time. It made me worried if I did the right thing. But I believed I did the best I could for him,” she explained. And her hopes were borne out. “In the first six months of him being at iHOPE, it was a total change. It was from night to day.”
Kevin was excited to go to school every day. His health improved. He made friends. With hour-long sessions of occupational therapy and a one-on-one aide, he started toilet training and learned to hold a toothbrush. But by far the biggest game changer has been that Kevin received a digital-communication device. The DoE had initially informed Miriam that her son wasn’t a good candidate for one, but at iHope the faculty had access to more models and were able to test a variety of devices with Kevin until they found one that worked well for him. Kevin operates his device with eye-gaze technology.
His mother’s face lit up as she talked about how it feels for her boy to be able to make his preferences known. “Him being able to tell me that he wants pudding instead of yogurt. He tells the teacher that he doesn’t feel like doing math, that it’s boring, and he switches over to the joke page on his device. That I was able to learn that he doesn’t like meat, that he’s a vegetarian,” she says. “It’s just amazing to see when you’re provided the opportunities and the support just how much you can gain.”
Miriam says that most babies start to babble “mama” within the first year, but she never got to hear that. It wasn’t until Kevin learned to use his device, at 7 years old, that she first heard “I love you, Mom.”
iHope is an extremely specialized setting for children who will always need a lot of care. The question of what services are appropriate — which is the requirement under the law and different from “optimal” — is always a thorny and uncomfortable one to address but especially for children like these. In due-process hearings, a lawyer may have to defend why an hour-long session of physical therapy, rather than 30 minutes, matters for a student who will never walk or why daily speech therapy is important for a child who may never speak.
Sherif Moussa, a civil-rights attorney who focuses on special education, represents some iHope families in their cases against the DoE. He contends that sending students there saves taxpayers money in the short and long term, because the alternative for some would be a residential nursing facility with round-the-clock staff and because some students, like Kevin, might gain skills that allow them to live more independently for the rest of their lives. And that’s without getting into the argument that, as Chill puts it, “Education is a human right.”
Still Miriam and all the other parents at iHope have to return annually to the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, where special-education due-process cases are heard alongside noise complaints. “Every year I go see the placement the city offers, and then I come back with the notes as to why I don’t think it is an appropriate placement for him. Every year I sit through the IEP meeting with the IEP team in the district. The recommendation keeps being the same program that he was in,” she says. Every year, all of the school-district employees who sit in these meetings, and a judge who presides over the hearing, are paid to walk through this process, so are Kevin’s lawyers. And every year, for ten years running, the city has lost the case.
Some identifying details about the families in this story have been changed to protect the privacy of their children.
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