Join Priscilla Rahn in this episode of ‘Restoring Education in America’ as she sits down with Dr. Mark Mostert to delve into the pressing issues surrounding special education and bureaucratic inefficiencies. Dr. Mostert, a seasoned researcher and expert in disability policy, shares his insights on how large federal programs often marginalize those they are meant to help, emphasizing the need for more efficient private and state-level solutions. Listen as they explore the alarming trends in education policies and their impact on children with disabilities, and learn about the exemplary changes Mississippi implemented to trust evidence-based teaching methods.
00:00:03 Introduction and Overview of Excalibur Classical Academy
00:15:28 Inherent Dignity and Education Policy Shaping
00:17:02 Special Education Challenges in Public Schools
00:19:50 Mississippi’s Education Transformation Example
00:23:08 University Preparation for Special Education Teachers
00:24:46 Restoring Education and Hope for America’s Future
00:27:39 Closing and Further Engagement Information
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. She’s a master educator and author leading the conversation to restore the American mind through wisdom, virtue, and truth.
SPEAKER 01 :
well hello everybody welcome to restoring education in america i’m your host priscilla ahn thank you so much for tuning in today 2026 it’s america’s 250th birthday and i’m so excited for all of the patriotic things that are happening And I can’t think of anything more patriotic than opening a new private classical school. Excalibur Classical Academy is opening this fall in the Centennial Colorado area. And their mission and vision is restoring America’s heritage by developing servant leaders who are keepers and defenders of the principles of freedom. for which our founding fathers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. So if you have a child that will be starting kindergarten through third grade this fall, please go to their website to find out more. Their website is ExcaliburClassicalAcademy.org. And if you’re interested in teaching or working or volunteering at the school, please send them an email so they can get back to you. I am super excited for my next guest to talk about something that is really important, but maybe a lot of people don’t know that much about. And it has to do with special education and able Americans. So I’m going to bring my special guest onto the stage, Dr. Mark Mostert. Hello, Dr. Mark.
SPEAKER 03 :
Priscilla, how are you?
SPEAKER 01 :
I’m doing great. I am so excited to have this conversation with you. But before we get into that conversation, I’m going to share your bio with our listeners. So Dr. Mark Mostert is Senior Researcher at ABLE Americans, the National Center’s project to support Americans living with intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities. Mark received his undergraduate degree from the Johannesburg College of Education, a master’s in special education from the University of South Alabama and a Ph.D. in special education research from the University of Virginia. Mark has an extensive academic background as researcher, author and presenter both nationally and internationally. He spent 35 years in academia, the last 20 at Regent University, where he was full professor of special education while directing the doctoral program in special education. He also served as the director of the Institute for the Study of Disability and Bioethics. Mark has served as a disability consultant to several member nations at the UN on topics related to disability policy and practices. He resides in Virginia Beach, where he pursues his lifelong love of opera and classical music. A man after my own heart, Dr. Mostert, because I’m a music teacher.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, there you go. Wonderful.
SPEAKER 01 :
So do you sing or are you just a connoisseur?
SPEAKER 03 :
I’m a connoisseur since I was five years old, and I used to sing semi-professionally, opera and classical music, yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay. So on a side note, on another time, I’m going to have to hear a sample of your beautiful singing. So Dr. Mostert, let’s get into this really important topic. Initially, what sparked your interest in education and then eventually in special education?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I originally, like most undergrads, wasn’t sure what to do when I got to my undergrad degree. But I I’ve had an abiding interest always for people with disabilities. I grew up in apartheid South Africa. And one of the things that I lived with on a daily basis, because it was so obvious, were black people, Africans with disabilities that were treated very badly, both by the government in power and also by the biases against people with disabilities generally. And so it struck me that doing good to those who are the least among us was something I wanted to pursue. And the way to do that, I thought, was to become a special education teacher. So my undergrad degree is in special education. Then I decided to go further, got my master’s. And then, as you so kindly read, got my PhD at the University of Virginia and spent 35 years as an academic. And I like to say that now I’m a recovering academic. Thank goodness for that.
SPEAKER 01 :
So you argue that large bureaucracies actually marginalize people with disabilities. Can you describe some of those bureaucracies and tell me how a bureaucratic mindset is hurting education as a whole?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, any bureaucracy, by definition, has layers and layers and layers of people who do things sometimes together, sometimes not. And the problem with bureaucracy is that they keep growing, right? They never stay small. They never stay efficient. They never stay effective. And the more layers of bureaucracy you add one on top of the other, the more likely you are to have a situation where the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. And that makes things very, very difficult in getting services and support to people with disabilities. To give you an easy example, in the foster care system, foster parents get paid money to foster whatever children they have. But when those children or youth turn 18, all of that support stops stone cold. So you have a child and a youth who’s been in a foster home probably, you know, doing very well. But once they turn 18, the system basically shuts down and does nothing to support them. So unsurprisingly, what you end up with are a large percentage of those youth who have just turned 18 and to go towards their 20s, being homeless, getting into substance abuse, getting into criminal behavior, all the things that we could avoid if we provided them with more support. Now, that’s one aspect of a very small program with foster youth. Generally speaking, all the bureaucracies in the federal government and pretty much the states, but more so at the federal level, are so incapable of moving quickly and efficiently and effectively that to get help takes forever without getting into details there’s some programs in the federal government for people who have severely emotionally disturbed children in some places they wait seven eight nine ten years on a waiting list to get help that’s what bureaucracies do they make you fill out 20 more forms get in line and so the disconnect between getting people support and actually having it on the ground is amazingly long and inefficient. You add to that, of course, the bureaucracies we see now with all the fraud discussions around the country, the massive amount of fraud, waste, and abuse in these programs, particularly Medicaid and Medicare. Some pretty good figures say that about 25% of the billions of dollars we spend on Medicare and Medicaid is lost to waste, fraud, and abuse. That’s 25% if we regained would make things a lot easier for people with disabilities and their families. But often that money is not coming back to any kind of bureaucracy. It just disappears. And occasionally, people are convicted, but not many. It’s an outright outrage as to what’s going on. But that’s the way bureaucracies work. And what we do at ABLE Americans is to say, look, Is there a more efficient way than another layer of government bureaucracy to help people with disabilities? Are there private solutions? Are there state solutions? Are there community solutions that will get the help to people quicker? Now, I hasten to add, not every federal program is completely useless. They do some good, but it could be so much more good if they cut the red tape. and went straight from money that’s not wasted, that’s not fraud, that’s not abused, and getting that directly to people who need it. So we don’t have things like waiting lists of eight or 10 years as we do now.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, Dr. Mostert, you’re bringing up a good point about the fraud that we’re seeing across the nation. And you would think, you know, these leftists who are saying, oh, we’re just picking on these states, you know, and we’re denying all of this support while the whole time they’re wasting and abusing federal tax dollars. I mean, it’s a shame. I’m so glad that you’re doing this work because I’m sure you would agree that, you private sector would do a more efficient job at a cheaper price than the federal government, wouldn’t you say?
SPEAKER 03 :
I think that’s absolutely right. Because again, every layer in the bureaucracy adds this little bit onto the tab. And that’s without fraud, waste and abuse. That’s just how things work, right? So when you look at fraudulent payments to people, payments to dead people, people who are gaming the system, You simply don’t have enough money to go around for people who truly need it. Now, let me tell you how it gets worse. I’m afraid to tell you. If we claw back any money, if the federal government claws back any money from fraud, waste, and abuse, that does not go back to Medicare and Medicaid. It goes into some kind of fund that no one’s quite sure where the money goes. So it’s not as if when we find the money, get it back, we’re actually making things more robust for people with disabilities and their families. It goes somewhere else, and it’s never passed on down to the people who need it.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, my goodness. So we’re going to have to share this episode with lawmakers to make sure something gets done in the federal government. Dr. Monster, you directed an institute for the study of disability and bioethics. Where do you see ethical lines being crossed in modern education policy regarding disability? students with disabilities. And for example, like the eugenics of the unborn children identified with Downs, I see that conversation in some states. You can actually abort children, but can you go into some of your work in that arena?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, well, that’s one area. I think where we’ve seen policy, generally speaking, about disability taken on a very ominous turn. And to start at the start of life, it’s exactly true what you said. Doctors, generally speaking, it’s not not every doctor, but generally speaking, doctors are now no longer trained to, quote unquote, do no harm. They are now trained. What is the utilitarian value of a person? In other words, what’s this person’s life going to be like in our judgment? And is that going to be good or bad in our judgment? So what happens is when a pregnant woman goes to see many, not all, but many doctors, and they have a Down syndrome diagnosis, the pressure is put upon them very, very harshly to abort the child. And the physicians say things like, well, you know, this kid’s not going to have a good quality of life. They’re going to be mocked. They’re going to be shunned, et cetera, et cetera. All the old biases that we’ve known about disability forever. The other part that I concentrated to in the Institute was the other end of life. OK, when people are old or sick and sickly, what happens to people with medical disabilities? And then you have a double whammy. What happens if you have someone with Down syndrome who has a medical disability? Right. And what we’re seeing more and more is a culture of death emerge where people are now becoming expendable due to their disabilities. Canada is foremost in that sense, and Europe has a long time ago basically gone that route. But in Canada, they just passed a law in the last several years called medical aid in dying, and that is basically assisted suicide and euthanasia, right? And more and more, the medical profession, as with Down syndrome and other prenatal conditions, are now pushing people at the other end to basically say, yeah, why don’t you kill me? I want to die by you assisting me to commit suicide, or why don’t you just euthanize me? Stick a needle in my arm and let me go. And all these laws start out with, well, these are for patients who are within six months of death in unbearable pain. And then very quickly what happens, it expands. Well, maybe it’s not six months, and then maybe they don’t have to be in pain. And now it expands in Canada to psychological problems. There’s a case right now in Canada where a young woman, a 34-year-old, was pushed and pressured to pick a date for her euthanasia because she has such severe mental illness problems. That is what is going on and how they’ve crossed every ethical line that they possibly can be. And it boils down to some very age-old biases, unfortunately. That is, people with disabilities aren’t worth living. People with disabilities can’t contribute to society. People with disabilities are expensive for the medical system. And all of that means People with disabilities in many instances are walking this uphill battle just to be accepted and to get what’s rightfully theirs.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, to tag on to that from a faith-based perspective, what does it mean to affirm the inherent dignity of a child with a disability? And how should that help shape education policy?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, first of all, talking about inherent humanity, Every child that is conceived and born is precious, okay? That’s just the way it is. That’s the ethical line that many of us stand to. You cannot simply say someone is less human or not as valuable because they’re not like the rest of us. Because once you do that, you then put everyone in a very precarious position where basically lives become what the eugenicists in the 1920s called lives unworthy of living. They don’t contribute, they’re expensive, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In terms of education, certainly in K through 12, we have some wonderful special ed laws that we’ve passed. You know, before 1975, public schools had a perfect right to say to a parent, your kid’s got a disability, we can’t have them in the school. Now we have laws where that’s not allowed, that’s considered discriminatory, obviously. But what we have now in education, without getting into the weeds too much, is a movement that started in the late 80s saying, Kids with disabilities don’t have special needs. They’re just the same as everybody else. So let’s not put them in special ed classes where they can actually get attention. We’re going to put them in the general education classroom because they deserve to be there, inclusion, all this fun stuff that goes on. And what the research has shown for the last 25 years is that that doesn’t work. So education policies of putting these kids in with non-disabled kids means the disabled kids actually progress more slowly than if they have specialized attention. That’s a policy. That’s not really a policy. That’s an ideology, right? Teachers are trained to, we’re all in the same class. We’re all different in one way or another. So then no one is special, get it, when they are. People with disabilities and kids with disabilities have very specific needs that have to be addressed and because they are not like other kids. They have a disability, and the needs of those disabilities mean specialized education and specialized treatment. So we often have the policy there, but the ideology certainly does not follow.
SPEAKER 01 :
So do you think, Dr. Mostert, if you have a significant number of children with special needs and it’s a wide variety, you have students in the AN room, effective needs, and you have students with other physical disabilities, what would that ideally look like in a public school setting where you do have that philosophy of let’s put them all in general ed versus let’s seclude them in a different place? Like where’s the balance there?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, first of all, the law is very clear that there is a continuum of placements for kids with disabilities. For example, if a kid has a physical disability, say in a wheelchair, They absolutely should be included in the general education classroom because in a classroom, what you need to have is intellectual rigor and power, right? That’s not a problem. When you have kids who have intellectual disabilities or developmental disabilities, that’s a completely different story because their intellectual capacity is maybe not on a par with the other kids. So schoolwork is going to be more difficult because schoolwork involves intellectual activity. Those kids, and the law provides for this, as I said, that not all kids should be in the general education collection. Federal special ed law is very clear, and the policies are very clear, that kids need to be in the environment that is the best for them and their particular individual needs. And what the inclusion movement has done is blow that out of the water, put everyone in the same class, and hope for the best. And it’s not working, and it hasn’t worked, but that’s the ideology that we’re up against.
SPEAKER 01 :
I’ve been in the classroom 32 years in public school and I can attest to what you’re saying. It’s not working. So Dr. Moster, you’ve consulted with member nations at the United Nations on disability policy. What is the U.S. doing better or worse than other countries when it comes to special education?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, generally and including special education, we’re worse. It’s a lot worse than you could imagine.
SPEAKER 1 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 03 :
Let me just put it that way. If you look at every measure, both in general and special education, when we as the United States put our kids up to comparing them to other kids across the globe, academically, scholastically, et cetera, et cetera, we trail miserably, absolutely miserably. We trail, depending on what you look at, we’re somewhere around 80%. 25th or 30th in the world in how we deal with academics in our schools. And that’s a particular problem when you have ideologies that lean towards a lot of things in schools, but not really teaching what needs to be taught. We’re far away in this day and age from teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, and that’s it. We don’t do that anymore. That’s a cultural shift. How we get back that cultural shift, I’m not sure, but some states are starting to do that. For example, Mississippi 10 years ago was, I think, 49th or 50th in the US in terms of scholastic achievement. They came in and said, look, We’ve got to fix this. What we’re going to do is we’re only going to teach scientifically valid interventions to get kids to read and do math, et cetera, et cetera. Mississippi in those 10 years, having made that one change, insisting that this is the way we teach reading because we have 100 years of research that says this is the way to go, phonics, by the way. they’ve gone from number 49 or 50 to number four in 10 years in their scholastic achievement because they took a lot of the ideological content out and they said what needs to happen in schools is kids need to be taught to be literate. That is your first and that is your only responsibility. It’s worked well and I wish other states would have a look at Mississippi and see what can be done in a fairly short period of time. If you do what I as a researcher know from my work, how to teach reading. We’ve known how to teach reading for over a hundred years. Okay. That’s just it. We’ve known how to do it. We’ve not done it because, you know, whatever the flavor of the day is, you have an in-service and then you try to do it for the year. And the next year someone comes in with a new flavor of the day. And so it goes. And what that means is the kids don’t get what they need. What they need is solid evidence-based research interventions to teach them how to do it. And Mississippi is showing the way.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it’s almost like you’ve been a fly on a wall my entire career. You’re talking like you know exactly what’s been going on. And it’s not rocket science to make these corrections. And you’re right, phonics is the way to go. And I’m seeing even a lot of large urban districts where superintendents are letting principals do whatever they want. There’s too much autonomy, even from building to building and different philosophies. So you’re 100% correct. After 35 years, though, in academia, how well are universities preparing special education teachers for the realities of today’s classroom?
SPEAKER 03 :
They’re not. Simple, short answer, they’re not. Because again, there’s a couple of factors. First of all, academic standards in universities over the last 20 years have fallen by 80%. Okay. It’s very difficult to be in the professoriate and hold students to the standard that they need to meet. It’s very difficult to do because many students, not all, but generally speaking, have gone through all this schooling with the idea that they’re so wonderful and so fantastic that they can never get anything less than an A. And so that happens in colleges. Great inflation in college is crazy. And so when they get to master’s or doctoral level work, they assume that they’re just going to waltz through like they did all their lives, their academic lives. And the truth is that can’t happen. When you have students like I did who are PhD students who are going to be college professors, I held to a standard that said, I know how to do this. I know how to produce high quality PhDs. Here’s the standard. Two things are going to happen. You’re going to meet it. If you don’t, I will work myself to the bone to help you and to get you to where you need to be. But what happens is the universities have lowered their standards so much that they were letting people into my PhD program that basically just shouldn’t have been there. So when you say, are we preparing teachers? That in Virginia is mostly at the master’s degree level, right? Well, you have to… teach curriculum in the master’s degree in Virginia to meet state standards of what a teacher should be, special ed, general ed, it doesn’t matter. The state standards are not always, but pretty much developed from some kind of ideological side, whether it’s left, right, in between. And so things change. And as those requirements at the state level for certification change, so the curricula in the universities change. So when you have an administration that says, like Mississippi, you know, we really should go back to evidence based interventions. That’s one thing. If you have another administration come in and says, we need to teach more about social justice than we do about how to teach reading, writing and arithmetic, that becomes problematic because social justice teaching, and I think there’s a place for it somewhere, but I’m not sure it’s in master’s degrees. But what I saw over the last 15 years of my career was that master’s degree curricula in Virginia for certification were almost completely dominated. by ideological coursework versus how do we teach kids to read. So what happens is the teachers get into the schools and they’re unprepared to teach reading. They just don’t know how to do it because no one’s ever taught them. And those teachers, they try very hard, they’re very enthusiastic, but they don’t have the tools because no one’s taught them. And that’s the fault of the universities and the fault of their professors.
SPEAKER 01 :
Dr. Mostert, do you believe centralized education policy, particularly at the federal level, can ever adequately serve children with complex disabilities? Or should authority return to the state’s communities and families?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, that’s a more nuanced question. I think the federal government does some things well. For example, the special legislation that’s been passed in 1975 and going forward has been very useful in classifying how we treat kids with disabilities. However, we’re back to the bureaucratic question, right? And so you have the Department of Education that is largely a bureaucratic organization that doesn’t do much of anything except hand out money. That’s basically it. Right. So I think at the state level, you have to that’s where the emphasis has to be. The states have to decide. And again, using the example of Mississippi, what do we want our kids to be when they get out of high school? What do we want them to be? Do we want them to be literate? in writing, math, et cetera, et cetera? Or do we basically just graduate them because we promoted them socially and they’re out? The state level needs to make sure that in their community, in their state, in whatever their needs or wants are, that that’s the way they have to go. So certainly I would emphasize the state over the federal government.
SPEAKER 01 :
So, Dr. Mostert, I could talk to you for a very long time about this issue. But the show is called Restoring Education in America. In your mind, what gives you hope or what do we need to do in order to restore education in America?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I think we, you know, when people say go back to the basics, that always sounds kind of cliched. But, you know, easy example. My great-grandfather was, I don’t think he made it through the fifth grade, okay, many, many years ago. I have his exercise books from school. He wrote in perfect cursive. He had perfect sentences and paragraphs. And he only made it through the fifth grade. That’s all his education was. What has happened from that to now? Well, as we’ve been discussing, all those problems multiply. So I think that going back to basics idea is good. In education, number one, you only use interventions in teaching kids that we know empirically through research are supported by that research. Not something that comes from somebody’s experience, not something that comes from You know, the fad of the week, you know, the intervention du jour. It has to be going back to those fundamentals of teaching what schools need to be. And that means we have to reevaluate what education is, because right now, education has very little to do with what you and I experienced in school. Right. It has a whole different meaning. You look at universities and what they teach kids, certainly in undergrad courses. There’s very little that comes down to critical thinking and learning. So we have to go back to the basics. What do we want kids to know when they leave the first grade through the 12th grade? And it needs to be literacy, history, Western civilization, all those things that make the USA great. That’s what we need to go back to. We need to reduce the amount of battling ideologies. that affect what goes on in schools. Because teachers, I’m sure you understand this, teachers sometimes get very irritated about the in-service at the beginning of the year that says, no, take everything you’ve done for the last year and destroy it. This is how we’re going to go because we have this great experiential learning or whatever. So teachers become very jaded and rightfully so. We need to support teachers as we make this transition down to more evidence-based interventions and give them the tools that they truly need to help kids, not just, you know, piecemeal lip service to whatever the intervention du jour happens to be.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, there you have it. Dr. Mark Mostert, senior researcher from Able Americans, all of that wisdom. Thank you so much for your time today. And to my listeners, thank you for tuning in and catch me next time. And remember, educating the mind without the heart is no education. So seek wisdom, cultivate virtue, and speak truth.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thanks for tuning in to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. Visit PriscillaRahn.com to connect or learn how you can sponsor future episodes to keep this message of faith, freedom, and education on the air.
