The US Department of Education just announced $144M to help families access early intervention and early special education services.
There is a serious, well-documented gap between the support that would improve these kids’ lives and outcomes, and the support families can actually get. That the problem exists, and that it’s worth solving, we can agree on all day, all year.
But I’ll be honest, I feel like I’ve seen this movie before. Whether special education or public benefits, it’s the same pattern: we admit the last round of spending didn’t close the gap. Then we fund more of the same. It won’t change — because we keep paying for the wrong thing. We pay for activity. Programs launched, materials produced, boxes checked. Nobody checks whether a single family ended up better connected to services at the end of it.
We don’t have to guess whether the current approaches are working — California state surveys with families tell that story for us. Looking at the data from the last five years, the share of parents who say they always get enough information about the public services their child qualifies for didn’t go up. It went down, from 27% to 20%. Let’s not pay for more of the same; it’s clearly not enough if families still can’t access services at the end. And let’s not burn another pot of money on overhead and setup costs for a bidder that’s good at winning government contracts, only to invent yet another square wheel. Let’s pay when a family enrolls in the early intervention they qualified for. Pay when the supports in a child’s plan actually get accessed, rather than just existing on paper. Pay for time-to-services going down. Those things are countable. We just don’t count them because we fund empty promises, not results.
This is exactly why Undivided exists. We’re here to make sure parents actually access the support their kids need, not just talk about it.
People ask me all the time why we aren’t a nonprofit. It’s because we’ve built Undivided to have fully aligned incentives with the families we support. We only succeed if they do. And that’s how I know we’re making an impact: parents continue to renew, month after month. They wouldn’t keep doing that if it weren’t making a real difference for their family. The demand isn’t theoretical. Families are voting for it with their own money right now.
So as this new funding gets allocated, and as far as I can tell, nobody’s decided yet how it will be spent, that’s the whole question. Will it follow outcomes, or noise? Charlie Munger said it best: show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.
Fund what reaches families. Measure whether it did. Pay based on whether families can access the services they need, not noise.
– Seth Besse, CEO of Undivided
