President Barack Obama stood firmly alongside special education advocates during his 2008 campaign, supporting the full funding Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Obama's budget proposals have included gradual increases to funding the state grants for special education – including a small bump to $12.86 billion for 2012– but Congressional budget battles have made the prospects for full federal funding of the IDEA bleaker than ever.

Congress's promise to shoulder 40 percent of each state's "excess cost" of educating children with disabilities has dogged the act's supporters since it was passed in 1975. Actual federal commitment to the costs has recently hovered between 17 percent and 20 percent of the total in recent years.

That's certainly not going to change anytime soon, said Joel Packer, the executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a nonprofit coalition of education funding advocates.

"We support full funding, but the chance of that happening is close to zero,” said Packer. "They haven't said let's cut IDEA, but they haven't proposed significant increases in IDEA. The problem overall is that Congress is fixated on cutting funding for everything.”

Senator Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, introduced legislation in July 2011 to fully fund IDEA at 40 percent, but it never left the Senate Finance Committee.

Without full funding, special education costs are shifted to state and local governments, where budgets are also shrinking.

Although Obama does not control Congressional purse strings, he emphasized his support of the full funding as part of his campaign. With long-term budget deficit issues, no one expects the appropriations to ever reach Obama"s goal, and since we rate the promises based on results rather than intent, we rate this Promise Broken.