Muckraking Lawyer Dee Alpert Dies at Age 65

This is a great tribute to an incredible New York advocate for children who even reached out to help parents in Montgomery County, Maryland.  


Thank you, Ms. Alpert for all you did to advocate for the best interests of children.  


You will be missed.  


The Wall Street Journal
By Jacob Gershman

Dee Alpert, a bespectacled, muckraking lawyer who helped guide parents and others through the often-murky corridors of special education, died last week at age 65. Her family said the cause of death was related to a cerebral aneurysm. 

Within the city’s education world, Ms. Alpert was something of an unofficial inspector general. She had a rare grasp of the arcana of school regulations, audits and budgets, and volunteered her services to parents and advocates. 

She probed the city’s methods for determining drop-out rates of students and detailed the roadblocks in front of parents who seek information about the progress of their disabled children.. She scoured financial statements of school districts, such as Roosevelt on Long Island, blowing the whistle on risky borrowing schemes. 

In blasts of thousands of words, she posted her findings on her personal website, Special Education Muckraker, which then circulated around the parent-advocacy arena. Her style had a touch of the conspiratorial, but commanded the attention of major policy experts, like Diane Ravitch, who praised Ms. Alpert for her “fierce integrity” and “keen intellect.” 

She wrote about how abuse cases are treated differently when a victim is a special education student. One of Ms. Alpert’s most high-profile exposes was titled “Abu Ghraib on the Hudson,” in which she untangled proposed state regulations for allowing schools to lock students with disabilities inside “seclusion rooms.” State officials said they wanted to help schools better manage behavioral problems. But Ms. Alpert pointed to loopholes that she said opened the door to corporal punishment. Her piece found its way to the inboxes of advocates in other states and stirred more national opposition to such policies.

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