Education Commissioner Mike Morath issued his own statement, noting that the state already had increased resources for parents and hired 39 additional special education workers across the state.

“I am committing today that there will be more,” he said in the statement.

The federal review was prompted by a 2016 investigation by The Houston Chronicle, which revealed the enrollment target. The newspaper quoted dozens of teachers saying that the target had forced them to withhold services from students with autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, mental illnesses, speech impairments or even blindness and deafness.

In the resulting outcry, Texas lawmakers ended the policy and passed several bills overhauling special education. Still, the federal review found that years of pressure from state officials to enroll fewer students in special education had created a culture of noncompliance with federal law that had outlasted the policy.

Among other issues, the federal regulators found that many Texas schools have trained teachers not to try to find out whether struggling students qualify for special education until regular classroom teaching techniques like Response to Intervention have been tried for years without success. That approach runs counter to federal law, which requires schools to evaluate students as soon as a disability is suspected.

The letter said regulators identified a statewide pattern of evaluations being “delayed or not conducted for children who were suspected of having a disability because these children were receiving supports for struggling learners in the general education environment.”

Advocates for children with disabilities praised the federal government’s action on Thursday, while cautioning that there was more work to do.

“The Commissioner of Education must immediately embrace the corrective actions required by the U.S. Department of Education and take additional steps, in collaboration with stakeholders, to ensure that all students who were previously denied special education services now rightfully receive compensatory services,” said Dustin Rynders, the education director at Disability Rights Texas, an advocacy group based in Houston that receives federal funds.