One of the most common arguments against school choice is that it will create a
system of privilege that prefers only the easiest students to teach. Opponents of vouchers
argue that because public schools are meant to serve children of all
backgrounds—including children with disabilities—school choice promises only to
harm these students as scarce resources are siphoned off to private schools. If vouchers
were adopted on a large scale, so these people claim, the neediest students would only be
left behind to suffer neglect in crumbling, deserted schools.
Upon greater scrutiny, this oft-repeated scenario does
not hold up. For years, many students with the worst disabilities have attended private
schools at partial or even full public expense. Far from abandoning the needs of special
education students, the private sector is supplying what the public school system has
failed to provide.
More specifically, public school districts currently foot the bill for
more than 100,000 special education students attending private schools at an estimated
cost of $2 billion to taxpayers, according to U.S. Department of Education figures and
industry estimates. In most of these cases, public schools have come to rely on
specialized private schools to educate their toughest disability cases, when doing it
themselves would be prohibitively expensive.
"A voucher isn’t really the right analogy," says Mike
Petrilli, program director of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which supports education
reform efforts from a conservative perspective. "It’s really closer to
contracting, like the Edison Project," the for-profit school management company that
manages more than 50 public and charter schools across the nation. "But it makes a
lot of sense to contract out this function to a company that can pool its resources."
Petrilli is right. The current set-up can’t be called a voucher
system, because public school districts are occasionally compelled by the courts to send
their students to these schools—whether because of negligence, incompetence, or some
other reason. But more importantly, public school officials serve as the gatekeepers
during the placement process, such that most parents don’t really ever get to make an
unencumbered "choice" for their child to attend one of these schools. Of course,
some parents with savvy attorneys may be able to swing a private school placement through
more aggressive arm-twisting, but many less wealthy parents aren’t aware they can so
affect the process.
But these differences aside, one important similarity between private
special education placements and a larger system of school choice cannot be easily
dismissed: school districts have made a market-based decision to contract with these
schools because they provide specialized services that public schools cannot easily
replicate on their own.
Today, the private special education sector includes more than 3,600
outside providers that educate many of the nation’s most difficult disability cases,
including large numbers of students with serious emotional disturbances and the more
intractable learning disabilities. These schools include both day and residential
institutions, some of which operate in a hospital-like setting.
Put in perspective, however, these 100,000 students still amount to a
relatively small slice of the large special education population nationally—only
about 1.8 percent of the 5.6 million special education students who are mostly served in
public schools. Department of Education figures show that 61,608 students attend private
special education schools at full public expense, while 65,960 disabled students attend
private schools through partial public support. Although perhaps few in number, this small
percentage of students consumes 7.3 percent of the $32.6 billion that the Center for
Special Education Finance says is spent annually by federal, state, and local governments
on special education.
Private special education schools "often have the appearance of
being a higher-cost provider relative to public schools, when in fact they may be
competitive or even lower cost than the public schools for a given type of student,"
writes Janet Beales in her 1996 Reason Foundation study, one of the few in-depth reports
to examine the field. "The full costs of nonpublic schools are easily identified,
whereas the costs of public services are often incompletely reported to due to
cross-subsidizing, excluded costs, and other reporting errors."
Placement Disputes
While some states have had subsidized private special education for
quite some time, the current state of the industry is traced to the passage of the
Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, which effectively created a federal
entitlement to education for disabled children. Before then, many disabled students
didn’t attend school at all or were hidden away from the rest of the school
population in questionable and even shocking situations.
The law has since been renamed the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act, or IDEA, but its most basic mandate has not changed: that states provide a
"free appropriate public education," or FAPE, individually tailored to each
disabled child’s needs. Under the current system, school administrators must find and
diagnose disabilities, then decide on a case-by-case basis what educational and
health-related services are "appropriate" in order for each disabled child to
receive an adequate education. Again, school administrators determine whether public
schools can provide the needed services or if a private provider should be called in.
Not surprisingly, this process varies wildly from district to district.
In fact, a student diagnosed with a significant disability in one district or state may be
seen as normal in another. Take Hawaii, for instance: only 7.3 percent of its school-aged
children have been diagnosed as disabled, while 14.5 percent of all children in
Massachusetts have been classified as having disabilities. The open-ended FAPE provision,
which for the most part limits neither costs nor services, has become a hotbed of
expensive litigation. As parents clash with schools in highly-publicized legal battles,
the courts have become the testing ground of what services schools are obligated to
provide their students. Often, these cases verge into outrageous territory, with the
courts ruling that schools must pay big sums for nurses to trail students during the
school day or administer complicated medical care as a necessary part of a child’s
education. Sadly, schools that offer a wide range of services without legal intervention
are often financially punished when a flood of disabled students move into their districts
to take advantage of the better programs. In some ways it is this pattern that has let the
legal system set the course for special education in our schools.
IDEA also requires that each disabled child’s education be
provided in the "least restrictive environment." This requirement falls in line
with the trend toward greater "inclusion" of disabled students among
non-handicapped children, one of special education’s many brewing controversies.
These days, however, outside providers are seen by many parents as more responsive than
public schools since they have the specialized resources and a more focused approach to
the needs of these students.
Public schools have come to rely
on specialized private schools to educate their tougest disability cases when they’re
too difficult to handle.
In fact, the parents of nearly 66,000 disabled children are currently
opting out of the IDEA placement process in exchange for private education that is only
partially subsidized by the government. This movement is a clear criticism of public
management.
Sometimes, these partial subsidies result from public disagreements
over a child’s special education placement. Say, for example, that school officials
believe their facilities are adequate to educate a child, but that child’s parents
still find them wanting. In such a case, the public school may invite the parents to use
the federal share of the cost of their child’s education—on average about
11 percent of the total—to underwrite the cost of a private school tuition. Because
these placements are still managed by public officials, however, many parents forego even
this partial subsidy, accepting the full cost of private education as the price of their
individual choice.
Spending Games
So where are private special education schools most prominent and for
whom are they most useful? The truth is that little research has been done on special
education outcomes or the average state spending per disability in private schools.
In general, students attending specialized private schools tend to have
more severe disabilities. Department of Education data from 1991 show that states rely on
private providers mostly to serve students with serious emotional disturbance (29,515
students nationally), serious learning disabilities (8,159), multiple disabilities
(7,311), and mental retardation (7,172). And according to the U.S. Department of
Education, in that same year 55 percent of students with traumatic brain injuries (983)
were privately placed.
Several states consistently contract with private schools to provide
special education, says Sherry Kolbe, executive director of the National Association of
Private Schools for Exceptional Children. Kolbe’s group represents more than 800
private special education providers across the nation that serve students with
disabilities ranging from epilepsy to spina bifida. Although it’s not a voucher
system that keeps these institutions in business, the success of private industry and
nonprofit groups to establish a beachhead of privatization in special education speaks
volumes in support of the claim that markets would evolve under vouchers to serve the
neediest students.
Ironically, it turns out, many of the states that do the most
contracting with private special education providers normally oppose the use of private
school vouchers in education. Those states, mostly in the Northeast, include California,
Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and
Rhode Island. The District of Columbia and Puerto Rico also have large percentages of
special education students enrolled in private schools, while the South lags in providing
such services, Kolbe says.
According to Kolbe, some private special education schools have been
around since the turn of the century and have influential community members on their
boards. Higher-than-average state investment in such schools isn’t a sign of runaway
spending, she argues, but a prudent use of resources that often saves money. Greater
investment in such schools is a sign of social responsibility, Kolbe argues, and "the
states with more identifications are the ones who aren’t afraid to say this kid needs
extra help."
Still, a person not familiar with the costs of special education may be
hit with serious sticker shock. This year in Bergen County, N.J., for example, tuitions
range from $19,881 to $39,562 a year for private schools that serve the disabled. This
last figure is more than four times the average per pupil expenditure in the state of New
Jersey, which leads the nation in per capita public school spending.
Nationally, industry estimates peg the average day tuition at $22,000
and residential tuition at $60,000 for private special education schools that contract
with public schools. Meanwhile, annual tuition can be as low as $2,000 at some religious
special education schools.
So how could the school choice movement affect special education?
Although she does not take a formal position on vouchers, Kolbe thinks more choice in
general could benefit both parents and students in the current system.
Too often, she says, local school districts play a cruel game of
keepaway with parents that boils down to a concern for money and general distrust of
private providers. Just as in bilingual education, schools get money from the state and
the federal government for each disabled child, and parting with that money does not come
easily to bureaucrats. "Any money they give to our programs, they can’t spend in
the public schools," Kolbe says. "The main concern is that they might have to
pay public dollars for private education," even if private options are more
cost-efficient and public schools lack specialized resources.
For example, Kolbe says, public schools hire speech therapists at a
higher cost than a private school would pay to give a child more intensive, personalized
instruction. Contracted services like these could even be provided on a part-time basis,
in situations where private school educators—not for-hire specialists—visit the
public schools. "You’re basically throwing money away," she argues.
"There should be more of a realization that our schools provide one-on-one
instruction to help students get past their problems and return to regular schools."
States that contract the most with
private special education providers normally oppose the use of private school vouchers in
education.
At the same time, while public school administrators have the right to
decide what resources are necessary to provide each student’s free and appropriate
public education, Kolbe says many school leaders go to extreme lengths to keep parents
from learning more about private options.
The newly reauthorized IDEA is supposed to lessen the antagonism
between parents and school officials, but some observers wonder if it goes far enough. The
new law gives parents more say during the legally mandated placement hearings—where
their child’s placement is first authorized—but nothing ensures that advice will
be heeded. The refurbished law also requires mediation in times of dispute, but school
leaders have a spotty record when it comes to following the law, some observers point out.
"We’ll see if it makes any difference," Kolbe says.
On the other hand, giving parents the opportunity to flex real
decision-making power in the special education placement process could make it less
adversarial. "You could cut down on a great deal of the lawsuits if parents felt they
had a stake," says Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation.
Congress is also mulling steps to end the gold-rush atmosphere of
special education law by limiting attorney fees to prevailing community wages. Already, it
has used Washington, D.C., as its test subject. Included in this year’s D.C.
appropriations law is a provision that limits attorney fees for special education to $50
an hour, capped at $1,300 per student.
Of course, not everyone is a believer. Robert Wagner, executive
director of the 1,500-member Education Law Association, worries that encouraging more
private outsourcing will open the floodgates to even more claims. Parents who want costly
additional services for their children might look harder for them in an environment where
a vague law leaves special education programs to be sorted out by attorneys.
"It’s like a person saying, ‘I’m taking Spanish, so I need to go to
Spain to learn it,’" Wagner says. "That may be true, but is it entitled
under the statute?"
Choice Consequences
Ardent advocates of school choice are just beginning to consider how a
wholesale voucher system might affect special education. It is their hope that public and
private schools can cooperate to solve several of special education’s more nettlesome
problems: overdiagnosis of special needs, cost containment, and inclusive classrooms.
According to Department of Education figures, the population of
students marked as disabled in public schools continues to mushroom at an alarming rate in
relation to overall school population. Meanwhile, the private school special education
population has remained steady for the last decade. This single fact has led many to
question whether perverse funding incentives are causing public schools to overdiagnose
their students as disabled. Would a market in special education continue this trend or act
to correct it?
In particular, public schools recently have been criticized for
overdiagnosing Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Last year, the number of students
diagnosed with "other health impairments," which include ADD, jumped an
incredible 24.5 percent to 133,354 students nationwide, according to the industry
newsletter Special Education Report. Would a competitive market in special
education really be more accountable? Although private providers generally treat the
profoundly disabled, ADD students might be perversely attractive to an open market. If the
per-pupil funding for ADD were higher than for other students, but the actual cost to
educate them was lower than public estimates, private special education might make a
market in these children for itself.
Many have asked whether perverse
funding incentives are causing public schools to overdiagnose their students with
disabilities.
More favorably, vouchers could limit how much taxpayers must pay to
educate the disabled and begin a movement toward cost containment. For planning purposes,
private special education administrators would need to know how much funding the
government would provide for each disability. Deciding what each disability is worth,
however, would be anathema to those advocates for the disabled who put no price on the
cost of special education.
Unlike the government, which can afford a whatever-it-takes approach to
budgeting, private institutions are constrained by the grim reality of the bottom-line.
"It would probably end up looking like a managed health-care plan," Petrilli
says, "where an HMO decides how much to pay for each procedure."
Critics charge that vouchers would leave some students behind in an
effort to cut costs. Sherry Kolbe of NAPSEC worries that vouchers would never cover the
full amount of private school tuitions, but others believe that the industry would likely
redesign its cost structure to accommodate local vouchers without sacrificing quality.
"A lot of fat in the system is driven by regulations," says one analyst, who
spoke on the condition of anonymity since his company does business with local school
districts.
Private industry is better at tracking consumer wants and needs.
Consequently, vouchers might help settle the debate over inclusion now raging in special
education circles.
The practice of inclusion, where disabled students are placed in
classes with fully-abled peers, is acclaimed as a way to boost the confidence and academic
achievement of disabled students.
While inclusion is heavily supported by the Clinton administration and
most advocates for the disabled, the majority of parents are less thrilled, saying the
extra attention paid by instructors and classroom assistants to disabled students comes at
the expense of their own children. In a recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll, inclusion was
opposed by 65 percent of adults who agreed with the statement that disabled children
"should be put in special classes of their own." Even some special education
parents are doubtful about inclusion, since regular classroom teachers and their
assistants don’t always have the necessary training to teach special needs students.
The industry analyst cited above envisions a scenario where
voucher-bearing parents of disabled students will effectively hold a referendum on
inclusion by choosing whether to stay in public schools or take their business elsewhere
to private providers.
In a full voucher system, where the public and private sectors compete
to sell the unique strengths of their programs, parents would have a greater opportunity
to select what form of education is best for their child.
"It’s going to be interesting to see what they choose."
