Recently, Dallas Disability Examiner Steve Carter wrote about how public schools are more likely to pay for private school for students with disabilities based upon a Supreme Court decision. In its decision, the Supreme Court said that parents of students with disabilities had a right to seek reimbursement from school districts for private school tuition, “even if they did not first try their public school’s education programs.” While this seems like a win for parents, parents must first pay the cost of tuition before seeking reimbursement.
After reading that article and another article published last month in the Washington Post about the impact of charter schools, I felt that it brought up a good question – while being the never ending angst for teacher unions, should parents of students with disabilities embrace the public policy issue of school choice as a benefit for their children?
The State of Florida has a school choice program specifically for students with disabilities, which the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of school choice and the charter school movement, promotes on their website as a success story. The Center also includes a study conducted by Manhattan Institute at their website that provides the first analysis of the effect of a special education voucher program on special education students who stay in public schools.
Should parents of students with disabilities get behind the school choice/school voucher movement and help push it to the forefront?
To read the Manhattan Institute’s study on special education vouchers and school choice, please visit their website.
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Comments
No, parents of children with disabilities should not embrace vouchers.
This would be a losing proposition for most such parents. That's why the groups that represent them oppose vouchers. Even when the value of the voucher is tied to the degree of disability (as it is in Florida), it doesn't come close to covering the actual costs of educating a child with special needs. And private schools are free to charge tuition in excess of the value of the voucher, so this isn't even an option for low-income parents. (The vouchers have even exercised an inflationary impact on FL tuition.)
Finally, IDEA doesn't apply to private schools, so they could deny admission based on disability, and refuse to comply with the terms of the child's individualized eductaion program, in which case the parent's only options are to find another private school or return to public school. If you think disruption plays havoc on general education students, try it with a special needs kid.
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