Special-education vouchers work for everybody

 Most school voucher programs are intended to help low-income students stuck in underperforming urban schools. Voucher programs now operating in four states, however, focus on an even more vulnerable clientele: disabled students. Florida’s recent experience suggests that vouchers are the right prescription to improve special education.

Before 1975, about one in five disabled students went unschooled. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, disabled students gained the right to a “free and appropriate education.”

The enactment of IDEA was one of the most important education breakthroughs in the 20th century. However, the law has been implemented in ways that are severely flawed. Supplementing existing IDEA provisions with special-education vouchers addresses many important concerns.

Many parents protest that public schools do not always provide the services legally required by Individualized Education Plans, which are essentially court-enforceable contracts, mandated by IDEA, that outline the specific services to which disabled students are entitled.

When this happens, parents can sue. But the legal process often takes years — too long to have an effect on the student’s schooling — and many parents find the cost prohibitive. Further, parents need to weigh these burdens against their limited chance of success; research suggests that courts tend to favor schools instead of parents.

Vouchers address the issue of inadequate services in two important ways. First, they give disgruntled parents a timely, out-of-court means to remove their child from an unsatisfactory public school.

A survey we conducted found that parents using vouchers in Florida were more likely to receive promised services in their current private school than they were in their former public school. They also reported a higher degree of general satisfaction with their child’s academic achievement.

Second, schools respond to the increased possibility that disabled students could leave by improving the services they provide. A study we conducted last year found that the educational gains made by disabled students in Florida increased as more private school options became available nearby.

Vouchers also help to ensure that low-performing students who are not actually disabled don’t get placed into special education. Though schools frequently complain about burdensome costs due to the rapid expansion of special education in the past three decades, in truth schools in most states benefit financially from diagnosing a student as disabled.

A growing body of research finds that schools respond to this financial incentive by overdiagnosing learning disabilities in low-achieving students. Vouchers counter the financial incentive to misdiagnose a student by putting the entirety of their per-pupil funding at risk once they are diagnosed as disabled.

Our new study of Florida’s special-education voucher program finds that, for the 2005-06 school year, public schools in close proximity to an average number of voucher-accepting private schools were 15 percent less likely to diagnose a student with a learning disability. As an added benefit, vouchers thus save money by slowing the artificially inflated rate of growth in special education.

Taxpayers also win when students use a voucher to attend a private school. Florida’s voucher is worth the lesser of what the public school system would have paid to educate the child or the cost of tuition at the accepting private school. This ensures that the program is at least cost neutral.

In practice, private schools educate disabled students at lesser cost than do public schools. In 2007, the average dollar value of the 21,000 special-education vouchers used in Florida was $7,500. That’s less than Florida’s average per-pupil cost to educate both special education and regular enrollment students combined.

Special-education vouchers benefit taxpayers and kids. They should be expanded across the country.

Marcus A. Winters is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Jay P. Greene is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Their new report, “How Special-Ed Vouchers Keep Kids From Being Mislabeled as Disabled,” is available at www.manhattan-institute.org.