I support school choice. I ended my career as a teacher and administrator working in private choice and charter schools. School choice will almost certainly yield net benefits to American education.
At the same time, I’ve always been skeptical of those school choice proponents who sell the policy as a wonder drug. Lagging academic scores? School choice. Crime, poverty, and teen pregnancy? School choice. Civic tolerance and racial comity? School choice. Paternity suits? Apparently school choice!
Despite my reservations about these sweeping claims, however, I’m starting to think that school choice can dramatically improve the sorry state of special education in America.
There’s no one answer about what exactly ails special education. Indeed, there seem to be two contrasting narratives. On one side, there’s the argument that ordinary district schools insufficiently provide required services, so aggrieved parents lawyer up to get their children the free and appropriate education to which they are entitled. On the other side, a competing narrative holds that ballooning special education rosters (caused by too many questionable diagnoses and upper-middle-class parents seeking advantage for their kids) garner even more ethically questionable accommodations.
Last spring, I made the case that special education as we know it in today’s America is becoming unworkable: “Liberalizing eligibility requirements have swelled enrollment, creating ever-expanding accommodations that are unfair to general education students—and, counterintuitively, harmful to special education students themselves.” At the time, I thought the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the federal law governing the delivery of special ed, needed an overhaul with more stringent guardrails on who could receive an individualized education program (IEP) and what qualified as an accommodation.
Six months later, I think I might have been wrong. Not directionally so. In The Wall Street Journal, Emma Camp said it best: “When a third of a high school’s students count as ‘disabled,’ the definition of disability has grown so broad as to become nonsensical.” We still need to rethink special education, but regulation got us into this mess, and I don’t think Washington can regulate itself out.
Instead, let the sorting mechanism of school choice better allocate funds and services.
A new report at the American Enterprise Institute from the University of Arkansas’s Patrick Wolf and researchers from EdChoice makes the compelling case that families whose children have special needs are better served in a choice-based system. The current public infrastructure, they argue, is one where “proceduralism and compliance rule.” Committees convene to create a child’s IEP, and public schools are compelled to meet those obligations.
Conversely, in a choice-based system, parents can build a system that actually meets the unique needs of their child, securing a suite of individualized services and schooling options. In fact, according to the report, students with disabilities are overrepresented in school choice programs. In choice schools, they represent 17.2 percent of enrolled students but only 15 percent of students within traditional public schools. Not only do choice schools serve more students, but—importantly—surveys have found high parental satisfaction with the services received via those programs.
The choice programs in question include both those targeted at special needs students specifically and programs for all students. For the general programs, participation rates ranged from 7.4 percent in Indiana’s voucher program to 36 percent of students in Arkansas’s education savings account (ESA) program. An outstanding but important question is who precisely these students are: Do they have mild-to-moderate disabilities such as a speech delay, or are these programs also serving students with more labor-intensive disabilities, such as severe autism?
As it stands, this report undercuts one of the strongest arguments leveled against school choice programs: that they don’t serve all students. It’s long been asserted by critics that those with means will flock to private schools, while public schools will be left with the most challenged students. Yet the opposite seems to be the case. Families of students with special needs are drawn into the customizability of choice programs.
Importantly, choice as a potential solution also has far greater political viability than head-on reform. Amending IDEA to introduce real accountability into the sector is a political nonstarter. No elected official would ever be caught even suggesting such an act. As Dan Lips has argued, however, it’s quite possible to see how policymakers left and right could come together around a law that provides some additional funding in return for the expansion of choice programs directed at students with disabilities.
Of course, any policy comes with tradeoffs. I worry about the perverse incentives that a choice-based system would create, where students with special needs would receive larger vouchers or deposits in their ESA. As the old adage goes, you get more of what you subsidize.
But there’s evidence that affluent parents already pay psychologists to secure an IEP for their children, thus getting them extra time on high-stakes tests such as the SAT. Moreover, current programs (e.g., Florida’s Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities) already require that students have either a pre-existing IEP from a public school or a validated qualifying diagnosis from an eligible licensed medical professional. These guardrails won’t militate against all abuse but will prevent it from being any worse than public schools.
While it still leaves open questions about who exactly is served and how an ideal policy might function, Wolf’s report unearths important data that proportionally more students are being served in choice programs. This isn’t to say that we should throw out the legal entitlement tomorrow and enter a new era of unbridled choice-based utopia. We need more evidence and time to say conclusively that choice programs really do make a difference for students with disabilities, but if parental satisfaction and current enrollment trends forecast any answer, it’s an experiment worth pushing further.
