New York taxpayers will spend $3.6 billion this year educating public-school students with learning disabilities.
But that’s not all we shell out. Thanks to a Supreme Court decision called the Carter Rule, parents who feel that their disadvantaged children aren’t getting a proper education can petition to have their private-school tuition covered by taxpayers.
Spurred by a cottage industry of lawyers, the cost of these Carter Rule placements has skyrocketed. We spent $235 million on private tuition last year, up from $144 million in 2009. Last week, The Post reported how one student even qualified for subsidized tuition because she was bullied.
Private placements are a solution to a very real problem. Prior to a federal law entitling disabled students to a free and appropriate education, it was common to deny schooling to them. Advocates for disabled students fought hard for legal protections, and those protections have certainly improved the likelihood that a disabled student will receive an adequate education.
There are multiple reasons that private placements are so expensive. For starters, it costs more to provide services to a disabled child (particularly a severely disabled child) then it does to educate a non-disabled student.
But private placements impose additional costs as well. Lawsuits are expensive for both parents and taxpayers. Further, there is anecdotal evidence suggesting that parents who obtain private placements tend to be relatively wealthy, and thus more capable of gaming the system.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise, since obtaining a private placement requires the time, inclination and resources necessary to sue a large public bureaucracy.
So, how do we rein in such costs while making special education fair for all?
While it’s easy to be mad at having to spend private-school tuition for families that could likely afford it themselves, limiting private placements is the wrong approach. Instead, New York can save money by giving parents more options without having to resort to petitions and lawsuits.
Florida’s more than decade-long experience with a special education voucher program, the McKay Scholarship for Students with Disabilities, provides an ideal template. Under McKay, any public school student with a learning disability is eligible for a voucher that they can use to pay the tuition at their chosen school, either public or private. The voucher is worth the lesser of what the public school would have spent to educate the student or the tuition charged by the chosen school.
The first benefit of a special-education voucher system is that it will reduce the number of lawsuits, which can be costly and nasty. Rich parents might still haggle over exactly how much money their child should get. But the public school’s ability to offer the required services would become a moot point. If parents think the services offered by the public school aren’t good enough, then they can send their child elsewhere. No lawsuit required.
The voucher program also saves money directly. The expensive private placements that make their way into the news are quite real, but they represent a small minority of all disabled students. Most students with diagnoses have mild disabilities that make them more costly to educate than the average non-disabled student, but not astronomically so.
Since the voucher is at a maximum worth what the public school system would have spent on the student, the program is at worst cost neutral (minus the price of administrating the program). In practice, however, the program is a massive cost saver because public schools are more expensive than private schools.
According to the Florida Department of Education, McKay vouchers in Florida in 2010 ranged from $4,746 to $19,133. The average was $7,144. According to the US Department of Education, Florida spent an average of $12,744 per public school student in 2007-08 (the most recent year available).
So the average McKay voucher is substantially cheaper than what the public school system spends to educate a non-disabled student.
As a bonus, special education vouchers improve the education provided to all students in the public school system. How? By fostering competition. Research shows that public school systems improve in response to the risk of losing students to choice programs. Further, since disabled students are almost by definition among the lowest-performing students in a school, as they depart for a private school the average peer quality of the students who remain in public schools increases. Research shows this is directly related to improved student outcomes.
Recently published research by me and my co-author Jay Greene found that exposure to a greater competition from the McKay program in Florida was related to improved student achievement in nearby public schools.
Everyone wins from a special education voucher program. Disabled students get to attend their desired school without going through a lengthy and expensive legal process first; public schools no longer have to defend their practices in court; public school student outcomes improve; and taxpayers save oodles of dollars. It’s exactly the sort of policy that leaders in Albany should consider, especially during these tight fiscal times.
Marcus A. Winters is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.