Blog-fight! Very stimulating. My thanks to Sara Mead at The Quick and the Ed, who responds to my response to her post about how advocates of educational freedom are hawking snake-oil.
First, I’d like to happily and wholly agree with one of Mead’s points: “[School choice programs that target students with disabilities] create perverse incentives for parents and schools that could exacerbate one of the biggest problems in special education: overidentification of students with disabilities.” No argument there at all, and I would simply add that there are perverse incentives for disability over-ID in the public system right now. Getting your kid classified as ADHD, or Asperger’s, etc. allows your child to receive extra consideration and a more individualized education. If your child is difficult to control and only responds well in a particular educational environment, your only recourse may be a special classification. Wouldn’t it be great if parents could just choose a school that works for their child in the first place, without the need to label them?
Now, on to the good stuff.
Mead admits that these special programs “seem to be working okay,” but that “they don’t seem to be solving the problem they ostensibly were intended to solve–parent difficulties getting needed services or out-of-district placements for their children.” I’m sorry, but I fail to see how giving parents another choice isn’t a general step forward. No one ever claimed that vouchers would make the government system perfect, only that it would allow parents easily to look elsewhere for the services their child needs. The program does that, and there’s nothing disingenuous about saying choice solves a lot of problems for thousands of families. The report Mead cites claims only that children with less severe disabilities are the ones helped most by the program, not that it doesn’t help children with disabilities.
I’d also like to point out that although political support is difficult to come by for any school choice program, the public actually supports universal over targeted programs by huge margins, often with two or three times the support. This is a very consistent finding (I’ve found the same thing in my own recent opinion research). And I think the school choice movement’s myopic obsession with hyper-targeted programs is both a tactical and a strategic mistake.