Sign Up For Our Newsletter

Continued hatchetwork at the Palm Beach Post

The contempt held against school choice by the Palm Beach Post shows no signs of letting up.  

To clarify: the McKay Scholarship Program gives vouchers to disabled children for use at any school that will accept them.  Now, to the article.  First off, the headline:

New federal rule shifts more tax bucks for disabled to private schools.

Notice the distinction: the money goes to private schools rather than disabled kids.  Something frequently forgotten in the school choice debate is that vouchers can be used at either public or private schools.  If public schools simply did what they’re paid to do, then this debate would be over before it began. 

Florida students who get state tax money to go to private schools because they have disabilities now will be entitled to about $21 million more, taken from programs that would have helped disabled students in public schools.

Changes to federal law will require Florida school districts to pay for services such as speech therapy, physical therapy and occupational therapy for these students, even though they have chosen to attend private schools instead of public schools by using vouchers called McKay scholarships. 

Once again, a not-so-subtle distinction: students getting McKay vouchers have disabilities, meanwhile they’re disabled students in the public schools.  What, does accepting vouchers somehow make the McKay kids less disabled?  Furthermore, the public schools don’t need the money if they are teaching fewer disabled students!!!  To borrow a question from the big boss: Which is more important, where a child is educated, or whether a child is educated? 

The change will benefit about 16,800 private school students statewide, and it will slash school district budgets for students with disabilities in their own schools. It will cost Palm Beach County alone $1.25 million, money the district otherwise would use on items such as special computers that help students who can’t speak or special education teachers who work alongside regular classroom teachers.

Broward will have to divert $2.3 million. In St. Lucie County, it will cost about $165,000; in Martin County, about $50,000.

"All of us went ‘Gulp,’ " said Russell Feldman, special education director in Palm Beach County.

The change essentially will wipe out any increase in federal money for disabled students Feldman expected for next school year. Feldman said he would have used that money for teacher aides, crisis intervention teachers and substitute teachers who govern classes while special education teachers are in training. 

Florida will spend some $21 billion on K-12 this year (probably more, depending on how the budget finally shaped up).  You’re losing $1.25 million–and you’re having to teach fewer students.  Somebody call the waaaaambulance.   

That money would have been spent on students enrolled at public schools with severe disabilities. But most students who use McKay scholarships have mild disabilities because most private schools can’t accommodate students with serious impairments.

Not true.  As Jay Greene pointed out in 2003, kids using McKay vouchers pretty much reflect the special education kids in public schools:

McKay students reflect the general population of disabled students in Florida. Although the state does not keep exact statewide numbers on matrix levels, the Florida Department of Education estimates that 60% of students are in Matrix Level 1 (the mildest category), 25% are in Matrix Level 2, 10% are in Matrix Level 3, and 5-6% are in Matrix Levels 4 and 5 (see Florida DOE 2002). No doubt many schools do “pick and choose,” but that’s a two-way street; some schools can’t accommodate severe disabilities and take only mild cases, but other schools specialize in students with severe disabilities. In any case, it appears from our survey that students with more severe disabilities are not underrepresented in the McKay program.

And further on in the study, he addresses the issue of finding an appropriate school:

These results indicate that most participating families did not have significant difficulty in finding an acceptable school. It is true that former participants reported a higher rate of difficulty than current participants, but recall that former participants make up only 10.2% of all families that participated in 2001-02 and 2002-03. If we weight the current and former participant categories to represent their respective shares of the total participant population, we find that 29.8% of all participants from those two school years had difficulty finding an acceptable school. This means that seven out of ten participants found it “not too difficult” or “not at all difficult” to find an acceptable school. However, some parents did have difficulty finding an acceptable school, and this seems to be the main reason parents leave the program. When former participants were asked the main reason they left the program, the most common response, making up 16.3% of former participants, was that they had not found a private school with adequate services.

It is also important to look at the overall McKay participant population when considering the difficulty that students with major disabilities had in finding an appropriate school. When our survey samples are weighted to represent their shares of the total participant population, among all McKay participants in 2001-02 and 2002-03 we find that 29.3% of students with mild disabilities and 30.5% of students with major disabilities had difficulty finding an acceptable school. There is no statistically significant difference between these figures, indicating that in the overall participant population students with more severe disabilities were no more likely that students with mild disabilities to have difficulty in finding an acceptable school.

Now, are these results ideal?  Of course not.  In a perfect world, these kids would have no problem finding the kind of help they need.  Maybe these results aren’t even optimal.  But the bottom line is this: these kids are better off than they were in public schools–a point which, oddly enough, appears missing from this article. 

If these students stayed in public school, it is unlikely they would have earned a share of the federal money.

Students using McKay vouchers get anywhere from $4,805 to $20,703 in Florida tax money a year, depending on whether they have mild learning disabilities or more severe disorders, such as autism. This school year, the amount of state tax money that followed these students to private schools was about $80 million. If these students were at public school, that money would cover any special services they require because of their handicaps.

Really?  Then why didn’t they simply stay at the public school?  Maybe because their parents didn’t feel their children were getting the help they needed?  Oddly enough, this is another issue that goes unaddressed in the article, so let’s go to a different section of Jay Greene’s study:

• 92.7% of current McKay participants are satisfied or very satisfied with their McKay schools; only 32.7% were similarly satisfied with their public schools;
• Those participants also saw class size drop dramatically, from
  an average of 25.1 students per class in public schools to 12.8 students per class in McKay schools;
• Participating students were victimized far less by other students because of their disabilities in McKay schools. In public schools, 46.8% were bothered often and 24.7% were physically assaulted, while in McKay schools 5.3% were bothered often and 6.0% were assaulted;
• McKay schools also outperformed public schools on our measurement of accountability for services provided. Only 30.2% of current participants say they received all services required under federal law from their public school, while 86.0% report their McKay school has provided all the services they promised to provide;
• Behavior problems have also dropped in McKay schools. 40.3% of current participants said their special education children exhibited behavior problems in the public school, but only 18.8% report such behavior in McKay schools;
• Former McKay participants provide similar responses. 62.3% were satisfied with their McKay school, while only 45.2% were satisfied with their old public school. Their class sizes also dropped from an average of 21.8 students to 12.7 students. Former participants also reported that their McKay schools performed better than their public schools on almost every other measure;
• This superior performance by McKay schools was largely provided for the same or only slightly more money per pupil than is spent in public schools. Even though the McKay program allows participants to choose schools that charge tuition above the amount of the voucher, 71.7% of current participants and 75.8% of former participants report paying either nothing at all or less than $1,000 per year above the voucher;
• Perhaps the strongest evidence regarding the McKay program’s performance is that over 90% of parents who have left the program believe it should continue to be available to those who wish to use it.

Back to the article:

As long as they’ve attended public school at least one year and show that they have some kind of disability, they can get state tax money to go to any private school until they graduate from high school or turn 22. 

Real leeches on society, eh?   

In some cases, such as students with broken bones or lisps, they may outgrow the disability but keep getting private school tuition money. In others, they are classified as having a psychological problem called "school phobia" that can entitle them to a voucher.

Oh, come on.  Can’t you at least give us an example of when something like this has taken place?  

What’s more, school districts now will have to go to students’ schools to provide the therapy or tutoring and they can’t use public school employees. In Palm Beach County, hiring a teacher for tutoring might cost $22 an hour. But the district will have to hire a contractor and that might cost as much as $50 an hour, Feldman said. 

It might cost more.  But what is frequently forgotten is that contractors a) generally don’t get benefits and b) aren’t charged union dues (cue NEA weeping).  If you were to add in those costs to a teacher’s salary, the cost of a teacher versus those of a contractor would almost disappear. 

In Palm Beach County, private school kids will be entitled to speech therapy, occupational and physical therapy and academic tutoring. But the district won’t pay for special equipment, one-on-one aides and sign language interpreters.

Palm Beach County School Board members Debra Robinson and Sandra Richmond oppose the new rule. Richmond’s son, who has Down syndrome, went to public schools.

Robinson nearly always votes against sending tax money to private schools on principle, she said. Not because she doesn’t want students with disabilities to get what they need, but because of the philosophy behind McKay scholarships and the lack of any accountability for private schools that get public money.

"I think any parent should do whatever they think they need to do to get their kids a good education," Robinson said. "But this belief says that the private schools are inherently better."

Not necessarily.  The belief says that parents should have the right to select a school they feel is best for their child.  For crying out loud, Florida spends more on K-12 than any other budget item–more than transportation, public safety, or health and human services.  If I’m a customer and I feel I’m getting ripped off, at some point shouldn’t I get a shot at a refund? 

UPDATE: A good comment via e-mail…this program doesn’t mean public schools are losing money–only that they aren’t getting more of it.  Well, look for a reason to complain, and eventually you’ll find it…