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Jar Jar Rawls: Why Eduwonk is Wrong on McKay (Dr. Matthew Ladner)

So I’m a complete Eduwonk nerd. I admit it. Visit the site several times per day. My therapist says it is good to talk about it.

So what do you do when you are a nerdy fan and your hero makes a big mistake? Watching Eduwonk position himself to the left on the anti-school choice jihadis at the Palm Beach Post on the issue of school vouchers for children with disabilities left me feeling like the Star Wars fanatic who camped out in 1999 only to be greeted by Jar Jar Binks as a reward.

Apparently, the geekeratsi provided Lucas with some important feedback, as Jar Jar all but disappeared from the following movies. In the same spirit, I offer the following information to Eduwonk. “But the PBP really lost me when on Saturday they quasi-embraced what I consider the worst of all three Florida private school choice programs, the McKay special education vouchers,” Eduwonk wrote.

The McKay Scholarship Program is not just the best of the voucher programs in Florida, but in fact, the best voucher program in the country.

The liberal political philosopher John Rawls wrote in his influential work “A Theory of Justice” that societal ethics should be decided as if behind a theoretical “veil of ignorance” whereby no one would be aware of what their position would be in a forthcoming society.  While many contest Rawls’ philosophy, it is hugely influential in left of center thinking. Accordingly, let’s ask the question: does today’s system of education for children with physical and neurological disabilities remotely approach that which would likely be created behind a “veil of ignorance” under which everyone and everyone’s child had an equal chance of suffering from a disability?

The short answer: not even close. While federal special education law stands as a landmark piece of legislation protecting disabled students from discrimination, huge problems surround the education of children with disabilities. Parents register enormous dissatisfaction with the lack of services provided to their children; researchers point to the over-identification of minority students and out-of-control costs; and teachers vent their frustration with the amount of red tape and paperwork involved.

The conservative Fordham Foundation and the liberal Progressive Policy Institute (specifically, Eduwonk in a previous life) teamed up to summarize this situation as follows: “For this program that has done so much is also sorely troubled. America’s program for youngsters with disabilities has itself developed infirmities, handicaps and special needs of its own…we are not educating many disabled children to a satisfactory level of skills and knowledge. Too often we are frustrating their parents, distracting their teachers, hobbling their schools, and making it harder to keep order in their classrooms, all this despite the best of intentions and the most earnest of efforts by families, educators, and policymakers.” 

In 2001, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Progressive Policy Institute published an edited volume on the functioning of IDEA. Eduwonk was one of the editors of this tome, and I was one of the many contributors. This volume broke something of a taboo against criticizing IDEA by exposing a legion of problems with special education. These problems included but are not limited to the fact that IDEA emphasizes procedure over student achievement, that an alarmingly large number of children have been inappropriately placed in special education due to poor early reading instruction, and racial bias in placement of minority children.   

Growth in special education has made IDEA simultaneously costly and ineffective. By some estimates, 40 percent of the increase in K-12 spending has gone into special education. Special education, in short, does too little to help children with disabilities and too much to harm children without disabilities. Jay Mathews of the Washington Post noted that the available research “suggests that the special education system has led to widespread, if well-intentioned, misuse of tax dollars and has failed to help kids.” (Jay Mathews, “When Special Education Falls Short,” Washington Post, December 11, 2001.)

The McKay Scholarship Program for Students with Disabilities represents a radical departure from the normal operation of the special education system. McKay makes a school voucher available to any special education student in Florida public schools. This program is the largest school voucher program in the country, with approximately 375,000 eligible special education students and more than 18,000 students participating.

The program has been expanding rapidly, with approximately double the number of students utilizing McKay vouchers this school year than in the 2002-03 school year.  Students with an individual education plan (IEP) enrolled in a Florida public school are eligible to participate. Private schools meeting minimal requirements, including financial soundness and compliance with nondiscrimination regulations, can participate in the program. The maximum amount of each student’s voucher is equal to the total cost of educating that child in public school.

WHO IS ELIGIBLE, AND HOW IS MCKAY WORKING OUT? 

Children in special education programs are disproportionately poor. Special education children are 50 percent more likely to be living in poverty than the general student population, and substantially less likely to be living in a household with a family income above $75,000. Sixty-eight percent of disabled children have family incomes below $50,000 and are 50 percent more likely to be living in poverty than the general population.

In addition, African American students are substantially overrepresented in special education programs nationwide. African American students are 1.45 times more likely to be classified as disabled, 2.99 times more likely to be classified as having mental retardation and 2.21 times more likely to be classified as having emotional disturbance than all other groups combined.

The McKay program therefore serves the most disadvantaged population in our public school system: children with disabilities, disproportionately poor and minority. How is the program working? The Manhattan Institute conducted a parental satisfaction survey of both parents who had used the program to transfer and parents who had used a McKay scholarship to transfer but had subsequently returned to a public school. The survey found 92.7 percent of current McKay participants are satisfied or very satisfied with their McKay schools while only 32.7 percent were similarly satisfied with their public schools. McKay parents found that their child’s class size dropped dramatically, from an average of 25.1 students per class in public schools to 12.8 students per class in McKay schools. In public schools, 46.8 percent of disabled students were bothered often and 24.7 percent suffered physical assault, while in McKay schools, 5.3 percent were bothered often and 6.0 percent reported assault.

Most telling of all, more than 90 per

cent of parents who had withdrawn their child from the program believe it should continue to be available to those who wish to use it.

So McKay parents like McKay, even if Eduwonk does not. But what about Eduwonk’s concerns?

The Crux of the Eduwonk Critique of McKay

Eduwonk is concerned that McKay creates a perverse incentive for parents to seek a disability label. The logic is very clear: get a label, get a voucher!

Eduwonk has good reason to be concerned about mislabeling, but should be far more concerned about school districts than parents as a source. The vast majority of the growth of special education has been the large increase of students classified as “learning disabled.” School districts often label children as learning disabled when teachers perceive a discrepancy between classroom performance and innate intellectual ability. Such a vague standard is subject to error and abuse. Students with learning disabilities constituted only 21 percent of all special education disabilities when Congress passed the EAHCA, but by 1998 that figure had more than doubled to 46 percent. While the number of students with clinical disabilities (such as autism, blindness, deafness or mental retardation) has remained nearly constant since 1976, the percentage of total students classified as learning disabled (LD) has more than tripled- from 1.8 percent of all students to 6 percent of all public school students.  (For a discussion of the economic and environmental factors behind disability rates, go here for more Jay P. Greene–Ed Week subscription required.)

Recent medical research into learning disabilities demonstrates a strong link between ineffective reading instruction and later learning disabilities. Analysis by a team of medical doctors, led by Dr. Reid Lyon of the National Institutes of Health, presented evidence that improper reading instruction has lead to an enormous increase in the number of students labeled as having specific learning disabilities. The medical evidence strongly suggests that children who do not receive proper reading instruction in the early grades develop learning deficiencies, which are easily mistaken for learning disabilities.

Such “teaching disabled” children require extensive remediation to achieve grade level in reading. Yet unlike children with a neurological disorder, teaching-disabled children have conditions that could have been prevented with proper reading instruction in the early grades. Lyon’s medical team found that rigorous early reading instruction could reduce by 70 percent the number of students identified as learning disabled. Lyon and his coauthors estimate that, nationwide, nearly two million children have preventable learning disabilities.

Labeling children as disabled when in fact no disability exists does substantial harm to each mislabeled child. The erring district may seriously damage a child’s self-image and confidence in their capabilities. During his 2001 testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, then U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige underscored the long-term damage mislabeling inflicts on minority children:

For minority students, misclassification or inappropriate placement in special education programs can have significant adverse consequences, particularly when these students are being removed from regular education settings and denied access to the core curriculum. Of particular concern is that, often, the more separate a program is from the general education setting, the more limited the curriculum and the greater the consequences to the student, particularly in terms of access to postsecondary education and employment opportunities. The stigma of being misclassified as mentally retarded or seriously emotionally disturbed, or as having a behavioral disorder, may also have serious consequences in terms of the student’s self-perception and the perception of others, including family, peers, teachers and future employers. 

In the edited PPI volume referenced earlier, Dr. Lyon wrote, “From its inception as a category, LD has served as a sociological sponge that attempts to wipe up general education’s spills and cleanse its ills.” Children with disabilities therefore not only represent a large and growing percentage of public school students, but also a pool of students who are far more intertwined with the failures of the general education system than is commonly recognized.  Kids who have been mislabeled are victims of the system and will usually be well behind academically. Making them eligible for a voucher to go to a school which might serve their needs for a change seems like the least we could do. School districts that want to prevent this are cordially invited to stop mislabeling children. 

The McKay program creates countervailing pressure against the perverse incentives of the special education system. Mislabeling is a phenomenon overwhelmingly driven by school districts, not by parents. The perverse incentives are legion: extra money, test gaming, and segregation of difficult students, a far greater problem than scheming parents angling to get their kids labeled.

Ah, Eduwonk would say, a voucher is a far greater incentive than extra SAT time. True enough. The fact of the matter is, however, that a parent cannot become eligible for a McKay scholarship without an Individual Education Plan, and cannot get an Individual Education Plan unless granted by the school district. If the district believes that a child has no disability and is simply angling for McKay, they have the ability and incentive to turn them down.

If Eduwonk wants to move public schools out of the dark ages of a profoundly unscientific method of labeling SLDs, sign me up. Improve early childhood reading instruction? Yes please! Universal screening and early childhood remediation? Let’s talk!

Transforming a legit concern into a boogey man fear to deny the worst served kids in the public school system the chance to benefit from a wildly popular and beneficial program? Leaving our most disadvantaged students in a frustratingly dysfunctional system with only the rich kids having access in the form of a lawsuit? As either John Rawls or Jar Jar Binks would say (but both would agree) “that smells stinkamuss!”

Dr. Matthew Ladner is director of state projects at the Alliance for School Choice and is a senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute.