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1.  McKay creates an incentive for parents to seek disability labels, possibly creating a disincentive for districts to provide special education services to anyone. 

This is an empirical question. Andy has conceded the over-enrollment problem, while theorizing that McKay will dissuade districts from enrolling special education. All of the other perverse incentives still exist to over-enroll students into special education, however, and a quick check of the data reveals that the special education rate in Florida moved from 14.9% in 2000 (first year of McKay) to 15.7% in 2005. Is this evidence of parents seeking labels for McKay? No, these figures are exclusive of McKay. If McKay has influenced special education rates at all, it has only done so at the margin thus far, and (if so) only perhaps slowed the rate of growth a tiny bit.

2. McKay is not really needed because it is already possible for children with disabilities to attend private schools under IDEA.

Andy is correct that IDEA gives some access to private schools, but neglects to mention that this access is highly skewed to the wealthy. Nationwide, nearly 2 percent of all special education students attend private schools paid for by public school districts that fail to provide an adequate education. Such placements are sometimes the result of a consensual agreement between a school district and a parent, but more often the result of a lawsuit or the threat of a lawsuit. Low-income parents typically lack access to the services of an attorney with specialized knowledge of special education law, making such placements primarily the province of the well to do. The McKay program serves the interests of parents by equalizing access to a private placement without the need to fight a legal battle. The parent simply must express dissatisfaction with the services provided at the public school. The McKay program protects the interests of districts by capping the total amount of a voucher to be equal to the amount provided for the education of the child, while adverse court decisions sometimes result in “Cadillac placements” costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Andy references the special education train wreck in Washington DC. Similar to the rest of the district, the special education services in DCPS can be politely described as “troubled.” Opportunistic lawyers have made themselves a fortune by winning large judgments and Cadillac private school placements for DCPS children in private schools. A McKay system in the District would short-circuit this entire process by allowing dissatisfied parents to seek better services in private schools without the need to sue, and simultaneously protect the financial interests of the district by limiting the maximum amount of the scholarship to the amount that would have been spent on the child’s education anyway. The kids win, DCPS wins, and the only “cost” is that a few lawyers have to find someone else to sue.

My conversations with those advocating for children with special needs and the parents of special needs children over the last few years have a common theme: school districts are skilled at figuring out who they can push around. The opening interview of this study on race and special education in Arizona is a repulsive example, and it was not hard to find. McKay equalizes access to private schools among the rich and poor and gives leverage to parents who cannot access specialized special education attorneys. 

3. Since McKay is designed to help those being poorly served by public schools, we should see a skew towards severe disabilities in the McKay population, but we do not. 

4. The learning disability category is murky and inaccurate, making an LD designation a poor basis for eligibility for a voucher. “Singling out just special education students for vouchers like this is not the way to expand educational choice. It creates more problems than it solves.”

Andy implicitly assumes that the parents with the children with the more profound disabilities will naturally be the least well served by their public schools and therefore argues that we ought to see McKay students skew towards the higher end of the disability scale. I believe this assumption is unjustified. Parents with mild disabilities may very rationally expect their children to succeed academically with some extra help and may become the most dissatisfied when that in fact does not occur.

John Stossel’s recent special (I know I’m running the risk of having Andy’s head explode in rage by citing Stossel, but stick with me Andy) taped an IEP meeting in South Carolina for a high school student. The principle stated that she saw progress with the student and was not concerned. The child’s mother returned repeatedly to the fact that her son was reading at a fourth grade level as a 15-year-old and was very frustrated. As it turned out, she had good reason to be frustrated. ABC footed the bill for private tutors and the student’s reading level increased by two grade levels after a mere 72 hours of tutoring. 

Therefore, I am not the least bit surprised that parents of LD kids have taken their fair share of McKay Scholarships. Andy is uncomfortable with them being eligible, I am not. I’m uncomfortable with them needlessly academically rotting like the kid above while the school collects extra money. Andy is as well, but is suffering apparent cognitive dissonance at the thought that voucher program might be helpful in solving the problem.

As I said in the previous post, I’m all for vigorously reforming the process of SLD identification, improved reading instruction, universal screening and remediation, etc.  Nor do I argue that McKay will solve all the problems of special education. I’m simply arguing that the McKay scholarship program represents a substantial improvement in the delivery of educational services for disabled children.