More Choices for Disabled Kids: Lessons from Abroad.

IF THE OPPONENTS of school choice could have their way, the national debate over the use of public money subsidize private schooling would turn on the subject of education. With research demonstrating the overall success of school voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland, and with the constitutional issue of public funding of religiously affiliated schools headed for resolution in a seemingly God-tolerant Supreme Court, defenders of the educational status quo have been reduced fanning fears that government support of greater parental choice would transform public schools into dumping grounds for difficult-to-educate students. Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers, repeatedly warns that, with private education more accessible the poor and middle class, good students will flee independent and parochial schools, leaving behind kids who are physically and emotionally handicapped, are hyperactive, or have been involved with the juvenile justice system. [P]rivate schools . . . don't have take [the learning-disabled], agrees Tammy Johnson of the liberal activist group Wisconsin Citizen Action, so public schools would be left to deal with children. Even if private schools were required take a certain percentage of disabled students, adds Rethinking Schools, an online publication of teachers opposed school choice, they tend not provide needed services for children with education or for children who speak English as a second language. NAACP president Kweisi Mfume predicts that the true cost of private education will always exceed what the government can afford cover, so those in the upper- and middle-income brackets will be helped the most ... as long as their kids don't have personal, behavioral, or educational challenges that cause the private school pass them by. Given the large number of parents who have come rely on education services provided through America's public schools, this strategy of conjuring a worst-case scenario for learning-disabled students would at first appear a promising one. According the Seventeenth Annual Report Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, over 5.37 million children - percent of American students diagnosed with special needs - currently participate in public school education programs; their parents, many of whom have become adept at using the legal system access an estimated $32 billion in annual services, are a potent political force. The vast majority of these parents have come believe that their own son or daughter benefits most from being educated in the same classes as normal students - a remedial philosophy known as inclusion - and would vigorously oppose any policy that threatens isolate special-needs children in separate schools for the learning-disabled. The argument that school choice must inevitably create education ghettos would appear have been strengthened by the recent adoption of market-based education reforms in New Zealand. In the late 1980s, that country's Labour government undertook a sweeping reorganization of its highly centralized education system, replacing the Department of Education and its 4,000 employees with a new Ministry of Education staffed by only 400 people and putting each local school under the control of a community board of trustees. At the same time, the government abolished school zoning, allowing children transfer freely between schools, even private schools, at state expense. A recent book on these New Zealand reforms by school choice opponents Edward Fiske and Helen Ladd, When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale, makes much of a flaw in the initial legislation, which permitted the more popular public schools reject students who would be costly educate or whose disabilities might drag down the test averages. …