Special Choices: Do Voucher Schools Serve Students with Disabilities?

Nine school voucher programs in seven states specifically provide choice for families with disabled children (see sidebar, page 18). In Florida, for example, more than 22,000 students with disabilities receive McKay Scholarships to attend private schools at a perstudent cost to the government that averaged $7,220 in 2010-11. But what about the private schools that participate in voucher programs open to all low-income families, such as those in Milwaukee, Cleveland, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C.? Do these schools exclude most students who in a public school setting would be identified as in need of special education? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Critics of voucher programs often argue that private schools do exclude most disabled students, and the matter occasionally has been the subject of litigation. Yet accurate information on students with disabilities served by private schools is notable for its absence. The main reason for the lack of accurate information is that private schools do not operate under the provisions of the federal law that furnishes aid to the states for students identified as needing special education. Public schools expend considerable resources identifying children eligible for special services, both because they are under an obligation to provide those services and because they receive additional funds from federal and state governments if a child is identified as having a disability that affects their learning. Those obligations, rights, and funding support do not apply if parents choose to place their children in private schools with the help of a voucher. By and large, private schools have not developed the capacity to identify children with disabilities, and many of them are reluctant to do so, as they believe it leads to stigmatization of the children. In other words, a child who may be classified as in need of special education in a public school may not be classified as such if his or her family chooses a private school, using a voucher to defray the cost. As a result, any official statistics on the prevalence of students with disabilities in public and private schools can be highly misleading. We have not been able to surmount all of the obstacles to identifying the percentage of students in private schools who would have been identified as in need of special education in public schools, but we believe we have fairly accurate information on this question for the country's largest and longest-running school-voucher program. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), first established in 1990 and steadily expanded to include more private schools and more students in subsequent years, now serves more than 23,000 students who attend 107 different private schools. The annual voucher a school receives for each MPCP student is approximately $6,000. MPCP thus provides an excellent context for detecting the admission policies of private schools when a modest-value voucher program for low-income students is operating at scale. In 2006, the State of Wisconsin authorized our research team to conduct a five-year evaluation of MPCP. Through the course of that study, we collected a wealth of data about the students in the voucher program and in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) that permit us to estimate what proportion of the voucher student population would qualify for special education if the students were enrolled in public schools instead. Drawing on different sources of data and various analytic methods, we estimate that anywhere between 7.5 and 14.6 percent of voucher students have disabilities that would land them in special education were they in public schools. That rate compares to the national public-school rate of student disability of 12 percent and the official student disability rate reported by MPS of 19 percent. Our estimates are at least four times higher than the 1.6 percent disability rate among voucher students in Milwaukee reported by the Wisconsin State Department of Public Instruction (DPI), a figure that gave rise to a lawsuit alleging discrimination by the MPCP program. …