Debunking a Special Education Myth: Don't Blame Private Options for Rising Costs

Can spiraling special costs explain why educational achievement remained stagnant over the past three decades while real spending more than doubled? Policy makers, researchers, and school district officials often make this claim. students--goes the argument--are draining resources away from regular students. In 1975, the federal government enacted the Education of All Handicapped Children Act, now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which requires states to provide a free appropriate public education to all students with disabilities. Parents have the right to work with school officials to devise an individualized plan for their child. They also have the right to pursue legal action if they and the district cannot agree on what services their child will receive and whether the public school or a private provider will deliver those services. Since the implementation of the federal law and subsequent state laws, the percentage of students in the nation identified as requiring special has risen sharply, from 8.3 percent of all students in 1977 to about 13.7 percent in 2004, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Two-Step A popular riff on the idea that special students are bleeding public school budgets blames private placements. A large number of mostly undeserving disabled students and their clever parents, critics allege, have managed to get public schools to pay for attendance at expensive private schools. Tales of the greedy needy--disabled students who receive unreasonably expensive services--appear regularly in the media. San Francisco Chronicle describes the case of a student with learning disabilities and an anxiety disorder whose parents enrolled him in a $30,000-a-year prep school in Maine--then sent the bill to their local public school district. Chronicle declares that similar situations are playing out up and down California as more parents of special students seek extra-special at public expense: private day schools, boarding schools, summer camps, aqua therapy, horseback therapy, travel costs, personal aides and more. Chronicle cites a school finance consultant to the California Department of Education to make the harm to general parents clear: This is not sustainable ... is a growing portion of budgets in many districts, squeezing out services for other pupils. Time magazine relates a story about an autistic child whose parents put him in an expensive private school and then informed Colorado's Thompson school district it had to pick up the bill for Boston Higashi's $135,000 annual tuition. Time warns, Special ed costs threaten to eat into budgets for school endeavors that are not federally mandated, like athletics or the gifted-and-talented program. money has to come from somewhere, says Becky Jay, who was president of the local school board when the [family] first asked for tuition reimbursement, 'and regular kids lose out.' New York Times does a similar dance routine. paper profiles a wealthy community--Westport, Connecticut--where some [special students] are getting as little as a few hours of weekly speech therapy. Others get tuition for private school or home tutoring. superintendent, we are told, has held the line on special services: His administration has denied many special requests--horseback riding and personal trainers, for instance--that it deemed extravagant. Again, we are warned that runaway special costs pose a threat: The strain on the bottom line can be intense, even in Westport, where in the 2002-03 school year the $10.9 million spent on special consumed 15.9 percent of the district's spending. It's a two-step. First, provide colorful anecdotes of unreasonably expensive-sounding private placement, and then warn about how general may suffer. …