How many choice students have disabilities? Way more than you think.
They say a law is only as good as its enforcement, and not all laws are enforced equally. As valuable as goals of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) are, the law’s enforcement is left largely to parents. If a child’s special needs are not being met in their public school, it is up to the parents to “make their service preferences known, and seek redress if these requests are not responded to.” This isn’t a mere flaw in the system, a failure to act on the government’s part, although that happens occasionally. It is part of the design of IDEA itself.
Every year, tens of thousands of parents go through a formal process trying to legally enforce their school district to give their children with disabilities the services they need. We can never really know how many more parents are in informal talks with their school district over a lack of adequate care.
As is often the case when an individual is left to fight a large institution, not all parents are equally able to advocate for their kids. High-income districts have more disputes with parents over special education provision than low-income districts, and schools often are less responsive to the concerns parents of children with disabilities if they are a racial minority.
It shouldn’t need to be said that children from certain backgrounds don’t magically have fewer disabilities. Rather, it’s simply harder to hold your local education institution accountable from a disadvantaged position. Disputes with school districts over special education require enormous commitments of time and, frequently, money that many parents do not have. It’s impossible to know how many parents know their children with disabilities lack the resources or environment they need at their public school and don’t begin a formal dispute.
But if we consider Hirschman’s concept of Voice and Exit, if parents are not able to ensure their children have what they need through the formal institutions of public education and IDEA, we would expect them to look for alternatives.
It’s no surprise, then, that so many students with disabilities are participating in private school choice programs. Based on our most recent counts, there are a minimum of 184,450 students in school choice programs who have disabilities.
I said 184,450 was the “minimum” number of choice students with disabilities because this is almost certainly an undercount. You’ll notice that I’ve only listed data from about a quarter of school choice programs. While these programs represent most of the largest choice states in the country, there are still dozens of programs that do not report or, sometimes, even collect data on students with disabilities. And some research suggests that students with disabilities in these programs are undercounted.
Even so, if we conservatively assume 184,450 is the total number of private school choice students with disabilities, they would account for 15% of all 1.25 million students in private school choice programs. For comparison, that’s the same percentage of public school students who have disabilities.
Take-up rates vary from program to program, but there are ways programs can be structured to be more inviting to students with disabilities. One of the most important features a program can have is ensuring differentiated funding also follows the student. Education funding formulas have a base amount of money dedicated for every student, but disadvantaged groups such as English language learners (ELL), children qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch, or children with disabilities are usually entitled to some amount of additional funding. Several veteran school choice states, such as Arizona and Ohio, ensure that the extra funding entitled to students with disabilities through the states’ education funding formulas is distributed to choice participants.
Unfortunately, many states do not have universal funding, instead capping funding for each choice student around whatever the base amount of state funding is. That means that extra funding entitled to a student with disability would stay in the public school if a family moved their child to a private school choice program. Without the extra funding, it becomes more difficult for a private school to provide a special education student with the resources they need. For some families, this is enough, but states that don’t tie school choice program to the funding formula like this are restricting opportunities for many special needs families.
So, while there are many more students with disabilities using choice programs than skeptics might expect, there is still room for many choice programs to improve. States with data on participating students with disabilities could report that data for better transparency, and policymakers in many states interested in letting funding follow the students can do more to make sure that is the case for all children.
