One commenter asks what to do about the kids who are harder to teach? This is a very good question, to which the obvious answer is "subsidize them". We already do quite a bit of this; a friend with an autistic son has the city of New York paying for his schooling because the city can't provide adequate services.
A diagnosable disorder should bring a bonus on your voucher. Of course, this means that you'll need a vast special ed bureaucracy to set standards and diagnose. But we already have it, because school districts get extra money for special ed. I'm not sure how much new administrative overhead this would entail.
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Well, the Washington Post had an article last week that because the city can't accommodate all of the special education students in the system, it's spending $200 million a year to send 2300 of them to private schools. At about $85,000 a head, that doesn't seem to be a very effective method of dealing with these kids.
Granted, we are talking about DC city government, and you can always count on it to find the most expensive and wasteful way to do any given thing, so perhaps other school districts would be able to keep costs lower. Still, if we assume a private school education in this city costs $30K a year, that's still a lot of administrative overhead.
Every special needs child deserves a college prep education.
Uggh. If a kid's got a 30-point gap in their learning abilities (say 50% in English, 85% in math) they are learning disabled. They qualify for "special ed." Cindy McCain could teach them.
And in most schools, she'd teach to their weakness.
Not their gift.
Flipping that model around -- giving the "special ed" for the strength deserves some thought. Particularly before we go handing out extra money for religious sects to send their children to schools where science isn't taught.
The best way to build the weaker skills is usually through challenging the stronger skills. Gaining mastery where it's easy helps children with uneven learning skills learn how to focus more on their weak skills.
Right now, our schools focus on the weaknesses -- unless your a sports star, perhaps.
Instead, pay more attention to the kids who are incredibly gifted, but might not have the entire kit of tricks necessary to be a Rhodes scholar or Ivy League grad.
Right now, we look for median or above kids who have relatively flat learning curves and reward them. And we're letting a lot of extremely bright children fall through the cracks as academic or behavioral failures. (Salvidore Dali, Albert Einstein, Monet, Thomas Edison all flunked classes or flunked out of school.)
The special ed laws we have now basically say "you owe these kids any service that improves their education". These laws were written by state legislators trying to buy the support of some vocal parent advocates in a way they thought would be pretty cheap because there aren't very many special ed kids, right? But since these laws have come on to the books the number of special ed kids has more than doubled and the average amount spent on them has more than tripled.
A more fair system would say "a normal kid gets $x; a special ed kid gets $2x. buy the best education you can with that, but society cannot be on the hook for the infinite investment your child deserves".
There's a lot of gaming of the system going on with some (certainly not all) parents of "special ed" kids.
I did some of it myself. Louisiana includes the gifted as deserving of special ed, also. (At least they used to.) There were some fantastic classes offered to them that were otherwise unavailable.
One the other hand, another child of mine has multiple physical and learning disabilities, yet has a normal IQ. I can tell you that the public schools were uniformly incapable of dealing with that combination.
I hope that vouchers will increase the availability of specially oriented private schools like the one I finally found for my son.
What's the issue?
Charter schools here in NYC are paid "per student" as voucher schools would be, have to accept special ed students, and get paid by formula. So what's the supposed problem with vouchers?
The charter schools here of course get substantially less funding per student (both regular ed and special ed) than the regular public schools get.
And produce results such as literally tens of thousands of students are wait-listed to get into them.
Determining the funding level for special ed students in them is one thing about them that is not an issue.
In a free market I would expect specialty schools that cater to kids with disabilities to develop.
I come at this topic from two perspectives.
My eldest son is 10 years old. He is incredibly intelligent, and in the 4th grade gifted program at his local public school here in Kansas. His teachers worry that even the gifted course of study is not challenging him enough. He is already reading at a 12th grade level and can do some 8th grade math. We supplement what the school is doing with our own work here at home, and while we have some concerns that he will develop bad study habits because things come to him so easily, overall we feel the combination of the school and our own efforts will give him a quality education. The extra funding provided to the school to maintain the gifted program is much appreciated.
Our second son is 3 years old. He has a developmental problem of some sort, probably a form of autism. He seems intelligent enough, though not as sharp as his brother, but he has a lot of problems with language, communication, and social interaction. The school district is going to evaluate him next month and he will definitely require services from the district. At a minimum he will need special education pre-school according to the preliminary assessment. Because he seems bright despite his problems, they believe that he will eventually be able to be mainstreamed. But it is going to take a lot of effort on our part to break through the barrier of his communication disability, and a lot of intensive work from the school district. THANK GOD the services provided by the district are free, because the private options we have looked into are far more expensive than we can afford, thousands of dollars per month in some cases.
We are a typical middle class household in terms of income. We are fortunate in that we have the intellectual and emotional equipment to help both of our kids, but without a publicly funded program we would be screwed financially. We're very fortunate also in that we live in a school district with a decent program, adequate funding, and solid teachers. Anything that threatens this funding, such as the modern Republican party, is a threat to our children.
FDRLincoln: Thanks for writing in. As you wrote, the services your younger son is getting from the school district are very expensive. They are presumably spending quite a bit more on him than they are on a typical child. I am interested, do you think there is any limit on how much more a school district should spend on a special-needs child than it spends on a typical child? If so, what is the approximate multiple? Best of luck, by the way, with both your children.