Three Things Not to Miss in Wolf’s Post

May 16, 2013

Tyson-Spinks SI cover

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Jay has already linked to Pat Wolf’s devastating knockout of the special ed smear campaign against Milwaukee vouchers. However, it’s such a long piece (there’s so much falsehood to debunk!) that I want to make sure the most important points don’t get overlooked:

  1. Pat catches the Department of Public Instruction lying about how many disabled students are in the voucher program. “Lying” is a strong word, but that is what happened here.
  2. USDOJ faults DPI for not requiring schools to report how many voucher students are disabled, so they can monitor discrimination against disabled students - but the reason is that state law gives them no power to do so, and regulations forbid them from doing so. The purpose of the regulation is to protect against schools using the information to discriminate against disabled students!
  3. “A statistical analysis that my research team conducted during our five-year evaluation of the program confirmed that no measure of student disadvantage – not disability status, not test scores, not income, not race – was statistically associated with whether or not an 8th grade voucher student was or was not admitted to a 9th grade voucher-receiving private school.  Our evidence is consistent with the expectation that private schools are admitting voucher students at random during that critical transition, as the law requires.”

Pat also points out, against the USDOJ’s claim that private schools in the voucher program are covered by Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, that the U.S. Supreme Court has twice reviewed and let stand Wisconsin court rulings finding that voucher schools are not government contractors, and students in the program are “parentally placed” not “government placed” in their schools, so the schools are not within reach of laws that apply to government services. In my (non-lawyer) opinion that does not make it a slam dunk that the voucher schools aren’t covered by ADA, because the ADA is such a badly crafted law. But it’s still worth remembering.

Update: This post has been modified because the original version didn’t state point #2 quite right. My apologies!

1 Comment | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Wolf on Milwaukee School Choice and Disabilities

May 16, 2013

Pat Wolf does a beautiful job on the Ed Next blog of dispensing with a series of false claims about school choice and disabilities in Milwaukee.  You should really read it.  It’s a work of art.

1 Comment | special ed, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Two New Studies on How School Choice Impacts Students in Vulnerable Demographic Categories

May 15, 2013

Race Card w watermark

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

At Brookings, Matthew Chingos looks at a huge swath of CCD data and finds no evidence that charter schools increase racial segregation. No surprise there, as readers of Win-Win already know. It’s been a while since I had occasion to trot out the old race card graphic – my sense is that the segregation talking point has had its day in the sun.

In Education Finance and Policy, Rajashri Chakrabarti looks at Florida school data and contributes the latest in a line of studies showing that schools act in self-interested ways, responding to structural incentives, when classifying students into special programs. Chakrabarti finds that schools threatened with vouchers due to low test scores increased the classification of students as Limited English Proficient, removing them from the pool of tested students; however, schools did not increase classification of students into special education, where they would become eligible for McKay vouchers. The obvious conclusion? All students should be eligible for vouchers – then there’s no system to game.

PS Sorry for the awkward headline – I couldn’t come up with anything snappier or any pop culture references. Uh . . . release the kraken!

2 Comments | charter schools, civic values, special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Heads You Win, Tails You Still Win

March 5, 2013

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

I had the opportunity to testify to the Senate Education committee in Texas today on the experience with parental choice programs for special needs children. One of the items of discussion was the following chart:

McKay Texas 1This phenomenon is often discussed regarding special education, but seldom quantified. In 2004 however officials from Education Service Center 20 (a regional body roughly covering school districts in the San Antonio area) provided the following chart to quantify the additional cost per special education student in a number of school districts. There were costs above and beyond those covered by state funding, and thus represented in effect a transfer from district general funds into special education funds on a per special education student basis.

 

Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby also testified to this interim committee in 2004, and she made the point that since school districts have been complaining that states don’t cover the full costs of special education for decades, that they have no cause to complain about students leaving with their (inadequate) funding. Districts can either keep these funds in the general education effort, or spend more on their remaining special education students (approximately 5% of Florida special education students directly utilize McKay but far more benefit from it) but either way they benefit.

 

 

6 Comments | school funding, special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

More Reasonable Responses to My WSJ Piece

October 16, 2012

Yesterday I chronicled the unreasonable (and unfortunately predictable)  reaction of the teachers union to my WSJ op-ed suggesting that there were trade-offs between hiring more teachers and quality teachers.  I also received a number of reasonable, but still mistaken, responses attempting to explain the 50% increase in the teaching workforce without improved results by blaming special education and English Language Learners (ELL).  A letter in yesterday’s WSJ succinctly stated the argument:

In 1970 many disabled and mentally handicapped students were denied access to public education. Today these students are guaranteed a public education until the age of 22. Also in 1970, about 5% of the U.S. population was foreign born, compared with about 20% today. Many of these children enter the education system with limited English skills and are provided services to improve their mastery of English. Such services were unheard of in many parts of the country even 20 years ago.

It is obvious from these statistics that many more special-education teachers and English-language specialists are counted in the teaching profession now as compared to 1970. Mr. Greene claims that math and reading scores of 17-year-olds are unchanged since 1970. I would submit that the teaching resources devoted to students, excluding teachers of special education and limited-English speakers, is close to unchanged since 1970.

There is a plausibility to this argument, but special education and ELL can neither account for the 50% increase in teachers nor can they be ignored when considering the stagnation in student achievement.  Special education teachers constitute about 14% of the teaching work force and disabled students constitute about 13% of the student population.  So, if we imagine, as the letter writer does, that many of these disabled students were denied access to public education, then the addition of teachers was roughly commensurate with the addition of disabled students.  Excluding all disabled students and teachers, the reduction in student-teacher ratios between 1970 and 2012 would still have been roughly from 22 to 15.  If you wanted to use as the starting point 1980, 5 years after the start of federally mandated special education, the ratio still drops from 18.6 to 15.2.

But of course not all disabled students were denied access to schools before federal legislation.  Outside of the most severely disabled, the bulk of students now classified as disabled would have been present in school in 1970; they just weren’t being served very well.  So, if we added a large number of special education teachers to better educate students who were always present but who we now consider disabled, it should have resulted in much better outcomes for those students.  But overall outcomes are flat.

There is a disturbing habit among people who make the argument represented in the WSJ letter to act as if special education is a black hole from which no progress can or should be expected.  Yes, they say, we hired more teachers, but that was for more special education students and you couldn’t expect that to result in any progress.  But this is entirely wrong.  Special education can and should result in greater academic achievement, so even teachers added in that category should be contributing to better aggregate outcomes.

All of these arguments also hold true for ELL except that ELL is much smaller and involves fewer teachers than special education.  A critic could note that the world has given the US public education system more ELL students because of higher immigration, although the same cannot really be said of special education.  Other than the exclusion of severely disabled students, whose numbers are quite small, the distribution of disabilities in the public school student population should be roughly the same today as it was back then given that most disabilities are genetic in their origin.  It’s just that we didn’t serve many of those students well in the past and therefore should expect that achievement should be rising as we devote more resources to them.  More teachers should be producing more achievement.

And yes, more ELL students might require more teachers to produce the same achievement.  But in other ways our student population has become easier to educate.  Unless students have become significantly more difficult to educate across all dimensions, it’s not possible to explain away the facts that we have 50% more teachers without any meaningful improvement in outcomes.

Several years ago Greg Forster and I addressed this in our Teachability Index, in which we tracked 16 indicators of the advantages or disadvantaged that students bring to school and found that overall students are somewhat less challenging to educate now than they used to be.  And for a forthcoming book I have updated and improved upon that analysis and still find that students are somewhat easier to educate, so it should not require many more teachers to get the same results.

We can’t blame special ed and ELL to account for the lack of productivity in education as we’ve hired more teachers.  The problem is that we’ve ignored the trade-offs between teacher quantity and teacher quality.

2 Comments | special ed, teacher quality | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Double Standards on Special Ed Placements v. Vouchers

July 25, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In today’s Examiner, AEI’s Michael McShane (an official JPGB super best friend) wants to know why none of the people fighting to kill the DC voucher program seem to have any objections to DC’s high rate of outplacement for special education students. Could it be because there are a lot more rich white special ed parents? McShane is here to chew gum and kick the cans of edu-hypocrites, and he’s all out of gum.

McShane doesn’t make the mistakes others have made in characterizing DC’s high rate of outplacement. Still, the stats are eye-popping, and will no doubt have many readers asking questions. McShane really doesn’t have the opportunity in a short piece like this to provide the necessary background. Thankfully, Jay wrote this a while back to bring people up to speed.

1 Comment | politics, special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Ed Week on Distorted Special Ed Counts

March 15, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Ed Week dives into details on the difficult issue of how special education counts get distorted by a variety of factors. The article gets into a lot of interesting issues that make it difficult to get a clear picture of how many disabled students are served by the program. See also here for the researchers’ take on the issue.

One factor not canvassed in the Ed Week story – unsurprisingly – is the role of financial incentives in public school special education programs. Public schools are incentivized to label studnets as disabled in order to access additional funding. Study after study after study after study has confirmed the empirical relationship between the presence and strength of these incentives and rising rates of special education diagnosis in public schools. Private schools have no such distorting incentive and will thus report lower numbers of disabled students. (All this is true regardless of whether you think the true rate of disabilities is higher, as in the public system, or somewhat lower, as in the private system.)

2 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Parenting Advice from Sara Mead

December 12, 2011

Sara Mead takes issue with my recent post that puts misconduct by some McKay schools in perspective.  I noted that those reacting to reports of misconduct by calling for the elimination or heavy regulation of McKay do not similarly react to incidents of misconduct in traditional public schools.  She likens this to a misbehaving child saying “he did it first.”  Sara urges us to be tough parents who don’t accept such weak excuses:

I was a very naughty child. When I was inevitably caught misbehaving, I often tried to justify it by saying “So-and-so (usually my sister or a classmate) did it first!” Not surprisingly, that argument never won the day or kept me from being punished.

I was reminded of this by Jay Greene’s recent blog post about reports of malfeasance and fraud by operators participating in Florida’s McKay Scholarship program for children with disabilities. Jay cites a series of examples of abuses in public school districts–basically a grown-up “he did it first!”–before stating that “existence of misconduct in traditional public schools in no way excuses the misconduct that has been uncovered in the McKay program.”

Glad we agree on that one!

Let’s ignore that I clearly said (in the comment she quoted!) that misconduct by McKay providers is inexcusable.  And let’s ignore that she mis-characterizes my call for perspective.  And let’s ignore my argument that the direct operation of schools by the government or heavy regulation of private providers unfortunately does not eliminate misconduct.

Instead, I would like to offer some parenting advice of my own.  When I was a child I sometimes tried to persist in making an argument, even when the evidence contradicted it.  My parents correctly taught me that when you are wrong, you should admit it.

I was reminded of this when thinking about Sara Mead’s repeated claim that the McKay Scholarship program provides incentives to increase the over-identification of students as disabled.  In 2003 she and Andy Rotherham released a report that made a series of speculative allegations against McKay, including:

special education vouchers may actually exacerbate the over-identification problem by creating  a new  incentive for parents to have children diagnosed with a disability in order to obtain a voucher. In fact, if special education identification led to funding for private school attendance, it would be unusual if this did not create an incentive to participate in special education in many communities, particularly those with low-performing public schools.

And in 2007 Sara Mead repeated the claim:

Offering vouchers to children with disabilities—and only children with disabilities—creates an incentive for parents to seek out a special education diagnosis in order to get a voucher. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some parents seek out diagnoses of learning disabilities or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to get their children additional help and accommodations on tests. McKay’s offer of a voucher for students with disabilities creates an even stronger incentive for parents to “game the system.” And Florida psychologists who diagnose youngsters with ADHD and other disabilities have told reporters that they see some Florida parents who are seeking these diagnoses just so they can get a McKay voucher.

But in 2009 Marcus Winters and I released an empirical examination of the issue that actually found the opposite.  McKay actually provided incentives to reduce the excessively high rate at which students are identified as disabled.  And in June of this year, the leading quantitative AERA journal, Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis, published our article with this finding.

Nowhere has Sara Mead said that she was mistaken.  And last week Education Sector responded to reports of misconduct in McKay by urging people to read the 2007 report with this (and other) false or unsubstantiated claims.  People shouldn’t persist in repeating false claims.

I hope we can agree on that one.

2 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Perspective on McKay

December 10, 2011

Ed Week, Ed Sector, and others are picking up on a hyperventilating story from the free weekly Miami New Times about misconduct in Florida’s McKay Scholarship voucher program for disabled students.  The piece is actually a re-hash of a story the New Times ran 5 months ago about private schools participating in McKay that mishandled money, hired incompetent staff, or failed to provide adequate services.

The stories were embarrassing, but the reaction by the New Times and others has been completely lacking in perspective.  Organizations receiving government funds are unfortunately even more prone to misconduct than typical organizations.  This is also true of public schools.  For example in the Detroit Public Schools we see:

 Five Detroit Public Schools employees have been charged with embezzlement in an ongoing probe into the “culture of corruption” that took hold in the state’s largest district, a prosecutor said Wednesday….

A series of audits into district finances have been ordered. Two separate audits announced last week revealed the district has been paying $2.1 million per year for health coverage for ineligible dependents, and bought 160 unused BlackBerries and 11 motorcycles.

“It has been said that the accomplice to corruption is frequently our own indifference, and I agree wholeheartedly with that,” Worthy told reporters in announcing the charges.

“My office was not surprised about the culture of corruption that we’ve been seeing in the past in the Detroit Public Schools system,” she said. “What did surprise even us, though … is how rampant, how overt and how conspicuous and downright bold-faced the corruption is, allegedly, in some of the cases that we’ve been looking at.”

And from Springfield, MA public schools we learn:

A 13-month audit recently concluded at Putnam Vocational Technical High School found that some employees abused a student association checking account that operated independently from the city and school system in apparent violation of Massachusetts law.

McCaskill was in charge of that unauthorized account, which averaged about $200,000 annually in transactions since late 2005, but was managed with a manual ledger that never matched bank statements, according to the report from Springfield’s Office of Internal Audit….

“There is no excuse for the disgraceful, dishonest practices that appeared to have run rampant among a group of employees at the school for several years,” Ingram also wrote in a post on his official blog.

And right in the backyard of the Miami New Times we find the mysterious absence of $3.8 million from the Broward County teacher union accounts, the prior head of the Broward teacher union in jail for soliciting sex from a minor, and the former head of the Miami-Dade County teacher union in jail for corruption and embezzlement.

And while the New Times was repeating the complaints of Miami-Dade superintendent  Alberto Carvalho about McKay, they somehow failed to mention Carvalho’s own history of manipulating newspaper coverage through a reporter with whom he was reportedly having an affair.

But these are just selected anecdotes.  In a systematic study of scandals in public and private schools, Greg Forster and Matthew Carr found that misconduct was actually slightly more likely in regulated public schools than in largely unregulated private schools.  That is, some amount of scandal is unfortunately unstoppable and increasing regulation or government operation of schools is unlikely to eliminate the problem.

Of course, the existence of misconduct in traditional public schools in no way excuses the misconduct that has been uncovered in the McKay program.  But then again no one calls for the public school system to be shut down as a result of these scandals like folks are calling for an end to McKay.  And Diane Ravitch, in her typical, scholarly fashion, responds to the McKay reports by tweeting “Legalized child abuse in Florida?”, but appears to have no reaction to similar reports from traditional public schools.

My point is that the reaction to reports of misconduct in the McKay program are lacking perspective.  Yes, abuses need to be stopped.  And the regulations on the books, if enforced, could keep those abuses to a minimum.  As former Senator John McKay told a Florida newspaper in response to calls for more regulation:

Kriseman suggested nine issues to increase accountability, including mandatory site inspections of facilities. He said the Department of Education should review and sign off on personnel criminal background checks in facilities seeking to receive McKay dollars. And teachers in a school accepting McKay dollars should have a state teaching certificate.

Former State Senate President John McKay — who created the law — agrees. McKay listened to Kriseman’s full list of suggestions.

“A number of his suggestions are quite positive,” McKay said. “Many of the things he’s asking for are already in the statute.”

McKay suggested asking officials with the Department of Education to enforce the law.

“It’s nice to have words in a statute,” McKay said. “Unless someone does something, it’s kind of meaningless.”

And of course, all of these criticisms of McKay fail to mention the proven positive effects of the program.  It improves student achievement for disabled students, reduces the rate of new identification of disabilities, increases the chances that students will receive needed services, and is overwhelmingly loved by parents.  I wish we could say the same about all traditional public schools, including those riddled with misconduct.

6 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Special Ed Voucher Research

June 7, 2011

Marcus Winters and I have done a few studies on the effects of Florida’s McKay voucher program for disabled students.  These studies were published as Manhattan Institute reports:

“How Special Ed Vouchers Keep Kids From Being Mislabeled as Disabled,”  Manhattan Institute, Civic Report No. 58, August 2009.

“Evaluating the Impact of Special Education Vouchers on Public Schools,”  Manhattan Institute, Civic Report No. 52, April 2008.

It took a while, in fact a couple years, but a revised version of those two studies combined into one article has been published in the peer-reviewed journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, which is the leading empirical publication sponsored by the American Educational Research Association.

You can read the full article on the EEPA web site here.

And here is the title and abstract:

Public School Response to Special Education Vouchers

The Impact of Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program on Disability Diagnosis and Student Achievement in Public Schools

Marcus A. Winters, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Jay P. Greene, University of Arkansas

Abstract

The authors expand on research evaluating public school response to school choice policies by considering the particular influence of voucher programs for disabled students—a growing type of choice program that may have different implications for public school systems from those of more conventional choice programs. The authors provide a theoretical framework to show that special education vouchers could influence both school quality and the likelihood that a school will choose to identify the marginal child as disabled. Using a rich panel data set from Florida, the authors find some evidence that competition from a voucher program for disabled students decreased the likelihood that a student was diagnosed as having a mild disability and was positively related to academic achievement in the public schools.

2 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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