I have a piece this morning on National Review Online about special education vouchers.
Governor Palin said in her convention speech that she was going to be an advocate for special-needs kids in the White House. I discuss what she should be an advocate for — special ed vouchers.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
I read Mr. Greene’s column in the National Review Online with great interest. My son has Asperger’s Syndrome and my wife and I had to take on the Henrico County, Virginia, school system in an administrative hearing regarding placement. Both of the county’s witnesses lied repeatedly under oath, they ignored our subpoena even though we complied with theirs, and the county attorney humiliated my wife. I fought back, and was able to have one of their witnesses indicted on a perjury charge. However, it was a brutal experience and the charge was thrown out on a loophole devised by the county attorney. The Virginia General Assembly subsequently removed the loophole from the law, but I saw first hand the ruthlessness and arrogance that county governments use against special ed families. A voucher system would spare parents and school employees the hellish experience of administrative hearings. Jay Mathews of the Washington Post wrote a story on the case, “Helping a Bullied Child,” on February 14, 2006, and comments that he received and forwarded to me indicate that the problem of misconduct during these hearings goes far beyond Henrico.
Bill, Thanks for telling us your story. You are entirely right that these problems are all too common.
Special Education funding, as doled out by the feds, has proven that it can be a money-maker for a school district. You may have to fight and compete for budget dollars in other areas, but in Special Education, if you have your paperwork in order, you can rake in more federal dollars while providing less actual services. In my part of (state deleted), most districts have at least one administrator who has the job of “gaming the system.”
Local school boards cut the local dollars for Special Education. Federal funds will more than replace them. In fact, if your design your programs right, you can use federal bucks to protect and expand other programs in your school. At my school, the para-professional in charge of In-School-Suspension is paid for with Special Education dollars. We were threatened with being sued three years ago, when a Special Education student was sent to In-School-Suspension (“They can’t be served in there!”), and we managed to turn the situation around. Made the Feds fund the position for us, and then got to hold onto it when all the state and local funding got cut for all the Regular /Education paras.
I am a retired teacher who read with interest the article in NR on the “Special Ed
Racket.” I spent my entire career in the same high school in Fort Worth. When I
began in 1970, there were no special ed classes in my building. By the time I
retired in 1998, special ed had, incrementally, taken over an entire wing of the
building. For the most part, I operated at the other end of the acadmiec spectrum, teaching AP courses in government and economics. While we ceertainly needed the special ed prorgrams we had lacked earlier, eventually most of the emphasis in our school was on those chilldren, with the high achievers and their needs, if not ignored, at least not addressed with much enthusiasm. My favorite special ed story concerns the time when our head football coach was married to the lead special ed teacher. He managed to
get his entire offensive line into special ed, because that made them exempt from the state’s no-pass/no play provisions for extra-curricular activities.