Palin Backs Special Ed Vouchers

October 24, 2008

In a speech in Pittsburgh today, Governor Palin endorsed the idea of special ed vouchers saying, “In a McCain-Palin administration, we will put the educational choices for special needs children in the right hands — their parents’. Under reforms that I will lead as vice president, the parents and caretakers of children with physical or mental disabilities will be able to send that boy or girl to the school of their choice — public or private.

Under our reforms, federal funding for every special needs child will follow that child. Some states have begun to apply this principle already, as in Florida’s McKay Scholarship program. That program allows for choices and a quality of education that should be available to parents in every state, for every child with special needs.”

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

The Denominator Law

September 16, 2008

Education policy debates should have a law.  No one should be allowed to highlight numerators without also presenting denominators.  That is, it is often misleading to describe a big number without putting that number in perspective.  In almost every education policy issue we see debates distorted by large numbers (the numerators) without the benefit of perspective that comes from also mentioning the denominator.

For example, the placement of disabled students in private schools is a regular sore spot for school districts and the topic of numerous alarming articles in the media.  New York City complained as part of its lawsuit in the Tom F. case that private placements initiated by parent request were costing NYC schools $49.3 million in a single school year.

Wow, that sounds like a huge burden — it’s millions of dollars!  But that is just the numerator.  If we add the denominator to the discussion, private placements no longer seem like a large financial burden.  NYC has a total annual budget of about $17 billion.  Once we add the denominator we see that private placement consists of about .3% of the NYC budget.  And if we consider that disabled students would have to be educated in the public schools if they were not placed in private schools, the additional cost of private placement is less than .1% of the total NYC budget.  See what a difference a denominator can make?

Articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, etc… lament the crushing burden of private placements.  One would think from all of these articles that private placements happen all of the time.  In fact, there are 57,708 disabled students using public funds to be educated in private schools at parental request.

Wow, that’s tens of thousands of students.  But wait.  There are more than 6 million disabled students and almost 49 million total students in K-12 education.  So privately placed students represent less than 1% of all disabled students and about one-tenth of one percent of all students.  Enforcing the denominator law would have a huge effect on news coverage of this issue.

The presentation of numerators without denominators also distorts the “boy crisis” debate.  In a recent report issued by the American Association of University Women, they argue that boys are doing fine since the number of men graduating college has increased over time: “More men are earning college degrees today in the United States than at any time in history. During the past 35 years, the college educated population has greatly expanded: The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded annually rose 82 percent, from 792,316 in 1969–70 to 1,439,264 in 2004–05.” It’s true that the number of women enrolled in college has increased even faster, they claim, but as long as college enrollment is rising for both men and women, there is no cause for alarm.

But there are also more people in the United States over time.  How do things look when we add a denominator to the discussion?  In 2006 25.3% of men between the ages of 25 and 29 had a BA or higher.  If we look at the cohort of men three decades earlier (ages 55-59) 34.7% have a BA or higher.  Educational attainment is declining for men once we add the denominator.  The same comparisons for women show an increase from 27.4% holding a BA or higher among those ages 55-59, rising to 31.6% among women ages 25-29.

The Denominator Law is important because the number of people and dollars involved in education is so huge that everything seems big without the benefit of the perspective that denominators bring.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Another Special Ed Post on Pajamas Media

July 5, 2008

Greg Forster and I continue the discussion of financial incentives and special education over at Pajamas Media.  This piece responds to a PJM column by Laura McKenna, which was a response to an earlier PJM column we wrote.

All of this builds on special education posts on this blog here, here, here, and here.

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

PJM Column Today

June 16, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Jay and I have a column on Pajamas Media this morning with our take on Response to Intervention. A sample: 

Five years ago, we published a study with disturbing implications — literally millions of students may have been labeled as “disabled” and placed into special education when they didn’t really have a disability. Since then, we’ve been struggling to get past the many myths and misconceptions surrounding special education, trying to get people to see the problem.

Now there’s finally been a change, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news is, federal special education authorities have at last acknowledged the problem and adopted a policy designed to address it. The bad news is, the policy is no good.

That’s the way it usually goes in education reform — two steps forward, one step back. And the obstacles to reform in special education are unusually large, so the steps are baby steps.

But you know what they say: the first step is admitting you have a problem. And we’re glad to see that step has been taken.

UPDATE: Whoops, forgot the link.

4 Comments | instructional reform, special ed | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

More Special Ed

June 5, 2008

My earlier post on Response to Intervention and special education has prompted discussions on Joanne Jacobs’ site and at Flypaper.  I’m struck by how frequently discussions of special education contain claims that are completely at odds with the evidence, but that people seem to prefer repeating. 

This is the central theme of the Education Myths book and there is a chapter in the book that specifically addresses special education.  Despite current and past efforts to dispel some common false claims (myths) about special ed, they just keep going.  As NYC Educator wrote in a comment, “Greene can argue all he likes, but…” [I’ll just go ahead and repeat the claim that he just debunked.]   You can have your facts, say the myth-makers, but I know what’s really true.

Sigh.

Just to briefly review the unsubstantiated and false claims that have come up in this current discussion:

1) Parents are the driving force behind over-identification of disabilities.  (Not true. If parents were the driving force, why are special education enrollments so sensitive to financial incentives facing schools?)

2) External developments, such as improving medical care for premies, deinstitutionalization, and socio-economic forces, account for a large part of rising special ed costs.  (Not true.  The number of premies and deinstitutionalized students pales in comparison to the growth in special ed, which has almost entirely occurred in SLD.  And mental retardation has been declining and total severe disabilities have remained flat over time, contrary to what one would expect if premies and deinstitutionalization were at work.  And poverty cannot, by definition, be the cause of a disability.)

3) Special education students are typically found in self-contained classes with tiny class sizes and high costs. (Not true.  Most disabled students, especially those with SLD, spend a majority of their day in regular classrooms.  Services for most disabled students consist of some accommodations in their regular classroom or a little pull-out, small group instruction.  These services are not dramatically different in character or cost than what is provided to lagging students who are not classified as disabled.)

I’ve attempted to respond to each false claim where it was posted and these topics were previously covered in Education Myths, so I won’t repeat the complete refutations here.  Instead, I’d like to speculate about why people are repeatedly drawn to myths about special education.  Even normally smart and sensible people, including some very good ed reformers, are confident about claims that they cannot empirically support and that most evidence contradicts.  Why?

First, many ed policy wonks live in the DC area and their perceptions of special ed are distorted by the highly exceptional practices in the District.  For example, many people think that private placement, the education of disabled students in private schools at public expense, is a common and financially burdensome arrangement.  In fact, there are only 88,156 such students in the entire country out of almost 50 million students in public schools.  But in DC private placement is almost 17 times more likely than in the rest of the country.  DC is just different (for a variety of reasons) but people feel comfortable generalizing from their immediate experience.

Second, many ed policy wonks run in relatively elite circles.  They know or have heard of savvy parents who have extracted unreasonable services from the public schools.  But as I mentioned above, the evidence contradicts the claim that special ed placements are driven primarily by parents.  Most people aren’t like the ones who went to your selective college, live in your comfortable neighborhood, or who blog about education policy.

Third, school leaders and educators have a vested interest in complaining about the financial burdens of special education or the unreasonable demands of parents.  But newspapers treat their claims as if they were those of disinterested experts.  If the local superintendent says that special education costs are threatening what can be provided in general education or that parents are to blame for a rise in special ed enrollments, it must be so.

Fourth, the hard reality is that most people are primarily interested in their own children.  If they are led to believe that special education is going to drain resources from their non-disabled kids, they want to stop that.  Since this is what they hear from school leaders and the news, they learn to resent special education.  No one repeats that extra money for Title I kids drains money from their children (which is as true as for special ed), so they don’t resist programs for poor and minority students to the same degree.

Fifth, there is a false image in some people’s heads that disabled kids are basically basket cases and that money spent on them is money wasted.  We even see this, to some degree, in school spending analyses by people like Richard Rothstein, who argue that special ed costs should be excluded when examining increases in expenditures over time and the relationship to student achievement.  It’s as if they assume that that money is poured into a black hole and couldn’t possibly improve student outcomes.  Crusty, conservative reformers are also drawn to this black hole view.  Don’t waste the money on losers, they think but don’t quite say.  Survival of the fittest!

Of course, these explanations for the extra prevalence of myths about special education are just speculation.  I don’t have evidence to prove them.  But I do have evidence debunking a number of false claims that are regularly made about special education.  It would be a shame if smart people ignore the systematic evidence and repeat myths because they trust their direct experience and prior prejudices more than facts.  This is why we have systematic evidence — to check the errors that regularly occur from following one’s gut.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Responding to Response to Intervention

June 2, 2008

(Editorial Note — See also follow-up post here)

Like many well-meaning instructional reforms, Response to Intervention (RTI) is likely to fail if it is not coupled with other reforms that address the perverse incentives blocking its proper implementation.

The idea behind RTI is that we could avoid placing many students in special education if only we provided them with well-designed instructional approaches in the early grades.  The huge increase in special education enrollments consists almost entirely of growth in Specific Learning Disability (SLD), which is an ambiguous category that is difficult for practitioners to diagnose properly.  Almost any student with a normal range IQ but sub-par achievement could be labeled as SLD.  But of course, students may lag in their achievement because they have been poorly taught, not because they have a problem processing information, as is characteristic of a true SLD.  Schools have a variety of incentives to discount the former explanation and instead push students into special ed.

RTI is a federally-backed program that attempts to address this problem by allowing schools to divert 15% of their special education money into well-designed instructional programs for the early grades.  If students are taught well, they won’t be lagging academically and so will not end up being identified as disabled.

This all sounds great, but it is almost certainly doomed to failure if we do not also address why schools were not previously providing well-designed instruction in early grades or why they are so motivated to identify students as disabled.  Essentially, RTI frees-up money to get schools to do what they presumably should have been doing already — providing well-designed instruction in the early grades.  Unless we think that the main impediment to well-designed instruction was that schools lacked the funding to do it, diverting 15% of special education money to early-grade instruction will not get them to do anything significantly different from what they were already doing.  Even if we thought that the problem was that schools were unaware of the effective approaches that RTI offers, we have no reason to believe that schools will truly adopt or effectively implement those strategies. 

It is a a seductive but entirely mistaken reform approach to believe that schools are eagerly awaiting to be told by the federal government or philanthropists how to teach effectively but are just lacking the critical resources and knowledge to do it.  Schools already hire certified professionals who have been exposed to countless hours of pre-service and in-service training.  Why would we think that the only reason that they are failing to employ an effective technique is because they are unaware of it?  And with school budgets increasing every year, why would we think that the next bit of money is the one that they finally need to pursue effective strategies?

Instead, we have to recognize that educators have reasons for doing what they are doing.  They generally believe that the techniques they’ve adopted are effective, even if they aren’t.  Getting them to switch to something else takes more than just offering it to them.  This is especially the case when they’ve seen untold failed instructional fads come their way.  They’ve learned to tuck their heads down and do what they think works based on their own limited experience and inertia. 

RTI does nothing to address these barriers to instructional reform.  In addition, it does nothing to address the incentives that schools have to place students in special education.  In most states schools receive additional funding when a student is identified as disabled.  If a student is lagging academically and the school would have to devote some resources to helping that student catch-up, the school could either choose to say “my bad” and pay for those extra resources out of their existing budget, or they could say that the student is disabled and get additional money to help that student catch-up.  Of course, they have strong financial incentives to choose the latter explanation.  Research that I’ve done with Greg Forster and that Julie Cullen at UC San Diego has done, confirms that these positive financial incentives play a large role in the growth of special education.  That is, special education is growing, in large part, because we reward schools financially for increasing their special ed enrollment.

I know that many people claim that special education is a horrible financial burden on schools because it costs far more than the subsidies they receive.  But people who say this are either simply advocating for more subsidies or don’t properly understand what a “cost” is.  A cost is an expenditure that one would not otherwise make.  Simply showing that more is spent on special education students than subsidies received does not prove that the subsidy is less than the cost of identifying a student as disabled.  More is spent on students lagging academically whether they are identified as disabled or not. 

The positive financial incentive for identifying students as disabled exists when the subsidy is greater than the expenditure required by the special ed label beyond what would have been spent on that student anyway.  Because proper accounting is almost entirely absent in education, it is difficult to measure these additional costs directly.  But from the research showing the response to financial incentives, we know that there is often a financial reward for putting students in special education.

I don’t mean to suggest that educators are cynically gaming the school finance system or are even aware of its details.  My point is that the systems that school districts have adopted for the evaluation and identification of disabilities are shaped by these financial incentives so that even well-meaning practitioners will tend to over-identify disabilities when there are financial rewards for doing so.

Of course, RTI does nothing to address these financial incentives for increasing special ed enrollments.  In fact, it may contribute to those perverse incentives because schools are rewarded even more by placing more students in special education because they now get to divert 15% of that money for general education, which is essentially fungible.  And to make matters worse, diverting 15% of special education money away from disabled students may short-change truly disabled students who need those resources.

I’m sure that the people backing RTI are completely sincere in their confidence that we could prevent disabilities (and save money) if only we had proper instruction.  But wishing does not make that happen.  Reformers need to stay focused on combining promising instructional reforms with fixing the perverse incentive systems that undermine those instructional approaches. 

The incentive reforms should include changing the process by which we provide financial subsidies so that there are not strong rewards for over-identification of disabilities.  One way to do that is to provide vouchers for students with disabilities equal to the full value of what is spent on them in public schools.  That way schools would have to think twice before identifying a student as disabled.  Sure, they’ll get extra resources if they put a kid in special ed, but they also risk having that student walk out the door with all of his or her resources.  It places a check on perverse financial incentives. 

RTI with special ed vouchers could be a winning combination.  RTI by itself is just increasing federal subsidies for the status quo.

28 Comments | instructional reform, special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

More Special Ed Voucher Study

May 3, 2008

I’ll be on C-SPAN with Marcus Winters Monday morning at 9 am ET to discuss our new study on special education vouchers.  The show is Washington Journal, which has a call-in format.  We look forward to hearing from you!

You can find links to the study and some op-eds in the announcement below:

New Report by Jay Greene and Marcus Winters
 Manhattan Institute senior fellows Jay P. Greene and Marcus Winters have released a new report entitled, “The Effect of Special Education Vouchers on Public School Achievement: Evidence from Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program.” The authors conclude that the McKay program has had a positive effect on the quality of education that public schools provide to disabled students.
To read the report, click here.

WASHINGTON TIMES SERIES:Winters and Greene have been featured in a three part series for The Washington Times, read their articles below.The Politics of Special-Ed Vouchers Jay P. Greene and Marcus Winters, Washington Times,05-01-08
Vouchers for special-ed students Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, Washington Times, 04-30-08
Vouchers and Special Education Marcus A. Winters and Jay P. Greene, Washington Times, 04-29-08

OP-ED:
A Special-Ed Fix, Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, New York Post, 04-30-08
INTERVIEW:
An Interview with Marcus Winters: Special Education Vouchers, EdNews.org, 4-30-08       

UPDATE

Here’s another op-ed in an Arizona newspaper.

Leave a Comment » | competitive effects, research reports, special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

New Special Ed Voucher Study

April 29, 2008

Marcus Winters and I have a new study out today on the effects of special education vouchers in Florida on the academic achievement of disabled students who remain in public schools.  As we write in an op-ed in this morning’s Washington Times: “we found that those students with relatively mild disabilities —the vast majority of special-education students in the state and across the nation — made larger academic gains when the number of private options nearby increased. Students with more severe disabilities were neither helped not harmed by the addition of McKay scholarship-receiving private schools near their public school.” The findings are based on an analysis of individual student data using a fixed effects model.

The results of this analysis of Florida’s special education voucher program have important implications for the four other states (Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, and Utah) that have similar programs.  It also suggests ways that federal legislation governing special education, the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), could be reformed.  We have two more op-eds coming out this week in the The Wash Times that will explore these issues.

Lastly, this new study speaks to the general question of whether expanded choice and competition improve achievement in public schools.  Like the bulk of previous research, including Belfield and Levin, Chakrabarti,  Greene and Forster, Hoxby, Rouse, et al , and West and Peterson (as a partial list), the new study finds that student achievement in public schools improves as vouchers expand the set of private options.

UPDATE

There is also an editorial endorsing continuation of the voucher program in DC in the Washington Post and another embracing vouchers in the Wall Street Journal. 

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

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