Union-Backed Group Favors Failed Education Status Quo
Defenders of the education status quo get agitated when something they disagree with works well. Vouchers are just such an example. The success of education vouchers across Ohio and the nation has opponents, such as labor union-funded organizations like Policy Matters, desperate to slow the progress of school choice policies by any means necessary. Unfortunately, the facts are too often the first causality in their battles.
Policy Matters (PM) released a “study” on the Autism Scholarship program this week, with the hopes of using their report to derail another, broader scholarship program being considered by the Ohio legislature. The Special Education Scholarship legislation, which is the real target of the folks at PM, would allow Ohio children with all types of special needs to be eligible for a scholarship to attend an alternative school or receive services from a private provider.
Among the criticisms made against the current Autism scholarship, the two most incendiary claims are that the vouchers are discriminatory and there is no accountability to ensure students receive the services they need. Each of these arguments is deceptive.
The PM report claims that the majority of service providers who accept scholarships are discriminatory because some were sectarian, some did not accept the most severely disabled children, and some charged more than the scholarship amount.
The data provided in the report itself reveals that these claims are shaky at best. The problem is that PM has confused discrimination with specialization. By their definition, any business or organization that offers something that some people want and others do not is discriminatory. For example, they call any private school with a religious orientation discriminatory. This is nonsense. Just because some parents may not want their children to receive services in a religious environment does not mean that religious schools discriminate against those parents.
Similarly, PM claims that schools which specialize in serving children with less severe disabilities are discriminating against children with more severe disabilities. Again, this definition penalizes schools for specializing and focusing on what they do best.
According to PM, if a school does not serve everyone it is therefore discriminatory. By this logic, schools for dropouts, magnet schools with arts-based curricula, and STEM schools are all guilty of discrimination.
A second bogus claim in the PM report is that the vouchers lack accountability. This is a red herring and has been disproved over and over again. Where the public schools are the only game in town there is little consequence when they fail to provide adequate services or waste taxpayer dollars. The private schools and organizations participating in scholarship programs, on the other hand, pay a high price for such failures. They accept additional accountability to the state and federal governments that they would not have otherwise, have to hire additional staff and supplies, and know that if the families aren’t satisfied, they can leave at any time and take the voucher money with them. Also, there is an assumption that public schools never take an adversarial stance with the parents of special needs students. A quick review of local court dockets dispels this myth easily. In the public schools the only recourse for dissatisfied parents is to hire a lawyer and file suit. For voucher parents, by contrast, they have the leverage of choosing to take their child to another service provider.
Finally, there are two findings, which the PM report tries hard to avoid, that offer important evidence in support of the Autism Scholarship program. The scholarship parents interviewed were all more satisfied than the parents whose Autistic children were not in the program. Plus, taxpayers already pay upwards of $28,000 per Autistic child to be served in the public school system. The report itself admits that the average Autism scholarship was less than $15,000, and the maximum allowed is $20,000.
If our goal is to improve educational opportunities and chances for success, and raise parental satisfaction, then programs such as the Autism Scholarship and the proposed Special Needs Scholarship are promising options. If, on the other hand, our goal is to increase spending and taxes, enlarge the education bureaucracy and maintain a lethargic and unresponsive status quo, then accept the suggestions from Policy Matters.
Legislators and the Governor will reveal what policy truly matters to them in the next few months.
Matthew Carr is the education policy director at the Buckeye Institute. Beth Lear is an education policy analysts at the Buckeye Institute.
