School Choice Serves as Reprieve for Special Needs Students
If school choice doesn’t help children with disabilities, someone forgot to tell the 137,000-plus special needs kids who are participating in private school choice programs right now.
Of the 80 private school choice programs currently operating in the United States, 20 publicly report the number of special needs students participating or are designed exclusively for those students. Totaling the most recent available counts across these programs, we find 137,074 special needs students are using school choice programs.
In reality, this number probably understates the true count quite significantly. It doesn’t include any special needs kids among the roughly 850,000 participants in the other 60 school choice programs. And for some programs that publicly report special education students, such as Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Program, some students who may be receiving special education services may be uncounted due to their entry to the program through eligibility tracks besides special needs. Some students who have only ever attended private school may have never received an official classification or Individualized Education Plan (IEP).
But even if these 137,000 students were the only special education students using private school choice, that would mean nearly one out of six choice students (16%) has special needs, which roughly aligns with the share of public school students who are classified as students with disabilities (15%).
Some might find this demand for private school options among parents of special needs children surprising, given the federal laws requiring public schools to accommodate them generally don’t apply to private schools. And many public schools do a great job of enabling special education teachers to help these students. But as too many parents of special needs children have experienced, what happens in practice sometimes is very different from what is prescribed in law.
Enforcement of education disability regulations is often weak, requiring “parent involvement beyond participation, specifically, an expectation of advocacy,” as one study put it. If a public school overlooks the struggles of a special needs kid, the burden is generally on the parent to prove to the legal system that their child needs more help than the school is providing. Without other schooling options, a parent has to take on the time, financial, and legal commitments to fight for their child’s ability to attend a nonpublic school with the IEP dollars devoted to their child’s education. Tens of thousands of families with special needs children engage in this process every year.
Many more families likely wish they could advocate for their children through this traditional process. But this “expectation of advocacy” is particularly harmful to special needs children in non-affluent families, who often face too many constraints to take on this burden. That’s why high-income districts have more special education dispute activity than low-income districts. Furthermore, one study found schools to be relatively less responsive to minority parents with special needs children. These trends don’t exist because low-income or minority children magically have fewer disabilities. Rather, ensuring your kids are getting what they need currently poses huge time, financial, and legal burdens that are out of reach for many parents, no matter how dedicated. We’ll never truly know how many kids with disabilities aren’t getting the services they were promised.
Unsurprisingly, parents worried about their special needs children may look for alternatives outside the traditional system. Parents of special needs children are substantially likelier to have tried different schooling sectors compared to the average parent. Many studies have documented the share of parents who decided to homeschool their special needs children, who cite dissatisfaction with the previous school's services, bullying, and stigma. While existing research has limitations, signs point to these children benefiting socially and academically through increased engagement. But again, paying private school tuition or homeschooling can be costly decisions not accessible to everyone.
Understandably, special education families’ needs for responsiveness, individualization, flexibility, and options appear to translate into school choice support. In monthly surveys from EdChoice and Morning Consult, special education parents consistently are likelier than the average parent to support school choice policies. At the time of writing, 80 percent of parents of special needs children endorse ESAs, compared to 72 percent of non-special needs parents and 67 percent of non-parents.
And where school choice programs do exist, they seem to help. Choice programs exclusive to special needs students have higher participation rates than other programs. And using a voucher seemed to allow more special education children to access what they needed. In a 2021 survey, 80 to 90 percent of surveyed families in Florida special education school choice programs reported their new, nonpublic choice school provided all needed services.
As lawmakers continue to rethink K-12 education in a post-COVID world, school choice must be part of the picture—not in spite of special education students, but especially because of them.
