Sentences with phrase «special education vouchers»

Any private school may open their doors to students with special education vouchers, and can specify how many students they could handle.

There is a strong and growing body of evidence that offering special education vouchers to disabled students would be desirable public policy.

The language of the proposal appears to be taken fairly literally from generic legislation used in other states that have passed special education voucher programs.

The rights of parents are seemingly identical under IDEA and under special education voucher laws, but the ease with which parents can exercise those rights is profoundly different.

«The Effect of Special Education Vouchers on Public School Achievement: Evidence From Florida's McKay Scholarship Program»

Letitia James, the city's public advocate, found that many special education vouchers were going unused.

STANFORD — While the recent debate in Washington, D.C. over the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which serves low - income children, has highlighted a sharp political divide in our nation's capital over school choice, outside the beltway special education voucher programs tell a different story.

The opposite is true: Special education vouchers discourage school districts from over-identifying disabled students, because any student identified as disabled might leave the district for a private school, reducing district revenue received from the state.

Special education vouchers essentially use public funds to democratize access to private placement by reducing legal and financial barriers.

Similarly, Mead contends that special education vouchers create «perverse incentives for parents and educators.»

One might expect special education voucher programs — as exist in Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin — to provide the best guarantees for students with disabilities.

Many parents of students with disabilities bypass special education vouchers.

Special education voucher students experienced a loss of 0.13 standard deviations in ELA relative to their matched comparison students.

In general, the cost and incidence of private placements appear to have been exaggerated in the media (see «The Case for Special Education Vouchers,» features, and «Debunking a Special Education Myth,» check the facts, Spring 2007).

However, Greene and Buck find that vouchers are unlikely to increase the burden on districts: Special education voucher laws typically stipulate that the voucher amount should reflect the severity of the disability and that the cost to the district may not exceed the average cost the state pays for the education of children with similar conditions.

Almost 15 percent of students in the United States are said to have a disability under the procedures established by IDEA, so in states with special education vouchers, the potential for program growth is considerable.

In a feature article for the winter 2010 issue of Education Next, education researchers Jay P. Greene and Stuart Buck of the University of Arkansas, drawing on extensive previous research on the effects of special education vouchers, dispel several common myths about these programs and show how they have benefited handicapped children in states where they have been enacted, including those not in private placements.

Four states — Florida (1999), Georgia (2007), Ohio (2003), and Utah (2005)-- have special education voucher programs that together serve more than 22,000 students.

Some claim that special education vouchers are unnecessary because disabled students already have the right to private placement under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Special education voucher laws are very straightforward: The parents of any child found in need of a special education can ask the school district to pay for their child's education at a school the parent has identified as appropriate.

But special education vouchers are not the best way to do this; they create other, adverse consequences, such as further segregating or perpetuating double standards for children with disabilities and creating perverse incentives for parents and educators.

Using children with disabilities to increase public support for vouchers may be smart politics, but it doesn't mean that special education vouchers are good policy.

Andrew Rotherham and Sara Mead expressed this concern in a paper for the Progressive Policy Institute in 2003: «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.»

Special education vouchers have a political advantage that vouchers for low - income students lack: they can benefit not only the poverty - stricken disadvantaged, almost never a politically potent interest group, but also anyone who has a child with disabilities, a population that crosses all social and economic boundaries.

With special education vouchers, families get both: the right to an appropriate education from public schools and the option to purchase that appropriate education from private schools.