Pamela Lang, a parent of a child with special-needs in Arizona, wrote for Public Voices for Public Schools about her terrible experience finding a school for her son.
She writes:
I may not look like your typical public school advocate. I’m not opposed to private schools, and I even use a voucher for my son. I’ve also always loved public schools and advocated for our elected representatives to do a better job of funding and resourcing these valuable community institutions. Frustratingly, I’ve watched as morally-bankrupt radical special interests have spent decades undermining our public schools, chipping away at them year after year, until they start to buckle under the shear strain.
I would love to enroll my son at our local community public school. But I live in Arizona and my son has special needs, meaning the resources to educate my child here had already been stripped away through a myriad of defunding schemes. So my school choices were taken from me and I had to look around and see what options there were to find an education for my son. It turns out that I was the one who got an education. An education in the realities of living in a state at the forefront of “school choice” with a child who has unique and resource-intensive needs.
I decided to withdraw my son from our public school and take an Empowerment Scholarship Account voucher to help find him a place where his needs would be best met. Because of his disability, he qualified for roughly $40,000 per year on Arizona’s ESA voucher program, enough to fully cover the tuition at almost any school in the state. So we had choices. Or, we thought we had choices.
An often overlooked aspect of these voucher programs is they end up being publicly-funded education discrimination programs. Everywhere we went we were told my son would not be a good fit for their school and we were discouraged from even applying. We visited highly-rated private academies that touted their resources for special needs students only to be told his needs were too great, or that they weren’t right for us, and that they ended their special needs enrollment, while others who demanded to view my son’s files beforehand refused to even see us.
This entire situation is exacerbated by the reality that people pushing these privatization schemes and destroying public schools also require families like mine to give up federal protections for their children, as I had to do for my son because of his needs. We had to waive our federal Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) rights to be allowed to use the vouchers, meaning any private school that did accept him wasn’t legally required to provide him with adequate services. These issues could be addressed simply with minor legislation, but the lawmakers pushing these vouchers, while often parading special needs families around as the face of their privatization campaigns, have shown no interest in fixing these obvious problems. And that’s because they don’t really care about us. They didn’t care about my son when they diminished our public school’s capacity to care for and educate him, and they don’t care about my son when he’s using their prized vouchers.
We eventually found a microschool, one of the latest privatization schemes, that would take my son, only to find they were essentially abandoning him throughout the day and providing negligently minimal supervision, and this took us almost three years of continual searching to find.
It’s almost impossible to understand the environment that these “choice” programs create for desperate families. The amount of work I’ve had to invest just trying to find a private school simply willing to let my son in their doors has been exhausting. And that’s in addition to all the other resources necessary to make a private school work. I have to provide or secure transportation every day my son is in school. The workload is a lot for any family to take on, and in some cases the assault on public schooling is driving us to have no satisfying options.
This should always be the talking point when discussing school choice. Parents can only choose a school that will admit their child. For many parents that will mean settling on a school that the parents do not like but is willing to admit their child.
The second part of the story is how school choice is affect by schools running off their worst students.
Plenty of parents choose a charter or voucher to be in a school where everyone looks like them.
If a charter is set up somewhere like New Orleans, then of course the students are all going to look the same. The only way for a charter to be integrated is if students across a large area of geography can attend.
Not true, Superdestroyer.
The white kids in New Orleans attend the “best” charters. The lowest performing charters are overwhelmingly black.
Before Charters, New Orleans schools were less than 5% white. Where did the did white kids come from to fill the all white charter schools? Could lone give the names of a couple of all white charter schools in New Orleans? I tried looking but the data is confusing.
The assault on public education has left this family with no equitable options, instead of the word satisfying, for their son. The whole point of federal protections for special populations is to ensure that these students receive equitable service under the law. IDEA was designed to ensure these students would receive an appropriate education under the law. Likewise, Title VII was written to ensure that English language learners receive the appropriate service to meet the needs of the student. The federal government wrote these laws to protect these students from being ignored or neglected because what these students need is different and more expensive than the typical student. Private schools are not required to offer these services. Some parents in the Northeast have sued their school districts if these services were not available in their local school district. Sometimes school districts even have had to pay for tuition at an appropriate private school. I have no idea if this is an option in Arizona, but I would assume federal laws apply there as well.
What this post demonstrates how inadequate cheap vouchers are to meet the needs of special populations. Too many red states are using the Covid confusion to dismantle public schools and offload expensive students. As this parent discovered, her child is in a “twilight zone limbo” of privatization.
You won’t find any discussion at all of the problems with vouchers in ed reform. 100% cheerleading from the echo chamber. All voucher programs are wonderful and all of them work seamlessly.
Go right now to any of the well-funded ed reform think tanks or lobbying shops or university departments and look for any real analysis at all of any of the possible downsides of privatization, even the downsides that are already apparent. There is none. The echo chamber cheers every voucher expansion and initiative, lockstep.
They’re privatizing public education for 50 million US students with no real analysis or criticism or discussion of possible trade offs at all. It’s all “choice!” sloganeering.
The university departments are the most embarrassing. If you’re busy taking a public system that serves 50 million students private shouldn’t there be some discussion or debate or honest accounting of risks and benefits? Just one big reckless experiment, conducted by people who decided LONG ago that public schools should be eradicated and replaced with vouchers and contractors.
I hope Americans like the results of this experiment. They’re not getting any real information on the risks, but I suppose they’ll find those out when there aren’t any public schools left where they live.
Chiara, I agree with you about the scandalous silence of higher education. Some universities have been corrupted by their funders. Others have no excuse.
The issue is that the standard public school systems have had 50 years to show what they are capable of and have been shown to be lacking. Staying with the old system what the leadership of the U.S. but their kids in elite private schools is a non-starter.
The current public school system is superior to either charters or vouchers.
Do you have a better idea?
“. . . have had 50 years to show what they are capable of and have been shown to be lacking.”
Horse manure! Or is that excrement of Bovine origin?
Public schools contributed greatly to building this nation. If public schools are such failures, why does this country have so many patents and contribute to so much innovation. Don’t judge all public schools by the so-called failure in urban schools. Most of those students are poor, and we have failed them through under funding. The only privatized urban schools that do well are those that cherry pick their students.
And, the workers educated in public schools create GDP that covers Wall Street’s 2% drag. American workers get little reward for their productivity because of people like destroyer. Destroyer wants to facilitate the legal theft of all of main streets’ assets for the benefit of oligarchs.
The mid 1950’s was the first time that more tan 50% of 19 y/o were high school graduates and most of those high school graduates did not even have to take algebra, physics, or a foreign language.
Look at the horror stories coming out of Baltimore, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, DC. Look at the multiple testing scandals where teachers and administrators knew how bad their students were and faked the tests. Look at the need for remedial classes for college students.
The U.S. refuses to face the fact that it either can produce a limited number of high school students that can function at the 12th grade level while flunking out a large number of students or it can graduate neverly everyone while making a high school diploma worthless.
Superdestroyer,
May I suggest that you read “Reign of Error”?
Now that the ed reform lobby have secured so many voucher programs shouldn’t there be some effort by the thousands of people who are employed full time in “ed reform” to do some actual analysis of them?
Are the voucher programs superior to a public education system? Is anyone employed in ed reform permitted to ask, or does that risk loss of funding and employment?
I guess Americans will be testing out this ideological theory themselves as public schools disappear and they’re left with a low value voucher and a list of “service providers”. They’re building this privatization plane in the air! Don’t let anything like “real study” and “hard questions” get in the way of their revolution!
If Americans accept a low value voucher and a list of private service providers as a replacement for the universal public system they have now, on the assurances of the ed reform lobby that it will be “equitable” and “comparable” to a public sytem, Americans are suckers.
The ed reform “movement” hasn’t kept a single promise they have ever made, most notably their 20 year insistence that they weren’t privatizing public education when that is exactly what they were doing.
This is a bad deal.Reject it. It’s a rip off.
Typical “analysis” by the ed reform echo chamber:
https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-new-research-confirms-that-charter-schools-drive-academic-gains-for-their-own-students-and-for-kids-in-nearby-district-schools/
Charter schools are not only better than public schools, any improvement or progress a public school makes is SOLELY attributable to charter schools!
Apparently is it is impossible for the ed reform echo chamber to imagine that a public school could improve. If it does it is “because” of charter schools.
It’s all like this- 100% cheerleading. Over and over and over, doesn’t matter which ed reformer is writing it or which one of the tens of echo chamber groups who are promoting it.
You can save a lot of time reading in ed reform if you just boil down these paid promotions to “public schools suck, charter schools rock!”
Similarly, all of the voucher programs are EQUALLY fabulous and have no problems or issues whatsoever. Sometimes the voucher programs don’t even start before the “scientists” of ed reform are proclaiming how fabulous they are.
Echo. Chamber. It would be a damn shame if Americans relied on this to eradicate public schools. They will regret it.
Another worthwhile contribution from the lavishly funded echo chamber to public schools:
“I’m not exactly saying the public schools had it coming. Nobody (except perhaps the denizens of a mysterious Wuhan laboratory) had any idea what was coming, and nobody is ever fully prepared for a full-scale catastrophe. No giant system that’s been doing the same thing for decades can be expected to turn on a dime. The inertia is profound. And yet, in many ways, the educational failures of the past several years were far worse than they needed to be because of long-standing characteristics of American public education. It’s worth recounting three of those.”
They did absolutely nothing to assist any public school anywhere in the pandemic, but they don’t lack professional, full time, paid public school critics!
Can anyone who uses a public school point to anything this “movement” has contributed to that public school? Other than tests?
If you’re running a public school and you’re hiring these folks for advice or consult can I ask why anyone would do that? It’s been 25 years. If they had something to offer your school wouldn’t we have seen it by now? How does that serve public school students or families? That’s what they want? An ideological lecture on how public systems shouldn’t exist? Couldn’t one just get this at any GOP political rally?
https://www.educationnext.org/did-public-education-have-it-coming-crisis-students-parents-taxpayers-system/
IDEA was created by the Fed Gov’t to help children with disabilities. The problem is that the Fed Gov’t has NEVER fully funded it (60% funding?). It’s kind of like the Feds telling everyone that they need to purchase a horse, even if they can’t afford to feed it or take care of it. States are unable to come up with the rest of the funding and the number of children requiring IEP’s is rapidly increasing (given the fact that data from stupid standardized tests keep this pipeline flush IMHO) . Even some public school parents of children with disabilities have enormous difficulty in getting the correct/needed services that their children need in public school….it’s exhausting for them.
I think the feds promised to pay 40% but has never paid more than 12%
Worse than I thought.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Discover what publicly-funded education discrimination programs are doing to OUR public schools. This terminal cancer is spreading from the private sector, one school district and one state at a time from the bottom up.
Special ed costs, including lawsuits, are bankrupting our small school district. If courts determine that our SPED kids need $20 million in services, we must pay $20 million, even if our entire budget is $5 million. There needs to be a limit to how much a district must spend on SPED. Either that, or the state or federal government must step up and pay these costs.
This is also one of the reasons we’re in a world where the NYC schools budget is about $40k per student but people still say gen ed classrooms are underfunded.
Special education services are costly. It is also true that the federal government creates mandates in the name of civil rights, but it does not pay for the mandates. It leaves a lot of districts trying to figure out a way to pay for it. One of Biden’s campaign promises was to fully fund IDEA. I’m not holding my breath.
Democratic state legislatures should protect taxpayers. When consumers select a product in the market and, it’s a lemon, their recourse is limited. Once a student opts for a private school, there’s no return to the common goods provider.
What does a voucher user think happens when a student is costly?
Research found Catholic hospitals admit no more indigent patients than do other private hospitals. Most vouchers in states like Ohio go to Catholic schools. Privatization’s goal is revenue that covers minimized cost + margin. Privatizers are not in the enterprise to lose money.
Consider the Cristo Rey school chain prototype in Calf.- 60 students in a class. Taxpayers in states like Ohio fund Cristo Rey. In some locations Cristo Rey students, who are required to work one day a week in low level jobs, return their pay to the school.
How soon before Cristo Rey schools farm their students out to low-wage factories once SCOTUS rules that child labor laws are unfair to businesses?
Written sarcastically, but I wouldn’t put anything past SCOTUS at this point. I’m sure the court majority is pining for the Lochner Era days.
Yup, it’s school choice, alright. It’s just that parents are not the ones doing the choosing.
Yup. Too bad the education journalists are so co-opted or inept that they haven’t even noticed the obvious.
Education journalists’ fawning over charters reminds me of the townspeople fawning over the emperor’s new clothes. Some day I hope a much smarter and wiser child points out the obvious to them, since they certainly haven’t shown any sign that they noticed themselves.