Revamping special education

Public Interest, Summer, 2001 by Wade F. Horn, Douglas Tynan

Rising costs

As might be expected, the consequence of these trends is the skyrocketing cost of special education, often at the expense of regular education. According to the National School Boards Association, the per-pupil cost of special education is 2.1 times the cost of regular education. Since the average per-pupil expenditure in the United States is about $6,200, the average cost for students in special education is about $13,000 annually. Hence, the average excess cost of special education is $6,800 per pupil. Since IDEA covers 6.1 million children ages 3 to 21, the total cost of special education for these children is $79.3 billion, which is $41.5 billion more than a regular education would cost for them.

Under IDEA, the federal government is supposed to pay 40 percent of the costs of special education. In reality, federal funding has never exceeded 12.5 percent. Today, Washington provides $5 billion in total funding to local school districts, or about 12 percent of the costs of special education. On average, states pay 56 percent of the costs, with a range of 11 percent to 95 percent. The remaining average of 32 percent is paid for by local school districts. Thus, IDEA is perhaps the largest unfunded federal mandate for education ever placed on state and local government. Recently, Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont has called for an increase in federal funding over the next five years from the current 5 billion dollars annually to 37 billion dollars, which would approach the 40 percent funding suggested in 1975. To date, Senator Jeffords' efforts have resulted only in a nonbinding resolution, and not actual dollars.

Making matters worse, since special education (unlike regular education) is a federal mandate, schools can be sued for not providing the services that parents think their child deserves. This has led some school districts to spend extraordinary sums on special-education placements, services, and accommodations in order to avoid even more costly lawsuits. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that each year special education absorbs 38 cents of every new tax dollar raised for the public schools.

A particularly expensive result of qualifying a child for special education is the possibility that in doing so, a public school may be obligating itself to pay for all or part of a child's private school tuition in the event that public schools cannot accommodate their needs. In fact, public school districts today pay for the private school tuition of more than 100,000 special-education students at an estimated cost of $2 billion annually, and part of the cost of private schooling for an additional 66,000 special-education students. An extreme example of this is a southern California school district that, as reported in the Washington Monthly, pays for a severely brain-damaged boy to attend a specialized school in Massachusetts, flying his parents and sister out for regular visits, at an annual cost of $254,000.

One consequence of these escalating costs may be the eventual weakening of public support for special education. As ever increasing numbers of children are determined eligible for ever more expensive special-education services, the public's confidence in the special-education system may gradually erode. If so, the public may overreact and demand the abandonment of special education, leaving severely disabled children once again without public education. Indeed, in a recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll, 65 percent of parents said that the extra attention paid by instructors and classroom assistants to disabled students came at the expense of their own children.