One of the biggest selling points of Texas’ new private school voucher program was that it would support students with disabilities, offering up to $30,000 in state-funded accounts for tuition and other services.
The possibility drew thousands of applications from across Texas, and hundreds of families flooded public school districts with requests for special education evaluations to qualify for higher amounts.
However, fewer than 30 students with disabilities actually received the $30,000 maximum, according to data from the Comptroller’s Office. That’s less than 1% of applicants who indicated that they had a disability.
It’s something the Texas Education Freedom Account directors tried to warn parents about earlier this year. “Most students will receive less than the maximum,” a handout about special education vouchers read.
But many families still hoped that they would get closer to $30,000 to pay for private schools dedicated to students with disabilities, which can easily cost between $25,000 to $60,000 a year, according to a Chronicle analysis.
One in four of the over 100,000 students awarded vouchers had a documented disability, and their average funding award was about $16,000, or roughly half the maximum amount, according to the Texas Comptroller’s Office. While nearly 13,000 families received more than the base amount, only around 220 families received over $20,000, records shared with the Chronicle from June 23 show.
“The headline in everything we communicated was: ‘Homeschoolers get $2,000, private school students get $10,474 and students in special education get up to $30,000,’” said Travis Pillow, communications director for the education accounts. “It might be natural to see that round number and say, ‘My student is getting $30,000.’ When in reality, the ‘up to’ was very important, and the vast majority are getting less than that.”
Dee Carney, director of the Texas Center for Voucher Transparency, said families told her group through its online comment form they were “surprised and disappointed” by the amount of funding they received. Carney said some families were also struggling to find a private school that would enroll some of those students with disabilities.
“That disconnect raises important questions about whether the program can deliver on its supporters’ promises or whether vouchers will offer more options on paper than in practice,” Carney said.
The answer to those questions are No. There are some complicated technical reasons for this that are stated in the story (gift link), and there will be some changes made to the funding formula over time, so what is true today may not be true tomorrow. I certainly don’t want to make light of the challenges that parents of special needs kids face – they are significant and hard to overcome, often because of obscure and byzantine rules and programs on offer for them. But the primary purpose of these vouchers has always been to funnel money to families whose children have never attended and would never attend public schools. On that score, it’s working as intended. If what we really want to do is improve education access and outcomes for special ed students, the way to do that is to appropriate sufficient funding for all of those students in every public school. There’s nothing complicated or luck-of-the-draw about that. I’ll leave it to you to ponder why we don’t do that.
“The headline in everything we communicated was: ‘Homeschoolers get $2,000, private school students get $10,474 and students in special education get up to $30,000,’” said Travis Pillow, communications director for the education accounts. “It might be natural to see that round number and say, ‘My student is getting $30,000.’ When in reality, the ‘up to’ was very important, and the vast majority are getting less than that.”
Texas, you’ve been had, hoodwinked, run amuck, led astray!
This guy is the communications director for the voucher scam. He absolutely knew that readers of his carefully crafted headline would focus on “$30,000” and would mostly miss the “up to.”