Financing the Education of High-Need Students

Overview & Synopsis

America's approach to the education of children with disabilities is antiquated, costly, and ineffective. "Special education" as we know it is broken--and repainting the surface won't repair it. It cries out for a radical overhaul. Federal policy is responsible for much of this failure. Even though the education world has changed around it--as have technology, mobility, fiscal conditions, demographics, and so much more--it remains essentially stuck where it was in 1975 when the first major national law in this realm (now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or IDEA) was passed. IDEA mandates a "free and appropriate public education" for every child with a disability. However, what's "free" to the student is not free to the taxpayer--or, for that matter, to other students being educated within the same finite budget. The average learning program for youngsters in special education costs more than twice the average program for general-education students, and added together comprise at least 21 percent of total education budgets (to cover about 13 percent of the K-12 population). Cost considerations--who should pay, how much, and how effectively--grow even more thorny when we turn to the education of the most severely disabled or highest-need pupils, the bill for whose education may exceed a hundred thousand dollars per child per year. And the distribution of those dollars is complicated, sometimes unfair, and often inefficient. That is the topic of this brief: how most efficiently to pay for and deliver education for the country's highest-need students. Though their numbers are small, their ranks are growing and their education programs require careful consideration to meet their needs within the constraints of the public purse. [Foreword by Chester E. Finn, Jr.]