Vouchers and Students with Disabilities

Abstract

School choice initiatives such as open enrollment, magnet schools, charter schools, and voucher plans have been offered as methods of school reform. A publicly funded voucher plan in Florida targeting students with disabilities was considered as a possible model for the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Although the model was not adopted in the reauthorized law, the potential impact of such voucher plans must be examined.. The empirical evidence regarding the impact of vouchers on parent choice, student achievement, and fiscal school management is inconclusive and incomplete. Further, the impact of voucher plans on educational programs for students with disabilities has not been thoroughly studied. Such an examination requires a multiparadigmatic analysis of legal, economic, academic, sociological, and political dimensions.

Special Education Funding Reform: A Review of Impact Studies

“…Two studies (Etscheidt, 2005;Jordan, 2001) conducted qualitative analyses in an effort to better understand the possible impact of recent special education funding reforms. Etscheidt (2005) analysed the legal, economic, academic, sociological and political dimensions of a voucher program in Florida that targeted students with identified disabilities.…”

“…Low achieving students, for example, might be classified as learning Chambers, 1996). Along these lines, various models for funding special education services have been described in the literature, including census-based and categoricallybased approaches, as well as voucher programs (Etscheidt, 2005;Furney, Hasazi, & Clark-Keffe, 2005).…”

“…In addition to the variation described by Pijl and Dyson (1998), two additional studies (Etscheidt, 2005;Granell, 2002) analysed the use of voucher programs for funding specialist educational services. The voucher programs in both of these studies involved a direct public payment to parents to cover their child's public or private school costs.…”

“…Because this search failed to produce articles related to voucher systems, which have been used in the reform of both general (Granell, 2002) and special education systems (Etscheidt, 2005;Richards & White, 1989), we ran separate ERIC and PsycINFO searches with the terms vouchers and special education. A replication of these searches was then conducted on the Medline and Econlit databases, but no new records were produced.…”

Developing The Vision: Preparing Teachers To Deliver A Digital World-Class Education System

“…The literature on school reform and governance, particularly the work on vouchers, school choice and funding has provided evidence of models that have been used in the construction of the scenario (Caldwell & Roskam, 2002;Clausen, 2006;Etscheidt, 2005). Furthermore, current media, ABS statistics, journal articles and government reports inform the author on issues relating to globalisation, funding and teacher education (Barnett,2009;Commonwealth-Australia,2007;Fitz, 2002;Goldstein, 2004;Hartocollis, 2005;Joseph, 2006;Kuh, 2000;OECD, 2001).…”