August 19, 2008
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NSBA Reviews Study of Florida's McKay Voucher Program (2003)


prepared date:  June 17, 2003

 

National School Boards Association’s

review of

 

“Vouchers for special education students: an evaluation of florida’s mckay scholarship program” by The Manhattan Institute, June 2003
 

background on the Mckay voucher program

 

  1. Florida’s McKay voucher program, originally enacted as a single-district pilot program in 1999 and expanded statewide in 2001, provides vouchers to children with disabilities. McKay vouchers range from about $4,500 to $21,000, depending on the child’s disabilities. However, private schools can and do charge parents higher tuition or fees beyond the voucher amount.
     
  2. According to The Manhattan Institute report, for the 2001-02 school year there were 374,834 special education students attending Florida public schools and 9,202 students enrolled in the McKay voucher program and attending private schools funded by public dollars.
     
  3. Any special education student who attended a Florida public school the previous school year is eligible to receive a voucher if his/her parents are dissatisfied with the public school. Initially, the state limited eligibility to students who were not making progress in at least two areas of their Individualized Education Plan (IEP). IEP progress is no longer a consideration for eligibility.
     
  4. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, students in the McKay voucher program surrender their rights to a “free appropriate public education” as guaranteed under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and “have no individual entitlement to. . .special education and related services.”
     
  5. Teachers who work at schools participating in the McKay voucher program do not need to be certified or even have a high school diploma. 

Noteworthy – key Points about the manhattan institute evaluation

 

  1. The report was conducted by The Manhattan Institute, a leading proponent of school vouchers. The lead author, Dr. Jay Greene, previously led or co-authored other studies that claimed positive findings associated with vouchers – studies which later faced criticism and questions about their validity by other researchers and impartial sources (e.g. the U.S. General Accounting Office).  
     
  2. The report is based on telephone surveys of 600 parents who have a child in the McKay voucher program, and 215 parents whose children previously participated in the McKay voucher program.  The researchers did not interview a set of “public school-only” parents to provide a comparison group. 

  3. The study concludes that parents are more satisfied with the prviate schools in the McKay program than they were with the public schools that their chilren previously attended.  The researchers base these views on factors such as class size, attention from teachers, the school's communication with parents, and behavior problems of their children in the private schools versus the public schools, among others.
     
  4. Approximately 98 percent of all voucher-eligible students in Florida are not participating in the voucher program, according to enrollment data reported in this study. One could conclude that indicates overwhelming parental satisfaction with the special education services provided by the public schools, or shortcomings with the voucher program that precludes the participation of some 365,000 students. Such shortcomings may be the extra cost of private school tuition beyond the amount of the voucher, lack of participation on the part of private schools, few student vacancies in participating private schools, lack of transportation services, or lack of special education services in private schools, among other reasons.
     
  5. With national attention – heightened by the No Child Left Behind Act – focused on academic achievement of all students, including those with disabilities, this study provides no data about the academic achievement of students in the voucher program.  To be fair, that is not a criticism of the researchers but rather the program itself, which contains no academic evaluation requirements. In Florida’s public schools, accountability to all taxpayers and parents is largely determined by scores on state assessments. The public policy question is whether publicly funded private schools should be held accountable to all taxpayers and parents as public schools are.
     
  6. The Florida Department of Education provided The Manhattan Institute researchers with parent contact information and “an advance letter was sent to all sample households on Florida Department of Education stationery” prior to the phone interviews. In other words, the Florida government provided significant assistance in carrying out this study, the findings of which have been made public, with much promotion by voucher advocates.

    In stark contrast    , the Florida government has refused to publicly release the test scores of students participating in the state’s original “opportunity scholarship” voucher program, claiming it would be an invasion of privacy to do so. 

For More Information:

 

Contact

Marc Egan

Director, Voucher Strategy Center

National School Boards Association

1680 Duke Street, Alexandria, Virginia 22314

703-838-6707 (p); More info visit www.nsba.org/novouchers