Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 82, No. 4
Abstract
Fixing Special Education
Jay P. Greene
Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas
The current system of educating disabled students provides financial incentives to schools to overidentify students as disabled and underserve those that are identified. The incentive to overidentify is caused by providing schools with additional funds as more students are placed in special education categories that are ambiguous to diagnose and require relatively low additional expenditures to address. The incentive to underserve is caused by high information and transaction costs imposed on parents using the legal process to obtain desired services. An efficient alternative to the current system is to offer disabled students vouchers worth the cost of their education in public schools with which they can attend a private school if they wish. This article considers empirical analyses of the relationship between financial incentives and overidentification as well as the potential benefits of vouchers for special education. It concludes that vouchers for special education are a promising idea for improving the quality of education for disabled students while constraining growth in special education enrollments.
About The Author
Jay P. Greene is endowed chair and head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Greene conducts research and writes about education policy, including topics such as school choice, high school graduation rates, accountability, and special education. His research was cited four times in the Supreme Court's opinions in the landmark Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case on school vouchers. His articles have appeared in policy journals, such as The Public Interest, City Journal, and Education Next; in academic journals such as The Georgetown Public Policy Review, Education Finance and Policy, and The British Journal of Political Science, as well as in major newspapers, such as The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Jay Greene is the author of Education Myths (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Greene has been a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Houston. He received his B.A. in history from Tufts University in 1988 and his Ph.D. from the Government Department at Harvard University in 1995. He lives with his wife and three children in Fayetteville, AR.
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