Bobby and I stood outside the small public elementary school that our children attended, pondering our respective 1st graders’ prospects. The weeds poked up through the asphalt, the windows on the 30-year-old building were dirty, the playground equipment was rotting. Inside the K–2 school, some 600 kids were being prepared for academic underachievement: in a few more years two-thirds of them would be unable to read at grade level.

“Nothing wrong with this place,” Bobby finally said, “that a busload of nuns wouldn’t solve.”

I laughed. I knew exactly what he meant. We grew up on opposite sides of the country (he in New York and I in Oregon), but we both grew up Catholic, in the ’50s, and that meant one thing if nothing else: nuns.

The guardians of moral order and academic achievement for several generations of Catholic boys and girls, these robed religious women ruled with—well, with rulers. And paddles. And, sometimes, fists. Before “tough love” there was Sister Patrick Mary or Sister Elizabeth Maureen. Before No Child Left Behind there were behinds burnished by a swift kick from a foot that emerged without warning from under several acres of robes.

Indeed, our childhood memories, different in detail, were singular in their moral clarity: we knew what a busload of nuns could do. They would march up and down the aisles. (Yes, there would be aisles, in a room filled with 30 to 50 kids—phooey on class size.) And with a glance from behind their starched white wimples, we would learn.

The problem is that there no longer are busloads of nuns; in fact, most schools would be lucky to have a Mini Cooper’s worth of such minimum-wage professional teachers. Their ranks have declined by a staggering 62 percent since 1965 (from 180,000 to 68,000). The staff composition of Catholic schools has similarly been turned on its head, from some 90 percent female religious in the ’50s to less than 5 percent today (see Figure 1). “The school system had literally been built on their backs,” reported Anthony Bryk, Valerie Lee, and Peter Holland in their 1992 study Catholic Schools and the Common Good, “through the services they contributed in the form of the very low salaries that they accepted.” Consequently, costs have soared; average annual tuition has gone from next to nothing to more than $2,400 in elementary schools and almost $6,000 in high schools.

Despite a growing Catholic population (from 45 million in 1965 to almost 77 million today, making it the largest Christian denomination in the United States), Catholic school enrollment has plummeted, from 5.2 million students in nearly 13,000 schools in 1960 to 2.5 million in 9,000 schools in 1990. After a promising increase in the late 1990s, enrollment had by 2006 dropped to 2.3 million students in 7,500 schools. And the steep decline would have been even steeper if these sectarian schools had to rely on their own flock for enrollment: almost 14 percent of Catholic school enrollment is now non-Catholic, up from less than 3 percent in 1970 (see Figure 2). When Catholic schools educated 12 percent of all schoolchildren in the United States, in 1965, the proportion of Catholics in the general population was 24 percent. Catholics still make up about one-quarter of the American population, but their schools enroll less than 5 percent of all students (see Figure 3).

What happened to the Catholics? What happened to a school system that at one time educated one of every eight American children? And did it quite well.

May I Have Your Attention, Please!

As most educators know, Catholic schools work and have worked for a long time. Sociologist James Coleman and colleagues Thomas Hoffer and Sally Kilgore, in 1982, were among the first to document Catholic schools’ academic successes, in High School Achievement: Public and Private Schools. A variety of studies since, by scholars at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, the Brookings Institution, and Harvard, have all supported the conclusion that Catholic schools do a better job educating children, especially the poor and minorities, than public schools.

According to the Common Good authors, Catholic high schools—and many believe that this applies to elementary schools as well—“manage simultaneously to achieve relatively high levels of student learning, distribute this learning more equitably with regard to race and class than in the public sector, and sustain high levels of teacher commitment and student engagement.” One of the keys, they concluded, is the organization of Catholic schools. Parochial schools are less likely to fall into the public-school habit of “structuring inequities”: public schools offer students the chance to take weaker academic courses while Catholic school courses are “largely determined by the school.” The irony, say Bryk et al., is that such a “constrained academic structure” contributes more to “the common school effect” than the potluck served by the public schools. Catholic schools give less weight to “background differences” of their students and thus do not allow those background differences to be “transformed into achievement differences.” Even after adjusting for student background differences, Bryk and his colleagues found significant “school effects” on academic achievement.

“You know the story about the kid whose parents got fed up with their son’s constant discipline problems in the public school?” asked James Goodness, communications director of Newark Catholic Schools, while entertaining journalists at a recent archdiocesan-sponsored luncheon. Newark, the tenth-largest parochial district in the country, closed nine elementary and two secondary schools in 2005, with a corresponding enrollment decline of 5 percent, from some 47,300 to 44,750 students. Goodness, with his story about the problem public-school boy, was explaining what made Catholic schools special. “‘That’s it!’ says the dad. ‘It’s Catholic school for you.’ They sent him. They waited. No calls from school. ‘What’s up?’ the dad finally asks. ‘The nuns been boxin’ your ears?’ ‘No,’ says the kid. ‘They didn’t have to. When I got to school, I saw this guy hanging from a cross with nails in his hands and feet and I figured they meant business.’”

What Catholic schools are very good at, it seems, is getting kids’ attention. No surprise to those of us who grew up in them. The establishment of order and discipline, in all things: We wore uniforms. We had homework. We had to eat our lunch, even the peas and carrots. My wife remembers classmates having to put a nickel in the “mission box” if they mispronounced a word—“libary” instead of library or “pitcher” instead of picture—at her Jersey City parochial grade school. Grammar counted. Posture counted. So did skirt length. It was all for the greater glory of God, of course. By reaching for God, the “all-knowing,” so the nuns said, we might know something even if our reach fell short. There were no prizes for just showing up. All of it, we knew, on some preternatural level, made us “better.” And the research seems to support that view. In fact, one of the “surprises” for the Common Good researchers, who deemed Catholic schools’ academic focus both consistent and laudable, was that the schools seemed to succeed even when the teaching and the curriculum were “ordinary.”

Such Catholic rigor was part missionary zeal—to spread “the word”—and part defense against the encroachments of an increasingly secular world. And secular, for Catholics, meant a certain slackness in moral and academic discipline. In the United States, the so-called “wall of separation” between church and state, between order and freedom, eventually forced Catholics to build their own school system, the only country in the world where they have one (see sidebar). The battles to safeguard order, and academic excellence, were fought early and often. At the turn of the 20th century, for example, Catholic school leaders refused to follow their public school counterparts into a vocational and utilitarian tracking system. “Catholic youth should not be the ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water,’ but should be prepared for the professions or mercantile pursuits,” went one early protestation by the Association of Catholic Colleges.

Catholic schools toyed with progressive education models in the 1970s, but gave it up, report the authors of the Common Good, when they realized they could not be all things to all children. Catholic high schools soon “returned to conventional class-period organization, heightened academic standards and a renewed emphasis on a core of academic subjects.”

Everything but a Plague of Locusts

So, if they are so good, why are Catholic schools disappearing? And if there are so many more Catholics, why are there fewer schools? No more nuns? No more money? Charter schools? Loss of faith? Indolence? Scandal? Irrelevance? The answer seems to be all of that—and less.

“The answer is fairly simple,” says James Cultrara, director for education for the New York State Catholic Conference. “The rising cost of providing a Catholic education has made it more difficult for parents to meet those rising costs.”

The Catholic-school story has been covered, as education journalist Samuel Freedman wrote in the New York Times, “as either a sob story or a sort of natural disaster, the inevitable outcome of demographics.” But Freedman believes that “there need not have been anything inevitable about the closings,” especially since Catholic populations are increasing.

Brooklyn closed 26 elementary schools in 2005, even though its Catholic population has grown by some 600,000 since 1950. “But the other trends were unmistakable,” says Thomas Chadzutko, superintendent of the diocese’s schools, and the man who presided over the closings. “Enrollment was down and expenses up.”

If only it were that simple.

The loss of nuns has undoubtedly added to the financial burden. But demographic change, and the failure to respond to it, has created other burdens. Since the Catholic school “system” is actually a loose and quite decentralized confederation of 7,500 schools supported, for the most part, by 19,000 parishes in more than 150 dioceses, it took “the Church” some time to see the trends, much less develop new strategies to respond to them.

“We have a system of schools, not a school system,” explains Newark’s new vicar for education, Father Kevin Hanbury. “The local parishes traditionally have been responsible for the schools.” Those parishes, and their schools, feel change at the local, neighborhood level quite quickly. But it takes time for the huge, theologically monolithic, and institutionally undemocratic Church to react.

The flight from inner cities to the suburbs by working- and middle-class Americans affected Catholic schools as much as, if not more than, it did public schools. Downtown churches were suddenly filled by poor immigrants from Catholic nations (Latin America and the Caribbean) without a tradition of Catholic schools, much less a habit of paying for them. According to the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA), between 2000 and 2006, nearly 600 Catholic elementary and secondary schools closed, a 7 percent decline, and nearly 290,000 students left, almost 11 percent. The largest declines were among elementary schools in 12 urban dioceses (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Boston, Newark, Detroit, and Miami), which together have lost almost 20 percent of their students (more than 136,000) in the last five years.

One factor is that the public schools in the suburbs are not like the public schools that Catholics tried to avoid in the cities. “Folks got to the suburbs and discovered that it was not only very expensive to build new schools, but that the public schools were not that bad,” says Patrick Wolf, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas.

And charter schools, says Father Ronald Nuzzi, director of the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) leadership program at Notre Dame, “are one of the biggest threats to Catholic schools in the inner city, hands down. How do you compete with an alternative that doesn’t cost anything?”

Ron Zimmer, of the RAND Corporation, and two colleagues studied the impact of charters in Michigan, one of the most chartered states in the nation, and determined that private schools were taking as big a hit as traditional public schools because of charters. “Private schools will lose one student for every three students gained in the charter schools,” they wrote. This had, they said, “not only…a statistically significant effect on private schools but an effect that is economically meaningful.”

And then came the sex abuse scandals. There has been nothing quite so shattering as the endless parade of headlines about priests abusing children. The Louisville Archdiocese was hit with almost 200 sex abuse suits in a single six-month period in 2003. In April of that year, the Boston Archdiocese revealed that it carried a $46 million deficit, “the largest any diocese has ever had,” according to the New York Times, because it had paid out more than $150 million in legal settlements in sex abuse cases. The crisis in Boston was heightened, said Cardinal Sean O’Malley, because parish donations fell off by several million dollars as a result of the scandal. The diocese closed more than 60 parishes, and dozens of parish schools. A Gallup survey in 2003 found that one in four Catholics withheld donations to the Church because of the scandal. Four dioceses, of the 195 administrative units in the American Catholic church—Davenport, Iowa; Portland, Oregon; Spokane, Washington; and Tucson, Arizona—have already declared bankruptcy because of lawsuits over sex abuse. Others, like Boston, are on the brink.

Marketing for Miracles

“The world changed” was a common refrain of Catholic educators with whom I spoke over several months of research. And it was clear that they included the Catholic world in that assessment. Faith, on many levels, has been shaken. The “new reality,” says Samuel Freedman of the Times, is that Catholic schools “will have to become expert fundraisers to survive.” And marketers. And promoters. And lobbyists. And miracle workers. Catholics are scrambling to find their footing in a world of charters, vouchers, and tax credits.

CATHOLIC SCHOOL HISTORY LESSON Spanish and French colonists brought schools (which were Catholic) with them to the New World in the 1600s. There were parochial primary schools in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. The first “female academy” in America was in New Orleans, established by the Ursuline Sisters from France in 1727. Catholic schools in those days were often supported by public funds. St. Peter’s in New York City applied for and received state aid in 1806, as did St. Patrick’s in 1816. Catholic schools continued to receive public monies in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and New Jersey almost to the end of the 19th century. New York State did not outlaw the practice until 1898. Catholics perceived “public school” as not just a threat to Catholics, but, as the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia (CE) recounts, an “imminent danger to faith and morals.” And in that threat was born the modern Catholic school system, as Catholic bishops convened in Baltimore in 1884 and ordered each parish to build a school and each Catholic kid to enroll. Between 1880 and 1900, as the immigrants began arriving, the number of students in Catholic schools more than doubled. “The vastness of the system,” the CE reported at the turn of the 20th century, “may be gauged by the fact that it comprises over 20,000 teachers, over 1,000,000 pupils, represents $100,000,000 worth of property; and costs over $15,000,000 annually.” The Church saw its “missionary” duty to educate the new immigrants and in 1910, Catholics counted 293 Polish, 161 French, and 48 Italian schools, and a smattering of Slovak and Lithuanian schools. But the “vastness” now represented such a threat to the secular system that some considered Catholic schools “a destroyer of American Patriotism,” and John Dewey pronounced the church “inimical to democracy,” Many states simply outlawed Catholic schools. It took a Supreme court decision, in 1925, Pierce v. The Society of Sisters, to declare unconstitutional an Oregon law that required public school attendance. The Catholic “system” continued to grow and by 1965, a stunning 12 percent of all elementary and secondary students in the United States were enrolled in Catholic schools. Then came sex, drugs, rock ’n roll—and Vatican II. The conclave of the world’s Catholic bishops and cardinals called to order in 1962 by a cherubic old pontiff, John XXIII, turned the Church on its head at a time when the Beatles, Martin Luther King, and the Weather Underground were shaking civil and social foundations to their core. Swept away were the Latin Mass, the Baltimore Catechism, meatless Fridays, the high priest at an altar with his back to his congregation. Not only are the nuns and priests now gone, but so too is a Catholic culture that for 100 years produced nuns and priests with faithful regularity. Of course, the debate as to whether the demise of Catholic didacticism and marshal order has been good or bad still roils Church waters. But the fact remains that the American Catholic school system isn’t what it used to be. — Peter Meyer

The Brooklyn diocese has hired a marketing firm. In Newark one of the first things Father Kevin Hanbury did when he was made vicar of education last year, before he hired a full-time marketing director, was host a white linen luncheon for the local media. “We have a story to tell,” says Hanbury, “and we want to get it as close to page 1 as we can.” The story, as Hanbury and other Catholic leaders tell it, is that Catholic schools not only work, but they are good for America. “Many of our schools are majority non-Catholic,” says Karen Ristau, president of the NCEA. Ristau herself, a laywoman, represents a new, and some would say sobered, Church. She has an armful of academic credentials, but is also a grandmother. “We have high expectations for these little kiddos,” she says, speaking of the 2-million-plus children in the Catholic school system that NCEA represents.

After I called the Memphis diocese to inquire about Catholic schools there, a FEDEX truck was at my door the next morning, with a package of press clips, brochures, and a CD. “Let me tell you this story,” says a soft-spoken Mary McDonald, superintendent of Memphis Catholic Schools, also a grandmother. Though McDonald can now describe her first days on the job as superintendent in July of 1998 with some bemusement, when she received orders from her new boss, Bishop J. Terry Steib, to reopen already closed Catholic schools in downtown Memphis, she thought she’d been sent to hell.

Memphis was a sprawling Catholic diocese that had seen the number of its faithful increase by half, but its school enrollment decrease by almost a quarter. While there were new Catholic schools and Catholic schools with waiting lists in the suburbs, inner-city Memphis had become increasingly black and poor and non-Catholic. A half-dozen Catholic schools had closed over the previous two decades. The few schools that remained were in the death grip of aging parish populations, increased costs (the number of nuns in Memphis had dropped from 160 to 80), and dwindling enrollment.

No wonder “the Bishop’s vision,” as she calls it, sent McDonald right to the diocesan chapel and onto her knees. It didn’t seem to matter to Bishop Steib that McDonald, a teacher and school principal during her 30 years in education, had never been a superintendent. “It was daunting,” she recalls. “I just went out and started talking to anyone who would listen—and even those who didn’t want to—about the value of and need for Catholic schools.” And it didn’t matter that the people in those slums where the empty schools were weren’t Catholic, says McDonald, who often quotes a line attributed to Cardinal James Hickey of Washington, D.C., which has become a call to arms in the new crusade to save Catholic education: “We don’t educate these children because they are Catholic, but because we are Catholic.”

A year after McDonald started beating the bushes of Memphis for money, on a July day in 1999, her phone rang. The call was from someone offering “a multimillion-dollar donation,” says McDonald, who told the Memphis Commercial Appeal at the time, “I know a miracle when I see one.” Though the donors—there were more than one—remain anonymous to this day, their $15 million “was earmarked for Catholic education,” says McDonald, recounting the story seven years later, as if she still can’t believe it. “And they weren’t even Catholic.”

McDonald and her staff reopened St. Augustine, a 65-year-old school that had closed in 1995, within three weeks of receiving the donation. McDonald had 20 students registered in three days. The school opened with 30 students in two kindergarten classes. The students didn’t need to have the $2,400 tuition—the donation paid for scholarships—and they didn’t need to be Catholic.

“But the schools are truly Catholic,” says McDonald. “We’re not a public school. We’re not a charter. We have the same values we’ve had for centuries—do the same things. We say prayer every day. We say the rosary at the same time every week. We have Mass for everyone.” And uniforms, of course. “Our donors believed that Catholic education could make a difference,” says McDonald, “and that Catholic schools are successful in inner cities.” Within the next six years, eight more schools reopened, adding more than 1,300 students to the Jubilee School system, the name of the new initiative. Almost 90 percent of the students lived at or below the poverty level; over 80 percent were non-Catholic.

Has all the change and consolidation affected academics? No, says McDonald. Jubilee students are reading at grade level within a year of arriving; they are then outperforming their peers on standardized TerraNova tests. So far, none of the Jubilee students are old enough to have entered high school, but McDonald is optimistic. “We have a 99.9 percent graduation rate in our six high schools. Virtually no one drops out.”

Capital Campaigns and a Voucher in Every Pot

A half-dozen years earlier in Washington, D.C., Cardinal Hickey had appointed a commission to study the problems confronting his diocese’s inner-city schools. “The commission recommended closing 12 of 16 struggling schools,” recalls Juana Brown, who was then the principal of one of those schools, Sacred Heart. Hickey issued his now-famous dictum: “Closing schools is not an option.” He ordered the group back to the drawing board.

When it returned, Hickey’s commission proposed creation of Faith in the City, an outreach and fundraising initiative that included a Center City Consortium (CCC). The task for CCC was solving the mystery of the less-than-holy trinity of modern Catholic education: financial distress, declining enrollment, and falling test scores.

This was the same mystery, on a smaller scale, that Mary McDonald was tackling in Memphis. Though details differed, the “can’t fail” spirit has marked both enterprises and made them models for Catholic school rescue and reform.

“I tried to get people to look at Memphis,” recalls George Loney, who directed Dayton’s Catholic Urban Presence program, launched in 2002 to find a solution to that city’s Catholic school crisis. Loney did help Dayton’s Catholic schools, part of the Cincinnati Archdiocese, achieve “needed economies of scale” by consolidating. And test results are good. “I just can’t get them to publicize them,” he says.

The D.C. archdiocese announced in December of 2006 that it would close—“we prefer to say consolidate,” says communications director Susan Gibbs—three elementary schools in the District. Yet the CCC schools seem to be working. Martin Davis of the Fordham Foundation writes that the 13 consortium schools achieved “remarkable growth” in grades 2 through 8 proficiency rates on the TerraNova from 2000 to 2005. “More remarkable,” writes Davis, “those growth rates include test scores from 2004–05, when 300 high-poverty children from failing District of Columbia public schools entered consortium schools through the new D.C. voucher program.”

In fact, vouchers are proving to be something of an antidote to the threat posed by charter schools. In Milwaukee, for example, according to Paul Peterson, while charters have “accelerated” the decline of private schools, vouchers seem to have “stabilized” them. Catholic schools in the city have been, since 1996, among the many private schools to benefit from the first state-supported voucher program. In 2005, each of the some 14,000 vouchers passed out in Milwaukee was worth $5,943 at any one of 117 eligible schools, 35 of them Catholic. (The 45 charters in the city, allowed since 1993, received between $7,000 and $9,000 per student.) The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel concluded in 2005 that “the principal effect of choice” in the city has been “to preserve the city’s private schools, many of them Lutheran and Catholic.”

David Prothero, associate superintendent of schools for the archdiocese, says the 6,000 Catholic-school voucher students represent nearly half of Milwaukee’s Catholic school students. “That’s significant.”

“The irony is that the research shows that private schools don’t make a big difference for high socioeconomic students,” says Patrick Wolf, author of a recent study on voucher impacts in Washington, DC. “But they do make a difference for low-income students. And they’re the ones who can’t afford them.”

“From a lawmaker’s point of view,” says Jim Cultrara, who is also co-chairman of the New York State Coalition of Independent and Religious Schools and spearheaded a serious, though unsuccessful, effort to have the New York State Legislature pass a tax credit in 2006, “it’s fiscally prudent to provide financial assistance to enroll children in independent and religious schools. It helps reduce the tax burden and alleviate overcrowding in public schools. And that’s not even counting the benefit of providing students with a quality education.”

Thus, the significance of the scholarship programs and vouchers, and the Church’s mission to the poor. The latest NCEA data show the mean tuition and per-pupil cost for Catholic elementary schools to be $2,607 and $4,268, and for high schools, $5,870 and $7,200, all below average public-school per-pupil expenditures. Thus, too, the persuasiveness of the argument that Catholic schools are a form of subsidy to the nation’s public education system. Diane Ravitch wrote, in a Daily News editorial after hearing word of the Brooklyn diocese school closings in 2005, “It will be a loss for all New York City. The Catholic schools in this city have provided genuine choice for children from low-income and working-class families for more than 150 years. What is more, they have established a solid reputation for safety, academic standards and moral values. All of this has been supplied at a nominal cost to families and at no cost to taxpayers.” The NCEA estimates the value of the Catholic school system’s annual subsidy to the nation at $19.4 billion.

Through smart financial administration and management and aggressive fundraising, many dioceses are beginning to take back some ground lost in the last several decades. Pooling resources for such things as collecting tuition, custodial contracts, and paying salaries has saved money as well as freed principals to focus on academics. Through aggressive marketing and with a corporate board of “the rich and powerful,” the D.C. consortium has raised $30 million in a capital campaign in the last five years. An annual gala fundraiser, co-sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Representative John Boehner (R-OH), last year garnered $1 million.

“Mr. Boehner has visited every one of our schools,” says Brown. “He’s 1 of 11 children and grew up Catholic and has been a tremendous booster.”

It is probably no coincidence that Kennedy and Boehner were key Capitol Hill strategists in passing the historic No Child Left Behind Act. “Catholics believed in every child learning long before NCLB,” says Juana Brown. “We have a mission to educate.”

The dust has still not settled in the Church. But the new missionaries, like Brown and McDonald, seem as holy and determined as their habited predecessors. Given the Church’s history, one would not want to bet against them, especially on the education front. Can tax credits, vouchers, and fundraisers substitute for the devotions of the faithful? Can marketing directors get those same faithful to forget about the sexual predators? These are serious and still largely unanswered questions. But there is a more vexing concern for some of us, even those of us used to imponderables such as the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin: where do you find a busload of nuns?

Peter Meyer, former news editor of Life magazine, is a freelance writer.

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking
By Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown, 2005, $25.95; 288 pages.

Think: Why Crucial Decisions Can’t Be Made in the Blink of an Eye
By Michael R. LeGault
Threshold Editions, 2006, $24.95; 386 pages.

Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking at All
By Noah Tall
Harper, 2006, $11.95; 96 pages.

As reviewed by Diane Ravitch

I wish I had a dollar for every time I have heard or read a paean to the importance of critical thinking skills. (Just for fun, I Googled the phrase and came up with over one million hits.) Often, the pedagogues who champion critical thinking skills insist that such skills are of far greater value to children than “mere knowledge,” “mere facts,” or what they derisively refer to as “content.” In other words, if students learn how to think, then it matters not at all if they never read great literature or study history.

Now along comes celebrated author Malcolm Gladwell to tell us in his best-selling Blink that intuition is far superior to the critical thinking skills that so many educators prize. Reflection and deep thought are out, it seems, and judgments made on the fly are in.

Not only was Blink a huge, long-running bestseller, but it boosted Mr. Gladwell into the ranks of megastars on the lecture circuit, where he is now paid $40,000 or so to dispense his theories to corporate executives. Gladwell’s ideas refute the schools’ labored efforts to teach critical thinking, which usually refers to gathering facts, reflecting on their meaning, and analyzing available evidence to reach a judgment. Instead, Gladwell celebrates instinct, first impressions, decisions made “at a glance,” the power of the unconscious. If the schools were to take his advice to heart, they would soon be teaching neither knowledge nor critical thinking skills, and we could treat them as daycare centers rather than academic institutions.

Gladwell is surely a talented writer, as one would expect of a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He skillfully relates a series of tales intended to show the power of snap judgments. His first example involves a decision by the Getty Museum to buy a remarkably intact Greek sculpture from the 6th century B.C. for nearly $10 million. Since this investment demanded a high degree of caution, the museum hired scientists to investigate the age of the piece. The scientists probed and analyzed and concluded that the sculpture was genuine.

When the museum invited several art experts to look at the statue, they immediately and correctly called it a fake, based on their instincts about what was real and what was not. But in this tale, as in most of the others that Gladwell cites, the person who makes the alleged snap judgment is someone who has spent years accumulating the knowledge to make a fast and accurate decision. It was not as if the Getty called in a dozen Joe Six-Packs from the street; no, it listened with anguish to people who had spent their professional lives learning to tell the difference between real and fake.

Gladwell’s argument simply doesn’t hold water. Blink decisions are only worthwhile when they are made by people with years of experience. Even then, as he readily acknowledges, blink decisions are often wrong. Sometimes they are simply prejudice. Other times, they are wrong because acting on instinct can lead to wrong judgments.

The notorious killing of African immigrant Amadou Diallo in 1999 by four members of the New York City Police Department was a blink decision. The police saw Diallo late at night standing in front of an apartment building in a poor neighborhood in the Bronx. They called to him and he didn’t answer. They shouted, and he reached into his pocket for his wallet. They made a snap decision that he was reaching for a gun; they drilled 41 shots into him. They were wrong, and he was dead.

Michael R. LeGault apparently had a book in the works about the decline of American culture and society and his publisher was looking for a title to hold the thing together. When Gladwell’s work became a big bestseller, it seemed like good marketing sense to call LeGault’s book Think, as if it were written in response to Gladwell. Think contains no primary research, no fresh insights. Mostly it is an unremitting complaint about the degradation of American life by purveyors of pop culture, pop psychology, feel-good experts, and marketing gurus.

In his book Blank, Noah Tall (a pseudonym) gives an excellent reason to read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: you can’t understand the brilliant humor of Blank until you have read Blink. Tall offers an ironic version of each of Gladwell’s case histories to show how ridiculous the blink judgment actually is. He, too, finds psychologists working on exotic theories of human behavior. For example, there is the TAVIACI syndrome, which means The Average Voter Is A Complete Idiot. “By a coincidence that can only be called extraordinary,” he writes, “it was discovered by Dr. Gaetano Taviaci of Vesuvio University & Pizzeria in Naples.” Even Abraham Lincoln, “an ambitious gay activist from Illinois, failed to impress voters until he started wearing a hat taller than anyone else’s.” That distinction enabled him to capture the entire idiot vote, which was enough to get him elected.

Then there is Dr. Ian Plegg, who mapped out “the third hemisphere” of the brain. Plegg, the first man ever to receive a doctorate in Scientology, discovered the “little-known lower subbasement hemisphere, or the LSBH.” He would have won a Nobel Prize for his work, “but some of his more envious colleagues pointed out that ‘hemi’ comes from the Greek meaning ‘half,’ and that technically you can’t have a third half.”

As for the Greek sculpture that fooled the Getty Museum, Blank transports it to the Oprah Winfrey Museum of Fine Art in Cicero, Illinois. The curator brings in the scientists, who confirm its antiquity; along comes a postal worker eating a limburger sandwich who says the statue doesn’t smell right. Then a bevy of art experts declares it a fake. The curator takes it to the ultimate experts at the television program Antiques Roadshow, who declare it to be definitely 19th century. Having paid $9.7 million for the phony statue, the dejected curator auctions it on eBay for $2,750. (When the statue turns out to be genuine, the curator shoots himself.)

The bottom line, I surmise, is that it takes years and years of deep study to become truly expert so that you are then qualified to make snap decisions.

Diane Ravitch is research professor of education, New York University, and a member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

It is notoriously difficult to determine the impact of research and scholarship on public policy. While we all might like to imagine that the perfect study, a powerful book, a trenchant article, even a well-timed op-ed might turn the tide of history, this rarely happens. And when it does, it takes eons. Consider Charles Murray’s definitive work on social policy, Losing Ground, published 12 long years before Congress enacted welfare reform. Or George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s 1982 Atlantic Monthly article “Broken Windows,” which took just as long to gain traction in the nation’s police departments. Or, to pick an example from education, the late Milton Friedman’s voucher proposal (circa 1955), which wasn’t implemented in any form until Milwaukee’s program began in 1990.

Nevertheless, those of us at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, unabashed influence peddlers for sure, were curious about the impact of education studies published over the past decade or so. (We’re turning ten this year.) Among other things, we wanted to know whether the most influential studies were also the best studies, or if there was something else that explained their prominence.

So we contracted with the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, publishers of Education Week, to find out. They surveyed a host of education insiders, analyzed citations in academic journals, and tallied media hits. They computed scores across those three categories and identified 13 studies that stood head and shoulders above the rest (see Figure 1).

The list is eclectic. The studies range from large-scale assessments (National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP] and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study [TIMSS]), to evaluations of specific interventions (class-size reduction and vouchers), to commission reports (National Reading Panel, National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future), to data analyses (Education Trust on teacher quality, Jay Greene on graduation rates). What to make of them? Is a study’s influence related to its rigor?

At first blush, the most rigorous methodology, randomized field trials (RFT), appears not to fare well, since few such studies made the list. But solid RFT studies exist in only a handful of areas in education—class-size reduction, early reading, vouchers—and all appear here. Indeed, it’s hard to think of any RFT work more than a few years old that didn’t make the cut.

Policy analysts using other methodologies can also take heart. Smart, provocative data analyses or syntheses pack a punch. Look at the Education Trust on teacher quality, for example. Its “studies” were short policy briefs that combined solid research, unimpeachable data, and a powerful and popular ideology (“close the achievement gap”) in an accessible format.

Of course, influence is inevitably linked to impact, to discernible changes in policy or practice (for better or for worse). On this count, all sorts of studies have enjoyed success. The National Reading Panel led directly to the federal Reading First program. The Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio Experiment (STAR) class-size study inspired action at the federal and state levels. Jay Greene’s work on graduation rates prompted a commitment by the governors to report these data in a consistent fashion. Ed Trust’s work led to the “highly qualified teachers requirement in NCLB.” Paul Peterson’s voucher studies helped shape the D.C. voucher experiment authorized by Congress. And the American Diploma Project report motivated at least 25 states to vow to align their K–12 outcome standards with their higher-education entrance expectations. None of these actions was automatic—each was pushed by advocates with agendas—but it’s fair to say that policy or practice would be different had the studies never been published.

As for NAEP and its international cousin, TIMSS, though they surely differ in kind from the others, we dare not underestimate their influence. NAEP isn’t called the “Nation’s Report Card” for nothing, and the man on the street (and the reporter in the field) cares most of all about whether test scores are rising, which states are falling behind, and whether we can compete in world markets. These “horse race” questions are likely to drive the education influence industry for years to come.

 

THE WINNERS: THIRTEEN INFLUENTIAL EDUCATION STUDIES National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), broadly known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” is the only nationally representative assessment that enables comparisons of results across states and jurisdictions as well as changes in results over time. Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) TIMSS assesses student achievement in mathematics and science at the 4th- and 8th-grade levels in the United States and other participating countries. In 2003, some 46 countries took part. National Reading Panel (NRP), “Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction,” 2000 Congress convened the National Reading Panel in 1997 and charged its members with reviewing research-based findings on reading instruction. The panel reviewed only studies that appeared in English in a refereed journal, that focused on children’s reading development from preschool through grade 12, and that were experimental or quasi-experimental in design. Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) Experiment In this four-year longitudinal class-size study, more than 7,000 students in 79 schools were randomly assigned to one of three classroom situations: small class (13 to 17 students per teacher), regular class (22 to 25 students per teacher), or regular class with a full-time teacher’s aide. An analysis of academic achievement found that smaller class sizes resulted in higher achievement than either of the regular class–size situations. The National Academies’ Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (CBASSE), “Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children,” 1998 This commission reviewed research on topics related to the development of reading and reading outcomes, such as normal reading development and instruction, factors identifying groups and individuals at risk for reading difficulties, and prevention, intervention, and instructional approaches related to positive reading outcomes. The commission report found that many factors can promote learning to read, such as exposure to experiences in early childhood, promoting motivation related to reading, and attendance at schools that provide effective reading instruction. William L. Sanders on Value-Added Methodology and the Tennessee Value-Added Accountability System This statistical methodology introduced a new paradigm for predicting student academic progress and comparing the prediction to the contribution of individual teachers (or value added) as measured by student gain scores. Sanders’s methodology can provide an indication of an individual teacher’s effectiveness based on his or her students’ performance. The Education Trust on Teacher Quality The Education Trust has produced a number of noted reports on teacher quality. “Good Teaching Matters: How Well-Qualified Teachers Can Close the Gap” (1998) makes the case that the capability of the teacher, rather than influences from outside the classroom, has the strongest effect on student learning. In addition, the report highlights data showing that poor and minority students are more likely to be taught by less-qualified teachers. National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future (NCTAF), “What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future,” 1996 This commission report maps out a plan for providing every child with high-quality teaching by attracting, developing, and supporting excellent teachers. It contends that the capability of the teacher has the strongest effect on student learning, and that “recruiting, preparing, and retaining” quality teachers is the most important way to improve education. The National Academies’ Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (CBASSE), “How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School,” 1999 This commission report brings together findings from the fields of neuroscience, cognitive and social psychology, human development, and emerging technologies in examining the processes of effective learning and the environments in which learning best takes place. Key findings include the idea that students come to the classroom with preconceived notions of how the world works. If their schooling does not engage these notions, students may not grasp new concepts that they are taught. Richard F. Elmore on School Reform Drawing on his personal interactions with Community District #2 in New York City, Elmore promotes the idea that school reform cannot be imposed through artificial constructs developed by outside policymakers, but must begin from the inside with a commitment by educators to develop the knowledge, structures, and practices at the heart of instruction. His work examines the promise of distributed leadership, the potential for improved incentive systems to promote effective practices and bring them to scale, and the necessity to maintain a tight focus on instruction within an internalized accountability system. Jay P. Greene on High-School Graduation Rates Greene’s “High School Graduation Rates in the United States” (revised in 2002) employs a unique method for calculating graduation rates and presents his own rates for each of the 50 states, for distinct racial and ethnic group breakdowns, and for the 50 largest school districts. Greene’s results suggest that high-school graduation rates in the United States are lower than the public previously believed. American Diploma Project (ADP), “Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts,” 2004 Achieve, Inc., the Education Trust, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation established the American Diploma Project, whose report contends that the high-school diploma too often fails to signify that students are well prepared for postsecondary education or the workplace. As a remedy, it provides “college and workplace readiness benchmarks” designed to help states align their high-school assessments and graduation requirements with the demands of credit-bearing college courses and quality jobs. Paul E. Peterson on School Choice and Vouchers Peterson’s studies of voucher programs, including publicly funded programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland, find that participating African American students make greater academic gains than similar students who are not enrolled in the program. Peterson’s research also addresses the equality issue in the vouchers debate, rejecting the notion that voucher programs “skim” the best and brightest students away from public schools.

Preparing student teachers for the classroom should include practice with support and guidance from a skilled mentor teacher. Although hard data are difficult to come by, it seems student teachers are most often assigned mentors more or less at random. The university where I earned my teacher certification in secondary social studies takes a different approach, known as mutual selection: interns begin the school year observing and assisting in different classes.  Shortly after Thanksgiving, interns ask one or two teachers to be their mentor(s). Those teachers can accept or decline the placement.

During my first month, I spent a lot of time in the classrooms of two high school social studies teachers. Mr. Hayes taught American History. He took a businesslike approach to teaching, and he taught me how to grade student work efficiently. When students misbehaved, he brought them into the hallway where he would discuss the problem, instruct the students to change their behavior, and shake their hands before they returned to the classroom together. Mr. Raymond’s World History classroom looked traditional, but his teaching style got everyone up and out of their seats to work together on projects. He was widely adored. On the first day of school, he was two minutes late entering the classroom because so many of his former students had stopped to give him hugs and say hello. I was certain I would ask Mr. Raymond and Mr. Hayes to be my mentors.

In late September, my internship supervisor shared devastating news: I had to observe in the middle school. In my experience, middle schools were horrible places filled with unhappy students. To my surprise, it was wonderful! The kids were happy and enthusiastic. The social studies content was engaging—ancient world cultures and geography. And I discovered Ms. Brook, who used humor in her teaching, storytelling as an alternative to lecture, and project-based learning; she managed her classroom with a firm yet caring approach. I quickly decided that I would like to student teach with Mary Brook.

From January to May, Mary and I taught three classes of 8th-grade world cultures and two classes of 7th-grade geography. She proved to be a true mentor, even after I left her classroom. During my difficult first year teaching in a tough inner-city school, I was overwhelmed by the discipline issues I faced. Mary spent more than two hours with me on the phone after my first day in my own classroom.

In a traditional teacher-training program, I would have been asked before beginning my internship only to indicate a preference for a middle- or high-school placement. My request would unequivocally have been for a high-school assignment, and I would not have been assigned to Mary. With traditional student teaching assignments, university administrators or school districts assign pre-service teachers to in-service teachers with little or no knowledge of either person’s personality or teaching style. Not surprisingly, many mentoring relationships are strained and troubled. Today, as a student teacher supervisor, I see few genuine mentoring relationships develop between student teachers and randomly assigned mentors.

Ideally, a mentor offers support while communicating clear, meaningful feedback specifically designed to help the student teacher improve her practice. Such a “critical friendship” develops most easily when the mentor and student teacher have compatible teaching styles and personalities. Mutual selection allows student and mentor teachers who are already acquainted, and know they are compatible, to agree to work together, making a successful partnership far more likely.

Sara Fry is assistant professor of education at Bucknell University.

Can spiraling special education costs explain why educational achievement remained stagnant over the past three decades while real education spending more than doubled? Policy makers, education researchers, and school district officials often make this claim. Special education students—goes the argument—are draining resources away from regular education students.

In 1975, the federal government enacted the Education of All Handicapped Children Act, now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which requires states to provide a “free appropriate public education” to all students with disabilities. Parents have the right to work with school officials to devise an individualized education plan for their child. They also have the right to pursue legal action if they and the district cannot agree on what services their child will receive and whether the public school or a private provider will deliver those services. Since the implementation of the federal law and subsequent state laws, the percentage of students in the nation identified as requiring special education has risen sharply, from 8.3 percent of all students in 1977 to about 13.7 percent in 2004, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

The “Two-Step”

A popular riff on the idea that special education students are bleeding public school budgets blames private place ments. A large number of mostly undeserving disabled students and their clever parents, critics allege, have managed to get public schools to pay for attendance at expensive private schools. Tales of the “greedy needy”—disabled students who receive unreasonably expensive services—appear regularly in the media. The San Francisco Chronicle describes the case of a student with learning disabilities and an anxiety disorder whose parents “enrolled him in a $30,000-a-year prep school in Maine—then sent the bill to their local public school district.” The Chronicle declares that similar situations are “playing out up and down California as more parents of special education students seek extra-special education at public expense: private day schools, boarding schools, summer camps, aqua therapy, horseback therapy, travel costs, personal aides and more.” The Chronicle cites a school finance consultant to the California Department of Education to make the harm to general education parents clear: “This is not sustainable… Special education is a growing portion of budgets in many districts, squeezing out services for other pupils.”

Time magazine relates a story about an autistic child whose parents put him in an expensive private school and then “informed Colorado’s Thompson school district it had to pick up the bill for Boston Higashi’s $135,000 annual tuition.” Time warns, “Special ed costs threaten to eat into budgets for school endeavors that are not federally mandated, like athletics or the gifted-and-talented program. The money has to come from somewhere, says Becky Jay, who was president of the local school board when the [family] first asked for tuition reimbursement, ‘and regular kids lose out.’”

The New York Times does a similar dance routine. The paper profiles a wealthy community—Westport, Connecticut—where “some [special education students] are getting as little as a few hours of weekly speech therapy. Others get tuition for private school or home tutoring.” The superintendent, we are told, has held the line on special education services: “His administration has denied many special education requests—horseback riding and personal trainers, for instance—that it deemed extravagant.” Again, we are warned that runaway special education costs pose a threat: “The strain on the bottom line can be intense, even in Westport, where in the 2002–03 school year the $10.9 million spent on special education consumed 15.9 percent of the district’s education spending.”

It’s a two-step. First, provide colorful anecdotes of unreasonably expensive-sounding private placement, and then warn about how general education may suffer.

As it turns out, the evidence contradicts the private placement myth. Only a very small fraction of disabled students are placed in private schools at public expense. And contrary to claims that this is increasingly common, the likelihood that disabled students will be placed in a private school has not grown in the last 15 years. While some of those private placements are indeed expensive, the overall cost of private placement nationwide constitutes a tiny portion of public school spending.

The Extent of Private Placement

The media dance would be an engaging one if the plural of anecdote were data. But the data on private placement are actually dancing to a very different tune. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs tracks the number of private placements. The information for each state and by disability classification is posted on its web site. We have reproduced the relevant information in Table 1.

As of 2004, private schools served, at public expense, a total of 88,156 students with disabilities of the 5,963,129 students with disabilities nationally, which amounts to 1.48 percent. And these privately placed students amounted to 0.18 percent of the 47,917,774 students enrolled in public education. Nor has the percentage of students who are privately placed substantially increased in recent years. According to the Digest of Education Statistics, a similar proportion, about 1.6 percent, of students receiving services under IDEA were educated in a private school setting in 1989. The percentage of all students who were privately placed has increased slightly since then, due to an increase in the percentage of students diagnosed as disabled, but there has been no surge in the proportion of special education students in private settings.

The fact is that private placement is extremely rare.

Instances of private placement that occur as a result of parental requests rather than at the initiative of school districts appear to be even more rare. In many cases, public schools simply do not have the facilities or staff to accommodate students with certain disabilities, and those students are sent by the public schools to specialized private schools. For example, some public schools are incapable of serving blind and deaf students, who constituted 3,022 of the 88,156 privately placed students in 2004. Another 19,876 students in private placements are mentally retarded, have multiple disabilities, or have suffered a traumatic brain injury. The lion’s share of the 38,510 emotionally disturbed students attending private school at public expense were also likely sent because public school officials believed that they were unable to handle the students’ needs. The number of private placements for students with mild disabilities that resulted from parental action is likely to be a very small portion of the 88,156 students in private placements. (See Figure 1 for a breakout of private placements by disability.) Media reports are often just the tip of the iceberg, but in this case there may not be much more beneath the waterline.

 

Evidence on Cost

Perhaps the private placement of disabled students is so expensive that it still diverts significant resources from general education. To estimate the additional cost involved in placing disabled students in private schools, we relied on a study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. According to the Special Education Expenditure Project, the average cost of a private placement in 2000 was $25,580. The project report also provides the average cost of serving students in a public school setting, broken out by disability type (e.g., specific learning disability, mental retardation, autism, etc.). Weighting the costs by the type of disabilities among students placed in private schools, we can estimate that the average privately placed student would have cost $15,117 if he had instead been served in a public school. That is, we estimate that private placement cost an additional $10,463 per student.

This estimate likely overstates by a fair margin the additional cost of serving disabled students in private schools. It assumes that the cost of serving a privately placed student would be the same as the cost of serving the average student with the same disability. But we have good reason to believe that most privately placed students are more severely disabled and therefore more expensive to educate than the average student in the same disability classification. An emotionally disturbed student who requires private placement, for example, is likely to be more challenging and expensive to educate than the average emotionally disturbed student who remains in public schools. With the law’s emphasis on providing services in the least restrictive environment, the severity of the disability is likely to increase the probability of private placement.

Given the conservative estimate of $10,463 per pupil as the additional cost of private placement and given 88,156 privately placed students, the total additional cost of placing disabled students in private schools may be as high as $922 million. This sounds like a lot of money, but to public schools it is almost a rounding error. In the school year ending in 2000, the same year as our cost estimates, public schools spent $382 billion. The $922 million for private placement amounts to just 0.24 percent of the total budget. The cost of family-driven private placement is certainly less.

The Exceptions Do Not Make the Rule

There are some school districts and states where private placement is more burdensome. In Washington, D.C., for example, privately placed students constitute 3.03 percent of enrollment as of 2004. According to the Washington Post, the cost of private placements represents 15 percent of the school district’s budget.

But Washington, D.C., is the exception, not the rule. No state has more than 1 percent of its students privately placed. Only four states (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New Jersey) have more than 0.5 percent of their students attending private schools at public expense. And to repeat, nationwide only 0.18 percent of all students are privately placed. Nor is D.C. typical for a large urban school district. According to the New York Times, New York City schools have 2,000 privately placed students at a cost of $24 million. That amounts to only 0.19 percent of student enrollment and only 0.17 percent of the budget.

Why do some places have an unusually large proportion of privately placed students? In Washington, D.C., the explanation might be found in the dysfunction of the school district (see “Old Wine, New Bottles,” forum, Fall 2001, and “How Vouchers Came to D.C.,” features, Fall 2004). The D.C. schools struggle to provide an adequate education to any of their students. Disabled students are entitled under federal law to demand an adequate education and to obtain one in a private school if the public schools are unable to provide it. The nondisabled students who remain in D.C. public schools lack the same mechanism for exiting failing schools. That is, the high rate of private placement in D.C. may be more a function of the quality of D.C. public schools than a function of special education per se.

The higher rate of private placement found in D.C. and a handful of northeastern states could also be explained by a self-reinforcing process. Once some students obtain private placements, it is easier for others to do so. A network of parents and lawyers develops as private placements become more common, spreading information about options and strategies. So private placement may beget more private placement.

If obtaining a private placement requires a battle with school officials, parents with greater awareness of their legal rights and greater resources to engage in the fight are more likely to win. Washington, D.C., and northeastern states have a high concentration of wealthy and well-educated parents. Because it is the nation’s capital, D.C. has an unusually high number of lawyers, disability advocates, and policy-savvy parents.

Blaming Special Education Following anecdotes about expensive and unreasonable-sounding private placements, news stories often segue into reports of the total cost of special education—not private placement costs per se. Perhaps special education as a whole is the legitimate target of complaint.This claim also appears at odds with the facts. It is true that special education enrollments have been increasing at a rapid rate, but that doesn’t mean special education costs are rising faster than the resources available for regular education. To estimate the relative burden of providing special education services over time, we use information on the cost of these services by disability type reported by the Special Education Expenditure Project. We know the number of students in each disability classification over time from the U.S. Department of Education’s Digest of Education Statistics. If we multiply the number of students in each disability category by the cost of services in each disability, we can estimate the total cost of special education services. Of course, we only have information on the costs per disabled student from a recent study, and it is possible that the cost of serving students in each disability classification has increased in real terms over time. To adjust for this, we assume that the change in the real cost of special education services is commensurate with the change in student-teacher ratios. Making that adjustment, special education services cost roughly $17.7 billion in 1977, when federal protection for special education began; spending almost doubled to $34.3 billion by 2003 as the number of students in special education increased by 76 percent. The near doubling in special education costs is not attributable to a rise in rare and expensive disabilities. Media reports often emphasize the growth in students with autism but their numbers remain very small, less than 0.3 percent of enrollment. The total cost of special education services for autism does not exceed 0.45 percent of all spending. Severe disability categories like mental retardation, which are costly to serve, have actually experienced a decline in enrollment. The bulk of special education cost increases comes from explosive growth in the specific learning disability (SLD) category, which is among the least costly to serve. Students in this category grew from 796,000 in 1977 to 2,848,000 in 2003. Still, the large cost increase doesn’t mean that special education is taking away more resources from general education. Total revenue for public education also nearly doubled between 1977 and 2003, adjusted for inflation. Special education costs constituted roughly the same share of total public school revenue (8.3 percent) in 2003 as in 1977. While special education does consume more money over time, the relative financial burden of special education on public education has not increased because public schools are also receiving significantly more money. — Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters

 

Why So Few?

Recent evidence from Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program for Students with Disabilities seems to indicate that the real question is why private placements are so rare. This program provides all students in special education with a generous voucher that they can use to attend a private school, eliminating the need for dissatisfied parents to sue their school. According to the Florida Department of Education, 16,144 students currently use a McKay Scholarship, about 4 percent of the students receiving services under IDEA. Given that only 1.48 percent of special education students are privately placed nationally, the experience with McKay suggests a pent-up demand for private schooling among the disabled.

In a phone survey, only one-third of parents who participated in the McKay program reported that they were satisfied with their child’s previous public school. If these results can be generalized to other states, then why don’t more parents pursue private placements? The simple answer is that it is not always easy for parents to secure their preferences if those preferences differ from the judgments of school authorities. IDEA regulations require school districts to provide services in the “least restrictive environment” possible for the child to reach full educational potential. Typically, officials consider the least restrictive environment to be the local public school.

Litigating against a school district costs time and money that many parents don’t have, and school districts are increasingly willing to spend. Determined public schools can outspend and outlast almost any family. In California, school officials “fought so hard to block the claims of a student that Judge Oliver W. Wanger of United States District Court took 83 pages to berate the district’s ‘hard-line position’ and its law firm for ‘willfully and vexatiously’ dragging out the case so long that the former student is now 24.” Litigated cases are extremely rare; media reports of a tidal wave of special education lawsuits are contradicted by an examination of the data. In California, only 0.6 percent of students with a disability file a formal complaint over their educational services. Far fewer ever reach the courts.

McKay as an Alternative

The McKay program offers a number of benefits. First, our evaluation found that families reported obtaining higher-quality services in a private setting with a McKay voucher than they had received in public schools. Second, McKay offers the promise of slowing growth in the percentage of students identified as disabled. It provides schools with a disincentive for overdiagnosis, as each student identified as disabled becomes a voucher-eligible student who could leave public schools and take all of the money devoted to her education with her. Third, the McKay program should help contain legal costs, both for school districts and families. And, by allowing private placement without the cost of a legal struggle, it increases access to private placement for lower-income families. We found that lower-income families used McKay vouchers to gain access to private placement at about the same rate as higher-income families.

Programs like Florida’s McKay voucher for disabled students would also address the concerns that people have with the cost of private placement. The amount of the voucher is equal to what would be spent by a public school to educate a student with the same type and severity of disability. This would guarantee that private placement costs the public no more than serving the student in the public school.

Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform, University of Arkansas, and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Marcus A. Winters is senior research associate at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and doctoral fellow at the University of Arkansas.