Jillian Schneider | April 2, 2025
(The Lion) — When public school activists attack school choice, they often claim choice programs will harm disadvantaged students, such as minorities, low-income students and especially those with special needs.
After all, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act only applies to public schools. Private schools have far fewer legal obligations regarding special education, it is argued.
In reality, an increasing number of parents are using school choice to educate their special needs children, as explained by EdChoice’s senior research analyst, John Kristof.
“As valuable as goals of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) are, the law’s enforcement is left largely to parents,” writes Kristof. “If a child’s special needs are not being met in their public school, it is up to the parents to ‘make their service preferences known, and seek redress if these requests are not responded to.’”
The Lion has reported on many examples of public schools putting barriers in families’ paths when it comes to meeting special needs.
Last winter, for example, a Wisconsin mother filed a lawsuit against her school district for racially discriminating against her dyslexic son.
Even though her son had a more severe disability, the district prioritized its limited resources to “First Nations, black, and Hispanic students.”
In Virginia, a school district sued a single father for $600,000, alleging he harassed school staff over accommodations for his special needs son.
“I’ve advocated passionately for my son, but who won’t?” the father told local media. “Every time there’s been an issue they’ve just come after me and never helped him.”
And one paraprofessional in Arizona claimed his district knowingly violated students’ IEPs (individualized education plans).
Using available data, Kristof found at least 184,450 special needs students in 21 school choice programs.
“I’ve only listed data from about a quarter of school choice programs. While these programs represent most of the largest choice states in the country, there are still dozens of programs that do not report or, sometimes, even collect data on students with disabilities,” Kristof explains. “And some research suggests that students with disabilities in these programs are undercounted.”
As of last year, there were about 80 state-run school choice programs in the United States. Around 30 are specifically designed for or prioritize special needs students.
And school choice programs may very well have a higher proportion of special needs students than public schools.
“If we conservatively assume 184,450 is the total number of private school choice students with disabilities, they would account for 15% of all 1.25 million students in private school choice programs,” Kristof observes. “For comparison, that’s the same percentage of public school students who have disabilities.”
Private schools may not have the same legal obligations as public ones, but that isn’t stopping parents from choosing them.
Indiana’s ESA (education savings account) program dedicated to special needs students reached its max capacity after just 3 years in operation.
And similar programs in Florida have been known to have waitlists thousands of students long.
This article was made available to EdNews Virginia via The Lion, a publication of the Herzog Foundation.