Twelve studies find that overall gains in charter schools are larger than other public schools; four find charter schools’ gains higher in certain significant categories of schools; six find comparable gains; and, four find that charter schools’ overall gains lagged behind traditional schools.
Source: Charter School Achievement: What We Know, July 2005 Update
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http://goldwaterinstitute.org/article.php/251.html
The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), designed to prevent the neglect and segregation of special education students, has resulted in the neglect and segregation of even larger student populations of minorities nationwide, including Arizona. The culprit: Perverse financial incentives to classify children as "learning disabled" when in fact they are "learning deficient," meaning they require remedial reading instruction, not special education programs.
Arizonans must not wait for Washington to resolve the problem. With nearly 10 percent of Arizona's disability labels attributable to perverse financial incentives under the special education "bounty funding formula," we must forgo the current funding system, repudiated by Congress during the 1997 IDEA reauthorization and by 16 states. In addition, Arizonans should implement a statewide voucher program enabling all disabled students to attend a public or private school of their parents' choice. According to the Arizona Department of Education, 1,170 disabled students are already attending private schools at public expense. The success of Florida's revenue-neutral special education voucher program, the McKay Scholarship Program, demonstrates that when perverse financial incentives are replaced with school choice, the quality of education improves, benefiting all students.
Date: 2003
Source: Goldwater Institute
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