Thanks for your comment. We hear this claim a lot, and there is no doubt that parents do drive diagnoses in some cases. Perhaps there are some local areas where this is an especially common phenomenon. However, the empirical data really don’t allow us to attribute the problem primarily to parents nationwide. Two-thirds of the growth in special education is directly attributable to funding incentives; that leaves only one-third of the growth attributable to all other factors combined. The influence of parents will be some subset of that one-third.
But disempowering parents is no solution in any event. Any institution becomes dysfunctional if it is not accountable to the people it serves, no matter how well intentioned the people in that institution are; that’s why the monopoly is the paradigmatic case of market failure. Schools are no different; give them a monopoly and disempower the people they’re supposed to be serving, and you will get dysfunctional schools.
