“You ask whether we might see a proliferation of specialized private schools for SLD with vouchers. Florida’s voucher program for disabled students is by far the oldest and largest such program (there are five nationwide) and we haven’t seen very much of that so far. In practice, almost all the SLD kids are going into regular schools. That tends to support our hypothesis that a lot of these kids were not legitimately SLD.”
Huh? That’s rather a major leap, isn’t it?
Parents may not want to use vouchers to send their kids to private programs for a variety of reasons. Private programs only make sense if your child is severely disabled and has no hope of being mainstreamed. If your child has a speech and language disorder (raising her hand), then you probably want your child to be mainstreamed for part of the day or at least around regular kids during lunch and recess for peer modeling. You want your kid housed in a school that has regular kids.
