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In Denmark, School Choice Helps All Children
Adapted from Lewis Andrews, “The Special Education Scare," in Salisbury and Tooley, eds., What America Can Learn from School Choice in Other Countries. Washington, DC; Cato Institute; 2005.
With research demonstrating the educational success of school voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland, and with the constitutionality of public funding of religiously affiliated schools upheld by Supreme Court in 2002, the national debate over the use of public money to subsidize private schooling now turns increasingly to the likely impact on learning disabled students.
Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers repeatedly warns that making private education more accessible to the poor and middle class will cause good students to “flee” to independent and parochial schools, leaving behind those kids who are physically and emotionally handicapped, hyperactive, or who have been involved with the juvenile justice system.
Reinforcing this notion that school choice will turn public schools into “special education ghettos,” NAACP president Kweisi Mfume claims that the true cost of private education will always be more than what the government can afford to cover, so “those in the upper-and-middle income brackets will be helped the most … as long as their kids don’t have personal, behavioral, or educational challenges that cause the private school to pass them by.”
Choice advocates counter with the argument that giving parents the financial ability to select their children’s schools actually helps the learning disabled, freeing them from poorly performing remedial programs and related administrative wrangling. They point to the popularity of Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program, passed in 2000, which allows parents of learning disabled students to receive a subsidy of between $6,000 and $20,000 to cover the tuition at a private school. Although this Florida plan is not well known nationally, it has become the fastest growing school choice program in the United States, serving more than 12,185 children in 749 private and parochial schools after just three years.
In early March of this year, Governor Jon Huntsman signed into law a similar bill in Utah. The Carson Smith Scholarships for Students with Special Needs Act now gives parents of special education students, who are dissatisfied with their child’s progress in public school, the automatic right to a private school subsidy without having to endure a lengthy legal process.
With Florida, Utah, and at least nine other states -- Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin -- seriously considering legislation to give all children the right to attend any school, public or private, the question of how such a policy effects those with special needs becomes increasingly important. How can we know what would happen to over the five million learning disabled students in America, if all pupils -- not just those in special education -- could freely pick among all schools?
Fortunately, there are some telling indicators from abroad. Today there are five advanced industrial countries that have adopted school choice as national policy: Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark. Of these, the case of Denmark is especially interesting because unlike the other four, which are still fine-tuning more recently enacted voucher-like systems, the home of Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Anderson has subsidized private education for more than a century and a half -- and in 1915 enshrined the right to school choice in its constitution. Today, twelve percent of all Danish students attend more than 470 private schools with municipal governments covering 80-85% of the cost.
The example of Denmark gets even more interesting, when we discover that in May of 1969 its parliament passed a resolution declaring that “handicapped pupils” be instructed “in a normal school environment,” effectively granting special education students the same right to attend private schools as mainstream students. Since then, parents have had the final say over what school their learning disabled son or daughter attends; and, if an independent school is chosen, the Ministry of Education pays a sum per pupil to the receiving school (with the student’s home town ultimately reimbursing the Ministry). Supplemental resources, such as classroom aids, extra courses and after-hours tutoring, are made available through grants on a case-by-case basis, but as a practical matter this procedure has not proved an impediment to parents placing their special needs child in a private school.
The Danish Ministry of Education is the first to admit that its initial impulse to give learning disabled students equal access to all schools was a bow to the politically correct fashion of treating any difference between pupils as if it didn’t or shouldn’t matter. Official publications now concede that integration of the handicapped “is not just the omission of segregation. It also involves adaptation of the ordinary school environment so as to cater to the development of the impaired pupil ….” But the inclusive spirit of the original policy has remained unchanged for over thirty years, making Denmark a uniquely instructive experiment in fate of special needs students under any policy approximating the freedom of a voucher system.
Judged purely on statistics, the Danish system of universal school choice would appear to benefit the vast majority of handicapped pupils. Only .5% of Denmark’s 80,000 learning disabled students are confined to specialized institutions, as compared to five times that percentage in the United States, with both public and private schools committed to the philosophy of including special needs children in regular classrooms. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which tracks education statistics internationally, has praised the Danes for their exceptionally “strong commitment to inclusive education” and for years has held up Denmark’s approach to schooling as a model to the rest of the world.
Once more, the seeming success of school choice in Denmark has been accomplished with some interesting economies. While the cost of educating the average pupil in Denmark is one of the highest in the world -- due to powerful unions that limit a teacher’s annual working hours to two-thirds of the American average -- the actual administrative cost for supervising the public subsidy of independent schools is remarkably low. In Denmark it takes only five people in the Ministry of Education to oversee all 82,000 private school students. Compare this to California, where nearly half of every public education dollar goes to bureaucratic oversight.
As to the fear that choice encourages mainstream students to flee public schools, turning them into special needs ghettos, Professor Niels Egelund, a prominent researcher on learning disabilities at the Danish University of Education, notes that “the percentage of pupils in private and parochial institutions is actually quite small” in spite of the low supplement required to attend one. “Any parent, who really wanted to,” he says, “could manage to send his child to an independent school, but most are satisfied not to.” Egelund’s observations support the argument that having a private option, rather than abandoning the most vulnerable students in failing schools, tends instead to make all schools more accountable to parents.
Indeed, one of the striking aspects of private education in Denmark is that it is not seen as particularly elite. A recent study by the European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education (EADSNE), indicates that the choice of an independent school in Denmark is based far less on academic status than on a school’s denominational affiliation, its political or social leanings, the mix of instructional languages, or increasingly the desire of some parents for old-fashioned discipline.
And if school choice has not led to the segregation of the learning disabled into inferior public schools, neither does it tolerate the practice sometimes seen in America of giving special needs students the mere appearance of an adequate education. Although the Ministry of Education recognizes that some students need “to follow different tracks in order to reach desirable academic goals,” says Per Kristensen, chairman of the umbrella organization for Danish private schools, special education in his country “does not exempt the learning disabled from having to attain them.” To the contrary, Kristensen believes that the existence of independent schools, which are freer to experiment with innovative teaching techniques, actually improve the quality of instruction for the learning disabled throughout Denmark.
The overall success of special needs students in Denmark, as well as in other school choice countries, has led the EADSNE to conclude that the financial mechanisms for providing services to the learning disabled may be just as important to their intellectual and social development as any known teaching technique. In its “Seventeen Country Study of the Relationship between Financing of Special Needs Education and Inclusion,” EADSNE found that monopolistic public school systems which simply upped the budget for every increase in the number of learning disabled students produced the least desirable outcomes, no matter what the educational philosophy or curriculum.
In its own published evaluation of providing school choice for all students, the Danish Ministry of Education writes that, while no one system can perfectly serve all handicapped pupils, theirs has “often succeeded in practice in cases where it has been deemed impossible in theory.”
Dr. Lewis M. Andrews is Executive Director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy Inc. at Trinity College, a Connecticut research and educational institute.
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