Supreme Court Upholds Tuition Ruling

I'm very sympathetic to parents of children with disabilities -- I have friends dealing with these issues -- but from a public policy perspective, I have real questions about what's going on and the fallout from yesterday's Supreme Court ruling (though it wasn't really a ruling -- it was a tie and will likely soon be revisited):

The Supreme Court on Wednesday let stand a ruling that the New York City school system must pay private school tuition for disabled children, even if the parents refuse to try public school programs first. But the justices are likely to take up the issue again soon, with nationwide implications.
 
The justices split, 4 to 4, in the case of Tom Freston, the former chief  executive for Viacom, and his son Gilbert, with Justice Anthony  M. Kennedy taking no part. The tie meant that a 2006 ruling in Mr.  Freston’s favor by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit,  in Manhattan, stands for now. But it has no effect outside the circuit, which covers New York State, Connecticut and Vermont.
 
The case has been closely watched by educators. Almost seven million students nationwide receive special-education services, with 71,000 educated in private schools at public expense, according to the federal Education  Department. Usually, districts agree to pay for those services after conceding that they cannot provide suitable ones.

I don't claim to be an expert on this topic by any means, but as best I can tell, Tom Freston (a centimillionaire) is quite representative of the mostly wealthy, well-connected parents who are able to hire lawyers and get vouchers -- let's be honest about what they are -- for their kids.  To the extent that a public school cannot or is not meeting a child's needs, I'm all in favor of giving the family a voucher so they can find a better solution, but that's not what we have today.

a) What about the low-income parents of kids with disabilities who can't afford lawyers and don't know how to maneuver through the system?  I'd bet my last dollar that, given two kids with identical disabilities, the one from the wealthy family is many times more likely to get a voucher to attend a much better private school.
 
b) Far more importantly, what about kids without disabilities who have the misfortune of attending a chronically failing, often violent school in which virtually no educating is going on (of course, nearly all of the students in such schools nationwide are low-income and minority)?  Why should children with disabilities get a voucher when schools don't meet their needs, but children who attend schools with disabilities, which aren't meeting any students' needs, get nothing?!
 
I think what Florida has makes the most sense: a statewide law that automatically offers vouchers to any student with a qualifying disability.  Even better, addressing my point in (b) above, Florida also used to have a voucher law that gave vouchers to students to any school that was rated an F two consecutive years -- until the Florida Supreme Court overturned it in one of the most asinine misapplications of the law I've ever seen (why does Florida always seem to be front and center when this happens? ;-)   (To see how competition spurs schools to improve, see the last few slides in my deck posted here: www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Voucherslides.pdf <http://www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Voucherslides.pdf>  -- the last slide shows the results in Florida.)
 

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Supreme Court Upholds Tuition Ruling
By DAVID STOUT
October 11, 2007
www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/education/11school.html

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 — The Supreme Court on Wednesday let stand a ruling that the New York City school system must pay private school tuition for disabled children, even if the parents refuse to try public school programs first. But the justices are likely to take up the issue again soon, with nationwide implications.