Public School Response to Special Education Vouchers: The Impact of Florida’s McKay

The authors expand on research evaluating public school response to school choice policies by consid-ering the particular influence of voucher programs for disabled students—a growing type of choice program that may have different implications for public school systems from those of more conventional choice programs. The authors provide a theoretical framework to show that special education vouchers could influence both school quality and the likelihood that a school will choose to identify the marginal child as disabled. Using a rich panel data set from Florida, the authors find some evidence that competi-tion from a voucher program for disabled students decreased the likelihood that a student was diagnosed as having a mild disability and was positively related to academic achievement in the public schools