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Tennessee isn’t tracking how many students with disabilities enroll in its new statewide private school tuition program, the latest concern for education advocates who say the program needs to be more transparent.
The Tennessee Department of Education said disability documentation is not required in the law establishing the Education Freedom Scholarship program earlier this year.
The department also isn’t tracking how many first-year tuition grants went to students already enrolled in private schools. Some advocates and lawmakers argue robust data is needed to determine who is benefiting from the program.
Equitable access for students with disabilities has long been a major point of debate in the Tennessee tuition grant conversation, particularly around private schools’ right to refuse enrollment of students with disabilities. A Republican majority in the Tennessee House this January voted down a proposed amendment to the program that provided some protections for students with disabilities in private school enrollment.
Jeff Strand, a former special education teacher and assistant director of government relations at EdTrust-Tennessee, said school choice has been billed by some state leaders as a “silver bullet” for families dissatisfied with their local public schools, but the lack of reporting requirements makes that hard to verify.
“It makes comparison or even evaluation of the success of this program impossible,” Strand said. “That has a double impact for marginalized student populations like students with disabilities.”
National data gathered before Tennessee launched its program showed students with disabilities, along with low-income families and students of color, are frequently left out of school programs because they have fewer options to choose from, among other issues. Private schools with specific special education programs may also charge higher tuition prices.
Students with disabilities who move to a private school also waive certain civil rights, such as the right to a free appropriate public education guaranteed under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
“I’d go so far as to say it’s not going to equally serve students with disabilities,” Strand said of Tennessee’s new program. “But we’re not going to be able to know. There’s nothing for us to learn from this. It’s a blank check to cherry-pick and handpick your student population as evidenced you’re doing a good job. But you can say, ‘We’re not going to take the toughest kids.’ You can take the kids you’re going to serve with minimal resources.”
The state’s lack of data on disability status stands in contrast to some major private school tuition programs around the country, such as Florida or Arizona, which uses paperwork from a student’s previous school and information spending on disability-related services to track how many students with disabilities are using state tax dollars to attend a private school.
Some Tennessee families might have submitted evidence of their student’s individualized education program if they were vying for a specifically allocated grant.
The EFS program gave some priority to students who were previously accepted into the Individualized Education Account program, an early school choice program Tennessee adopted for students with disabilities in 2015. Tennessee does not allow simultaneous EFS and IEA enrollment.
But the Tennessee Department of Education said in a statement that documentation submitted by former Individuals with Disabilities Education Act recipients couldn’t capture the full scope of disability status for all scholarship enrollees.
“At this time, we do not have the ability to determine the number of scholarships awarded specifically to applicants with IEPs,” Maggie Hannan, the department’s director of communications, said. “While eligible EFS applicants were able to upload documentation under the IEA category, not all of the documentation confirmed eligibility, nor would this likely have been reflective of all possible applicants with IEPs.”
Chalkbeat Senior National Reporter Kalyn Belsha contributed to this story.
Melissa Brown is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact Melissa at mbrown@chalkbeat.org.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.