The Trump administration’s plans to expand scholarship tax credits—a less subsidized version of vouchers—could very well end up being a boon to individual students in great need across the country. Such programs help individual students by allowing them to escape from failing public schools. But they do nothing to fix failing public schools.
An education reform worthy of the name should involve actually reforming public schools. And it should begin with the sprawling special education bureaucracy, which epitomizes everything that’s wrong with those schools.
My introduction to special education came as a local news reporter in New Hampshire. I quickly learned that the communities I covered had not one, but two public education systems. One was the regular public education system most people know about. The other was special education, which had its own set of rules and administrative apparatus, and, to varying degrees, separate buses, classes, and schools.
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