Not only can legislation impose excessive regulations on education providers, it can also open the door to costly litigation when rights and responsibilities are poorly defined. For example, when it enacted the Education for Individual with Disabilities Act, Congress never sufficiently defined the term "appropriate" in "free appropriate public education." In practice, that ambiguity has opened the door to costly litigation over what public schools are obligated to provide to students with disabilities.
Says Devereuxs Thomas McCool:
We probably have at any given time, one or two children who are here privately. But then what the family does is once the child is here, they go back to the district and say this is the program I want. If you can duplicate that, and its got to have this kind of staff ratio, these kinds of activities, this kind of individualization, this kind of social-work support, this kind of clinical support . . . and they cant do it. So a lot of [parents] go through the back door to get public funding.128