A Comparative Study of Parental Satisfaction with the Private and Government Special Needs Programs for Children with Learning Disabilities in Malaysia

Abstract

While many types of special education programs have sprung in
Malaysia throughout the recent years - each with its own
guarantee of a promising opportunity for education - these settings
can be classified by private and government type according to the
requirement of fees. This mixed method research study was
conducted to answer the question: ‘Is quality of the programme
simultaneous with the cost it demands?’ whereby quality is
measured based on parents’ level of satisfaction through surveys
and interviews conducted for this study. The level of satisfaction of
two groups of parents with children with disability - one enrolled
into a private special education programme and the other into a
government setting are studied concerning two aspects of quality
indicator, namely, curriculum modification, as well as teachers’ role
effectiveness in conducting the curriculum. The finding shows that
there is not a significant difference between the level of satisfaction
of parents towards government school (M = 69.07, SD = 11.25) and
private school (M = 70.50, SD = 7.75); t(58) = -0.58, p > 0.05, however, the qualitative data has identified a contradiction - showing that the inadequacy of teacher-parent collaboration and
parental expectations based on cost are major factors conduced to
the quantitative findings.