Walter Olson of overlawyered.com nailed the problem with the majority ruling when he opined in an e-mail, "The impulse to get a better shake for one's kid is universal, but it's disproportionately wealthy and clever parents, with their hired lawyers and experts, who succeed in using these rules to obtain a private school education at public expense. In this case, the question was whether parents should at least try the public schools' proffer of special-ed services before declaring them inadequate, which doesn't seem to me to be too much to ask."

And what a test case. You could understand the court's order for tuition payments for private school for a severely disabled child -- but not a teenager who had managed to graduate without any special education from kindergarten to the 11th grade, when he developed a marijuana problem.

The Obama administration blithely went along because, as Solicitor General Kagan wrote, it would be wrong to leave parents with "the choice of leaving the child in an inappropriate placement or paying for an appropriate placement in a private school."

Sadly, many parents face a similar dilemma. But only parents with the resources to game experts (who will diagnose a disability) and lawyers stand to win full boarding school tuition.

Noting that Souter's dissent was joined by conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, Olson noted, "I'm still trying to figure out why being progressive on this issue means siding with the private schools and affluent parents, while the conservative justices are the ones to defend the public school ideal of universal service."

It's one of those nice people things. The government has expanded the notion of disability to the point of absurdity. But nice people refuse to look at the impending drain on public school budgets, or how one child's boarding school tuition can mean that much less funding for all the other students' educational needs.