Special education in public schools seeks to help students with disabilities live their fullest lives. Done well, this preparation can lead to careers, college or other opportunities for more than 7.5 million K-12 students enrolled in special education nationwide.
Jacob Hibel, professor of sociology in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, has just received a $1.69 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to study how special education across Oregon public schools affect lifelong outcomes for students with disabilities. The results of this three-year study will chart a path for future research on how system-wide changes can drive improvements for all students in special education.
“These programs serve a diverse population of learners and are also staffed and administered in widely varying ways,” said Hibel, who is also co-director of the UC Davis Center for Poverty and Inequality Research. “We’re going to learn how these differences affect the experiences of students with disabilities in K-12 schooling.”
Studying special education in Oregon public schools
The study includes three main objectives:
- Describe variation in special education program staffing across schools and districts
- Assess variation in how special education students are integrated into classrooms with non-disabled students during middle and high school at the school and district levels
- Identify variation in how K-12 special education students across schools, districts and geographic regions are integrated with support systems in adulthood
Each of these three factors — variation in program staffing, classroom integration and support systems as adults — affect outcomes for students in special education.
The study will link administrative data from Oregon’s K-12 schools and colleges with individual-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau to chart how special education programs affect long-term outcomes well into adulthood. The data include more than 200,000 current and former students in special education programs.
The data also make it possible to break down how students’ individual characteristics affect the relationship between their special education program and their lifelong outcomes. These characteristics include race, ethnicity, gender, family socioeconomic status, English-learner status, immigrant generation status and type of identified disability.
Collaborators on the study include Quentin Brummet at NORC at the University of Chicago, Christopher Cleveland at Brown University, Andrew Penner at UC Irvine and Andrew Saultz at Lewis & Clark College.
Bringing special education into sharper focus
The Rehabilitation Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act require public schools to provide extra services and other accommodations to students with disabilities. These special education programs, which are associated with an Individualized Education Program and 504 plans assuring equal access, support students who have physical or intellectual impairments or other disabilities that impact their education.
Students in these programs face significant challenges, both in school and throughout their lives. They are less likely than their peers outside of special education to complete high school or a four-year college degree. They have lower average earnings, are less likely to have a bank account and are more likely to have encounters with the criminal justice system.
In this study, the research team is interested in what helps students in special education to thrive throughout their lives. This includes stable employment, independent living and achieving milestones throughout adulthood like lasting relationships.
While the study includes only data from Oregon, the state is comparable to many others in terms of special education as well as the population’s general characteristics. Oregon is the 18th most urban state and ranks 25th in median income. It ranks 20th in the percentage of students enrolled in public schools. In special education, the 9.5% of Oregon students enrolled in these programs in 2021 nearly matched the 9.7% who enrolled nationwide.
“At first we did not fully appreciate how close Oregon was to the national average on so many of the dimensions that are commonly studied by education researchers,” said Hibel. “We don’t expect Oregon to represent the U.S. as a whole, but our findings will likely include important lessons for other contexts across the country.”
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