Does Participation in Career and Technical Education in High School Improve the Probability of On-Time Graduation for Students With Disabilities?

• In Event: 49.042 - Pathways to Success for Students With Disabilities?

Abstract

Earlier work has shown positive returns to career and technical education for students making the transition from secondary education to the workforce, with clear benefits for students with and without disabilities. To date no work has explored whether academic benefits also accrue to students with disabilities who select into CTE programs.

Massachusetts has a unique and multi-pronged delivery system for CTE: they offer programs in comprehensive school settings where only some students participate in CTE, as well as regional vocational and technical schools that are stand-alone schools that operate as their own districts and where all students participate in some form of CTE. Understanding whether participation in either or both of these programs changes the odds of on-time graduation for students with disabilities may have policy implications for determining how CTE is made available to students with disabilities. In particular we focus on students with high-incidence disabilities (specific learning disabilities, communication disabilities, or health disabilities) who participate in CTE at the highest levels. To supplement this analysis we also explore descriptively whether students with disabilities have equitable access to CTE programs across all industrial clusters, or whether they are limited to only a few that may have lower expected labor-market or post-secondary benefits.

In this paper we use a rich set of administrative data made available to use through a partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. We have data for students (over 125,000 total student observations) in two graduation cohorts who were expected to graduate on time in the years 2008 or 2009. Using this data we are able to estimate the relationship between CTE participation in high school and the likelihood of on-time high school graduation for students with high-incidence disabilities. To produce these estimates we use two methods: logistic regression with fixed effects for disability category, town-of-residence, and grade-9 cohort, as well as coarsened exact matching (CEM), where we match on characteristics known to be used to make admissions decisions to CTE programs in Massachusetts.

We find that for students with disabilities in high-quality CTE programs the odds of on-time graduation are 1.75 times the odds for students with similar disabilities who do not participate in CTE. In addition, we find that students with disabilities who enroll in lower-quality CTE programs are not harmed, but do not seem to achieve the same benefits as students in the high-quality programs.

Current policies place some restriction on ease of access to these high-quality CTE programs. Our results suggest that there are still potential gains to students that can be achieved through policy modification. In addition, our results suggest that students in other states may stand to benefit from a model similar to the one employed in Massachusetts. Finally, graduating students with disabilities from high school on time accelerates their entrance into post-secondary education or the workforce (which provides a private benefit to that student) while also reducing the total costs of educating that student by reducing their total time in the K-12 system (a public benefit).

Authors

• Shaun Michael Dougherty, University of Connecticut

• Todd Grindal, Harvard University

• Thomas Hehir, Harvard University