Special Olympics Unified Champion Schools Program and Student Academic and Behavioral Outcomes

• In Event: From Research to Practice: Promoting Social and Emotional Learning Skills for All Students Through Innovative Social Inclusion Programming

Abstract

Lack of social inclusion and peer support are strong predictors of disengagement during school, leading to poor social emotional skills and academic achievement, and eventually higher likelihood of dropping out of school, especially for students with intellectual disabilities. The current view of social inclusion, reflecting both interpersonal relationships and community participation, calls for a broader whole-school approach. The Special Olympics Unified Champion Schools (UCS) program addresses this imperative and aims to integrate students with ID into the core of school communities through three interrelated components: Unified Sports, Inclusive Youth Leadership, and Whole-School Engagement. All three components bring together students with and without ID, providing opportunities for greater interactions and the formation of more meaningful relationships and a more social inclusive school environment (Siperstein et al., 2019). Studies have shown that the UCS model is correlated with improved social emotional and learning skills which might in turn to lead to improved academic outcomes.
Much of the literature has either examined the impact of social inclusion programs on behavioral outcomes or the impact of academic inclusion on academic outcomes. Given the well-documented relationship between social cohesion and school engagement as well as academic achievement, we hypothesize that the whole school social inclusion program, the UCS program, may lead to positive spillover effects on students’ academic performance. The current study uses individual-level student administrative data from North Carolina and UCS implementation data from Special Olympics, to estimate the impact of the UCS program on student academic (standardized test scores, high school GPA, and high school exit) and behavioral (absenteeism, suspension/expulsion) outcomes. We exploit variation in UCS implementation timing across schools in North Carolina in a Difference-in-Differences framework to estimate the impact of UCS on target outcomes for students with ID, students with other type of disabilities, and those without disabilities.
We find that cumulative exposure to the UCS program leads to improved academic achievement for students with ID, students with other type of disabilities, as well as students without disabilities. The impact is strongest for students with ID. One additional year of UCS exposure led to an increase in end-of-grade standardized math scores by 0.03 standard deviations for students with ID, 0.01 standard deviations for both students with other disabilities and students without disabilities. An additional year of UCS exposure was associated with an increase of 0.04 and 0.01 standard deviations in reading test scores for students with ID and students with other disabilities respectively. For high school students, one additional year of UCS exposure leads to an increase in GPA by 0.08 points for students with ID, 0.02 points for students with other disabilities, 0.03 points for students without disabilities. In addition, longer UCS exposure leads to small decreases in absenteeism for all types of students and lower probability of disciplinary incidents for students with other disabilities and students without disabilities. For high school students with ID, cumulative exposure decreased the likelihood of suspension or expulsion by 0.7 percentage points, approximately 4 percent of the baseline rate.

Authors

• Michelle Yin, Northwestern University

• Garima Siwach, American Institutes for Research

• Aditi Pathak