Poster #17 - The Short- and Long-Term Impacts of Expanding Public Education for Disabled Students

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

Historically, many public schools did not provide educational services or support for students with disabilities (also known as special education). Instead, disabled students struggled in their education or were excluded from public schools altogether. But, between 1949 and 1980, as activists pushed to improve the education of disabled students, every state in the US enacted legislation mandating public schools to identify and provide educational services for children with all types of disabilities. This is arguably one of the largest expansions of public education in recent US history, potentially enabling access to education for as many students as other major programs like Head Start. Today, about 15% of students in the US receive these services (NCES 2024).

In this paper, I study the causal impacts of these state mandates on disabled students and their non-disabled peers from preschool to adulthood and on a wide range of outcomes, including education, labor market outcomes, and family life. This work fills a gap in the literature on the impacts of educational services for disabled students, adding longer-term evidence and more outcomes than have been covered in prior work. Before the mandates required states to provide services for disabled students, little data was collected on their education. This lack of data is one possible reason for the scarcity of prior work on these mandates despite their importance. I begin by assembling a database of the relevant legislation in each state. To study relevant outcomes, I identify and compile a number of datasets from survey, administrative, and Census sources. Together, these data sources allow me to conduct, to my knowledge, the first quantitative causal study of these mandates and to offer detailed new evidence on how access to education for disabled students impacts their economic and family lives. Using variation in the timing of the mandates between states and a staggered difference-in-difference design, I estimate causal impacts separately for both disabled and non-disabled students.

I find that the mandates caused a sharp increase the share of disabled students receiving services and led to a marked increase in school enrollment. By adulthood, disabled individuals below schooling age when a mandate was enacted in their state attained 0.23 more years of education before 12th grade. These individuals also became more likely to acquire work experience, to form independent households, and to become parents. Instead of being zero-sum, the mandates had positive spillovers on nondisabled individuals’ education, employment, and incomes. The magnitude of these spillovers can be explained by the fact that the mandates increased school spending by over 15% in the long term. I find that the mandates are cost-effective: given the increased tax revenues generated by increased employment and incomes, the additional spending on public education is more than recovered. Non-monetary benefits are likely much larger. Although current policy debates in the US occur around a much more developed special education system, this work sheds light on the potentially large benefits of expanding these services.

Author

• Laura Caron, Haverford College
  Presenting Author