Poster #37 - The Benefit-Cost of Inclusion: Evidence from a Cross-State Evaluation of a Special Olympics Schoolwide Program

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) rarely spend their school days engaged with the rest of the student population (NCES, 2024). The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities challenges this construct by promoting educational inclusion as a policy goal designed to provide students with IDD the necessary supports to obtain a high-quality education. Aligned with this goal, Special Olympics developed a whole school intervention, the Unified Champion Schools (UCS) program. Operated independently in all 50 states, UCS operates from a theory of action that by providing athletic and social opportunities for students with and without IDD to interact with and engage with one another equally as teammates and peers, youth of all abilities gain necessary social and emotional skills that are integral to success in career and life (Yin & Jodl, 2021). Past research has found that UCS generates positive impacts for both students with and without IDD (Yin et al., 2022), but prior to this investigation no economic evaluation of the program has been conducted—a necessary factor for helping schools (and governments) enact policies that encourage whole school inclusion.This presentation reports on a benefit–cost analysis of the UCS program, to determine whether, and to what extent, the benefits of the UCS program outweigh its implementation costs. We analyzed a purposive sample of six demographically and geographically diverse high schools in their third year of UCS implementation. We selected these schools for (1) their similarity to schools studied in the original impact sample (based on participation in the same UCS activities), (2) their variation in school size and geography, and (3) cross-state variation to ensure nationwide geographic representativeness. Program costs were estimated using the ingredients method (Levin et al., 2018). Data came from 30 interviews with school- and state-based UCS implementers. Benefits were monetized using estimates linking increased high school graduation to lifetime earnings and reduced public expenditures (Yin et al., 2022), reductions in behavioral incidents (Sorensen et al., 2022) and student absences. Both benefits and costs were calculated over a 3-year period to align with the impact sample.Findings show that for students in the graduating cohort, average per-pupil program cost was $1,502 (school variation: $833–$5,094). Average per-student benefits were estimated at $4,131, implying a programwide return on investment (ROI) of 175%.This paper provides the first rigorous economic evaluation comparing the costs and benefits of an educational inclusion program. The calculated ROI is a conservative lower-bound estimate of the actual return to the program since we only account for a limited number of benefits. Despite the estimated ROI representing a conservative lower-bound estimate, the resulting figure provides clear evidence that the benefits far exceed its costs; the findings give strong support to the economic argument for investing in educational inclusion of students with an IDD.

Author

• Rachel Feldman, American Institutes for Research (AIR)
  Presenting Author