When Do Students With Disabilities Graduate High School? Using Survival Analysis to Understand the Graduation of Students With Disabilities

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

Abstract

With No Child Left Behind (NCLB), high-school graduation rates have become an essential indicator of high-school success. High schools, districts, and states are now accountable for measuring, reporting, and improving their graduation rates, in particular on-time graduation-rates, for students in the aggregate as well as by subgroup. Students with disabilities are one such subgroup. Policies expressed in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), however, provide differing expectations for high-school graduation of students with disabilities. IDEA permits students with disabilities to receive services in high school until they are twenty-one years old. NCLB, on the other hand, emphasizes students with disabilities graduate within four years after high-school entry.
To understand the appropriate expectation for high-school graduation, in this paper, I examine when students with disabilities graduate in Massachusetts and how graduation patterns differ for students based on student characteristics and educational-placement decisions. I utilized discrete-time survival analysis to estimate the conditional probability for high-school graduation in a given year after high-school entry by disability category. I also examine how these graduation patterns are different for students in fully-included in the general-education setting and students in substantially-separate educational settings.
Overall, I found that in Massachusetts, students with high-incidence disabilities, other health impairments and neurological disabilities, and sensory disabilities have elevated graduation-risk profiles and the majority of these students graduate within seven years, on average. Students with emotional disturbance, intellectual disabilities, and low-incidence disabilities, on the other hand, have lower graduation-risk profiles and about a third to a half of these students graduate within seven years, on average. Within each disability category, the conditional probability for graduation is highest for on-time graduation, four years after high-school entry. Additionally, across all disability groupings, except for students with intellectual disability, low-income students have a lower conditional probability for on-time graduation than non-low-income students. However, low-income students have a higher conditional probability for extended-time graduation than non-low-income students.
In examining the relationship between educational-placement decisions and graduation, I found that students with disabilities who are fully included have higher graduation-risk profiles, and students with disabilities who are educated in substantially-separate settings have a lower graduation-risk profiles. Across all disability groupings and in each year after high-school entry, students educated in fully-included settings have a higher conditional probability for graduation than students educated in substantially separate settings, on average. Additionally, the differences in conditional probability are more pronounced for on-time graduation than extended-graduation.

Author

• Laura A. Schifter, Self-employed