The 1984 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation is used to estimate the extent of labor market discrimination against men with disabilities. Men with disabilities are classified into a group with impairments that are subject to prejudice (handicapped) and a group with impairments that are less subject to prejudice (disabled). Very large differences in employment rates and hourly wages are found between handicapped and nondisabled men. The employment rates and hourly wages of disabled men are slightly lower than those of nondisabled men but substantially higher than those of handicapped men. Using data from the 1972 Social Security Survey of the Disabled as a benchmark, we find that wage differentials between nondisabled and both disabled and handicapped men increased between 1972 and 1984. The employment rate for handicapped men also increased but the 1984 rate was still substantially lower than the rates for nondisabled or disabled men.
The study uses a multivariate approach to investigate the effects of state education policies on grade repetition. The policies are: Head Start expenditures, provision of public pre-school handicapped programs, current school expenditures per pupil, provision of special education services, and grade school entrance dates. The effects of these policies are contrasted with the magnitude and significance of individual, family, and neighborhood characteristics. After holding constant state fixed effects, the state-to-state variations in overall school expenditures, special education enrollments of 6-15 year olds, handicapped preschool enrollments, and Head Start allocations are not found to have a significant impact on whether a child repeats a grade. School entrance month has a very large and significant impact on individual students' probability of having repeated a grade. This impact is due, almost entirely, to the relative age of the student. Thus, overall, variations in state policies are not found to have an impact on rates of school failure. In contrast, individual, family and neighborhood characteristics are all found to have large and significant effects on the probability that a child will repeat a grade.
Persistent increases in spending on elementary and secondary schools have gone virtually undocumented. Real expenditure per student increased 31/2 percent per year over the period 1890-1990. Decomposition of the spending growth shows that it resulted from a combination of falling pupil-staff ratios, increasing real wages to teachers, and rising expenditure outside of the classroom. Although the expansion of education for the handicapped has had a disproportionate effect on spending, most of the growth in expenditure during the 1980s came from other sources. Significant teacher salary increases, particularly for females, have failed to keep up with wages in other occupations.
The extent of discrimination against handicapped men and women is estimated in this paper. Observed wage differentials are corrected for selectivity bias. The results indicate that almost one-third of the wage differential for men and close to one-half for women can be attributed to discrimination. Interestingly, handicapped women are also subjected to sex discrimination.
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This review examined employment and postsecondary education outcomes for youth with disabilities leaving secondary schools, as well as studies of educational practices reporting high-quality outcomes. Analytical considerations included the current initiatives in educational reform that emphasize the improvement of career-related outcomes for all students and the inclusion of youth with disabilities in regular classes. While school- and employment-related outcomes for youth with disabilities continue to be problematic when compared with those for nondisabled youth, two educational practices appear to consistently align with higher-quality outcomes for students. The promising practices that merit attention in improving programs and in advancing the knowledge base include school supervised work experiences and functionally oriented curricula in which occupationally specific skills, employability skills, and academic skills are systematically connected for students. The educational reform literature indicates that valued outcomes for all students are focusing more prominently on workplace and transition outcomes, and that educational practices supported with documented evidence from the secondary special education literature are viewed by many authors as promising directions for improving secondary education for all students.
This paper focuses on the evaluation of special education services for handicapped infants. The research question posed is whether early intervention programming results in reduced need for specialized services when children are age-eligible for elementary school. The primary focus of the paper is the development-of a predictive model which may be useful in assessing the efficacy of early intervention services. The predictive model is applied using longitudinal data from a small sample of moderately handicapped infants. The preliminary findings support the contention that earlier intervention results in a lessened need for special education services in subsequent years. The paper also discusses the benefit-cost issues related to the efficacy question under investigation.
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