Journal of Disability Policy Studies

DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion, a social movement for promoting fair treatment and full participation in education and employment. Our comments are focused on how DEI might be interpreted and implemented in the context of special education’s primary U.S. legal guide, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). We concentrate on the meanings of diversity, equity, and inclusion as they apply to policies regarding the education of individuals with disabilities. We argue that policies related to DEI deserve careful scrutiny as they apply to special education. Hewing to the notion of disability as a particular kind of diversity defined by the IDEA is essential to achieving an appropriate and equitable education and the most meaningful type of inclusion for children with disabilities.

Since 2014, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Civil Rights Division have conducted investigations of individual school districts’ use of physical restraint and seclusion procedures. This report identifies the legal basis for these investigations, as well as common problems found across the districts as a result. It also describes common elements required in the resulting settlement agreements with school districts. Conclusions will address how school systems might evaluate and adjust practices related to restraint and seclusion based on these investigations and DOE recommendations.

People with disabilities are increasingly becoming parents, but population estimates of parents with disabilities vary. Also, there is very little information about the life circumstances of parents with disabilities. This study uses the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year data, 2016–2020, to explore the prevalence and life circumstances of disabled parents in the United States. Findings indicate that there are roughly 65.9 million parents in the United States, and about 4.4 million have a disability. Parents with any disability are more likely to live below 100% of the poverty line (27.30%) compared to nonparents with disabilities (17.74%), parents without disabilities (11.38%), or nonparents without disabilities (9.30%). Even after adjustment for sociodemographic characteristics and potentially protective factors such as program participation, the risk of poverty remains elevated (relative risk [RR] = 1.93, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.91–1.95, p < .001) for parents with any disability. Disparities persist across each of six disability types. Additional research is critical to inform program and policy development.

This study investigated the predictive relationships between (a) U.S. high school science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education and college application and (b) STEM major choice for students with disabilities (SWD) compared with students without disabilities (SWOD). Social cognitive career theory was utilized to elucidate the predictive factors associated with career development. The sample was extracted from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, which included 1,361 SWD and 5,962 SWOD. The findings indicate that educational expectations consistently predicted college application and STEM major choices for SWD as well as for SWOD. Demographic variables such as race and socioeconomic status were not predictive, except for gender, which was shown to influence both SWD’s and SWOD’s decisions regarding whether to pursue a STEM major. Several suggestions to facilitate STEM education for SWD are presented.

In the United States, about two percent of working-age adults experience vision difficulty, defined as blindness or “serious difficulty seeing, even when wearing glasses.” These individuals face barriers both to and within the labor market, leading to lower employment rates and reduced earnings compared to their counterparts without vision difficulty. For example, in our sample of 977,472 18- to 65-year-old women and 947,786 18- to 65-year-old men from the 2022 American Community Survey (ACS), women with vision difficulty are about 23 percentage points less likely to be employed than are women without vision difficulty; among men, the comparable gap is about 30 percentage points. Conditional on employment, on average, women with vision difficulty earn about 22% less than women without vision difficulty while men with vision difficulty earn about 29% less than men without. We estimate separate log earnings equations by gender and vision ability after controlling for selection into employment. We decompose earnings gaps into differential selection into employment, differences in human capital and other observable characteristics, and potential labor market discrimination. Our findings suggest that earnings gaps between individuals with and without vision difficulty are largely attributable to differences in educational attainment, differential selection into employment, and occupational segregation.