Identifying services and support that can help students with disabilities succeed in school and beyond is the focus of a new multi-university study involving researchers from UC Irvine, UC Davis, Brown University and Pacific University. Funded by the Urban Institute’s Student Upward Mobility Initiative, the project relies on data collected by UCI sociology professor Andrew Penner and the UCI Center for Administrative Data Analysis.

"When we met with our collaborators working with schools to talk about what data we could provide that would be helpful to them, one of the first things that came up was understanding how students fare after school," says Penner, director of UCI CADA. "We think that schools should help prepare students to thrive as adults, but without data linking what schools are doing to how students fare once they are out of school, it’s a real challenge. And in so many analyses, the experiences of students with disabilities are discounted, so we are really excited about this project, which will focus on how schools can facilitate thriving for students with disabilities."

The project is directed by Jacob Hibel, sociology associate professor and co-director of the Center for Poverty and Inequality Research at UC Davis. Additional researchers include Christopher Cleveland, education and education policy assistant professor at Brown University, and Andrew Saultz, interim dean and educational policy professor at Pacific University.

The research team will be among the first to identify how school-based programming for students with disabilities can lead to a better life as adults. Instead of only looking at academic achievement and college enrollment, the comprehensiveness of the data makes it possible for the investigators to expand to more general and longer-term outcomes like jobs and income, building a family, living independently and staying out of the criminal legal system.

The main data source in this project is Oregon K-12 education data that includes about 1.5 million students from as early as the 2004-05 school year. Of these, about 200,000 students received any disability services through individualized education programs (IEPs) or a 504 plan. In addition to disability and special education information, the data include test scores, attendance, disciplinary information and even housing status.

CADA has worked closely with collaborators in Oregon and at the U.S. Census Bureau to create data linkages that provide a broader view of a student’s life trajectory. “This data infrastructure is really unique, and allows our team to bring data to bear on important new questions,” Penner notes. The team’s analysis combining these multiple sources will show a detailed picture of which schools and what programs support students with disabilities to achieve a successful, thriving adulthood.

“This project will provide important new insights into the trajectories of students with disabilities in adulthood,” says Penner. “But what is most exciting to me is that it will help inform the work of our partners on the ground.”

Read more about the research project online.

-excerpted from UC Davis Letters & Science Magazine, courtesy of Alex Russell