The Impact of Funding Inequities on Education for Special Needs Students

Background/purpose:Historically, research has found fewer resources in schools have negatively impacted students’ ability to succeed. Social workers are entrusted with collaborating with schools and families to ensure children receiving special education have equitable educational opportunities.  The current policy study was designed to test a theoretical model examining the effect of school district funding inequities on educational outcomes of adolescents receiving special education services.  The study hypothesized that 1) funding inequities in schools would lower available resources provided and 2) fewer resources would negatively impact educational outcomes for youth in special education.

Method:

This was a secondary data analysis of the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2.  The 10-year longitudinal study first randomly sampled 12,000 school districts in the U.S, stratified by region, enrollment size and community wealth.  A random sample of youth diagnosed with disabilities was then taken from the school district rosters, stratified by disability.  The final sample had 10,590 youth from approximately 2,100 schools.  Parents were recruited in 2001 and followed every 2-years till 2009.  A youth’s school was asked to participate once parents gave consent.

The current study used four available surveys from the NLTS2: the school characteristics survey, school program survey, general education survey and school transcripts.  The surveys were used to analyze variables pertaining to the hypotheses: inequity school variables, availability of school resource variables and education outcome variables.  The study also included demographic information, including type of disability.

The study used univariate and multi-level modeling to analyze the data.  Univariate analyses were conducted using SPSS version 21 and the entire multi-level model was analyzed using MPlus version 7.1.

Results:  Univariate analyses showed more male than female participants and a youth mean age at the start of the study of 15.  The majority of participants were Caucasian with African-Americans and Hispanics the next represented ethnic group.  The first multi-level model analyzed showed unaccepted fit indexes.  The full model analyzed the demographic information within the individual youth predicting GPA and academic behavior.  It also analyzed individuals between schools with inequities predicting school resources as well as individual GPA and academic behavior.  A final model was conducted with academic behavior removed and found to have acceptable fit indexes (Χ²=0.087, p>.05, CFI=1.00, TLI=1.19, RMSEA<.05). The model showed that within schools, poverty, type of disability and being African-American all predicted low GPA.  Between schools, while inequities did predict the number of professional hired to work with youth diagnosed with developmental disabilities, they did not directly predict GPA.  Availability of school resources did not predict GPA as predicted. 

Conclusion:  Social Workers are charged with challenging social injustice by advocating for oppressed and vulnerable populations such as youth in special education.  This study indicates that social workers need to advocate at the individual level to help reduce inequalities associated with minorities and children from families with poverty to better improve education outcomes. Social workers can best effect change at the policy level by addressing legislative decisions that affect the individual and inequalities that effect number of professionals available to special needs students.