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Facts From NLTS2: High School Completion by Youth With Disabilities

NLTS 2200511
November 2005

Disability Category Differences9

School completion rates are quite high among youth with visual or hearing impairments (95 percent and 90 percent, respectively), as well as among those with orthopedic impairments (88 percent) or autism (86 percent). However, because these are low-incidence categories of disability (e.g., NLTS2 represents about 22,000 youth with hearing impairments, slightly fewer youth with orthopedic impairments, almost 15,000 youth with autism, and about 8,000 youth with visual impairments), their relatively high rates of school completion do not affect the average for all youth with disabilities to the extent that rates for higher-incidence categories do. For example, the school completion rate is 75 percent for the largest category, learning disability (NLTS2 represents more than 1,130,000 youth with learning disabilities). School completion rates for youth in four other categories are between 72 percent and 79 percent. Lower rates are apparent for youth with multiple disabilities or deaf-blindness and youth with emotional disturbances, among whom 65 percent and 56 percent are high school completers, respectively.

Significant increases in school completion are noted for three of the four disability categories whose members had the lowest school completion rates in 1987: learning disability (18 percentage points), mental retardation (21 percentage points), and emotional disturbance (16 percentage points).10

9 The terminology for classifying students who receive special education services that is used here is specified in federal regulations for the implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Amendments of 1997 (P.L. 105-17), 111 Stat. 37-157 (Knoblauch and Sorenson 1998).
10 Increases among youth in the speech/language impairment and multiple disabilities/deaf-blindness categories do not reach statistical significance, possibly because of the small sizes or large standard errors of those groups.