Racial-ethnic differences in educational trajectories for individuals with intellectual disability.
E Bisesti, S D Landes
PMID 33738868WHAT IT FOUND
Educational gains for adults with intellectual disability varied sharply by race.
Non-Hispanic Whites improved earliest. Non-Hispanic Blacks lagged behind and never caught up. Hispanics started lowest but surged in the youngest cohorts, surpassing both other groups in high school attainment.
Key findings
01Non-Hispanic Black adults with intellectual disability saw educational improvements begin a decade later than non-Hispanic Whites and did not reach similar attainment levels by the end of the study period.
02Hispanic adults with intellectual disability started with the lowest educational attainment but showed the largest increase in the youngest birth cohort, ultimately surpassing non-Hispanic Whites and Blacks.
03The commonly cited post-1940 increase in education for people with intellectual disability was driven primarily by non-Hispanic Whites, masking delayed or absent gains in minority groups.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The measure of intellectual disability relies on self-report or proxy-report of an activity limitation in the NHIS, which may miss individuals with milder disabilities or those whose disability is not recognized by surveyors. The study is observational and cannot determine causality; while authors speculate that policy changes (e.g., Civil Rights legislation) drove the trends, these were not tested. Small sample sizes for Hispanic participants in earlier birth cohorts caused fluctuating trends and reduced the stability of estimates for that group. The analysis excludes individuals in institutional settings, limiting generalizability to the full population of adults with intellectual disability.
Declared interests
No conflicts of interest were declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the high attainment rates in the youngest Hispanic cohort as evidence that educational disparities have been resolved for all groups. The data shows that non-Hispanic Blacks remained significantly behind non-Hispanic Whites in the same cohort, and the Hispanic surge occurred much later than the White improvement, meaning the historical experience of education for these patients is fundamentally different.