Summary
What if education gaps by disability are being measured incorrectly? Comparisons often mix all ages, but many people acquire disabilities after finishing school, and older generations had less access to education. Comparing everyone together distorts today’s picture of inclusion.
It is easy to quote statistics, but it is also easy to quote them badly. One must always be careful to interpret indicators and statistics correctly, as well as to choose the most appropriate ones. If not, you will not get the most appropriate, or even true, picture of reality.
In this monthly column, we highlight a statistic or indicator, briefly discussing its strengths and limitations, and how it should be interpreted.
This month, the statistic we discuss is educational attainment and completion. That is, looking at whether people have finished primary and secondary schooling, or have accessed any level of tertiary education. Promoting access to high-quality, inclusive education is an important objective of the disability rights agenda. Accessing inclusive education increases human capital accumulation and future earnings potential. Thus, understanding whether people with disabilities access schooling is key.
But what if the gaps between those with and without disabilities are not calculated correctly?
Many people acquire their disabilities after completing their schooling. So comparing the education levels of people with and without disabilities of all ages together might understate the barriers that school-age children face. Or even overstate them, if older people grew up at a time when education rates were really low.
Let’s take a look at an example from Latin America. The figure below shows the percentage of people with and without disabilities in Mexico that have completed primary, secondary, or any level of tertiary schooling as their highest level of education. Relative to people with disabilities, people without disabilities are 1.54 times likely to have completed their secondary schooling and 1.55 times more likely to have accessed higher education; meanwhile, people with disabilities are 2.29 times more likely to have finished only primary schooling without continuing to higher levels of education. This paints a grim picture of the situation.
Figure 1. Completion Rates – Persons with and without Disabilities not Accounting for Age
However, this picture isn’t accurate to the current level of inclusion within the education system. The calculations above are estimated considering people of all ages with and without disabilities.
In other words, the analysis includes people from older generations, who were of schooling age when access to schooling was more scarce, and inclusion was rarely discussed, and when many of the people with disabilities today did not have disabilities when they were school age.
So we have countervailing effects. Since then, Mexico has made commitments both to improving access to education overall and to inclusion, for instance, by ratifying the CRPD and developing policy and programmatic initiatives to promote inclusive education. Thus, we would expect younger generations, both of people with and without disabilities, to have increased access to schooling and smaller disability gaps in completion rates. At the same time, most older people with disabilities did not have disabilities when they were young, and as a result, their educational experiences were not affected by disability. Hence, their level of educational achievement today may overstate the inclusivity of education when they were young.
Let’s see what happens when we repeat the calculations but restrict the analysis to a more appropriate age group. People 20 to 24 years old are old enough that they should have finished their basic education and could have accessed tertiary schooling. As the figure below shows, the reality is different from what was presented in Figure 1. Let’s take a more in-depth look at each level of education.
Figure 2. Completion Rates – Persons with and without Disabilities, 20 to 24 year-olds
Relative to Figure 1, completion of primary schooling and transition to secondary schooling appear to have improved for both people with and without disabilities. This is evident in the fact that the percentage of people with only primary schooling as their highest level of education is lower, both for people with and without disabilities. However, the rates are significantly lower for 20-24 year olds with disabilities relative to those in Figure 1, potentially because inclusion in secondary education may have improved since older generations went to school, thereby improving retention rates during the primary to secondary transition. As a result, young adults with disabilities aged 20 to 24 are only 1.61 times more likely to finish primary school without continuing to secondary school, a much smaller gap relative to what is shown in Figure 1. Yet, the gap is still important, and there is still an important percentage of students, with and without disabilities, who fall through the cracks and don’t make it to secondary school.
But what happens to those students who do make it to secondary school? The percentage that actually completes their secondary schooling is much higher when restricting the analysis to 20 to 24-year-olds, both for people with and without disabilities. Not only that, but the gap between students with and without disabilities with secondary school as their highest level of completed schooling has also narrowed, such that persons with disabilities are only 1.24 times less likely to finish secondary school, compared to 1.54 times in Figure 1.
The story for tertiary education is a bit different. It seems there isn’t a large change from Figure 1 to Figure 2 in the number of 20 to 24 year olds that have moved on to tertiary education. We may be seeing this for two reasons: (1) access to tertiary education has not improved for 20 to 24 year olds relative to older generations, or (2) older generations with tertiary education that now have disabilities didn’t have disabilities when they accessed higher education when they were younger. This makes it seem, based on Figure 1, like a higher percentage of people with disabilities accessed tertiary education in the past, masking any improvements in access to tertiary schooling. Nonetheless, the results on tertiary education are concerning.
By restricting the analysis to 20 to 24 year olds, we see a much more nuanced and accurate picture of the current situation:
First, access to primary and secondary education seems to have improved. Further, gaps by disability in schooling completion persist at all levels, albeit they are much smaller at primary and secondary levels. Nonetheless, based on Figure 1, Mexico should be especially concerned about supporting secondary school completion and supporting secondary-to-tertiary transitions. Ensuring access to primary and transition to secondary school among students with disabilities is still a problem, albeit a MUCH smaller problem than Figure 1 suggests.
Now, this is still not the full story. There is much more we would need to look at to know the state of access to education among people with disabilities in Mexico. For instance, looking at completion rates tells us nothing about the types of schools students attend, such as mainstream or segregated special schools, or the quality or suitability of that education Yet, looking at each statistic closely and thoughtfully, such as in this case restricting the analysis by age group, adds clarity to the picture. That is why it is so important to be intentional in our statistical analysis. Until the next Stat of the Month!