About 5 percent of school-age children in the United States have a disability, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The statistic comes from a brief released this month offering an in-depth look at kids ages 5 through 17 with disabilities who live in community settings.
While the Census has long collected data on this group through its annual American Community Survey, this year marks the first time that government officials analyzed the results, said Matthew Brault, a Census statistician and the author of the report.
Brault found about 2.8 million children living with cognitive, vision, hearing, ambulatory, self-care or independent difficulties in 2010, the most recent year data is available. That represents about 5 percent of the nation’s 53.9 million school-age children.
Those with special needs were most likely to have cognitive difficulties, which were reported by more than half of kids with disabilities in every geographical area of the country.
What’s more, the Census report found that children with disabilities were more likely than their typically developing peers to attend public schools rather than private. However, the number of students with special needs enrolled in public schools varied dramatically from 76.5 percent in some areas of the country to almost 100 percent in others.
Then why do 13% receive special education services?
It’s difficult to understand the numbers when the report makes up new categories: “with a disability (what does THAT mean?), hearing difficulty, vision difficulty, cognitive difficulty, ambulatory difficulty, self-care difficulty”. IDEA describes specific disabilities that qualify for services as: “mental retardation (now intellectually disabled), hearing impairments (including deafness), speech or language impairments, visual impairments (including blindness), serious emotional disturbance, orthopedic impairments, autism, traumatic brain injury, other health impairments, or specific learning disabilities; and who, by reason thereof, needs special education and related services.”
How can we understand this brief if they create new categories without explaining how they’ve lumped the IDEA specific disabilities into each? It brings up more questions than it answers. It’s not very helpful.
Based on the article, “Brault found about 2.8 million children living with cognitive, vision, hearing, ambulatory, self-care or independent difficulties in 2010, the most recent year data is available”, this completely ignores students with mild learning disabilities, which involves a large number of the nation’s overall students with disabilities. In addition, based on the wording of the questions involved, parents of children with mild disabilities do not understand that their children are “categorized” or “lumped” in such a way, with students with more severe impairments. When a student enrolls at the high school, we have to ask in many different ways if a student has a disability because some parents think the word disability only includes cognitive impairments (i.e. retardation) or physical impairments, or they do not understand that their child is receiving special education, but rather thik they simply receive classroom and testing accommodations. The national average has stayed pretty consistent at 11% to 13% of the population over the past decade based on other national surveys, and with the jump in the number of children diagnosed autistic during that time period, it is absolutely impossible to imagine that the overall number has dropped THAT significantly! I would love to see the questions.
I have the same question as cherylmjorgensen.
since when do disability and special education go hand in hand? I have a disability and have no need for special education services. I have a 3.8 GPA and have done it all on my own…I have a physical disability,and generally speaking, those who do not are the ones who “need” special education..now “special accomodations” for disabled is different… Why are you trying to downplay and disregard the acomplishments of the disabled who make it on their own with such a statement? There is nothing wrong with special ed if you need it, but the terms “Disabled” and “Special education” are not one in the same.. So if the lower half of my body is paralyzed, that means the top half of my body where my brain is located doesn’t function “normally” as society would call it?? I don’t think so