As the new year approaches, with the hope engendered by a change in US government, here’s a salute to organizations—Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, Justice for All, and the World Institute on Disability, among others— that advocate for individuals with disabilities. These organizations and their siblings have done a great deal to secure health care, civil justice, employment, protection from violence, and many otherwise taken-for-granted features of daily life that are too often denied to individuals with disabilities. Now’s a good time to accomplish more.
On the educational front, one of the factors to which many disability rights organizations regularly point is the poor outcomes for students with disabilities after graduation from high school. The litany of unfavorable comparisons between students with disabilities and their not-disabled peers is familiar to many: higher unemployment, less frequent enrollment in post-secondary schools, more frequent contact with and incarceration by law-enforcement officials, etc. These are clearly outcomes that we would not only like to see improved, but also they are improvements that would auger well for our society (e.g., emphasizing the abilities of individuals) and economy (e.g., lower unemployment).
Among many advocates for individuals with disabilities, a (if not the) critical concern for public policy is ensuring access to situations to which those without disabilities routinely have access. Access may range from curb cuts that permit safer road crossings to computers that “read” printed text. Without elaborating further here, suffice it to say that the range of applications is far greater than this simple dimension, and information about possible means of ensuring or providing access abounds on the Internet.
Continue reading ‘Beyond access: Improving success’
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