Over the last two decades, Chile has made efforts to boost educational inclusion in schools among young people with disabilities, extending opportunities to this vulnerable group which tends to have lower labor force participation, employment and wages in part because of a significant educational gap. Today, around two-thirds of students with disabilities attend mainstream schools in Chile. Additional funding through the School Integration Program (Programa de Integración Escolar, PIE) has enabled the hiring of support staff, the training of teachers, and the acquisition of assistive devices, among other contributions. As a result, the difference in primary and secondary enrolment for children with and without disabilities is today less than 2 percentage points in Chile—the smallest gap in Latin America and the Caribbean, and about 80% of students with disabilities complete secondary school.
Despite these successes, the country still lacks a national program for inclusion of students with disabilities in tertiary education, and there is a wide gap at that level. Students with disabilities are nearly 16 percentage points less likely to transition to post-secondary education, which is significantly correlated with high quality jobs.
The Impact of the Pandemic
The pandemic may have worsened this predicament for students with disabilities. Latin America and the Caribbean was the region most affected by school closures, with a country average of 158 days of school closures between March 2020 and February 2021. Substantial research documents the detrimental effects of this disruption on learning. Students with disabilities in Chile were further limited by interruptions in the assessment of and adaptation to their needs and support of the integration program itself through distance teaching.
We decided to try to quantify the impact of the pandemic on this group in order to address barriers to learning and participation that can be exacerbated during a crisis and further harm their opportunities. In a recent study, Maria Ignacia Contreras, Suzanne Duryea and I compared the trajectories of students with and without disabilities before and after the pandemic. We specifically looked at the probability that they would take the general admission test for tertiary education and enroll in a high-quality tertiary institution.
Disproportionate Effects on Students with Disabilities
Our findings suggest that students with disabilities were disproportionately affected. While students with disabilities lagged behind other students in both these categories prior to the pandemic, the pandemic made them 8.5 percentage points less likely to take the general admissions test and 3.5 percentage points less likely to enroll in a high-quality institution. The inability of school personnel to meet face-to-face with students and facilitate adaptations to their needs, as well as the potential difficulties for this vulnerable group of taking the general test in the context of the pandemic may have been a factor.
Bolstering Programs in the Transition to Tertiary Education
Brazil and Mexico have the highest percentage of students with disabilities studying in mainstream schools in Latin America and the Caribbean today, at 70%, with Chile following close behind. Some countries in the region are still far from that goal.
Still, as our study shows, even countries with programs that aim for high levels of inclusion may leave students with disabilities vulnerable to falling through the cracks if they are not sufficiently robust. Specifically, it suggests the need for policies that better support their transition to post-secondary education. These include a national program dedicated to that goal as robust as the PIE program at the school level, establishing standards of support across tertiary education institutions, and promoting coordination across them so that accommodations and support are handled in a holistic, rather than fragmented manner, as is currently the case. Training programs or internships where students acquire capacities that bolster their personal and financial autonomy could also strengthen the resilience of students with disabilities in the face of crisis.
Research should over time reveal the full extent of the disruptions inflicted on students with disabilities by the pandemic. That will allow school systems to better understand where to focus remedial efforts at the primary and secondary levels to ensure that the group suffers no disproportionate effects on long-term learning and inclusion. They will also have to strengthen measures that aid the transition of students with disabilities to post-secondary education, even during a crisis, to keep talent from that group flowing and, with it, their possibilities for greater wages, employment, and opportunities.
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