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This compendium is the first of an annual publication of statistics on people with disabilities and government programs that serve this population. It is designed to serve as a reference guide to government publications. The information focuses on state-level statistics published by Federal agencies and presents some time-trend data. A glossary is provided to assist in the interpretation of the statistics. 

The success rate among the graduates of  America’s Special Education Programs has been studied and criticized for decades. In 2005, Dr. Frank Rusch of Pennsylvania State University and this writer addressed the issue related to the inability of young special education high school graduates to achieve success in employment, post-secondary education, adequate housing and community acquiescence. According to the study, Rusch and Pizzuro wrote: “Young adults with disabilities typically leave publicly funded educational institutions without a job, without being enrolled in postsecondary education, and without the security of knowing their roles in society. Fewer than 30 percent of high school leavers obtain jobs after departing mandated education and fewer than 10 percent enroll in postsecondary education. The past 25 years has witnessed continued poverty among young adults with disabilities, despite legislative reauthorizations aimed at improving educational opportunities (The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004) and employment access (The Americans with Disabilities Act).”

Statistics on the unemployed have been dominating the news for months. And while the current portrait of the jobless might seem dire, consider this: According to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than 20 percent of the disabled population in the country has work.But Aspiritech, a nonprofit in the suburbs of Chicago, is trying to help improve the job outlook for people with Asperger's and high-functioning autism.

The percentage of American students in special education grew significantly between the 1970s and now, though numbers have remained relatively stable in recent years, according to newly released statistics.

The Private School Universe Survey, part of the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, is a biennial roundup of private schools with information on enrollment, demographics, college attendance rates and number of days in the school year.

NEW YORK -- Rebuffing an intensive lobbying campaign, a task force of the American Psychiatric Association has decided not to list the disputed concept of parental alienation in the updated edition of its catalog of mental disorders. The term conveys how a child's relationship with one estranged parent can be poisoned by the other parent, and there's broad agreement that it sometimes occurs in the context of divorces and child-custody disputes. However, an acrimonious debate has raged for years over whether the phenomenon should be formally classified as a mental health disorder by the psychiatric association as it updates its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for the first time since 1994.

There's something funny about learning that a successful CEO or politician received bad grades in school. We're amused to hear that Steve Jobs earned C's on his way to a 2.6 GPA in high school-- before creating the most profitable company on Earth. But what if stories like these say more about the quality of our schools than we think? Indeed, statistics show that schools in the United States may not be fostering the skills needed to succeed in life after high school. A shocking number of high school graduates require remediation when they get to college. In New York City - which, unlike most other districts, is tracking the data and attempting to do something about it - more than half of high school graduates aren't prepared for coursework in in community college. Naturally, cities and states (and the authors of the Common Core Standards) have begun adjusting their approach, shifting focus to higher level skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, and even creativity. It's time we took a similar approach to the education of students with learning differences and learning disabilities.

Just weeks before a new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is scheduled for release, the head of the National Institute of Mental Health says it’s time to change how mental conditions are categorized. The agency will be redirecting its research focus away from the symptom-based diagnostic criteria of the DSM toward more scientifically verifiable standards, the mental health agency’s director, Thomas Insel, wrote in a recent blog post. By shifting away from thinking about mental disorders as they are currently classified in the DSM, Insel says researchers will be able to establish a new diagnostic system based on emerging science. “Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure,” Insel wrote. “Patients with mental disorders deserve better.”

The statistics weren’t comforting: In March 2012 the Centers for Disease Control estimated that one in 88 American children is somewhere on the autistic spectrum. We’re still not sure exactly what causes autism, and we’re not sure why the number of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has increased since the early 1990s. According to the National Academy of Sciences, it could be because people are more aware of autism spectrum disorders today; because pediatricians are doing more screening; and because there have been changes in how autism disorders have been defined and diagnosed. In other words, more children with milder symptoms are being identified as somewhere “on the spectrum,” where they wouldn’t have been in years before. But as the Dimicks discovered—like many other parents before them—plenty of doctors claimed to have all the answers. The road parents must navigate is made more perilous by medical professionals willing to prescribe all sorts of treatments, from hyperbaric oxygen chambers and chelation therapy (which removes heavy metals with chemicals) to shelves full of dietary supplements and other alternative remedies they say can treat, even cure, autism. At best these treatments remain unapproved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; at worst they are downright dangerous. To compound the problem, a host of celebrities act as unpaid marketing reps for these unproven treatments, touting a pervasive (but incorrect) belief that autism is caused by childhood vaccines. This misinformation campaign has led, in the last few years, to a decline in the number of children receiving lifesaving inoculations. And Texas has become a center for alternative autism treatment and the anti-vaccine crusade.

Each year the Annie E. Casey Foundation funds a national survey of child well-being. The new report was recently released. Montana is again ranked 28th, same as last year.The data is analyzed in four different categories: education, economic well-being, family and community and health.Montana was above average in three of the four categories, but finished 50th in child health.The report shows that Montana improved in economic well-being, up to 15th from 20th last year. We held steady on education at 13th. We declined a bit on family and community, down to 14th from 13th.But it’s the child health numbers that seem to be the greatest cause for concern.If you dig into the health numbers, Montana did improve over last year’s report in having fewer uninsured kids — down to 12 percent — and fewer teens abusing alcohol and drugs — down to 10 percent. However, we have increased our percentage of children with low birth weights — 7.5 percent — and increased the number of child and teen deaths per 100,000 — 45.How do we make sense of this data? It’s hard because for many of us these kinds of statistics don’t mean a lot when you pull them apart. As a state, Montana’s 28th place ranking is the lowest in the region. North Dakota ranks sixth, Wyoming ranks 15th, South Dakota ranks 18th, and Idaho ranks 20th.What the report tells us about child health is we have more work to do. It may seem like 88 percent of children being covered by health insurance is pretty good, but we’re average for the region. Similar to Idaho and Wyoming, but lower than both Dakotas.For teen death rates, we’re highest in the region at 45 per 100,000. Idaho is at 28, Wyoming at 32, North Dakota at 34 and South Dakota 39.In general what this means is in Montana we can do a better job, in this areas, of improving the health of our kids. The good news is that health continues to be a priority of the Gov. Steve Bullock’s administration, which launched an initiative last week called “A Healthier Montana: A Plan to Improve the Health of Montanans.”Bullock’s plan focuses on six areas: Preventing, identifying and managing chronic diseases; promoting the health of mothers, infants and children; preventing, identifying and controlling communicable disease, preventing injuries and reducing exposure to environmental health hazards; improving mental health and reducing substance abuse; and, strengthening Montana’s public health and health care system.Reports like Kids Count, are one of many analyzing different aspects of health in Montana and around the country, said Jon Ebelt, spokesman for the Montana Department of Health and Human Services. Typically, those reports only tell part of the story. And though the state takes the Kids Count report seriously, it fit into the broader look of health in Montana now outlined in Bullock’s initiative.“We’ve done a lot of work the last year to set the priorities on where we can make the most difference,” Ebelt said.At Lewis and Clark County, county health officer Melanie Reynolds is also focused on local work.The county has been working for a number of months on their community health improvement plan and is looking to unveil soon.So while the news from Kids Count was mixed, we’re pleased the state and local governments are continuing their efforts to support better health for Montanans. We anticipate these efforts will show themselves with an improved report next year.

In the classroom, it starts simply -- sometimes with a struggle to sound out simple words; sometimes with trouble telling time, memorizing the times tables or learning left from right. It often ends simply, too: with a troubling statistic. One in five of the American students identified as having a learning disability will walk away from their education. That's compared to a dropout rate of 8 percent in the general population.

New federal data about how often public school students are restrained or secluded at school show that, in the majority of cases, these approaches are used to contain kids with disabilities, who make up just a sixth of all students. Data from the Civil Rights Data Collection, gathered from the 2009-10 school year from about 85 percent of the nation's school districts, for the first time includes information about mechanical or physical restraints and seclusion. Although even the Government Accountability Office has investigated concerns about the use of these methods, there's never been data collected on this scale about the practices. (Read some of Education Week's coverage of other data collected by the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights here.)

Autism Spectrum Disorders and Public Schools How many Montana public school students are there with autism? There are approximately 141,000 public school students in Montana’s K-12 schools and on January 31, 2012, there were 823 students with an educational label of autism. There are 16,000 students with educational disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), which is the federal legislation which determines special education eligibility. Five percent of the students with disabilities are autistic. This percentage has increased from 1 percent to 5 percent in the last seven years, as the number of students with autism has increased and the number of enrolled students (and students with disabilities) has decreased.

At its core, the American educational system is about democratization of knowledge for all students, regardless of their circumstances. In 2011, 22 percent of non-institutionalized adults with disabilities had less than a high school education. If this statistic was applied to the general population, my suspicion is that there would be an outcry to reform K-12 education to have better graduation results. But for students with disabilities, there is no shock or outrage and that is something that has to change. The key to improving the educational experience for students with disabilities is better accommodations in schools and continued improvements in assistive technology.

The Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) was released in May 2013, bringing with it several revisions to the criteria for the diagnosis and classification of mental disorders. One important change was for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) classifications. Under the new DSM-5 criteria, clinicians will diagnosis individuals with a single umbrella diagnosis of ASD, rather than the four separate disorders that could be diagnosed under the DSM-IV: autistic disorder, Asperger's disorder, childhood disintegrative disorder and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified.