The State of Learning Disabilities (LD)

Key Facts

• An estimated 4-6% of public school students in the U.S. have learning disabilities.
• There were 2.7 million public school students – or about 5 ½ % of all students in public schools – who had been classified with an SLD in 2007 and therefore eligible to obtain educational assistance under the Federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
• The number of schoolchildren with specific learning disabilities (SLDs) who receive these Federally-authorized special education services grew just 1% between 1996 and 2006. In 2008, 32% of students classified with an SLD were 6-11 years old; that was down from 40% in 1998, and represented the biggest drop for any age group.
• In 2006, 54% of school students with SLDs who got special education services were white – down from 62% in 1999 – while 46% were non-white. Black students with SLDs represented 20% of the total – up 2% from 1999 – while Hispanic students comprised 22% of this population – up from 17% in 1999.
• The 12-17-year-old age group has the highest incidence of learning disabilities; 3.4% of students between the ages of 12 and 17 have been identified with an LD.
• Males comprise almost two-thirds of 6-17-year-old students with SLDs who receive special education services.
• The school dropout rate for students with SLDs dropped steadily, from 44.7% to 31.6%, during the eight years ending in 2003.
• In 2006, 55% of students with SLDs spent more than 80% of their in-school time in regular classrooms with the general student population. Six years earlier, that figure was just 40%.

Overview

It’s necessary to define what a learning disability (LD) is in order to understand how Americans with learning disabilities are functioning today in schools, colleges and workplaces.
The most commonly-accepted definition, from the Federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), uses the term specific learning disability (SLD). This is a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes for understanding or using spoken or written language, and it can impair a person’s ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell or do mathematical calculations.

Neurobiology and genetics of LD

LDs arise from neurological differences in brain structure and affect the brain’s ability to store, process or communicate information. It isn’t clear what creates the neurological disorders that lead to learning disabilities, but heredity is considered a major factor because LDs seem to occur within members of the same families; someone with a learning disability may have parents or other relatives with similar difficulties. Other possible causes include pre-natal and birth problems – a list that covers illness or injury, drug and alcohol use during pregnancy, low birth weight, oxygen deprivation and premature or prolonged labor --  as well as childhood experiences of traumatic injuries, severe nutritional deprivation, and exposure to poisonous substances such as lead.

We do know that learning disabilities are not caused by visual, hearing or motor disabilities, low intelligence, mental retardation, emotional disturbance, or cultural, environmental or economic disadvantages. However, there is a higher incidence of learning disabilities among people living in poverty – apparently because poor people are more likely to be exposed to the harmful toxins (e.g., lead, tobacco and alcohol) known to contribute to learning disabilities  in the early stages of development.

There is nothing imaginary about learning disabilities. They are real and permanent, and their diagnoses are biologically proven (including new data documenting that families are genetically linked to LDs). Yet some people never learn that learning disabilities are responsible for their lifelong problems with reading, writing or comprehension. Others aren’t diagnosed with LDs until they are adults. Still others suffer from low self-esteem, fall into juvenile delinquency or fail academically because they don’t receive their LD diagnosis until it’s too late to prevent these and other psychological problems from happening.

Because learning disabilities are usually spotted in children after they have started school, the public perception is that LDs mostly affect children and adolescents. It’s true that LDs are common enough to affect an estimated 4%-6% of public school students. (The percentage is much higher when individuals who struggle with reading are considered.) Yet LDs last a lifetime and affect many adults no less severely.

That said, individuals with LDs are not powerless against their disabilities. Over time, they can learn to compensate for their weaknesses, and if they receive effective support early enough, most people with LDs can develop good reading skills and find great success academically and professionally.

Scientific inquiry is creating more reason for hope, too. Top researchers and experts in the field are using methods like new imaging techniques to explore the brain for the origins of these disorders. The result is a deeper understanding of, and support for people with LD.

Common types of LDs

The most common LD is dyslexia, where people have trouble understanding written language. Researchers have recently learned the neurological basis of dyslexia – also known as reading disability or reading disorder – by using separate techniques to measure blood flow and electrical activity in the brain. They discovered that people with dyslexia don’t decipher printed words in the same way that non-dyslexic readers do. That’s because two distinct parts of the brain that normally work closely together instead work separately from each other in people with dyslexia.

Other common learning disabilities include the following:

• Dyscalculia – where a person has trouble solving arithmetic problems and grasping math concepts.
• Dysgraphia – where a person struggles to form letters or write within a defined space.
• Auditory and Visual Processing Disorders – where a person with normal hearing and vision nevertheless has difficulty understanding language.
• Non-verbal Learning Disabilities – neurological disorders which originate in the right hemisphere of the brain and cause problems with visual-spatial, intuitive, organizational, evaluative and holistic processing functions.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD) is sometimes mistakenly thought to be a learning disorder. While this isn’t the case, AD/HD does occur in about one third of people with LD, resulting in difficulty concentrating, staying focused or paying attention to specific tasks. That, in turn, hurts academic performance. AD/HD has a neurological origin, like learning disabilities. As with dyslexia, there are low levels of blood flow in parts of the brains of children who have AD/HD.

Prevalence: the demographics of LDs

Of all U.S. schoolchildren who have been identified with SLDs and receive special education services authorized by IDEA, more are white than non-white (the split was 54%-46% in 2006, and 52.5%-47.5% the following year). Yet the trend lines for whites and non-whites in this category went in opposite directions between 1999 and 2006. That 54% figure for white students, in 2006, was down from 62% in 1999, while the combined population of black and Hispanic students getting these services grew from 35% to 42% of the total (from 18-20% for black students and 17-22% for Hispanic students; by 2007, the Hispanic-black ratio of LD students was 23.7%-20.2%). Asian/Pacific Islanders account for 1.8% of LD classifications, while 1.7% of American Indian/Alaska Native students have been identified with an LD.

Among all of these racial/ethnic groups, only whites and Asian/Pacific Islanders had higher percentages of the total public school enrollment than of the total LD population in those schools.

Male students with SLDs who get special education services far outnumber their female counterparts: almost two-thirds of 6-to-17-year-old schoolchildren in this category are boys, despite an almost even split among males (51.4%) and females (48.6%) in the overall public school population . This is sobering news because males with disabilities as a whole – including those with SLDs – are known to be poorer students and more likely to face in-school disciplinary action and be arrested away from school.

The trend lines also diverge for younger and older students who are identified with SLDs and receive special education services. Between 1996 and 2006, there was a decline in the number of 6-11-year-olds with an identified SLD and an increase among 12-17-year-olds. The 18-21-year-old population having an SLD remained small and largely unchanged.

People living in poverty are more likely to have learning disabilities than the rest of the population. According to the Disability Watch Report from 2001, families below the poverty line reported that 6% of their children have learning disabilities. For families that were not poor, that figure was 4%.The same thing is true for adults in poverty, who self-reported their learning disabilities at three times the rate of adults who didn’t live in poverty (2.9% vs. 0.9%). 

Diagnostic challenges

Since many incidences of learning disabilities are never diagnosed or admitted, surveys based on reports from LD sufferers or their parents have sharply under-estimated how widespread LDs are in the U.S. Statistical measures taken during this decade suggest that it’s a big challenge to accurately gauge how many people have learning disabilities.

The U.S. Survey of Income and Program Participation (2005) showed that the percentages of people with learning disabilities are consistently in the single digits for every age group: the highest percentages were for ages 6-11 (2.4% of that age group), 18-24 (2.7%) and 12-17 (3.4%)

The National Health Interview Survey on Disability (2001) found that 4.1 million American children and adults (1.6% of the population) have been identified with learning disabilities. Parents responding to the NHIS-D survey reported that 4% of white and black children and 3% of Hispanic children have learning disabilities. Meanwhile, 1% of adults in each of these groups report that they have learning disabilities.

However, the true prevalence of learning disabilities in the U.S. may be as high as 10-15% -- in both children and adults. The data also suggest that the differences in SLD incidence among boys and girls are exaggerated. Males of all ages and their families report that they have learning disabilities twice as often as females and their families. But it’s likely that learning disabilities are present in roughly equal numbers of males and females: it’s just that males and their families have been more willing to obtain, and reveal, an LD diagnosis.

Skepticism about the validity of LD diagnoses may feed a public perception that downplays the presence of these disorders. Yet there is no evidence to support two of the prime mistaken assumptions underlying that skepticism.

One of these holds that children and young adults with learning disabilities are pretending to have these disorders so that they can get special treatment – such as permission to take an audio-taped version of a standardized written test. But NHIS-D data tells a different story.

Two-thirds (67%) of schoolchildren with learning disabilities have major problems in school, such as understanding instructional materials (52.2% of LD kids experience this), paying attention in class (49.6%), following rules or controlling behavior (33.3%) and communication with their teachers and classmates (23.5%).

The other erroneous belief is that families living in poverty teach their children to fake learning disabilities so that they can be eligible for Federal benefit programs like Supplemental Security Income. Again, NHIS-D data refutes this; it indicates that just 10% of all children with learning disabilities, and just 20% of poor LD children get SSI benefits. Moreover, 74% of LD kids have never even applied for SSI funds.

LD in the Schools

In 2007, there were 2.7 million American public school students (approximately 5 ½% of total public school enrollment) who had been identified with specific learning disabilities so that they could  be served under IDEA; in the previous year, SLD students represented 44% of the more-than-6 million school-aged children with all kinds of disabilities who get this help.  (Pre-school and school-aged children with SLDs who get IDEA-based assistance total 2.7 million, or 5.9% of public school enrollment in the U.S.)

Four federal laws – two that are education-specific and two that are more broad-based – establish and undergird the right of learning-disabled students to receive special education services and fair treatment in schools.

• Children and youth with disabilities, who are 3-21 years old, receive special education services through the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This law guarantees each child a free, appropriate public education tailored to his or her individual needs, as well as the right of the children and their parents or guardians to timely evaluation, access to all meetings and paperwork, transition planning and related services. IDEA specifies that children with any of 13 possible disabling conditions, including SLDs, are eligible for these services. Most children with LD are served under IDEA.
• Discrimination against people with disabilities in Federally-funded programs and activities is prohibited under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. While this civil rights law doesn’t fund such programs, it does permit the withdrawal of funds from programs that fail to comply with the law. Persons with a physical or mental impairment that substantially restricts one or more major life activities are eligible for services under Section 504. Some schools use Section 504 to support LD students needing only simple accommodations or modifications. Kids with AD/HD who don’t need more comprehensive special education support also are frequently served under this law.
• Perhaps the best known of the four laws is the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), another civil rights measure that protects learning-disabled people from discrimination in schools, the workplace and other environments. Like Section 504, ADA isn’t a funding mechanism and it protects people are protected who have a physical or mental impairment that heavily restricts one or more major life activities. Since learning is considered such an activity under ADA, students served under IDEA also are covered by ADA.
• No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is the latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which was first passed in 1965 and affects all public school students, from kindergarten through grade 12. NCLB’s major strength is that it compels schools to meet rigorous standards for educational content and student achievement (i.e., what and how well students should be learning). It also requires schools to measure yearly student progress to see if it is adequate. Under NCLB, schools must provide data on overall student progress as well as progress made by groups such as students with disabilities.

Notwithstanding the legal underpinning for educational support of disabled students, many teachers aren’t knowledgeable about working with them. Though most students with SLDs get most of their instruction in general education classes, only 60% of disabled students in these classes have teachers who get any information about their needs. Only about half of those students have teachers who get advice from special educators or other staff on how to meet those needs.

According to one national survey, just 57% of special education teachers say they are “very” familiar with the academic subject content their states require them to teach. Just seven states mandate that the Individual Education Plans (IEPs) for learning-disabled students conform with state content standards.

Factors concerning identification rates

Though the population of students classified with SLDs rose quickly during the ‘80’s and 90’s, the classification rate has declined among some student age groups during this decade. The falloff has been steepest among 6-11-year-olds: between 1998 and 2008, this age group’s share of the total student population with an SLD classification declined from 40% to 32%. Since most students identified with SLDs get that designation in elementary school, this means a lot fewer students are being classified with SLDs at an early age.

Yet the opposite is true for the overall disabled student population. During the decade ending in 2006, the number of SLD students getting IDEA-mandated services grew just 1%. All of that meager growth happened before 2000.That’s a striking contrast with the 26% increase in the total number of all U.S. schoolchildren with disabilities served under IDEA in that period.

So why are fewer LD classifications happening in grade schools? First, reading instruction has improved, so reading problems – a major characteristic of LD students – aren’t as prevalent. Second, there’s been a shift in how LDs are identified. The use of methods such as “response-to-intervention” may be getting help to more students early enough in school so that they don’t need to be classified  to receive special education services. Finally, teachers have better tools and are more qualified to help kids who are struggling to learn in the classroom.

The evidence from two large-scale studies of secondary-school students shows that students are being identified with LDs and getting support services at an earlier age.  The National Longitudinal Transition Study (NLTS) in 1987 reported that 7.3 years was the average age for identifying an LD in children. NLTS2, the successor study in 2001, found the average age for an ID dropping to 6.5 years. Over that same period, the average age when children with LDs began receiving special education services fell from 9 to 8 years. That’s a significant development, because early detection and treatment of disabilities -- especially reading disabilities -- is crucial for lessening their effects.

Even so, too many children with learning disabilities don’t receive an LD diagnosis until they’ve fallen far behind other children in basic reading, writing and other academic skills. The NHIS-D found that only 1.5% of five-year-old boys and 3-4% of six- and seven-year-old boys had been identified with learning disabilities, vs. 6% of 8-17-year-old boys. Diagnosis happens even later for girls – just 0.4% of five-year-old girls are identified with an LD, and the percentage doesn’t rise above 3% until girls reach age 9.

It seems that the ability to speak and understand English also influences how many students get an LD classification. Between 1987 and 2001, NLTS2 recorded a big percentage jump – from 1.3% to 15.4% -- in LD classifications among 15-17-year-olds who mostly don’t speak English in the home. This language gap, along with the challenges of reconciling American and immigrant cultures, may be one reason a disproportionate number of Hispanic students are classified as LD (23.7% of the student LD population is Hispanic, vs. 20.5% of total public school enrollment).

Progress measurements

The trend is for more and more students with SLDs to spend most of their instructional times in regular education classrooms. Between 2000 and 2006, the percentage of these students who spent more than 80% of their time in regular school classrooms rose steadily, from 40% to 55%. No other categories of disabled students – except students with speech or language impairments – had higher percentages of people who spent more time in general education than students with SLDs.

LD students are taught either in fully integrated or partly integrated settings. The last available measurement over a decade’s time (1987-1997) shows a movement towards fully integrating LD students into the general student population. This is how 43% of learning-disabled children and youth were taught by 1997 (up from 16% in 1987), while just 39% were still taught in resource rooms where they were segregated from the regular classroom for 20-60% of the school day. That was down from 61% in 1987.

For all their time spent in regular classrooms, students with SLDs – like all disabled students – are much more likely to repeat grades than their peers who don’t have disabilities. According to parental reports, almost one-third of students with disabilities had been held back in a grade at least once. The estimated retention rate for all students is much lower, between 15 and 19%. Disabled schoolchildren who are retained in grade are disproportionately black and from lower-income households. They’re also more likely to drop out of school.

While grade retention is a problem, the rate of high school graduation has been gradually rising among students with SLDs. In the 2002-03 school year, 57.4% of SLD students earned standard diplomas. That was the third straight year the rate increased and was higher than the general disabled student population graduation rate of 51.9%. A decade earlier, the SLD graduation rate was 49.1%.

Although students with SLD drop out of school at a higher rate than all but two categories of disabled students (Emotional Disturbance, or ED, and Speech-Language Impairment, or SLI), that rate has steadily fallen over the eight years ending in 2003, from 44.7% to 31.6%. The student dropout rate for all disabilities combined decreased almost as much in the same period, from 47% to 33.6%.

Behavior is a major challenge for many youth with learning disabilities. NLTS2 found that one-third of LD youths are suspended or expelled from school at some point. That happens much less often to students within the general population. Also, a disproportionately high rate of incarcerated juveniles (over 14%) are identified with an SLD disorder. In fact, SLD is the second most common disability found among incarcerated juveniles.

Once they get to high school, students with SLDs have significantly worse levels of math and reading skills than the norm for their grades.

• In both proficiencies, at least a fifth of SLD students are five or more grade levels behind that the rest of their peers.
• Close to half of SLD students (45% for reading, 44% for math) underperform the general student population by more than three grade levels,
• Nearly a quarter of SLD students (23% for both subject areas) are at least one grade worse in their skill levels.

On average, SLD students are 3.4 years behind all students in reading and 3.2 years behind in math.

A comprehensive assessment of disabled student performance has a bad news-good news aspect. Students without disabilities scored almost twice as high as disabled students on the 2007 National Assessment of Education Progress. And yet, disabled students made substantially larger gains in their scores than non-disabled students.

• In 4th grade, 36% of students with disabilities performed at or above basic, proficient or advanced reading levels, up from 22% in 2000. The figure for students without disabilities who matched or surpassed those proficiency levels was up 8% improvement (from 62% to 70%) during the same period.
• In math, 60% of 4th grade students with disabilities met or exceeded basic, proficient or advanced levels – double the percentage (30%) from 2000. The share of the non-disabled student population that was at or above the basic, proficient or advanced standard improved 16% during the same period (from 69% to 85%).
• Also in math, 34% of 8th grade students with disabilities scored at or above the basic, proficient or advanced levels, up from 21% in 2000. Among students without disabilities, the percentage who did that well went up 8%, from 67% to 75%.

(There is a continuing concern, however, that NAEP doesn’t include enough students with disabilities in its sampling. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that about 40% of disabled students were being excluded from NAEP samples.)

LD in Postsecondary Education

NLTS2 findings show that students with learning and other disabilities aren’t really different from other young adults in setting goals for life after high school. Like their peers, most LD secondary students want to continue their education or get training for a trade once they graduate; 54.3% of them want to attend a 2- or 4-year college, while 43.4% of them look to enter a vocational training program. Most (57.1%) also want to attain employment by competing in the workforce for jobs and about half (49.8%) want to live independently. Among disabled students as a whole, 47% plan to go to a 2- or 4-year college and about 40% want to get into a postsecondary vocational training program.

Yet their struggles in school don’t enhance the higher education or job prospects of LD adults, either. NHIS-D (2001) reported that two fifths (39%) of adults with learning disabilities hadn’t graduated from high school, vs. one-fifth (19%) for the general population. The figures for college are just as sobering: only 10% of people with learning disabilities have college degrees, vs. 22% of those without learning disabilities.  According to the Disability Watch Report of 2001, just 13% of people with LDs were entering 4-year colleges, compared with 40% of non-disabled people. The share of the LD population in 2-year colleges was almost twice as large, at 24%.

Undergraduates who identify themselves as learning-disabled comprised the largest disability group in college, at 1.6% of the general college student population (1995-1996 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study). But many of them don’t make it until graduation. The updated (1994) version of the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study revealed that nearly half of students with learning disabilities (48%) quit school without receiving their degree or certificate. While that almost matches the 47% drop-out rate for the overall disabled student population, it is one-third higher than the rate for non-disabled students (36%).

A National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) analysis of test scores, class rankings and grade point averages.may shed some light on why young adults with learning disabilities have so much trouble with college. The study concluded that two-thirds (67%) of high school graduates with LDs were entirely unqualified to enter a 4-year college (vs. 37% of non-disabled students), while just 6% of LD students were very qualified to attend a 4-year college (just one fifth of the qualified non-disabled student population, at 31%).

LD in the Workplace

Disability Watch Report data also indicate that it’s a big challenge for people with learning disabilities to earn a decent living.  Working-age adults with LDs had a 10% unemployment rate – whereas their non-disabled peers had a 4% unemployment rate. Many people with learning disabilities are consigned to low-paying occupations, which partly explains why adults with LDs earn an average of 36% less per hour than adults without LDs ($6.32 per hour vs. $9.82 per hour).

NHIS-D statistics make the case that finding a job has become very difficult for LD adults of working age. Only a little more than half (53%) of them were employed, and 41% of them are completely out of the workforce. But 75% of non-disabled adults are working, while just 3% are not.

This isn’t happening because working-age adults with LD cannot or will not work. Most of them (71%) say they’re able to work and 58% don’t believe their LD condition limits their ability to work in any way.

Learning disabled adults are far more likely to report employment discrimination than any other group of disabled adults. Their disabilities were the specific reasons why 34% of recently-employed LD adults lost a job (17% -- through firings, layoffs or forced resignations) or were denied employment (16%), promotions (11%), opportunities (9%) or transfers (5%).