Kids With Disabilities Shut Out by Economy
Featured Guest Blogger June 16th, 2009
Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her penetrating coverage of U.S. social issues. She writes the popular “Balancing Acts” column in the Sunday Boston Globe, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Gastronomica, and on National Public Radio. Her latest book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, details the steep costs of our current epidemic deficits of attention while revealing the astonishing scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of focus in a world of speed and overload. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.
A caring society benefits us all. Sadly, this simple truth still surprises us. We assume that lean, mean, Darwinian forms of capitalism are best, when mounting evidence show that a caring society is more beneficial, even economically. Socially responsible and diverse companies, for instance, fare better on many measures. Companies where women make up from 14 to 38 percent of top management have an average 35 percent higher return on equity than employers with the lowest women’s executive representation, Catalyst data shows. Doing the “right thing” is good business, as many in the work-life field know.
My latest Balancing Acts column in the Boston Globe underscores this point in yet another way. I wrote about teens with disabilities who yearn to experience that classic rite of passage, the summer job. In a down economy, as you can imagine, many willing, tenacious talented teens with disabilities find it nearly impossible to find summer work. (Just 15 out of 100 youths with disabilities likely will find work this summer, estimates Andrew Sum, an economist at Northeastern University.)
But we all lose out when teens with special needs can’t find work, because early work experience is strongly predictive of success in the labor market later in life for people with disabilities. In other words, kids who can’t get work early on tend to become a burden on society and on their families later.
The good news is, a few simple measures can help enormously. In researching my story, I stumbled upon a gem of a project, Project Summer, created by researchers at the University of Wisconsin/Madison in 2006 to help kids with special needs find summer work. The project involved 400 kids with special needs in more than 30 Wisconsin public high schools.
Put simply, when kids got the right supports, they were far more likely to work. These included advance help from teachers in planning their job hunt and high expectations from families and teachers that they could and should work. As well, schools benefited from having a liaison to the business community, such as a contact at a local chamber of commerce. These low-cost measures worked wonders. In one follow-up study, 65 percent of youths with severe disabilities who received such interventions found summer work, compared with a fifth of students who didn’t get such help.
Sometimes, caring isn’t about added funding and expanded bureaucracy. It’s all about a dash of imagination and a soupçon of common sense.
