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TITLE:The National Disability Policy: A Progress Report, December 2001 - December 2002-General
Author: National Council on Disability, http://www.ncd.gov (KACW 9/4/03)
Kathy’s Note: The National Council on Disability’s progress report is a 125 page document, covering a variety of issues, such as Civil Rights, Education, Health Care, Long-Term Services and Supports, Youth, Employment, Welfare Reform, Housing, Assistive Technology and Telecommunications, Transportation, and International Issues and Homeland Security. After much thought, I have decided to prepare a report on the broad issues and prepare a report on each of the above issues.
Overarching Patterns and Emerging Trends: This report discusses several issues, programs and laws. While each of these programs is addressed with specificity, there are overarching patterns and trends that link them together, including;

The Mainstreaming of Disability Issues: The growing interaction among disability and other public policy concerns results in part from fuller participation of Americans with disabilities in mainstream institutions, but this interconnectedness of issues creates complications unknown to policymakers and advocates of an earlier day.
The Rise Technical Assistance: The increased reliance on technical assistance as a means for increasing participation in mainstream society for people with disabilities. The Administration has emphasized technical assistance and provision of informational and educational resources for people with disabilities.
Evidence-Based Decision-making: Society has often made its most fundamental decisions on the basis of faith or of shared values that does not require empirical verification. In choosing among policy options, evidence (including statistical data) is becoming increasingly important, both as tools for defining issues and as a means for evaluating the efficacy of various strategies.
Cost Benefit Analysis: An increasingly important branch of evidence-based policymaking is the use of cost-benefit analysis to evaluate various laws and practices. Several factors differentiate recent approaches to such analysis from those traditionally used by Congress to estimate the impact of proposed legislation.
Intergovernmental Coordination: A result of the increasing complexity of policymaking is the involvement of a growing number of partners in implementation of any major public policy initiatives.
Budgetary Constraint: For the foreseeable future, discretionary spending at federal and state levels is likely to be under severe pressure.

Disability Statistics Research: More government agencies are now involved in the disability data collection process and in making decisions based on assumptions regarding the number and status of Americans with disabilities. If data from various sources can be combined in ways that show new relationships among various demographic, social and economic findings, important new insights into the comparative quality of life for people with and without disabilities can begin to emerge. Preliminary analysis of several data sets has begun to yield some provocative evidence of clustering, which begins to shed new light on the relationships between location, age, disability, employment and education, and which demands further attention. However the report finds that existing cost-benefit assessment research models do not take a number of key factors sufficiently into account and there are no methodologies widely accepted to reliably measure the full impact of accessibility policies on the out-of-pocket and transfer payment costs associated with disability.
Findings:

17.6% of Americans with disabilities live at or below the poverty level, while 10.6 % of Americans without disabilities live at or below that level.
43.4 % of Americans with disabilities ages 21-64 were identified as "not employed," while only 22.8 % of Americans without disabilities (approximately half as many) were identified as not employed.
An analysis of the data related to the indicator referred to as "dropped out" was reviewed. It shows that state-by-state dropout rates also vary widely, ranging from 4.5 to 28.2%. The dropout rates for students who are 14 and older with disabilities by race and ethnicity were 44% for American Indians/Alaskan Natives, 18.8% for Asian/Pacific Islanders, 33.7 % for African Americans, 32.3 % for Hispanic Americans and 26.9 % for Caucasians.
Among persons with disabilities of working age, some would regard the higher incidence of poverty as no mystery, given the statistical correlations between poverty and such variables as higher levels of unemployment and unmarried status and lower levels of educational attainment, all of which characterize the disability demographic and are generally associated with poverty.

Accomplishments:

NCD applauds the announcement by the Congressional Office of Compliance recommending that Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which requires access to the Federal Government’s electronic and information technology, be made applicable to all Congressional Accountability Act - covered employing offices on Capitol Hill, including the Government Printing Office, the Government Accounting Office and the Library of Congress.

Recommendations:

High-quality research yielding reliable demographic and economic data needs to be a central priority of the New Freedom Initiative (NFI), not as an alternative to action but as a guiding force for the major policy changes already under way.
People with disabilities should be given expanded opportunities for input into the research agenda.
Data elements used in "scoring" legislative proposals for their fiscal impact should be expanded, and new techniques for measuring tangible and intangible impacts of programs and expenditures should be developed.
The Interagency Subcommittee on Disability Statistics (ISDS) should seek input from the disability community regarding their most pressing concerns.
The new International Classification of Function (ICF) should be evaluated for its applicability to laws and programs in the United States, and for its potential impact on the disability research agenda. ICF’s approach suggests the need for wholly new types of research. Adoption by much of the world of the ICF signals a turning away from organic-or deficit-based models of disability in favor of models of function that link the individual and the environment in new and direct ways, allowing the disability and its extent to be determined by the nature of the physical, communication or social environment in which the individual functions.
The Administration should assess current research agendas to make sure that the potential benefits of a wide variety of environmental and community-design strategies can be fully taken into account in the formulation of public policy, and to ensure that suitable methodologies for gathering such information are developed and validated.
Research into costs of living with a disability should be made part of the national agenda, with a view both to documenting their nature and extent and to determining whether out-of-pocket costs of disability could be reduced by changes in the design of products, environments or communities.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) should undertake a review of the issues, including the extent to which it can seek input directly from individuals with disabilities on issues of concern to their lives, the extent to which non-fiscal impacts can be captured by existing scoring assumptions and methodologies, the feasibility of rescoring selected existing programs where appropriate, and the capacity of current techniques to reliably take longer-term forecasts and extrapolations and cross-agency budgetary relationships into account.

Major NCD Activities in 2002: With a budget authorization of $2,830,000, NCD conducted activities to highlight policies, programs, practices and procedures that guarantee equal opportunity for all individuals with disabilities, regardless of the nature or severity of the disability, from all cultural backgrounds, including;

Identified the overall needs and concerns of people with disabilities by conducting hearings, forums and conferences throughout the country, and by responding to thousands of telephone, e-mail and written inquiries on ADA and other disability civil rights issues.
Continued the Disability Civil Rights Monitoring Project by releasing research and comprehensive reviews of the first 12 years of enforcement efforts under the 1988 Fair Housing Amendments Act and related legislation and of the first 27 years of enforcement efforts under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended.
Published a request for proposals (RFP) in Federal Business Opportunities seeking an independent contractor to conduct an inquiry and develop recommendations for consideration by Congress, the Administration and sovereign tribal governments to support community members who have disabilities in four interconnected areas: education, health, rehabilitation and independent living. The project should analyze the status of previous findings and recommendations and describe culturally competent best practices that contribute to improving the quality of life for American Indians and Alaska Natives with disabilities living on tribal lands.
Filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Chevron U.S.A. v. Echazabal (No. 00-1406), a case involving the ADA.
Posted on the web the Spanish and Vietnamese translations of the executive summary of Reconstructing Fair Housing.
Testified on IDEA at the first Bipartisan Disabilities Caucus congressional briefing.
Called on funders, legislators and policymakers for accountability, achievement and fidelity of implementation for students with disabilities as the reauthorization of IDEA begins in Congress.
Released a position paper calling for federal legislation providing strong antidiscrimination protection to people with genetic predispositions as well as those with already-manifested disabilities and health conditions.
Released Supreme Court Decisions Interpreting the Americans with Disabilities Act, a critical analysis of the Court’s recent decisions involving the ADA.
Testified before the U.S. Senate on IDEA
Conducted a summit on the international convention on the rights of people with disabilities with 30 representatives from international human rights and national disability rights organizations.
Briefed the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on the IDEA and presented NCD’s new working paper on IDEA reauthorization
Provided expert testimony to the President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education on the reauthorization of IDEA. Specifically, on what works and what can be improved at the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) so that educational outcomes for children with disabilities will be improved by the IDEA reauthorization.
Provided written testimony for the record of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on discipline and the reauthorization of the IDEA.
Awarded a research contract to Kauffman and Associates of Spokane, Washington, to coordinate a seven-month project pertaining to people with disabilities on tribal lands with regard to education, health care, rehabilitation and independent living.
Released a report supporting a United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities worldwide, grassroots effort to develop international principles and provisions for people with disabilities seems ready to take action.
Presented testimony to a joint hearing of two House Financial Services Subcommittees on discrimination against people with disabilities and people from culturally diverse communities in public housing. The hearing examined complaints that fair housing policies are inadequately enforced. Discrimination complaints against people with disabilities now surpass complaints based on race.

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