Issues: Disability & Inequality
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I. Introduction (15m)
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II. Reporting (70m)
- Issues: COVID 19
- Issues: Education
- Issues: Family Care
- Issues: Changing Cities
- Issues: Rural Communities
- Issues: Housing
- Issues: The Justice System
- Issues: Racial Inequality
- Issues: Immigrant Communities
- Issues: Disability & Inequality
- How Much Evidence?
- Data Sources on Economic Mobility
- Context and Definitions
BACKGROUND
One in four American adults (that’s 61 million people) have a disability, according to a 2018 CDC report. These include cognitive, mobility, hearing, and vision disabilities. In the U.S., people with disabilities are more likely to experience poverty and be unemployed than people without disabilities, and a significant wage gap exists between the two groups. Discrimination and lack of workplace accessibility both contribute to barriers to employment for people with disabilities. Additionally, rising national healthcare costs and medical bills can greatly exacerbate financial instability.
WHAT ARE THE RESPONSES?
Educational attainment and workforce readiness are often the focus of programs that hope to improve economic outcomes for people with disabilities. Hiring programs that focus on training people with disabilities and their employers on working together have seen success at a local level. Some states have built programs to broaden access to higher education for people with intellectual disabilities, opening up new opportunities upon graduation. And over the past few decades, community organizing for accessibility of public spaces and transportation has also helped to break down barriers to employment and civic engagement in some cities.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR
Reporters should be wary of initiatives that claim to respond to “the disabled” or “the disability community” as a monolith. People with disabilities have a wide range of daily living experiences and they cannot all be addressed in the same way. Responses that ignore this diversity require extra scrutiny. Ask: do the leaders of this response have lived experience that lends expertise to their work? How do they measure success, and how do those measures apply to people with different types of disabilities? Of course, reporters should also consider additional intersections like race and gender when investigating.