Outcomes in Rural and Urban Settings for Students With Disabilities

Limited quantitative research has examined similarities and differences between the academic achievement and discipline outcomes, including suspensions, of students with disabilities in rural and urban schools. Therefore, we leveraged a statewide longitudinal data set to explore academic achievement and discipline outcomes for students with disabilities in rural schools and compared those outcomes to students with disabilities in urban schools. We then followed up with analyses to evaluate differences by disability category. The full data set of students in urban and rural schools included 1,306,134 observations from 366,529 unique students with disabilities across 11 consecutive years. We used a series of linear mixed-effects models to evaluate academic achievement for students in Grades 3 to 8 and generalized linear mixed-effects models to evaluate two discipline outcomes, in- and out-of-school suspensions. Overall, we found that students with disabilities in rural schools had lower reading scores, fewer in-school suspensions, and more out-of-school suspensions. Unique patterns across disability categories also emerged.