When do students with disabilities graduate high school?

With No Child Left Behind (NCLB), graduation rates have become an essential indicator of high-school success. High schools, districts, and states are now accountable for measuring, reporting, and improving their graduation rates for student subgroups, including students with disabilities. Policies expressed in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), however, provide differing expectations for high-school graduation of students with disabilities. IDEA permits students with disabilities to receive services in high school until they are twenty-one years old. NCLB, on the other hand, emphasizes students with disabilities graduate within four years after high-school entry. To understand the appropriate expectation for high-school graduation, in this thesis, I examine when students with disabilities graduate and how graduation patterns differ for students based on selected student characteristics and educational factors. In Part 1 of the thesis, I utilized discrete-time survival analysis to estimate the conditional probability of high-school graduation in a given year after high-school entry, by disability category. I also examined how these graduation patterns differ for