State Estimates of Employment Rates for Persons with Disabilities: Report Summary

Statistics on the states’ employment rates for persons with disabilities relative to their non-disabled peers may be of assistance to providers of employment services for persons with disabilities. Such information can help service providers, policy makers, and disability advocacy leaders to assess whether the employment rate of people with disabilities is improving over time, given policy, regulatory, and service intervention strategies. A recent report from the Cornell University Rehabilitation Research and Training Center (RRTC) for Economic Research on Employment Policy for Persons with Disabilities uses data from the March Current Population Survey to estimate employment rates for persons with and without a disability in the non-institutionalized working-age (aged 25 through 61) civilian population in the United States, and for each state and the District of Columbia for the years 1980 through 1998. The employment rate of persons with a disability relative to that of persons without disabilities are found to vary greatly across states. Over the last 20 years the relative employment rate of those with a disability dramatically declined overall and in most states.

Policy and Practice Brief: Representative Payment

This brief provides an overview of the Representative Payee program administered by Social Security. Discussed are the many provisions of the programs as well as practice tips and implications for BPA&O and PABSS personnel.

Promising Practices: Ensuring Choice Under the Ticket to Work Program - The Indiana PABSS Approach

The Ticket to Work program offered disabled and blind social security beneficiaries the promise of greater choice when selecting a vocational rehabilitation provider. With the issuance of Transmittal #17, much of the opportunity to choose a provider was removed. The Protection and Advocacy agency in Indiana took steps to protect the rights of disabled and blind beneficiaries to choose providers in the face of this significant policy change. Learn what was done to protect the rights and ability of beneficiaries to seek and choose vocational rehabilitation providers.

U.S. Asylum Policy and the New World Order

"In the new world order, differences in political ideology have given way to differences in economic conditions between nation states as the prompting force for the outflow of would-be refugees and asylum seekers. In part, these pressures are associated with the political disintegration of the poorer republics of the former Soviet Union and its former satellite nations into ethnic enclaves. But the most endemic of the new contributory pressures are emanating from North-South economic differences between the "have" and "have-not" nations."