P.A.R.C., Mills and Special Education

Until 1975, children with disabilities in the U.S. weren't guaranteed the right to a public education. The ruling in Brown v. Board sparked a series of cases related to children who had been segregated or restricted from schools based on disabilities.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. While we
researched this podcast, you and I uncover the things that
surprise us basically all the time, for sure. So sometimes though,

(00:24):
we discover things that surprise us, and the fact that
we are just learning this is also in itself surprising
because we should have known about that before because of
various things in our background. In this case, my mom
spent most of her career working with people who had
a range of disabilities. For she was a teacher for
adults with disabilities, and then she worked in a couple

(00:47):
of different roles at a residential care center for children
who had multiple disabilities, most of whom really needed full
time care. My aunt also taught third grade special education
for nearly her whole teaching career. And one of my
first jobs as a writer was writing for a company
that sold educational supplies, and they had a whole business

(01:09):
unit that dealt specifically with products for children who had
special needs. And yet, in spite of all of that
family history, I was surprised to learn from a listener
email that until ninety children with disabilities in the United
States were not guaranteed a public education. Listener Amy wrote
in to tell us about this aspect of Brown versus

(01:30):
Board that I hadn't known about before. After the Supreme
Court ruling that the practice of segregation based on race
was unconstitutional came out, it sparked a similar series of
cases that were related to children who were at that
point either segregated into different classrooms or restricted from public
schools entirely because they had a disability. So that is

(01:53):
what we're going to talk about today, And as a
caveat before we start, the language that we used to
talk about disabilities has evolved so much since the nineteen
sixties and seventies, so particularly in quoted material from court
proceedings and laws, this episode includes some terminology that we
would not use today. Today This would be considered insulting
or offensive. We're gonna note those as they come up,

(02:15):
but just as an advanced warning their words were going
to use that today we absolutely would not be using
in that way. So UH to kick it off, The
first US state to pass a compulsory school attendance law
was Massachusetts, and it did so in eighteen fifty two,
having passed a similar law when it was still a

(02:35):
British colony more than two hundred years prior to that.
Other states followed suit, and these laws required children in
a specific age range to attend school, and parents whose
children didn't go to school or get an equivalent education
at home faced prosecution. However, most states granted exceptions to
their compulsory attendance laws in the cases of children who

(02:58):
had disabilities. These children weren't permitted to enroll in public
schools at all, or if they were allowed to enroll
in school, they were kept in separate, segregated classrooms away
from other children, regardless of the nature of their disability
or what kind of education that they needed. School systems
had different rules for determining who could be excluded, but

(03:20):
in general, students deemed to be quote uneducable were not
allowed to enroll. Laws were all over the place when
it came to defining who exactly could be categorized as
unedgegcable UH. In some cases it was an i Q
below a certain number, but there were states that labeled
a range of disabilities that had absolutely nothing to do

(03:41):
with the ability to learn as unedgecable, and that is
not a label we would use anymore. Children who were
excluded from school mostly stayed home or were institutionalized. Many
of these institutionalized children did not actually need full time
care because of their disablinelities, and even if they did,
the institutions that existed in the nineteenth and early twentieth

(04:04):
centuries were not equipped to give that kind of care.
In general, these facilities just provided housing, minimal food, inattentive care,
and virtually no education for the children who lived there.
Even after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown versus Board
that schools could not be segregated based on race, other
courts were finding that segregation based on ability was allowed.

(04:27):
In the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the state's compulsory
education laws did not apply to children with disabilities. In
North Carolina, it was a crime for parents whose children
had already been excluded because of a disability to try
again at enrolling them. This law was actually in effect
all the way until nineteen sixty nine. So apart from

(04:51):
the fact that children were being denied in education, the
Supreme Court opinion in Brown versus Board had outlined very
eloquently a number of ways in which segregation and based
on race was psychologically harmful, and it seems to a
lot of people that the same would be true in
the case of segregation based on ability. For example, if
you just changed the word race to ability in this

(05:11):
sentence from the ruling quote, to separate them from others
of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race
generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in
the community that may affect their hearts and minds in
a way unlikely ever to be undone end quote. So,
if being put in a separate classroom made black children
feel inferior to white children, logically people thought it would

(05:34):
do the same in the case of children who had
a disability who were being separated from the rest of
the school, and the same questions were on the minds
of legislators, and the US started to pass a variety
of laws that addressed various aspects of education for disabled students.
In the late nineteen fifties, new laws provided teacher training

(05:55):
programs for working with blind and deaf students, as well
as captioned films and are accessible teaching materials. Not long
before his assassination in nineteen sixty three, President John F.
Kennedy signed two pieces of legislation that were related to
this subject. One was an amendment to the Social Security Act,
which expanded programs for mothers and children in an effort

(06:17):
to prevent intellectual disabilities, which are things like screening programs
and nutrition programs that I aimed at prevention. The other
was the Mental Retardation and Community Mental Health Centers Construction
Act of nineteen sixty three. This funded research and programs,
including the training of special education teachers. Then, as a

(06:39):
part of his War on poverty, President Lyndon Johnson signed
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law in nineteen
sixty five, and this law was meant to address student inequality,
especially when it came to children from financially disadvantaged families.
In nineteen sixty six, this law was amended to include
two parts related to students with disabilities. It established the

(07:02):
Bureau of Education of the Handicapped and the National Advisory Council,
and it created programs for students with disabilities and provided
grant funding for those programs. As a side note, the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act was really controversial at the time.
It increased spending on education really dramatically, and since many

(07:23):
of the poorest children it was meant to help, we're
also racial and ethnic minorities. It raised the hackles of
a lot of the same citizens and lawmakers who had
previously opposed integration, and at that point we're still opposing integration.
This law actually continues to be controversial today. It was
reauthorized in two thousand and two and at that point
renamed No Child Left Behind. Additional laws expanded access to

(07:48):
services through the nineteen sixties and in the early nineteen
seventies to court rulings outlined the idea that all children
had the right to a free, appropriate public education. We're
gonna talk more about that after we have a quick
word from a sponsor, so to get back to our story.
A number of court cases came about in the nineteen
sixties and seventies that related to the right to an

(08:11):
education for children with disabilities. Two of them have become
really the landmark cases in this field, and they're the
ones that are sited over and over again. The first
one was the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children versus the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, also known as Park versus Commonwealth The
Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children was an advocacy organization for

(08:34):
children with developmental disabilities and their parents. It was at
that point also providing education for most Pennsylvania children with
disabilities who were not being educated in public schools. Under
Pennsylvania law, at this point, children had to have reached
a quote mental age of five years before the age
of eight to start first grade, and schools could deny

(08:56):
admission to any student who didn't meet that criteria. People
were still talking about mental age a lot when my
mom was still working, but I don't think we do
that anymore. It's a very nebulous thing, the idea of
a mental age, and it's it's not nearly the prevalent
standard that it used to be. Along with Park, the

(09:17):
parents of thirteen children who had been excluded from school
formed a class action lawsuit with against the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania quote on behalf of all mentally retarded persons between
the ages of six and twenty one whom the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania is presently excluding from a program of education
and training in the public schools. Their attorney, Thomas K. Gilhoo,

(09:39):
argued that excluding the children from school was unconstitutional because
it violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,
so as a quick refresher, The Fourteenth Amendment was one
of the reconstruction amendments passed in the wake of the
Civil War, in part to help protect the rights of
recently freed slaves. The end of the first section of

(09:59):
the Amendment in includes both the equal protection and due
process clauses. Quote No State shall make or enforce any
law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens
of the United States. Nor shall any State deprive any
person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law,
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal

(10:21):
protection of the laws. Pennsylvania's defense was basically to cite
the laws that were already on its books. When was
the law we just talked about that required a mental
age of five years? Another relieved Pennsylvania of the obligation
to educate children who were quote uneducable and quote untrainable.

(10:42):
The Commonwealth also argued that educating these children would create
an undue financial burden on the government of Pennsylvania. The
case was settled before the U. S. District Court for
the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Judge Thomas Ambrose Masterson ruled
that yes, it was constitutional for pensyl Pennsylvania to interfere

(11:03):
in any exceptional child's right to an education, and the
Commonwealth was deemed to be responsible for providing a free
education for all children between the ages of six and
twenty one, regardless of their ability. The Commonwealth was also
required to offer free preschool to all students regardless of
ability as well, and if for some reason a school

(11:24):
system could not provide a free appropriate education for a
child within its own schools, it had to find other
arrangements for that child's education at no cost to the family.
The other case that's most cited in this context is
Mills versus Board of Education of the District of Columbia
or Mills versus Board. This was another class action suit,

(11:47):
and this time it involved seven children who had been
excluded from school in the District of Columbia. The case
is named for plaintiff Peter Mills, who, at the time
of the proceedings is twelve years old and award of
the district. He had been excluded from school in fourth
grade due to a quote behavior problem. Another plaintiff Dwayne
black Share was also excluded because of a behavior problem,

(12:09):
and the remaining plaintiffs were reported to have been excluded
for a number of intellectual disabilities and medical conditions. The
seven plaintiffs have been trying to get access to public
education for the nineteen seventy one nineteen seventy two school year,
and after failing to get results by going through normal channels,
filed their suit on September twenty four, nineteen seventy one.

(12:31):
On December twentieth, nineteen seventy one, the court signed an
interim stipulation that four of the plaintiffs get access to
a public education that would meet their needs by January
three of nineteen seventy two, and that the Board of
Education take a series of steps to identify other children
in need of special education services and figure out how
to provide them with an education. The ruling that I

(12:53):
was reading did not get into why only four of
the children were ordered to be an enrolled in school immediately,
based on the descriptions of the various um plaintiffs that
are included in the in the ruling, I think it
was just an issue of we need to figure out

(13:16):
more accommodations for these but let's go ahead and get
these into school. That is sort of my conclusion, but
it wasn't really spelled out that clearly. However, the Board
of Education missed the Stanuary their deadline, and it continued
to miss new deadlines that the judge ordered them, and
so the plaintiffs had to keep bringing the matter back
before the judge. It dragged on for months before Judge

(13:38):
Joseph Cornelius Watty ruled that excluding these children was a
violation of their constitutional rights. He cited Brown versus Board
and Bowling versus Sharpest precedents. Those are all things that
we've talked about during our two parter on Brown versus Board,
along with a number of other civil rights cases, and
he found that the whole process of excluding children from

(13:58):
school vile related their due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.
We've kind of alluded before to the way the Fourteenth
Amendment is worded applies to states and not to the
District of Columbia, which is why this really focused on
Fifth Amendment rights rather than Fourteenth Amendment rights. And he
finally ordered quote that no child eligible for a publicly

(14:20):
supported education in the district of Columbia public schools shall
be excluded from a regular public school assignment by a rule, policy,
or practice of the Board of Education of the District
of Columbia or its agents, unless such child is provided
a adequate alternative educational services suited to the child's needs,
which may include special education or tuition grants, and be

(14:44):
a constitutionally adequate prior hearing and periodic review of the
child's status, progress, and the adequacy of any educational alternative. So,
to be very short, that says you cannot exclude children
from school without providing um an alternate education that's suitable
for them, and you can't exclude children from school without

(15:05):
actually allowing them due process. And that was a problem
that was happening all over the country where basically a
principle would say this child is excluded from school because
of this disability, and the child really had no recourse
there was, so there was no due process in that
in that situation. So this brings us to the first
federal law that guaranteed the same thing UH that Judge

(15:29):
Watty had just UH guaranteed in the District of Columbia.
And we'll talk about this after another brief word from
a sponsor, So to get back to this story, and
when there were actual laws passed that applied all over
the United States. One of the things that was really
exceptional about Brown versus Board is that it was a
Supreme Court ruling that dramatically and fundamentally changed the way

(15:50):
people lived in their daily lives. One of the questions
that was raised during the Supreme Courts arguments and re
arguments and Brown versus Board, and it's actually a question
that still still persists in some people's minds today, is
whether the Court even had the authority to make such
a massive change. Critics argued that that wasn't the court's
job at all, that it really should have fallen to

(16:12):
Congress to pass a law to change segregation, not to
the Court to overturn all of those laws that were
already on the books. Congress did eventually pass civil rights
legislation that had some things in common with the Brown
versus Board decision, but when it came to children's rights
to an education regardless of disability, Congress took a more
focused approach. In nineteen seventy two, after these and other

(16:36):
cases had started moving through the courts, Congress introduced legislation
meant to directly address the subject of education for children
with disabilities. First Congress launched an investigation into the state
of education for children with disabilities, and these findings were
kind of shocking to today's sensibilities. Millions of children in
the United States were effectively being denied a public education

(16:58):
due to a disability, either by being excluded from schools
entirely or by being put into a segregated classroom that
was not appropriate for their needs. There were, according to
this investigation, more than eight million children who needed special
education services. Only three point nine million of these children,
so less than half we're getting an education that was

(17:20):
appropriate to their needs, One point seven five million children
were receiving an education that wasn't appropriate for their needs,
and two point five million weren't getting any education at all.
Aside from the basic idea that so many children just
were not receiving the education that they were entitled to,
this investigation actually raised another point. By failing to educate

(17:43):
children appropriately, state governments were essentially forcing them to remain
dependent on other people for their entire lives. The end
result of this lack of education was that children who
could have otherwise become independent, were growing up, to rely
exclusively on public agencies and to expay or dollars in
order to survive. According to the legislative records, the figure

(18:05):
was cited as billions of dollars spent per year to
keep people in quote subhuman conditions. The Education for All
Handicapped Children Act of nineteen seventy five, also known as
Public Law ninety four Dash one forty two, was signed
into law by President Gerald Ford on November seventeenth, nineteen
seventy five, and it was to take effect by September

(18:26):
one of nineteen seventy eight. This is the law that
guaranteed all children between the ages of three and twenty
one be allowed access to a free, appropriate public education,
regardless of whether they had a disability. It had four purposes.
First was quote to assure that all children with disabilities

(18:47):
have available to them a free, appropriate public education, which
emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their
unique needs. Second quote to assure that the rights of
children would disabilities and their parents are protected. Third quote
to assist states and localities to provide for the education

(19:08):
of all children with disabilities. And fourth quote to assess
and assure the effectiveness of efforts to educate all children
with disabilities. This law also outlined a number of ideas
that were are still part of education for children with
disabilities today. This included individual education programs are i e

(19:28):
p S, which are tailored plans of education that are
put together to meet each child's specific needs. The concept
of the least restrictive environment was also part of this law,
so that's the idea that a child should be educated
in the least restrictive setting that is still simultaneously appropriate
to meet their educational needs. It also sets up education

(19:50):
as a collaborative process. This is the one that involves
the active participation of the parents, the teachers, and other
professionals all working together to put together a plan and
educate a specific child. There were a lot of other
provisions in the law as well. Evaluation programs had to
be non discriminatory. They needed to account for economic differences

(20:11):
as well as language and ethnicity. And this was a
big deal because poor and minority children were disproportionately represented
in programs for children with disabilities, sometimes for discriminatory reasons
and not because an actual disability existed. And to be clear,
this was really an enormous step. We had gone from
people just being institutionalized as a matter of course to

(20:34):
there being a lot that guaranteed that everyone had the
right to the same education. But this was not an
easy process at all, and it wasn't even one that
a lot of people had high hopes for. When the
law was originally passed, President Ford himself said, quote, Unfortunately,
this bill promises more than the federal government can deliver,
and it's good intentions could be thwarted by the many

(20:57):
unwise provisions it contains. Everyone can agree with the objective
stated in the title of this bill, educating all handicapped
children in our nation. The key question is whether the
bill will really accomplish this objective, and as people's understanding
of what was actually needed and how it would work progressed,
Public Law ninety four Dash one four two was amended

(21:20):
several times between nineteen seventy five and nineteen ninety seven.
In the nineteen eighties, amendments expanded the scope of the
law to include services that started from birth, as well
as transition services from graduation into adult living. In nineteen
ninety the law was reauthorized, and at that time it
was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or IDEA.

(21:44):
It was re authorized again in nineteen seven, and this
reauthorization involved research into the outcomes of special education, in
other words, what had actually happened to special education students,
and the research was not particularly positive. Special education quote
has been impeded by low expectations and an insufficient focus
on applying replicable research on proven methods of teaching and

(22:07):
learning for children with disabilities. So while at times this
progress has been slow or faltering, overall things have improved
over the last forty years. The majority of children with
disabilities now go to neighborhood public schools and are educated
in regular classrooms, and both the graduation rates and employment
rates after graduation have increased, along with enrollments into secondary

(22:31):
schools by students who have disabilities. The number of college
freshmen with disabilities has tripled since ninety However, while things
have improved, there are definitely a number of challenges and
issues that parents and teachers, and as they get older
and become more accountable for their own education, the students
themselves still face. Yeah, most of the parents I know

(22:54):
whose children have uh some sort of disability have talked
really candidly about various struggles, like they will have teachers
who they love, and the teachers are obviously doing the
best that they can with the resources that they have,
but they they're like still struggles and getting i e.
P S put together and approved and having them implemented

(23:15):
once they actually are uh are put together. So it's
definitely definitely not a perfect process yet, but it's also
one that has certainly come a long long way since
nineteen seventy five. Do you also have a little bit
of listener mail we could hear I do, and it
is actually related to this uh this episode because it

(23:37):
is one that followed our Brown Versus Board episodes. It's
from Emma, and Emma says Hi tracing Holly. First, I
just want to say I love the podcast and listen
on my commute to work every day. I really enjoyed
all of your Brown Versus Board podcasts, in particular since
I'm currently a school librarian and worked as a classroom
teacher for ten years prior to my current shop. Thank
you for addressing the fact that school segregations exists today

(24:00):
and poses an ongoing challenge to the educational equity in
our nation. There's one particular angle that didn't come up
in your podcast that I thought was worth calling attention to.
And that's the issue of teacher diversity. For most of
my career as an educator, I have worked in primarily
low income schools serving majority minority populations. I taught in
South Texas for many years, where my students were overwhelmingly

(24:24):
poor and Latino, and then I taught in Hartford, Connecticut,
in a school serving a population that was roughly ent
African American. I should note here that I am white,
as are the vast majority of other teachers I have
worked with. Even in low income schools serving predominantly minority students,
the adults standing in front of the students every day
are overwhelmingly white. According to a report from the National

(24:45):
Center for Education Statistics, about eight two percent of public
school teachers in the year twelve were white. There is
a particular shortage of black male teachers in the profession.
I have seen statistics as low as one percent quoted
for the scentage of public school teachers who are black men.
When students of color have no positive role models who
look like them standing in front of the classroom, what

(25:07):
message does that send about their future? Prospects. I guess
I could propose a call to action here. I do
encourage any of your listeners who are passionate about educational
equity to consider teaching at a low income school, as
I did, but I mostly just wanted to bring the
statistic to light and share it with you as another
layer to the problem of segregated and unequal education that
still persists, persists so long after Brown versus Board. Best wishes, Emma.

(25:33):
Thank you very much, Emma. This is actually similar to
UM an email we got a long time ago when
we were still working on pop stuff that was about
the disproportionate, UH, disproportionate number of preschool teachers who were female.
There's a similarly low, like one percent number of male
preschool teachers UM, and how that's similarly that dichotomy and

(25:56):
gender UH creates issues in terms of having stive role models,
and so this is I think similar in terms of race,
and also in both of those cases, not a thing
I actually thought about. UM. I had not thought thought
about that in terms of gender before and until getting
this email, I had not actually thought about UM the
disparity and race among teachers in the United States. So

(26:19):
thank you Emma for writing to us. If you would
like to write, write to us. We're a history podcast
at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook
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(26:41):
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stuff about various aspects for of education as related to
disability on the website. You can also come to our website,
which is missed in History dot com, and you will
find show notes for the eisodes probably and I have
worked on an archive of every single episode that has

(27:04):
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