January 10, 2026 • 25 mins
This 2015 episode covers the lack of access to public education for children with disabilities in the U.S. until 1975.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
After this week's episode on the five oh four sit Ins,
we are returning to the topic of disability rights for
our Saturday classic with something that took place a few
years earlier than that. It is about lawsuits involving disabled
students that followed in the wake of Brown versus Board
and the passage of the first US law establishing that
all children, regardless of ability, have the right to a free,
(00:26):
appropriate public education.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
In this episode, we mentioned that the Education for All
Handicapped Children Act, which is now called the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act, required evaluation programs to be non discriminatory
because poor children and children who weren't white were disproportionately
being identified as disabled. This continues to be an ongoing
(00:50):
and pervasive issue today. Black and Indigenous children in particular
are disproportionately more likely to be incorrectly identified as disabled,
and there are also gender disparities in special education. This
relates to how many children are identified as disabled and
which disabilities they are identified as having, and it can
(01:10):
have a negative impact on students' entire educations and their
later lives.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
This episode also makes a passing reference to no Child
Left Behind. No Child Left Behind was repealed on December tenth,
twenty fifteen, and it was replaced with the Every Student
Succeeds Act. This episode originally came out on March twenty fifth,
twenty fifteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
(01:39):
a production of iHeartRadio Hello, and Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. While we research this podcast,
you and I uncover things that surprise us. Basically all
the time, for sure. So sometimes though, 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
(02:10):
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 of different roles at
a residential care center for children who had multiple disabilities,
most of whom really needed full time care. My aunt
(02:31):
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 unit that dealt specifically
with products for children who had special needs. And yet,
in spite of all of that family history, I was
(02:52):
surprised to learn from a listener email that until nineteen
seventy five, children with disabilities in the United States were
not getting guaranteed a public education. Listener Amy wrote in
to tell us about this aspect of Brown versus Board
that I hadn't known about before. After the Supreme Court
ruling that the practice of segregation based on race was
(03:13):
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 what
we're going to talk about today, And as a caveat
before we start, the language that we use to talk
(03:33):
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 the day today. This would be considered insulting
or offensive. We're gonna note those as they come up,
but just as an advanced warning. There are words we're
(03:53):
going to use that today we absolutely would not be
using in that way.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
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 British colony more
than two hundred years prior to that. Other states followed suit,
and these laws required children in a specific age range
(04:19):
to attend school, and parents whose children didn't go to
school or get an equivalent education at home faced prosecution.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
However, most states granted exceptions to their compulsory attendance laws
in the cases of children who 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
(04:48):
education that they needed. School systems had different rules for
determining who could be excluded, but in general, students deemed
to be quote uneducable were not a allowed to enroll.
Laws were all over the place when it came to
defining who exactly could be categorized as unedugable. In some
(05:08):
cases it was an IQ below a certain number. But
there were states that labeled a range of disabilities that
had absolutely nothing to do with the ability to learn
as uneducable, 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
(05:32):
not actually need full time care because of their disabilities,
and even if they did, the institutions that existed in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not equipped to
give that kind of care. In general, these facilities just
provided housing, minimal food and attentive care, and virtually no
education for the children who lived there. Even after the
(05:53):
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. In nineteen fifty eight,
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
(06:14):
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 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 based on race was
(06:36):
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 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
(06:57):
may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlike
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 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
(07:20):
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 programs for
working with blind and deaf students, as well as captioned
films and other accessible teaching materials. Not long before his
assassination in nineteen sixty three, President John F. Kennedy signed
(07:43):
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 to
prevent intellectual disabilities, which were 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
(08:05):
of nineteen sixty three. This funded research and programs, including
the training of special education teachers. Then, as a 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
(08:26):
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 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
(08:49):
Elementary and Secondary Education Act was really controversial at the time.
It increased spending on education really dramatically, and since many
of the poorest children it was meant to help were
also racial and ethnic minorities, that raised the hackles of
a lot of the same citizens and lawmakers who had
previously opposed integration and at that point were still opposing integration.
(09:11):
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
services through the nineteen sixties, and in the early nineteen seventies,
two court rulings outlined the idea that all children had
the right to a free, appropriate public education. We're going
(09:35):
to talk more about that after we have a quick
word from a sponsor. A number of court cases came
about in the nineteen sixties and seventies that related to
the right to an education for children with disabilities. Two
(09:56):
of them have become really the landmark cases in this field,
and the ones that are cited 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
(10:16):
for 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
(10:38):
deny 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 not nearly the prevalent
standard that it used to be. Along with Park, the
(10:59):
parents of thirteen children who had been excluded from school
formed a class action lawsuit 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. Gilhul,
(11:21):
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
(11:41):
the Amendment 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 law, nor deny
(12:01):
to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of
the laws. Pennsylvania's defense was basically to cite the laws
that were already on its books. One 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. The Commonwealth
(12:25):
also argued that educating these children would create an undue
financial burden on the government of Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
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 unconstitutional for Pennsylvania to interfere
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
(12:54):
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
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.
(13:19):
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,
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 in a ward
(13:39):
of the district. He had been excluded from school in
fourth grade due to a quote behavior problem. Another plaintiff,
Dwayne Blackshear, was also excluded because of a behavior problem,
and the remaining plaintiffs were reported to have been excluded
for a number of intellectual disabilities and medical conditions. Thetiffs
(14:00):
had 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 fourth, nineteen seventy one.
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
(14:22):
third 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
was reading did not get into why only four of
the children were ordered to be enrolled in school immediately.
(14:45):
Based on the descriptions of the various plaintiffs, that are included,
and the ruling, I think it was just an issue
of we need to figure out more accommodations for these,
but let's go ahead and get these into school. God,
that is sort of my conclusion, but it wasn't really
spelled out that clearly. However, the Board of Education missed
(15:09):
this January third deadline, and it continued to miss new
deadlines as 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 Joseph Cornelius Wattie
ruled that excluding these children was a violation of their
constitutional rights. He cited Brown versus Board and Bowling versus
Sharp as precedents. Those are all things that we've talked
(15:31):
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 school
violated 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
(15:52):
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 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
(16:13):
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
a constitutionally adequate prior hearing and periodic review of the
child's status, progress, and the adequacy of any educational alternative.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
So, to be very short, that says you cannot exclude
children from school without providing them an alternate education that's
suitable for them, and you can't exclude children from school
without actually allowing them to do process. And that was
a problem that was happening all over the country where
basically a principal would say this child is excluded from
school because of this disability, and the child really had
(16:58):
no recourse. There was no due process in that situation.
So this brings us to the first federal law that
guaranteed the same thing that Judge Wattie had just guaranteed
in the District of Columbia, and we'll talk about this
after another brief word from a sponsor. One of the
(17:26):
things that was really exceptional about Brown versus Board is
that it was a Supreme Court ruling that dramatically and
fundamentally changed the way people lived in their daily lives.
One of the questions that was raised during the Supreme
Court's arguments and re arguments in 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
(17:48):
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 Congress to pass a law to
change segregation, not to the Court to over turn all
of those laws that were already on the books.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
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 cases had started moving
through the courts, Congress introduced legislation meant to directly address
(18:24):
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 due to a disability,
either by being excluded from schools entirely or by being
(18:46):
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
were getting an education that was appropriate to their needs.
One point seventy five million children were receiving an education
(19:08):
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 children appropriately, state
governments were essentially forcing them to remain dependent on other
(19:31):
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 taxpayer dollars in order to survive. According to
the legislative records, the figure was cited as billions of
dollars spent per year to keep people in quote subhuman conditions.
(19:55):
The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of nineteen seventy five,
also known as Public Life Law ninety four Tosh 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 first 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,
(20:19):
appropriate public education, regardless of whether they had a disability.
It had four purposes. First was quote to assure that
all children with disabilities 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
(20:41):
that the rights of children with disabilities and their parents
are protected. Third quote to assist states and localities to
provide for the education of all children with disabilities. And
force quote to assess and assure the effectiveness of efforts
to educate all children with disabilities. This law also outlined
(21:02):
a number of ideas that are still part of education
for children with disabilities today. This included individual education programs
are IEPs, 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
(21:24):
in the least restrictive setting that is still simultaneously appropriate
to meet their educational needs. It also sets up education
as a collaborative process. This is 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
(21:47):
in the law as well. Evaluation programs had to be
non discriminatory. They needed to account for economic differences as
well as language and ethnicity. And this was a big
deal because poor and minority children were dispropored portunately represented
in programs for children with disabilities, sometimes for discriminatory reasons
and not because an actual disability existed. And to be clear,
(22:10):
this was really an enormous step. We had gone from
people just being institutionalized as a matter of course to
there being a law 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,
(22:33):
this bill promises more than the federal government can deliver,
and its good intentions could be thwarted by the many
unwise provisions it contains. Everyone can agree with the objectives
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
(22:56):
of what was actually needed and how it would work progressed,
Public TIK Law ninety four TOASH one four two was
amended 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
(23:18):
ninety the law was reauthorized, and at that time it
was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or idea.
It was reauthorized again in nineteen ninety 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
(23:43):
has been impeded by low expectations and an insufficient focus
on applying replicable research on proven methods of teaching and
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
(24:06):
in regular classrooms, and both the graduation rates and employment
rates after graduation have increased, along with enrollments into secondary
schools by students who have disabilities. The number of college
freshmen with disabilities has tripled since nineteen seventy eight. However,
while things have improved, there are definitely a number of
(24:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Yeah, most of the parents I know whose children have
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 in getting IEPs put together and approved and having
(24:57):
them implemented once they actually are our 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. Thanks so much for joining us
on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
(25:19):
our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and
you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
After this week's episode on the five oh four sit Ins,
we are returning to the topic of disability rights for
our Saturday classic with something that took place a few
years earlier than that. It is about lawsuits involving disabled
students that followed in the wake of Brown versus Board
and the passage of the first US law establishing that
all children, regardless of ability, have the right to a free,
(00:26):
appropriate public education.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
In this episode, we mentioned that the Education for All
Handicapped Children Act, which is now called the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act, required evaluation programs to be non discriminatory
because poor children and children who weren't white were disproportionately
being identified as disabled. This continues to be an ongoing
(00:50):
and pervasive issue today. Black and Indigenous children in particular
are disproportionately more likely to be incorrectly identified as disabled,
and there are also gender disparities in special education. This
relates to how many children are identified as disabled and
which disabilities they are identified as having, and it can
(01:10):
have a negative impact on students' entire educations and their
later lives.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
This episode also makes a passing reference to no Child
Left Behind. No Child Left Behind was repealed on December tenth,
twenty fifteen, and it was replaced with the Every Student
Succeeds Act. This episode originally came out on March twenty fifth,
twenty fifteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
(01:39):
a production of iHeartRadio Hello, and Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. While we research this podcast,
you and I uncover things that surprise us. Basically all
the time, for sure. So sometimes though, 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
(02:10):
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 of different roles at
a residential care center for children who had multiple disabilities,
most of whom really needed full time care. My aunt
(02:31):
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 unit that dealt specifically
with products for children who had special needs. And yet,
in spite of all of that family history, I was
(02:52):
surprised to learn from a listener email that until nineteen
seventy five, children with disabilities in the United States were
not getting guaranteed a public education. Listener Amy wrote in
to tell us about this aspect of Brown versus Board
that I hadn't known about before. After the Supreme Court
ruling that the practice of segregation based on race was
(03:13):
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 what
we're going to talk about today, And as a caveat
before we start, the language that we use to talk
(03:33):
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 the day today. This would be considered insulting
or offensive. We're gonna note those as they come up,
but just as an advanced warning. There are words we're
(03:53):
going to use that today we absolutely would not be
using in that way.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
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 British colony more
than two hundred years prior to that. Other states followed suit,
and these laws required children in a specific age range
(04:19):
to attend school, and parents whose children didn't go to
school or get an equivalent education at home faced prosecution.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
However, most states granted exceptions to their compulsory attendance laws
in the cases of children who 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
(04:48):
education that they needed. School systems had different rules for
determining who could be excluded, but in general, students deemed
to be quote uneducable were not a allowed to enroll.
Laws were all over the place when it came to
defining who exactly could be categorized as unedugable. In some
(05:08):
cases it was an IQ below a certain number. But
there were states that labeled a range of disabilities that
had absolutely nothing to do with the ability to learn
as uneducable, 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
(05:32):
not actually need full time care because of their disabilities,
and even if they did, the institutions that existed in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not equipped to
give that kind of care. In general, these facilities just
provided housing, minimal food and attentive care, and virtually no
education for the children who lived there. Even after the
(05:53):
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. In nineteen fifty eight,
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
(06:14):
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 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 based on race was
(06:36):
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 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
(06:57):
may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlike
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 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
(07:20):
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 programs for
working with blind and deaf students, as well as captioned
films and other accessible teaching materials. Not long before his
assassination in nineteen sixty three, President John F. Kennedy signed
(07:43):
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 to
prevent intellectual disabilities, which were 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
(08:05):
of nineteen sixty three. This funded research and programs, including
the training of special education teachers. Then, as a 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
(08:26):
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 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
(08:49):
Elementary and Secondary Education Act was really controversial at the time.
It increased spending on education really dramatically, and since many
of the poorest children it was meant to help were
also racial and ethnic minorities, that raised the hackles of
a lot of the same citizens and lawmakers who had
previously opposed integration and at that point were still opposing integration.
(09:11):
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
services through the nineteen sixties, and in the early nineteen seventies,
two court rulings outlined the idea that all children had
the right to a free, appropriate public education. We're going
(09:35):
to talk more about that after we have a quick
word from a sponsor. A number of court cases came
about in the nineteen sixties and seventies that related to
the right to an education for children with disabilities. Two
(09:56):
of them have become really the landmark cases in this field,
and the ones that are cited 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
(10:16):
for 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
(10:38):
deny 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 not nearly the prevalent
standard that it used to be. Along with Park, the
(10:59):
parents of thirteen children who had been excluded from school
formed a class action lawsuit 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. Gilhul,
(11:21):
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
(11:41):
the Amendment 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 law, nor deny
(12:01):
to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of
the laws. Pennsylvania's defense was basically to cite the laws
that were already on its books. One 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. The Commonwealth
(12:25):
also argued that educating these children would create an undue
financial burden on the government of Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
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 unconstitutional for Pennsylvania to interfere
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
(12:54):
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
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.
(13:19):
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,
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 in a ward
(13:39):
of the district. He had been excluded from school in
fourth grade due to a quote behavior problem. Another plaintiff,
Dwayne Blackshear, was also excluded because of a behavior problem,
and the remaining plaintiffs were reported to have been excluded
for a number of intellectual disabilities and medical conditions. Thetiffs
(14:00):
had 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 fourth, nineteen seventy one.
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
(14:22):
third 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
was reading did not get into why only four of
the children were ordered to be enrolled in school immediately.
(14:45):
Based on the descriptions of the various plaintiffs, that are included,
and the ruling, I think it was just an issue
of we need to figure out more accommodations for these,
but let's go ahead and get these into school. God,
that is sort of my conclusion, but it wasn't really
spelled out that clearly. However, the Board of Education missed
(15:09):
this January third deadline, and it continued to miss new
deadlines as 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 Joseph Cornelius Wattie
ruled that excluding these children was a violation of their
constitutional rights. He cited Brown versus Board and Bowling versus
Sharp as precedents. Those are all things that we've talked
(15:31):
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 school
violated 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
(15:52):
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 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
(16:13):
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
a constitutionally adequate prior hearing and periodic review of the
child's status, progress, and the adequacy of any educational alternative.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
So, to be very short, that says you cannot exclude
children from school without providing them an alternate education that's
suitable for them, and you can't exclude children from school
without actually allowing them to do process. And that was
a problem that was happening all over the country where
basically a principal would say this child is excluded from
school because of this disability, and the child really had
(16:58):
no recourse. There was no due process in that situation.
So this brings us to the first federal law that
guaranteed the same thing that Judge Wattie had just guaranteed
in the District of Columbia, and we'll talk about this
after another brief word from a sponsor. One of the
(17:26):
things that was really exceptional about Brown versus Board is
that it was a Supreme Court ruling that dramatically and
fundamentally changed the way people lived in their daily lives.
One of the questions that was raised during the Supreme
Court's arguments and re arguments in 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
(17:48):
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 Congress to pass a law to
change segregation, not to the Court to over turn all
of those laws that were already on the books.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
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 cases had started moving
through the courts, Congress introduced legislation meant to directly address
(18:24):
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 due to a disability,
either by being excluded from schools entirely or by being
(18:46):
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
were getting an education that was appropriate to their needs.
One point seventy five million children were receiving an education
(19:08):
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 children appropriately, state
governments were essentially forcing them to remain dependent on other
(19:31):
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 taxpayer dollars in order to survive. According to
the legislative records, the figure was cited as billions of
dollars spent per year to keep people in quote subhuman conditions.
(19:55):
The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of nineteen seventy five,
also known as Public Life Law ninety four Tosh 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 first 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,
(20:19):
appropriate public education, regardless of whether they had a disability.
It had four purposes. First was quote to assure that
all children with disabilities 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
(20:41):
that the rights of children with disabilities and their parents
are protected. Third quote to assist states and localities to
provide for the education of all children with disabilities. And
force quote to assess and assure the effectiveness of efforts
to educate all children with disabilities. This law also outlined
(21:02):
a number of ideas that are still part of education
for children with disabilities today. This included individual education programs
are IEPs, 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
(21:24):
in the least restrictive setting that is still simultaneously appropriate
to meet their educational needs. It also sets up education
as a collaborative process. This is 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
(21:47):
in the law as well. Evaluation programs had to be
non discriminatory. They needed to account for economic differences as
well as language and ethnicity. And this was a big
deal because poor and minority children were dispropored portunately represented
in programs for children with disabilities, sometimes for discriminatory reasons
and not because an actual disability existed. And to be clear,
(22:10):
this was really an enormous step. We had gone from
people just being institutionalized as a matter of course to
there being a law 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,
(22:33):
this bill promises more than the federal government can deliver,
and its good intentions could be thwarted by the many
unwise provisions it contains. Everyone can agree with the objectives
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
(22:56):
of what was actually needed and how it would work progressed,
Public TIK Law ninety four TOASH one four two was
amended 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
(23:18):
ninety the law was reauthorized, and at that time it
was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or idea.
It was reauthorized again in nineteen ninety 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
(23:43):
has been impeded by low expectations and an insufficient focus
on applying replicable research on proven methods of teaching and
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
(24:06):
in regular classrooms, and both the graduation rates and employment
rates after graduation have increased, along with enrollments into secondary
schools by students who have disabilities. The number of college
freshmen with disabilities has tripled since nineteen seventy eight. However,
while things have improved, there are definitely a number of
(24:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Yeah, most of the parents I know whose children have
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 in getting IEPs put together and approved and having
(24:57):
them implemented once they actually are our 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. Thanks so much for joining us
on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
(25:19):
our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and
you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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