We’ve looked at the first public school in the U.S., what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635, and what the Bray School tells us about education around the time of the Revolutionary War. We also looked at the Lancaster Monitorial system from the early decades of the 19th century before shifting to the Common School Movement and how it shaped U.S. Education. We talked about the one-room schoolhouse and some of the shifts it embodied. We looked at an 8th grade exam from 1895 that didn’t begin to approach the level of content expected of modern 8th graders and we’ve looked at the abuses of the Indian Boarding School system. We went back again to look at the parallel-but-very-unequal development of Black schools in the U.S. between the Civil War and Brown v. Board and we took a look at an 8th grade exam from 1912. We looked at the European roots of Kindergarten and how Kindergarten flourished in the U.S. We also discussed the high school movement. Today we are going to look one last aspect of public education that involved a large group of children who were excluded from public education until comparatively recently: children with special needs. In Part 1 we looked at the long slow move to educate disabled children. Today, in the last post of this series, we are looking the very recent events and legislation that mandated access to that education and how those mandates have played out for students today.
Although by the early 20th century there was much more recognition that children with disabilities could be educated, the idea that they should be educated as far as was possible was a lot slower to take hold. In a January, 2000 report, the National Council on Disabilities described the state of special education before 1975: “before enactment of the federal protections in IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), schools in America educated only one in five students with disabilities. More than 1 million students were excluded from public schools, and another 3.5 million [were in schools but] did not receive appropriate services.” That’s bad, but it still doesn’t capture how dire the situation really was.
Prior to 1975, every state had laws excluding students they deemed “ineducable.” This included those who were blind, deaf, or labeled emotionally disturbed, or “mentally retarded.” It shouldn’t surprise anyone that “ineducable” was so broad a term that it could be made to fit nearly any child a school didn’t want to deal with. There was no formal identification tool or process and there was no ability to appeal a decision once made. In some states, like North Carolina, parents of disabled children excluded from school could be arrested for trying to enroll them again. Although states had specific laws about exclusion, the actual determination of who was “educable” was often left at the discretion of the school principal and that created a system ripe for discrimination. Disabled children living in low-income or rural communities and children from ethnic and racial minorities were far more likely to be barred from attending school. Children with disabilities who were allowed to attend school were often placed in segregated classrooms and kept out of sight of “normal” students. Sometimes, children of normal intelligence with physical disabilities were placed in classes designed for children with intellectual disabilities. Still others were placed in regular classrooms with no special help or accommodations. At the same time, almost 200,000 school-age children with intellectual, developmental, or emotional disabilities were permanently institutionalized; at least some of those children didn’t have disabilities severe enough to warrant this treatment. Courts routinely confirmed the right of states and school districts to exclude these children.
Paving the Way
Some legal decisions and a few pieces of legislation began moving the U.S. toward a more inclusive climate, though it might be more accurate to say that they dragged the U.S. kicking and screaming in that direction. They are:
- Brown v. Board, 1954. Brown was the decision that dismantled school segregation based on race. A major thrust of Brown was that segregation was psychologically harmful to children: “to separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of 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.” Parents of disabled children realized that a similar argument might be made on behalf of their children.
- The Mental Retardation and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act, 1963. President Kennedy, whose sister was intellectually disabled (see Part 1), signed this act into law shortly before his assassination. It provided funding for research and programs, including the training of special education teachers. He also enacted an amendment to the Social Security Act that provided money for maternal and child health, nutrition, and screening initiatives designed to prevent disabilities.
- Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 1965. President Johnson signed this into law to address student inequality for children from poor families. It increased spending on education significantly, particularly for the poorest children, many of whom were also non-White. It was controversial for this very reason and widely opposed by the same people who opposed desegregation. What it did for special education was recognize that some “disabilities” were actually issues of poverty and lack of access to resources. This law was reenacted (with substantial changes) and renamed No Child Left Behind in 2001.
The Big Shift
The two pivotal cases that really reversed the prevailing stance toward disabled children were PARC v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1972) and Mills V. Board of Education (1972). PARC was a group that advocated for children with intellectual disabilities. Their lawsuit argued that excluding children from school violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment: “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, no deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The due process part was critical; students were frequently excluded from school with no ability to appeal or protest. The Commonwealth argued that educating these children would place an undue financial burden on the State. The U.S. District Court judge disagreed and issued two important rulings: 1. The State could not interfere with an exceptional child’s* right to an education, and 2. The Commonwealth was responsible for providing that education or, if they could not, paying for the child to attend a school that could.
Mills v. Board was a class action lawsuit in Washington D.C. on behalf of seven children who had been trying to gain access to public education for the 1971/72 school year. Although the district was ordered to provide education for four of the children named in the case,** it missed deadline after deadline to do so. In court, the plaintiff’s attorney cited Brown v. Board in his arguments: segregation from regular school was damaging for these children. The U.S. District Court judge agreed and ruled that the children were not given due process and that the Board of Education could not institute a rule, policy or practice that excluded children eligible for public education unless the child was provided “adequate alternative educational services suited to the child’s needs.” He further stipulated that these options had to be vetted for appropriateness and periodically reviewed to determine the child’s status and progress and whether the alternative was still appropriate to the child’s needs. Here we can see the seeds of the IEP.
The Result
The same year these decisions came out, Congress formed a committee to investigate the condition of disabled persons in the U.S. and found the situation described in the first section of this post. They decided to take direct action to ameliorate this, which I would love to report was entirely altruistic but which may have had more basis in reducing government expenditure. Congress noted that failing to educate children appropriately forced them to remain dependent on other people their entire lives. The result of this was a group of people who might have become independent relying instead on public agencies and taxpayer dollars. As a bit of an afterthought, they did note that this dependency kept them in “inhuman conditions.” President Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act into law in 1975.*** It embodied the findings from Brown, PARC, and Mills in that it mandated access to free public education for disabled children, required districts to provide appropriate education or pay for the child to attend a school that could, required due process in placement, specified individual education plans (IEPs), and even included providing education in the least restrictive environment. It would later be renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
And that solved disability discrimination in schools. The End.
Okay, It Didn’t
We’ve come a long way, to be sure. Mainstreaming has reduced, if not completely removed, the stigma around disabilities. Children today are unfazed by wheelchairs or classmates with Down Syndrome or autism. There is far more understanding about how to discuss differences and adapt to them in a social setting. Terminology and treatment are far more respectful. Children and their parents have more agency and protection. The vast majority of special education students (87%) spend their day in a regular classroom instead of hidden away. Those are great things.
But we still aren’t where we need to be. People with disabilities had to wait until 1990 for the Americans With Disabilities Act, which finally mandated accommodations in public spaces like ramps and elevators and handicapped-accessible bathrooms. Parents continued to battle school districts in court for the right for their children to learn. In one case from Wisconsin in 1984, a child with developmental delays was excluded from school and the district’s explanation was breathtakingly insensitive and cruel: “Just as a comatose or braindead child will not benefit from educational efforts, neither will Rachel at this time.” And public education still has big disparities in who is identified for special education and how they experience the special education and general school environments. Consider:
- Gender disparities are a huge problem. As of 2020-21, 65% of special education students were boys while 35% were girls. It is likely that boys aren’t just over identified but that girls may be under identified. Black boys are the most likely to be misidentified, except in communities that are mostly Latino. Then it’s Latino boys.
- During the 2020-21 school year, 825 districts in 39 states were identified as having significant disproportionality, meaning they had some populations that were significantly over represented in special education. Those populations are virtually always boys, non-White, or poor, or all three.
- English learners are often both over- and under-identified in special education. Issues related to learning a new language are misidentified as disabilities while actual disabilities like dyslexia are attributed to poor English skills.
- Black students are 40% more likely to be identified for special education than White students. This is true even in cases where the children’s economic status is equal.
- Mainstreaming is not equitable: 55% of White students with disabilities spend at least 80% of their day in a regular classroom versus only 33% of Black students. Additionally, 16% of Black students and 14% of Hispanic students with disabilities were in a more restrictive classroom environment (i.e., in a regular classroom for less than 40% of the school day) compared to just 9% of White students.
- Non-White students with disabilities (except for Asian) are far more likely to be suspended than White students with disabilities.
- Graduation rates are lower for Black, Latino, and Native students with disabilities than they are for White
students with disabilities. In one study, approximately 75% of Asian and White students with disabilities left high school with a regular diploma, but only around 65% of Black, Latino, and Native American students with disabilities left high school with a regular diploma in the 2014–2015 school year. This is critical because high school graduation is highly predictive of employment and income potential. - Students with disabilities make up 17% of all students K-12, but comprise 27% of students with one or more in-school suspensions, 29% of those with one or more out-of-school suspensions, 24% of those who were expelled, and 24% of those incarcerated. To be disabled in American public schools is to be seriously at risk.
It’s obvious that we are far from a perfect system. Since the first colonists arrived in the New World, we’ve made great strides toward full inclusion, but we still have a lot of work to do. There are many in public education who continue to push for equitable treatment for all children, regardless of their background, income, ethnicity, gender or any other factor. The core value of a free public education for everyone is something we still aspire to — is something still worth aspiring to.
May we do our best to preserve this most American of values for everyone.
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*Note the shift to far more respectful language than was being used less than a decade earlier.
**I could not find any information on why only four were allowed to attend. It’s moot anyway because the district didn’t comply.
***Ironically, Ford supported the noble goals of this law, but was ambivalent about its construction and potential effect. He wrote: “Unfortunately, this bill promises more than the federal government can deliver, and its good intentions could be thwarted by the many unwise provisions it contains.”