What is the history of the special education movement in America?
In the 1960s, advocates sought a Federal role in providing leadership and funding for efforts to provide a free appropriate public education, or FAPE, to children with disabilities. Congress took a step toward this in 1966 when it established the Bureau for Education of the Handicapped under Title VI of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act (ESEA). Subsequently, a number of initiatives earmarked small amounts of Federal funds for serving children with disabilities. As these programs proliferated, the Bureau recommended that they be codified under a single law (Martin, Martin, & Terman, 1996). The resulting Education of the Handicapped Act, P.L. 91-230, was passed in 1970.
During the same periodÑthe 1960s and early 1970sÑparents began to pursue State laws that would require local education agencies (LEAs) to offer special education services to students with disabilities and that would provide partial funding for those services. Despite the passage of such laws in a number of States and the provision of some Federal funding through P.L. 91-230, many children with disabilities remained unserved or underserved by public schools (Martin, Martin, & Terman, 1996, p. 28). It was clear that further Federal legislation would be required in order to ensure that students with disabilities were provided FAPE.
Two landmark Federal court decisions, Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1971 and Mills v. Board of Education of the District of Columbia the following year, established that
the responsibility of States and local school districts to educate individuals with disabilities is derived from the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution (US Department of Education, 1995a, p. 1).
These decisions set the stage for the enactment of a major new law, and
. . . States joined advocates in seeking the passage of Federal legislation to provide consistency, Federal leadership, and Federal subsidy of the costs of special education (Martin, Martin, & Terman, 1996, p. 29).
By 1975, Congress had determined that millions of American children with disabilities were still not receiving an appropriate education, finding that more than half of the handicapped children in the United States do not receive appropriate educational services which would enable them to have full equality of opportunity (Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA), Sec. 3(b)(3)). Public Law 94-142 was enacted to remedy this situation by requiring that all students with disabilities receive FAPE and by providing a funding mechanism to help defray the costs of special education programs (Martin, Martin, & Terman, 1996).
Today, IDEA includes broad mandates for the provision of services to all children with disabilities, from the first grader with a speech impairment to the junior high student with a history of emotional and behavior difficulties and the college-bound high school student who uses a wheelchair (Martin, Martin, & Terman, 1996). Despite the challenges involved in serving such a heterogeneous group, the key tenets of IDEA have remained intact since 1975 (US Department of Education, 1998). Although provisions have been added or amended in order to expand the provision of services to younger groups of children with disabilities, or to improve the quality of the services provided under the law, the four purposes of IDEA have remained essentially the same: to ensure that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education that emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their particular needs; to ensure that the rights of children with disabilities and their parents or guardians are protected; to assist States and localities to provide for the education of all children with disabilities; and to assess and ensure the effectiveness of efforts to educate children with disabilities (US Department of Education, 1995a, p. 1). (From the OSEP 22nd Annual Report to Congress, US Department of Education, 2001 http://www.ed.gov/offices/OSERS/OSEP/Products/OSEP2000AnlRpt/)