Education For The Handicapped

3 Pages 852 Words

Between the mid 1960s and 1975, state legislatures, the federal courts, and the U.S. Congress spelled out strong educational rights for children with disabilities. Forty-five state legislatures passed laws mandating, encouraging, and/or funding special education programs. Federal courts, interpreting the equal protection and due process guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ruled that schools could not discriminate on the basis of disability and that parents had due process rights related to their children's schooling (Martin, Martin & Terman, 1996).

People who have advocated for students with disabilities have always tried to find separate funding for special education services. In advocating for students with disabilities, there has been a push toward grants instead of categorical programs. Greater inclusion of special education students in general education classrooms has raised concerns about whether students with disabilities will continue to have full access to the special services they need.
Prior to the 1950s, few federal laws authorized direct education benefits to persons with disabilities (Martin, Martin & Terman, 1996). During the early and mid 1800s there were acts that made grants for asylums for the “deaf and the dumb.” This also promoted education for people who were blind. After these early trials, the federal government had limited involvement in public schools. The first major federal efforts in the modern era to improve public elementary and secondary schools came in 1958 and 1965, and neither included provisions for education of children with disabilities (Martin, Martin & Terman, 1996).

In the 1950s the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. This perceived threat prompted Congress to pass the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (NDEA). This act provided grants to improve science and math teaching in the ...