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Jonathon Swift and Daniel Defoe
Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe were men who began to step forward and advocate for those with disabilities in large ways for their time. Swift, an author, left his fortune from his writings to build homes for the "fools and mad". Defoe began defending those with disabilities by proposing the idea of group homes where a safe place for them to be take care of would be created.
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Jean Marc Gaspard Itard and "The Wild Boy of Aveyron"-Victor
Victor was found in the woods when he was about 11 years old and had clearly always lived there. Victor was deemed as an “incurable idiot”,but Itard worked with him for many years working on growing his academic, social, and living skills through a variety of learning activities and environments. Victor grew more than anyone thought possible and Itard created a pathway for different ways of educating a child.
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Jean Etienne Esquirol
This Physician during the 17th century was the first to discover the difference between mental illness and intellectual disability. This is a very monumental moment in special education’s history as there becomes a differentiation between the two, but it also became a hinderance as Esquirol believed that those with intellectual disabilities were unteachable.
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Edouard Seguin
Edouard Seguin was given the opportunity to teach a student with an intellectual disability and decided to take on more students that were in similar situations. This meant that the first school for students with intellectual disabilities began and Seguin wanted to help improve the treatment of these students.
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Samuel Gridely Howe
Samuel Gridley Howe created the first public school for feebleminded children in the U.S.. Howe found himself in the center of the public school reform and pressured Massachusetts to create a public school for the "feebleminded". Due to Howe’s work with children who were deaf and blind and with those with intellectual disabilities, he was able to make a step in the right direction, in America, for special public education.
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Ward V. Flood
Ward V. Flood was taken to the courts for the ability for a principal to refuse acceptance for a student in a school if they did not have the educational abilities to preform at the lowest level of the school.
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Public Classes Open
This year a few public classes opened in Boston and Rhode Island for the “feebleminded”. -
National Education Association
This was the year that the National Education Association created a Department of Special Education. The focus was mainly on including children who were deaf, but each decision made strides towards a more inclusion based education system.
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Elizabeth Farrell and Ungraded Classroom
Farrell created a system in the schools where the students are not assessed based in comparison with their peers abilities but rather what that particular student should be learning next. Elizabeth had already implemented this into many schools by 1912, but by then there were 131 classrooms across the United States that was using this model to teach “feebleminded” students.
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International Council for Exceptional Children
Farrell went to teach at Columbia University’s Teachers College and while working there her students and herself created the International Council for Exceptional Children on behalf of advocating for students with disabilities in and outside of the educational system.
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Parent Movement
During the early 1930s the parent movement began taking off and pushing for more opportunities for their children. Parents became visibly more angry about the situations that their children were being placed in at state institutions and began refusing to send their children there. The parent movement started in the 1930s but took off after the war and parents began banding together to advocate for their children for their rights to free and appropriate public education. -
National Association of Parents and Friends of Mentally Retarded Children
This parent group met up and was created in 1950 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There were representatives from smaller state groups from all over the country, but the parents decided to create this National group to make more Federal progress for their students.
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P.L. 85-926
This was an act created to, “Encourage Expansion of Teaching in the Education of Mentally Retarded Children Through Grants to Institutions of Higher Learning and to State Education Agencies.” This law was to educate more teachers so that more programs could be built for all types of abilities in all types of children.
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Mills V. Board of Education of the District of Columbia
Parents went to court because students with disabilities were being denied a free and appropriate public education. This court case had many direct effects on the educational improvements that followed.
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Education for All Handicapped Children Act
This law is to support states and local communities to meet the needs of children and families with disabilities. It required all public schools to accept federal funds to provide equal education and a free meal.
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P.L. 95-142
Students with disabilities are, by law, required to receive free and appropriate public education.
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IDEA
Children with disabilities are to be educated with their non-disabled peers unless the nature of the disability is deemed unsafe for that student or their peers. While the preference is that the student will be educated with their non-disabled peers, alternative places may be appropriate for specific students.
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