Serving Students with Special Needs

A Practical Guide for Administrators

Tom Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317817451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Serving Students with Special Needs provides administrators with essential knowledge about the requirements for special education services, as well as practical steps to ensure legal compliance and appropriate services for students with special needs. Each chapter includes basic information followed by specific suggestions or steps. This brief, easily applied, and highly practical guide covers:

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• Instruction, including differentiated instruction and universal design for learning

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• Assessment, including accommodations and modifications and response to intervention (RTI)

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• Developing multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS)

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• Student progress monitoring and using large data sets to inform decision making

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• Mediation, due process hearings, and litigation

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• Systems management and positive behavioral intervention supports (PBIS)

Scenarios are presented along with suggested responses and solutions. Serving Students with Special Needs has been specifically developed to provide administrators with practical suggestions to quickly and effectively implement appropriate special education practices.

1 Overview of the History of Special Education

DOI: 10.4324/9781315818634-1

Introduction

Special education in the United States has made significant transformations over the past several hundred years. While today’s students with disabilities are generally served effectively, this has not always been the case. Indeed, prior to federal and state legislation, litigation, and parental advocacy, many students with disabilities were severely discriminated against and provided with limited or no services. The result of this denial or lack of services was that many school-age children with disabilities were placed in institutional settings, served in private schools, stayed at home, or received inappropriate services in schools. As late as the mid-1970s, an estimated 1 million of the 8 million children with disabilities in the United States were totally excluded from public schools while another 3 million received inadequate services (Smith, et al., 2016).

Pre-1900 Period and Individuals with Disabilities

Prior to the twentieth century, individuals with disabilities were often neglected, abused, or even killed. Indeed, 1,500 years ago society did not have the resources to take care of this group. As a result, many individuals with disabilities were often left to die or murdered. This changed somewhat approximately 1,000 years ago when churches began caring for individuals with disabilities; however, the care was often relegated to merely providing food and shelter without any proactive programing. This, in effect, was the beginning of institutional care for individuals with disabilities. Although it was a major step forward from allowing this group to survive without assistance, the entire institutional movement became a new way of segregating and neglecting the needs of individuals with disabilities.

1900–1970

During the early part of the twentieth century, more children with disabilities were recognized as needing special education. Students with visual and hearing impairments, who began receiving services in residential schools in the late nineteenth century, continued to be served in schools for the blind and deaf. During the same period a small number of children with intellectual disabilities began to receive services in public schools. However, while some schools initiated services during this period, a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision concluded that a student, Merritt Beattie, who was intellectually capable of academic achievement but who exhibited speech problems, drooling, and motor problems, could be excluded from public schools because of the negative impact he would have on students without disabilities (LaNear & Frattura, 2007). This decision in Beattie v. Board of Education was made even though the student was capable of success in the general classroom.

Eugenics Movement

Another negative influence during the first few decades of the twentieth century was the eugenics movement. Based on the erroneous assumption that intellectual disabilities and other medical and psychological problems were primarily inherited traits, the movement became pervasive and dominated the professional literature. It was not a fringe movement but was led and supported by some of the leaders in government, the courts, and professionals. In fact, during this period, it was difficult to find anyone who did not agree, at least on some level, with eugenics (Wehmeyer, 2013). Although the eugenics movement in the United States did not result in murder, there were thousands of involuntary sterilizations of individuals with mental disorders. The situation was different in Germany, where Hitler used the eugenics movement as a rationale for murdering approximately 80,000 Germans with disabilities in the late 1930s. Hitler read several books written by American proponents of sterilization and developed German laws and practices based on those readings (Smith & Wehmeyer, 2012).

One of the proponents of eugenics was Dr. Henry Goddard. In his book, The Menace and the Feebleminded, he wrote:

We can, if we will, prevent the birth of feeble minded children by, first preventing the marriage of feeble minded people, second by putting in institutions where they may be kept for life, all persons who are capable of begetting or bearing children and who would be likely to give birth to feeble minded children. Third, we can sterilize these persons who would become the parents of feeble minded children.

Goddard, 1912, p. 51; cited in Smith & Wehmeyer, 2012, p. 55

The United States Supreme Court upheld the right of the state to sterilize individuals involuntarily in Buck v. Bell. In this case, the Supreme Court agreed with Carrie Buck’s sterilization based on evidence that she was feeble minded. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who wrote the decision, noted that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The eugenics movement was based, in part, on poor science, which concluded that individuals with inferior intelligence transmitted this intellectual limitation to their offspring, and the only way to stop additional generations of individuals with limited intellectual ability was through eugenics. The story of the Kallikak family supported this notion, basing the need to sterilize individuals with intellectual disabilities on a poor family whose daughter, Deborah Kallikak, was institutionalized at the Vineland Training School in New Jersey during the early 1900s (Smith & Wehmeyer, 2012). The eugenics movement primarily ended in the early 1930s and the focus was shifted to providing basic care for individuals with disabilities. Although the focus was still not on educational services, it was a step forward.

1970 to present

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several factors emerged that had a profound and positive impact on special education. These included the civil rights movement, legislation, litigation, and the advocacy movement. These forces came together to revolutionize how children with disabilities are educated and how adults with disabilities are treated (Smith, et al., 2016).

Civil Rights Movement and Individuals with Disabilities

One of the most important factors that led to the recognition that individuals with disabilities needed equal opportunities and education was the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Indeed, while Martin Luther King was primarily interested in securing equal opportunities for individuals from racial minorities, advocates for persons with disabilities saw a parallel in the discrimination they and their children faced in society. Similarly to African-American students, many students with disabilities could not attend public schools or have access to activities and services of majority culture, non-disabled children. Many were denied public educational opportunities and others were served inappropriately, often relegated to one classroom where they stayed all day, every day, and received all of their instruction from one teacher. In the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 that resulted in the racial integration of schools, the Court held that segregating public education on the basis of race was unconstitutional. Substituting individuals with disabilities with racial minorities identified in the ruling would result in the same conclusion: segregation based on an unalterable trait, such as a disability, is illegal (Turnbull, 2012). A key part of the Court’s decision in the Brown case was the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which stipulates that “the states may not deny any person within its jurisdiction equal protection under the law” (Yell, Rogers, & Lodge-Rogers, 1998). In other words, segregating students based on race and disability was ruled by the courts to violate the 14th Amendment.

It was also noted that adults with disabilities faced many of the same discriminations as adults from racial minorities. They were discriminated against in employment, housing, social opportunities, and postsecondary education. Whereas many racial minorities were excluded from various venues, many individuals with disabilities were barred because of the result of a disability. For example, an African-American might be excluded from a restaurant because of their race while an individual in a wheelchair might be excluded because they could not physically access the restaurant. Both situations, the Court ruled, violated the legal protection clause of the constitution.

The civil rights movement provided an avenue for persons with disabilities to demand their rights under the Constitution. It shifted the focus from a right to services to political and civil rights (Aron & Loprest, 2012). The result was adults with disabilities participating in marches, taking over federal offices, and demanding equal opportunities in employment. During the 1970s, individuals with disabilities occupied the office of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco, protesting the fact that regulations for Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act had not been promulgated. Likewise, parents of children with disabilities began to demand that public schools provide educational opportunities for their children. Although not the initial purpose of the civil rights movement, it resulted in awareness and actions related to equal opportunities for persons with disabilities and also women, fueling the women’s rights movement of the 1970s and ultimately the disability rights movement of the 1980s.

The passing of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was a major milestone in the disability rights movement. This act was a direct result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability. “For the first time, a federal law stated that excluding or segregating an individual with a disability constituted discrimination” and “challenged the assumption that disadvantages faced by people with disabilities, such as low educational attainment or unemployment, were the inevitable result of limitations stemming from the disability itself rather than from societal barriers or prejudices” (Aron & Loprest, 2012, p. 99).

Legislation and Individuals with Disabilities

While the civil rights movement provided a framework for individuals with disabilities and parents of children with disabilities to seek equal services, opportunities, and protections, the mechanism for achieving this goal was legislation and litigation.

In the early 1970s, several states passed legislation mandating schools to provide services to students with disabilities. Unfortunately, without extensive funding to accompany the mandates, many were not implemented. The laws reflected a positive shift in attitudes but until schools were provided financial incentives they had minimal impact on actual changes in how children were served.

Federal involvement in special education, through legislation, began in 1958 with the passing of the National Defense Education Act. This act provided funding for special education teacher preparation. Other federal legislation followed including the Special Education Act of 1961, the Mental Retardation Facility and Community Center Construction Act of 1963, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, and the Education of the Handicapped Act of 1970, the predecessor of Public Law 94–142. Each of these laws provided funding for preparing special education teachers. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was the first legislation authorizing federal funding for public educational programs, focusing on programs for children whose families were below the poverty line. In 1966 the ESEA was amended to create the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped, the first federal agency that focused on special education programs (Katsiyannis, Yell, & Bradley, 2001). Table 1.1 summarizes key components of these laws.

Table 1.1 Summary of Early Federal Legislation

National Defense Education Act (1958) Response to the Russian launch of Sputnik. Grants provided to improve science and math teaching. Led to federal involvement in special education; PL 85–926 followed the NDEA by four days and provided funding for training leadership personnel for students with intellectual disabilities.

Special Education Act (1961) Provided funding to prepare teachers for children with hearing impairments.

Mental Retardation Facility and Community Center Construction Act (1963) Provided funding for construction of facilities for individuals with intellectual disabilities, including research centers. Focused on prevention, care, and treatment. Increased funding for preparing teachers for children with intellectual disabilities and other disabilities.

Civil Rights Act (1964) Laid the foundation for future civil rights laws focusing on individuals with disabilities. Cited the 14th Amendment as requiring equal protections and opportunities.

Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) First federal legislation that subsidized educational programs for specific populations. Second year of funding provided grants for state-operated/supported schools serving children with disabi...