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1960s Civil Rights legislation passed which paved the way for special education laws.
1970 Provided a legal precedent for dismantling segregated public education based on disabilities
1973 Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (Part of the Act, Section 504, was a civil rights statute for persons with disabilities which prohibited discrimination based on a disability
1975 PL 94-142 (Education for All Handicapped Children Act) was passed and implemented in 1978.
It required:
- free appropriate public education: schools must provide a free, appropriate public education to all school-age children with disabilities
- least restrictive environment: children are educated with non disabled children as much as possible
- individualized education program (IEP): all children served in special education must have an IEP
- due process rights: disabled children and their parents must be involved in decisions about special education
- due process hearing: parents and schools can request an impartial hearing if there is a conflict over special education services
1990 Reauthorization of PL 94-142, name changed to Individuals With Disabilities Act (IDEA).
- transition plan: schools were required to actively plan for student's transition from school
- language: term "handicapped" replaced by the term "disabled"
- traumatic brain injury and autism: added as separate handicapping conditions covered by law
1997 Reauthorization of IDEA
Until 1973 there was no comprehensive law protecting the rights of students with disabilities and so the physically disabled, the "slow" students, and the "disturbed" were removed when it became inconvenient to keep them in school with the rest, or dropped out when they became humiliated by the ever widening gap between them and their school mates. It was the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that provided the statutory framework for modern disability laws. This act sprang from a humanistic desire to protect the disabled from inhumane treatment in the workplace and in the classroom. Section 504 of the act defined a disability as, "a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, [which] may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell or do mathematical calculations."
This was followed in 1975 with PL 94-142, which challenged the
exclusion of students with disabilities from public education
provided for their non-disabled peers, calling for a "free
and appropriate public education for every child, no matter how
seriously he may be handicapped. In 1990 it was renamed the Individuals
With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) which outlined an array
of services for public school students with disabilities to be
delivered in the "least restrictive environment" (LRE).
IDEA, both an education law and a civil rights law, boldly guaranteed
an opportunity to learn for all students regardless of their disability.
In 1990 the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), carried the
protection of people with disabilities into the private sector.
The ADA states that anyone with a disability that results in a
"substantial impairment of a major life activity" is
protected, and that schools and employers cannot discriminate
and must provide "reasonable accommodations" to adapt
to these disabilities.
Of these measures, 504 and ADA are purposefully vague in wording allowing for the widest possible response to individual situations. These are basically civil rights measures, which address equity and civil rights from a democratic perspective, asserting that every student has a right to a public education. These pieces of legislation, giving the disabled the same status as other minority groups, shave yielded a variety of service delivery models, from mainstreaming, to special day classes, to full inclusion.
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