Education, Special Needs Children

Throughout history, there has been an enormous disparity in attitudes toward and treatment of individuals with disabilities in the workplace and the community. The advent of universal public education during the 19th century added another area in which this disparity would play out.

Similar to many other universal rights, publicly supported education was denied to many individuals with disabilities in the United States up through the first half of the 20th century. In the 1950s, organizations of parents and professionals coalesced to press for the right of children with disabilities to receive a public education, and political leaders gradually began to acknowledge that right through legislation and court decisions. Educators responded by establishing special education programs and the bureaucracy by which students in need of special education could be identified and provided with services. The first significant federal legislation was Public Law No. 94–142, The Education of All Children. Passed in 1975, this law established three bedrock principles of special education. These principles have since expanded through several critical court decisions and the reenactments of the law. The current version is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, commonly known as IDEA 2004.

The first principle is that all children, regardless of ability, are entitled to a free, appropriate public education. Districts must provide programming with a suitable curriculum and instruction for each individual child with special needs. A continuum of services now exists, ranging from assistance within the regular education classroom to placement in a hospital or institution.

The second principle is a criterion for placement known as the least restrictive environment. This means that, of the range of settings where appropriate services can be provided for an individual child, the first choice must be the setting that is as close as possible to the setting the child would be educated in if the child had no disability.

The third principle is that children's right to be educated with their peers must not be infringed upon without their consent, or more typically, that of their parents. Federal law clearly defines the procedural safeguards in the provisions for obtaining informed parental consent before any decision is made regarding evaluation, classification, or placement.

Embedded in these principles is the intent to provide services that are nondiscriminatory in nature and designed to enable individuals to lead productive and independent lives as adults. However, progress in the education of students with special needs has not resolved many of the issues that confront individuals with disabilities. In addition, the classification and [Page 292]placement procedures of children have produced uncertainty and conflict among parents and educators. At best, the process can be categorized as a work in progress.

Changes in terminology reflect efforts to avoid unfairly categorizing children receiving special education services. Replacing the term handicapped is the term disabled, making a finer distinction between the two terms. A disability refers to a condition where an individual is unable to perform certain life skills because of a loss of function in one of the bodily systems. Handicap is situation specific; children with an attention deficit disorder may have a handicap where they are required to sit and listen for long periods of time, whereas on the playground no handicap is evident. In addition, leaders in the field of special education maintain that the language used in speaking about children in special education is important. Naming children by their diagnosis, as in “a learning disabled child” or “the autistic,” suggests that the disability is the major aspect of the child's life. Advocates instead promote the use of nomenclature that emphasizes the person rather than the disability, as in “individuals with disabilities” or “a child with autism.”

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