Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: P.A.R.C. and Mills About this episode This 2015 episode covers the lack of access to public education for children with disabilities in the U. S. until 1975.
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0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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0:34 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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2:18 Tracy V. Wilson? After this week's episode on the 504 sit-ins, we are returning to the topic of disability rights for our Saturday classic with something that took place a few years earlier than that. It is about lawsuits involving disabled students that followed in the wake of Brown versus Board and the passage of the first US law establishing that all children, regardless of ability, have the right to a free, appropriate public education.
2:44 Holly Frey? In this episode, we mentioned that the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which is now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, required evaluation programs to be non-discriminatory because poor children and children who weren't white were disproportionately being identified as disabled. This continues to be an ongoing and pervasive issue today. Black and Indigenous children in particular are disproportionately more likely to be incorrectly identified as disabled, and there are also gender disparities in special education. This relates to how many children are identified as disabled and which disabilities they are
3:24 Holly Frey? identified as having, and it can have a negative impact on students' entire educations and their later lives.
3:31 Tracy V. Wilson? This episode also makes a passing reference to No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind was repealed on December 10, 2015, and it was replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act.
3:44 Holly Frey? This episode originally came out on March 25, 2015.
3:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Enjoy.
3:52 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
4:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
4:05 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
4:07 Tracy V. Wilson? While we research this podcast, you and I uncover things that surprise us basically all the time.
4:12 Holly Frey? For sure.
4:14 Tracy V. Wilson? So sometimes, though, we discover things that surprise us. And the fact that we are just learning this is also in itself surprising because we should have known about that before because of various things in our background. In this case, my mom spent most of her career working with people who had a range of disabilities. First, she was a teacher for adults with disabilities, and then she worked in a couple of different roles at a residential care center for children who had multiple disabilities, most of whom really needed full-time care. My aunt also taught third grade special education for nearly her whole teaching career. And one of my first jobs as a writer was writing for a company that sold educational
4:58 Tracy V. Wilson? supplies, and they had a whole business unit that dealt specifically with products for children who had special needs. And yet, in spite of all of that family history, I was surprised to learn from a listener email that until 1975, children with disabilities in the United States were not guaranteed a public education. Listener Amy wrote in to tell us about this aspect of Brown versus Board that I hadn't known about before. After the Supreme Court ruling that the practice of segregation based on race was unconstitutional came out, it sparked a similar series of cases that were related to children who were, at that point, either segregated into different classrooms or restricted from public schools entirely because they had a disability.
5:43 Tracy V. Wilson? So that is what we're going to talk about today. And as a caveat before we start, the language that we use to talk about disabilities has evolved so much since the 1960s and 70s, so particularly in quoted material from court proceedings and laws. This episode includes some terminology that we would not use today. Today, this would be considered insulting or offensive. We're going to note those as they come up, but just as an advanced warning, there are words we're going to use that today we absolutely would not be using in that way.
6:14 Holly Frey? So to kick it off, the first US state to pass a compulsory school attendance law was Massachusetts, and it did so in 1852, having passed a similar law when it was still a British colony more than 200 years prior to that. Other states followed suit, and these laws required children in a specific age range to attend school, and parents whose children didn't go to school or get an equivalent education at home faced prosecution.
6:43 Tracy V. Wilson? However, most states granted exceptions to their compulsory attendance laws in the cases of children who had disabilities. These children weren't permitted to enroll in public schools at all, or if they were allowed to enroll in school, they were kept in separate segregated classrooms away from other children, regardless of the nature of their disability or what kind of education that they needed.
7:07 Holly Frey? School systems had different rules for determining who could be excluded, but in general, students deemed to be, quote, uneducable, were not allowed to enroll. Laws were all over the place when it came to defining who exactly could be categorized as uneducable. In some cases, it was an IQ below a certain number, but there were states that labeled a range of disabilities that had absolutely nothing to do with the ability to learn as uneducable. And that is not a label we would use anymore.
7:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Children who were excluded from school mostly stayed home or were institutionalized. Many of these institutionalized children did not actually need full-time care because of their disabilities. And even if they did, the institutions that existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries were not equipped to give that kind of care. In general, these facilities just provided housing, minimal food, inattentive care, and virtually no education for the children who lived there.
8:08 Holly Frey? Even after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown versus Board that schools could not be segregated based on race, other courts were finding that segregation based on ability was allowed. In 1958, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the state's compulsory education laws did not apply to children with disabilities. In North Carolina, it was a crime for parents whose children had already been excluded because of a disability to try again at enrolling them. This law was actually in effect all the way until 1969.
8:40 Tracy V. Wilson? So apart from the fact that children were being denied in education, the Supreme Court opinion in Brown versus Board had outlined very eloquently a number of ways in which segregation based on race was psychologically harmful. And it seems to a lot of people that the same would be true in the case of segregation based on ability. For example, if you just change the word "race" to "ability" in this sentence from the ruling, "To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." So if being put in a separate classroom made black children feel inferior to white children,
9:23 Tracy V. Wilson? logically, people thought it would do the same in the case of children who had a disability who were being separated from the rest of the school.
9:32 Holly Frey? And the same questions were on the minds of legislators. And the US started to pass a variety of laws that addressed various aspects of education for disabled students in the late 1950s. New laws provided teacher training programs for working with blind and deaf students, as well as captioned films and other accessible teaching materials.
9:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Not long before his assassination in 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed two pieces of legislation that were related to this subject. One was an amendment to the Social Security Act, which expanded programs for mothers and children in an effort to prevent intellectual disabilities. They were things like screening programs and nutrition programs that aimed at prevention. The other was the Mental Retardation and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act of 1963. This funded research and programs, including the training of special education teachers.
10:29 Holly Frey? Then, as a part of his war on poverty, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law in 1965. And this law was meant to address student inequality, especially when it came to children from financially disadvantaged families. In 1966, this law was amended to include two parts related to students with disabilities. It established the Bureau of Education of the Handicapped and the National Advisory Council. And it created programs for students with disabilities and provided grant funding for those programs.
11:04 Tracy V. Wilson? As a side note, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was really controversial at the time. It increased spending on education really dramatically. And since many of the poorest children it was meant to help were also racial and ethnic minorities, it raised the hackles of a lot of the same citizens and lawmakers who had previously opposed integration and at that point were still opposing integration. This law actually continues to be controversial today. It was reauthorized in 2002 and at that point renamed No Child Left Behind.
11:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Additional laws expanded access to services through the 1960s. And in the early 1970s, two court rulings outlined the idea that all children had the right to a free, appropriate public education. We're going to talk more about that after we have a quick word from a sponsor.
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12:48 Speaker 08 It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
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14:32 Speaker 10 Okay, chicken nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.
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15:32 Tracy V. Wilson? A number of court cases came about in the 1960s and 70s that related to the right to an education for children with disabilities. Two of them have become really the landmark cases in this field, and they're the ones that are cited over and over again. The first one was the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children versus the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, also known as Park versus Commonwealth.
15:56 Holly Frey? The Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children was an advocacy organization for children with developmental disabilities and their parents. It was, at that point, also providing education for most Pennsylvania children with disabilities who were not being educated in public schools. Under Pennsylvania law at this point, children had to have reached a "mental age" of five years before the age of eight to start first grade, and schools could deny admission to any student who didn't meet that criteria.
16:26 Tracy V. Wilson? People were still talking about mental age a lot when my mom was still working, but I don't think we do that anymore. It's a very nebulous thing, the idea of a mental age, and it's not nearly the prevalent standard that it used to be. Along with Park, the parents of 13 children who had been excluded from school formed a class-action lawsuit against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. "On behalf of all mentally retarded persons between the ages of 6 and 21, whom the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is presently excluding from a program of education and training in the public schools." Their attorney, Thomas K. Gilhul, argued that excluding the children from school was
17:08 Tracy V. Wilson? unconstitutional because it violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
17:13 Holly Frey? So as a quick refresher, the 14th Amendment was one of the Reconstruction Amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War, in part to help protect the rights of recently freed slaves. The end of the first section of the amendment includes both the equal protection and due process clauses. "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
17:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Pennsylvania's defense was basically to cite the laws that were already on its books. One was the law we just talked about that required a mental age of five years. Another relieved Pennsylvania of the obligation to educate children who were, quote, uneducable and, quote, untrainable. The Commonwealth also argued that educating these children would create an undue financial burden on the government of Pennsylvania.
18:18 Holly Frey? The case was settled before the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Judge Thomas Ambrose Masterson ruled that, yes, it was unconstitutional for Pennsylvania to interfere in any exceptional child's right to an education. And the Commonwealth was deemed to be responsible for providing a free education for all children between the ages of six and 21, regardless of their ability. The Commonwealth was also required to offer free preschool to all students regardless of ability as well. And if, for some reason, a school system could not provide a free, appropriate education for a child within its own schools, it had to find other arrangements for that child's education at no cost to the family.
19:04 Tracy V. Wilson? The other case that's most cited in this context is Mills versus Board of Education of the District of Columbia, or Mills versus Board. This was another class action suit, and this time it involved seven children who had been excluded from school in the District of Columbia. The case is named for plaintiff Peter Mills, who at the time of the proceedings was 12 years old in a ward of the district. He had been excluded from school in 4th grade due to a, quote, "behavior problem." Another plaintiff, Dwayne Blackshear, was also excluded because of a behavior problem, and the remaining plaintiffs were reported to have been excluded for a number of intellectual disabilities and medical conditions.
19:44 Holly Frey? The seven plaintiffs had been trying to get access to public education for the 1971-1972 school year, and after failing to get results by going through normal channels, filed their suit on September 24th, 1971. On December 20th, 1971, the court signed an interim stipulation that four of the plaintiffs get access to a public education that would meet their needs by January 3rd of 1972, and that the Board of Education take a series of steps to identify other children in need of special education services and figure out how to provide them with an education.
20:19 Tracy V. Wilson? The ruling that I was reading did not get into why only four of the children were ordered to be enrolled in school immediately. Based on the descriptions of the various plaintiffs that are included in the ruling, I think it was just an issue of, we need to figure out more accommodations for these, but let's go ahead and get these into school.
20:47 Holly Frey? Got it.
20:48 Tracy V. Wilson? That is sort of my conclusion, but it wasn't really spelled out that clearly. However, the Board of Education missed this January 3rd deadline, and it continued to miss new deadlines as the judge ordered them, and so the plaintiffs had to keep bringing the matter back before the judge. It dragged on for months before Judge Joseph Cornelius Waddy ruled that excluding these children was a violation of their constitutional rights. He cited Brown versus Board and Bowling versus Sharp as precedents. Those are all things that we've talked about during our two-parter on Brown versus Board, along with a number of other civil rights cases. And he found that the whole process of excluding children from school violated their due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.
21:30 Tracy V. Wilson? We've kind of alluded before to the way the Fourteenth Amendment is worded applies to states and not to the District of Columbia, which is why this really focused on Fifth Amendment rights rather than Fourteenth Amendment rights.
21:43 Holly Frey? And he finally ordered, quote, "That no child eligible for a publicly-supported education in the District of Columbia Public Schools shall be excluded from a regular public school assignment by a rule, policy, or practice of the Board of Education of the District of Columbia or its agents unless such child is provided (a) adequate alternative educational services suited to the child's needs, which may include special education or tuition grants, and (b) a constitutionally adequate prior hearing and periodic review of the child's status, progress, and the adequacy of any educational alternative."
22:22 Tracy V. Wilson? So to be very short, that says you cannot exclude children from school without providing them an alternate education that's suitable for them, and you can't exclude children from school without actually allowing them due process. And that was a problem that was happening all over the country, where basically a principal would say, "This child is excluded from school because of this disability," and the child really had no recourse. There was, so there was no due process in that, in that situation. So, this brings us to the first federal law that guaranteed the same thing that Judge Wadi had just guaranteed in the District of Columbia. And we'll talk about this after another brief word from a sponsor.
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23:36 Speaker 10 Okay, Chicken Nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest Chicken Nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old Chicken Nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new Chicken Nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better Chicken Nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option, too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating U.S. restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.
24:18 Speaker 10 This new chicken nugget, reinvented based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and Sauces today.
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25:44 Speaker 11 Live Right, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sykes proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
26:17 Tracy V. Wilson? One of the things that was really exceptional about Brown versus Board is that it was a Supreme Court ruling that dramatically and fundamentally changed the way people lived in their daily lives. One of the questions that was raised during the Supreme Court's arguments and re-arguments in Brown versus Board, and it's actually a question that still persists in some people's minds today, is whether the court even had the authority to make such a massive change. Critics argued that that wasn't the court's job at all, that it really should have fallen to Congress to pass a law to change segregation, not to the court to overturn all of those laws that were already on the books.
26:54 Holly Frey? Congress did eventually pass civil rights legislation that had some things in common with the Brown versus Board decision. But when it came to children's rights to an education regardless of disability, Congress took a more focused approach. In 1972, after these and other cases had started moving through the courts, Congress introduced legislation meant to directly address the subject of education for children with disabilities.
27:19 Tracy V. Wilson? First, Congress launched an investigation into the state of education for children with disabilities, and these findings were kind of shocking to today's sensibilities. Millions of children in the United States were effectively being denied a public education due to a disability, either by being excluded from schools entirely or by being put into a segregated classroom that was not appropriate for their needs.
27:42 Holly Frey? There were, according to this investigation, more than 8 million children who needed special education services. Only 3.9 million of these children, so less than half, were getting an education that was appropriate to their needs. 1.75 million children were receiving an education that wasn't appropriate for their needs, and 2.5 million weren't getting any education at all.
28:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Aside from the basic idea that so many children just were not receiving the education that they were entitled to, this investigation actually raised another point. By failing to educate children appropriately, state governments were essentially forcing them to remain dependent on other people for their entire lives. The end result of this lack of education was that children who could have otherwise become independent were growing up to rely exclusively on public agencies and taxpayer dollars in order to survive.
28:37 Holly Frey? According to the legislative records, the figure was cited as billions of dollars spent per year to keep people in, quote, "subhuman" conditions.
28:47 Tracy V. Wilson? The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, also known as Public Law 94-142, was signed into law by President Gerald Ford on November 17, 1975, and it was to take effect by September 1 of 1978. This is the law that guaranteed all children between the ages of 3 and 21 be allowed access to a free, appropriate, public education, regardless of whether they had a disability.
29:16 Holly Frey? It had four purposes. First was, quote, "to assure that all children with disabilities have available to them a free, appropriate, public education which emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their unique needs." Second, quote, "to assure that the rights of children with disabilities and their parents are protected." Third, quote, "to assist states and localities to provide for the education of all children with disabilities." And fourth, quote, "to assess and assure the effectiveness of efforts to educate all children with disabilities."
29:52 Tracy V. Wilson? This law also outlined a number of ideas that are still part of education for children with disabilities today. This included individual education programs, or IEPs, which are tailored plans of education that are put together to meet each child's specific needs. The concept of the least restrictive environment was also part of this law. So that's the idea that a child should be educated in the least restrictive setting that is still simultaneously appropriate to meet their educational needs. It also sets up education as a collaborative process. This is one that involves the active participation of the parents, the teachers, and other professionals all working together to put together a plan and educate a specific child.
30:37 Holly Frey? There were a lot of other provisions in the law as well. Evaluation programs had to be non-discriminatory. They needed to account for economic differences as well as language and ethnicity. And this was a big deal because poor and minority children were disproportionately represented in programs for children with disabilities, sometimes for discriminatory reasons and not because an actual disability existed.
31:01 Tracy V. Wilson? And to be clear, this was really an enormous step. We had gone from people just being institutionalized as a matter of course to there being a law that guaranteed that everyone had the right to the same education. But this was not an easy process at all. And it wasn't even one that a lot of people had high hopes for when the law was originally passed. President Ford himself said, quote, "Unfortunately, this bill promises more than the federal government can deliver, and its good intentions could be thwarted by the many unwise provisions it contains. Everyone can agree with the objective stated in the title of this bill, educating all handicapped children in our nation. The key question is whether the bill will really accomplish this objective."
31:46 Holly Frey? And as people's understanding of what was actually needed and how it would work progressed, Public Law 94-142 was amended several times between 1975 and 1997. In the 1980s, amendments expanded the scope of the law to include services that started from birth as well as transition services from graduation into adult living.
32:09 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1990, the law was reauthorized. Then at that time, it was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.
32:18 Holly Frey? It was reauthorized again in 1997, and this reauthorization involved research into the outcomes of special education. In other words, what had actually happened to special education students. And the research was not particularly positive. "Special education, quote, 'has been impeded by low expectations and an insufficient focus on applying replicable research on proven methods of teaching and learning for children with disabilities.'"
32:44 Tracy V. Wilson? So while at times this progress has been slow or faltering, overall, things have improved over the last 40 years. The majority of children with disabilities now go to neighborhood public schools and are educated in regular classrooms. And both the graduation rates and employment rates after graduation have increased, along with enrollments into secondary schools by students who have disabilities. The number of college freshmen with disabilities has tripled since 1978.
33:14 Holly Frey? However, while things have improved, there are definitely a number of challenges and issues that parents and teachers, and as they get older and become more accountable for their own education, the students themselves still face.
33:27 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, most of the parents I know whose children have some sort of disability have talked really candidly about various struggles. Like, they will have teachers who they love, and the teachers are obviously doing the best that they can with the resources that they have, but they're like, still struggles in getting IEPs put together and approved and having them implemented, once they actually are put together. So definitely, definitely not a perfect process yet, but it's also one that has certainly come a long, long way since 1975.
34:07 Holly Frey? Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
34:29 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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35:35 Speaker 11 Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
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Previous Behind the Scenes Minis: Bad Goals and Spirit Clothes Next Unearthed Year-end 2025, Part 1 Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated