History of Special Education

  • First Hospital

    First hospital for people with mental disabilities is opened in Virginia
  • American Asylum for the Deaf

    Thomas Gallaudet opens the American Asylum
    for the Deaf
  • Boston School Committee Report

    It is evident that the present system . . . imposes upon . . . teachers an undue share of labor and trouble. The very existence of such a class of schools, composed of children whose early education and moral instruction have been neglected, or who have not been favored by an ordinary share of intellectual endowments, naturally tends to abuses which no regulations . . . can prevent.
  • Annual Report of the Boston School Superintendent

    First, the true imbeciles, who ought not to be kept in public schools at all; second, feebleminded children who show the marks of an abnormal mental condition; and third, normal but very dull children who are nevertheless not beyond the reach of class-room instruction skillfully administered.
  • Dr. Alfred Binet

    Dr. Alfred Binet identifies “slow” or “retarded” children using an IQ test
  • Indiana sterilization

    Indiana became the first state to enact sterilization legislation.
  • Henry Herbert Goddard

    Henry Herbert Goddard helped to write the first U.S. law requiring that blind, deaf and mentally retarded children be provided special education within public school systems
  • National Expert of Special Education

    You know who these children are. You see them every day. They are a drag upon you, a drag upon the class, and a drag upon the school, day after day and year after year.
  • Supreme Court Sterilization

    Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell which legitimized the forced sterilization of patients at a Virginia home for the mentally retarded.
  • FDR

    First president with physical disability.
  • Annual Conference for CEC

    Segregation gives any human being a skewed culture. The handicapped needs special understanding rather than special class. . . . Special education today is in the unenviable position of tempering evil winds to the most closely shorn victims of outmoded and inadequate educational provision for all children.
  • Wishful Thinking

    Child-centered and integration approaches to special education represent the goo of wishful thinking.
  • President Kennedy

    President Kennedy recognized mental
    retardation as an issue of national
    significance due to his sister Rosemary.
  • Section 504

    Section 504 of Vocational Rehabilitation Act is established.
  • Education for All Handicapped Children Act

    This act "guarantees a free and appropriate education to all children in the U.S. Between the ages of 3 and 21" (Education of Exceptional Children, 1990, p. 28).
  • IDEA

    Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) enacted.
  • Christopher Kliewer & Linda May Fitzgerald

    A huge segment of America’s children construed as intellectually disabled continue to face harsh and delimiting educational segregation. . . . Children are told, “you are a broken version of what we wish you to be, and we will attempt to fix you to whatever degree possible in basement workshops out of the way of the general household.”
  • NCLB

    No Child Left Behind is signed into law and enforces accountability of schools in teaching and testing students with special needs.