So let’s see, here…we have all-of-these White Boys locked up in public school – and with the assist of WWs I and II, and the Great Depression – this American public school thang managed to get itself into the 1950s. And during that time — we had a rather homogeneous population of Whites (that by the 1950s included White girls). And lest we forget; the U.S. was still a ‘separate but equal’ society; and, 60s activism and P.L. 94-142 were yet to come!
I don’t think I will be able to tackle the integration of American schools in the 70s in this OP-ED – because that would take more research than I would ever care to do (and I certainly don’t intend to intimate that the integration of American public schools [taken by itself] was the prime cause of our current public school system failure). I do, however, I feel particularly well-versed in the enterprise called special education — to suggest how ITS inclusion in public education not only facilitated, but hastened, the downhill slide of American public education.
Imagine for-the-moment – that you were a 1950s and 1960s parent of a disabled child; a child who was sufficiently handicapped to be unable to make use of the normal and customary public facilities, and, in all probability — was in need of expensive special care and its various accouterments. What kind of price tag would have been attached to your family budget in the 50s, 60s and early 70s? Would Daddy have had to work 2 jobs for his disabled child? Most probably.
So let’s say that a number of said Daddies got together to complain about the cost of maintaining these children and came up with the idea of shifting this cost to the American tax payer — finally succeeding with P.L. 94-142 (circa 1974): Problem solved for the parents of disabled/handicapped children – and, problem just beginning for American public schools!
Sure – the first wave of incoming disabled/handicapped children were those with cerebral palsy or Down’s syndrome – and no one knew what to do for these children in a typical public classroom – except to install elevators and let outbursts and seizures pass when they occurred. And then came that first !@#$%^&*! A.D.D. article (have any of my readers located this thing yet? [Probably not – since no one has written to me yet!]?). And the doom of public education was upon us – as special education – prior to the seminal A.D.D. article was but a fledgling, cottage industry – not driven by research or theory – but by a public policy decision – lobbied by and for — parents with disabled/handicapped children – and summarily foisted upon the American tax payer (and we don’t practice socialism here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.?!).
More to come…