1690 – John Locke advanced the classical empirical theory that all our ideas come from experience. ”Before Locke, ideas were generally believed to be innate. If disabilities are also innate and imprinted before birth by God, the Devil, or nature, then they would not be amenable to ameliorization except by miracle. Such a conception of disability, even when it was modified by scientific and psychological advances, focused on the inevitability of the disabiling condition. The fatalistic mindset born on prevailing philosophical premises determined by society’s attitudes toward disabled individuals up to the time of the Enlightenment. But Locke’s sensationalism implied that capacities are not innate, not printed on the mind before birth, but rather, are gained through experience and the senses. Sensationalist theories came to be widely held, and they led to a general optimism about the prospects for the habilitation and rehabilitation of exceptional people. . .arising from the provocative notion of the tabula rasa and the idea that all knowledge arises from sense perceptions was the central question around which most epistemological and psychological problems of the eighteenth century revolved” (Winzer, 1993, The History of Special Education, p. 43).
[1790 - 1860 - American Industrial Revolution]
1800 – 1835 - “Most of the southern states enacted legislation making it a crime to teach enslaved children to read or write; in contrast, a massive campaign to achieve popular schooling for free Americans developed between 1830 and 1860, and out of this campaign emanated designs for state systems of public education. By the end of the antebellum period a majority of the states had established public school systems, and nearly half of the nation’s free children were already getting some formal education. Still, it was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that the organization, scope, and role of schooling were transformed into a carefully articulated structure of free tax-supported public institutions” (Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, p. 2).
Prior to 1820s were orphanages for children whose parents had died/abandoned them; afterwards the orphan asylum was for children whose parents could not afford them and refused physically/mentally disabled children. Specialized facilities were state-operated schools for blind/deaf/dumb that emerged with prisons and orphan asylums
1840s – Horace Mann – secretary of the newly created board of education of Massachusetts; central thesis was essentially Jeffersonian–no republic can endure unless its citizens are literate and educated. Believed mass group instruction was “not merely a practical necessity but a social desideratum;” the new educational institution devoted to mass, or group, instruction eventually created new vocations, the professional teacher and then the professional school administrator (Johanningmeier & Richardson, 2008, Educational Research, the National Agenda, and Educational Reform: A History, p. 103).
Late 1840s - Edward Seguin defines idiocy. Rather than an irrevocable flaw in nature, the flaw was a result of the separation of the will from the senses (the nervous system that affected the mind). Seguin’s definition implied that idiots were educable, and more important, the results of his efforts demonstrated that they were.
1859 - Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; eugenics movement begins. Sir Francis Galton coins the term in 1883. After 1920, when most scientists disassociated themselves from eugenics, the movement still had enough respectability and financial support to keep itself going, but enthusiasm for it began to wane by the beginning of WWII (Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 1994, p. 136; Goddard was the chief architect of the American Eugenics movement, and social Darwinism advanced the notion that inherited characteristics acquired through adaptation translated to positive eugenics (encouraging the best human stock to reproduce) and negative eugenics (restricting matings of the unfit) (Winzer, 1993, The History of Special Education, p. 284). ”In the place of eugenics, medical superintendents turned to the new psychiatry with its emphasis on mental hygiene, the language of adjustment and adaptation, and community-based services (Trent, p. 181).
1860s - Graded schools common in large cities; by 1870 had spread nearly everywhere with population density to support them; “normal” students were those that progressed at the regular pace as opposed to prior non-graded schools where students could progress at their own pace–drop-out students become concern
“By insisting that the proper education of idiots could occur only in special facilities and that the fate of the improperly trained was the almshouse or prison, the first generation of reformers justified the creation of their schools, and of course, their positions in them. After the panic of 1857 (economic recession), local officials, facing growing unemployment coupled with heavy immigration, began to pressure superintendents to take, not discharge, idiots. . . .Thus, the purpose of the school began to shift from returning productive idiots to their communities to keeping them in special school” (Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 1994, p. 27).
[1861 - 1865 - American Civil War]
After the war a medical model began to replace the educational model of the 1840s and early 1850s for child “idiots;” many Americans identified as feebleminded during most of the twentieth century would not have been so viewed before the Civil War
“The first years in which specialized services were provided to idiots were filled with examples of the successes of schooling and of after-care community employment. But by the 1860s, more than a few idiots began to use their training not to return as productive workers to their local communities but to remain as workers in expanding institutions. Although the original educational function of the institution would remain prominent, once in the institution many feebleminded child-students would become feebleminded adult-workers. Within a decade of the founding of the first schools, then, the education of idiots with all its promise to train productive workers was becoming a means of institutional perpetuation” (Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 1994, p. 23).
1862 – Land Grant College (Morrill) Act - for mechanics/agriculture and signed by Lincoln
1880s – 1920s - majority of compulsory state education laws passed
1893 – Committee of Ten (first national NEA report on high school led by Charles Eliot of Harvard); “the deepest depression in American history (to that time), beginning in 1893: the massive shifting of textile jobs from Northern to Southern states; labor unrest, with strikes by coal miners in Pennsylvania and Ohio, garment workers in New York, and railroad workers throughout the Midwest; the alarm created by Coxey’s Army; the rise of Jim Crow in reaction to hard times; the enormous immigration of Eastern Europeans and the corresponding demands for immigrant restriction; and the generation and concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few ‘robber barons’–all proved to many Americans even before the devastation of the First World War the frailty of success and optimism” (Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 1994, p. 137).
1898 – 1918 Progressive Era
[end of Spanish Civil War - WW I]
“By the First World War, the image of feeble minds created by professionals in the previous decades had shifted to a view of mental defectives that unlike previous views began to penetrate the American consciousness. . .graduating from being merely associated with social vices to being their fundamental cause, mental defectives became a menace, the control of which was an urgent necessity for existing and future generations.
By the end of the war, psychometricians Goddard, Yerkes, Terman, et al. had tested 1.75 million men with the army Alpha and Beta intelligence tests and concluded that 40 percent of the white male population was feebleminded
1900 – 1/2 of the population of 5-19 year olds were enrolled in school; 1950 - 8/10 of 5-19 year olds enrolled in school; 1990 - 9/10 of 5-19 year olds enrolled in school
1905 – Simon and Binet intelligence test first made public ; 1908 update made a significant advance: items were grouped according to age, and the concept of mental age was introduced: idiots were now those with a mental age up to and including two years; inbeciles included those with mental ages from three to seven years, and moron (equivalent to the English term feebleminded) was employed for those with tested mental ages of seven to twelve years (Winzer, p. 272).
1906 - Carnegie units (50-55 min. periods) introduced (evolved from 1890s NEA committees: Committee of 10 & Committee on College Entrance Requirements)
1907 – Indiana passed the first sterilization law in the nation. Focusing on habitual criminals and rapists, the law also allowed for involuntary sterilization of the insane, epileptics, and idiots – the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1927 in Buck v. Bell that sterilization was legal for eugenic purposes
1910 – By 1910 the colony model had permeated virtually all public institutions for mental defectives; the colony system put high grades and low grades, epileptics and mongoloids, moral imbeciles and spastics, troublemakers and “household pets” under one roof. Feeble minds would care for each other there, raising food in the fields, doing laundry, or caring for lower grades.
1917 – Smith-Hughes Act – Vocational Ed for “skilled workers”
1918 - Report of the Commission of the Reorganization of Secondary Education that presented the Seven Cardinal Principles of Education; contrasted with the Committee of Ten report: The Committee of Ten was viewed as conceiving of the high school as a school for the few while the Commission was believed to have made a proposal for a school for all American youth up to age 18. The 7 cardinal principles: (1) health, (2) command of fundamental processes, (3) worthy home membership, (4) vocation, (5) citizenship, (6) worthy use of leisure, and (7) ethical character (Johanningmeier & Richardson, Educational Research, the National Agenda, and Educational Reform: A History, p. 8).
1919 - U.S. Bureau of Education which became U.S. Department of Education issued A Manual of Education Legislation to state legislators on education committees for how to standardize schooling (e.g., state certification, standard texts and curriculum).
1920 - ”By 1920 the colony farms had become an important linkage with another new trend, the parole system (after a time of useful work and good behavior in the colony to work on privately owned farms). . . .No longer the central function of growing facilities, the school continued, nevertheless, to be a feature of them. Most institutions began to model their classroom and administrative structures after the public schools, ironically as those schools were beginning to emphasize vocational and “life-skill” curricula, which the institutional schools had stressed from the beginning” (Trent, 1994, Inventing the Feeble Mind, p. 107). . . .”By 1920 most institutional schools had begun prevocational and even vocational training for Kindergartners. Five year olds had several tools in the class toy chest that they were encouraged to handle and use in their play. By the age of six, young inmates were learning how to hammer a nail, punch holes in leather, or wash rags on a miniature washboard. All Kindergartners too learned to tend a garden. Given the institutional emphasis on agriculture, planting seeds, weeding, and observing plant growth became an important part of the education of even the youngest children. . .older preadolescent children were taught practical life-skills–money recognition and simple reading and writing. Ironically, these practical skills were of little value in most institutions, where lifelong institutionalization was now stressed” (p. 109).
Early 1920s – 1949 – Dalton Plan – “secondary-education technique based on individual learning. Developed by Helen Parkhurst in 1919, it was at first introduced at a school for the handicapped and then in 1920 in the high school of Dalton, Mass. The plan had grown out of the reaction of some progressive educators to the inadequacies inherent in the conventional grading system, which ignored individual variables in learning speed” (Britannica; also see Tinkering with Utopia, p. 94); 2% of secondary schools entirely adopted & 6% used modified version
[1932 - 1973] Local school districts declined
[from 127,531 to 16,960]
1933 – 1941 – The 8-Year Study - 29 schools selected; monthly teacher-student negotiated contracts laid out minimum tasks for students to complete and students could revise unsatisfactory work until completion of the contract; students moved at their own pace
1939 – 1945 – WW II
1954 – Brown v. Board of Education
“Settled the question of whether or not blacks and whites can receive an education integrated with or separate from each other; overturned the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the doctrine of “separate but equal.” This concept stated that separate public facilities of equal quality do not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which reads: Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. 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.
Linda Brown was an eight year old black child who had to cross Topeka, Kansas to attend grade school, while her white friends were able to attend classes at a public school just a few blocks away. The Topeka School system was segregated on the basis of race, and under the separate but equal doctrine, this arrangement was acceptable and legal. Linda’s parents sued in federal district court on the basis that separate facilities for blacks were inherently unequal. The lower courts agreed with the school system that if the facilities were equal, the child was being treated equally with whites as prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Browns and other families in other school systems appealed to the Supreme Court that even facilities that were physically equal did not take into account “intangible” factors, and that segregation itself has a deleterious effect on the education of black children. Their case was encouraged by the National Association For the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was argued before the Supreme Court by Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first black justice on the Supreme Court.” (PBS)
October 5, 1957 – Soviets launch Sputnik
1958 – National Defense of Education Act – focused on Science/Math/Foreign Language
1959 – 1991 - In 1959, less than one-third of the poverty population in the U.S. lived in metropolitan central cities; by 1991, the central cities included close to half of the nation’s poor (Wilson, 1996, p. 11 – When Work Disappears).
1960, February 1 - In what would become a civil-rights movement milestone, a group of Black Greensboro, N.C., college students began a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter
1960s - New model flexible high schools (“free schools;” “schools without walls”); one-third of student’s time was unscheduled;
[1964 - Civil Rights Act - "Landmark legislation prohibiting discrimination in several areas including housing, employment and education. The sections of the Act relating to education are Title IV, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion or national origin by public elementary and secondary schools and public institutions of higher learning; Title VI, prohibiting discrimination by recipients of federal funds on the basis of race and national origin; and Title IX, permitting the United States to intervene in pending suits alleging discrimination." (DOJ)
1965 - Elementary and Secondary Education Act - Established Title I compensatory education program and precursor to NCLB (reauthorization in 1994 added adequate yearly progress; reauthorized in 2002 as the No Child Left Behind Act); first major involvement of the Fed in funding and directing general elementary and secondary education; first Fed legislation of social program to have a mandated program evaluation; required annual testing with normal-curve equivalents (Dorn, 2007).
1967 - Nearly 1/3 of Black high school students dropped out before graduation
1970 - "By 1970 Wolfensberger had begun an apostolic campaign to denounce state schools and to establish the community as the sole locus of services for retarded citizens; While drawing on Goffman's views on deviance and labeling, Wolfensberger also turned to another sociological tradition, structural functionalism [i.e., structure primarily refers to normative patterns of behaviour (regularized patterns of action in accordance with norms), whilst function explains how such patterns operate as systems], to formulate a way of breaking through the effects of labeling. . .to change the roles and expectations associated with them, service providers must do two things, Wolfensberger insisted: work with mentally retarded people to help them assume socially valued behaviors and integrate them into culturally normative settings (Trent, p. 263).
1971 – Serrano v. Priest – first successful school funding lawsuit in California- 1973 Supreme Court decision in San Antonio v. Rodriguez struck down federal mandate for equalization
1972 - First minimum-competency testing program established (e.g., cut score to achieve a h.s. diploma or grade-to-grade promotion); by the end of the 1970s, 60% of states had statewide, mandatory testing programs; marked beginning of shift toward reporting student performance in comparison with expectations (criterion-referenced tests or CRTs) rather than norms (Koretz, Measuring Up, p. 57)
1972 - Educational Amendments – Title IX (9) prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex
1973 - Rehabilitation Act – Section 504 - prohibits the exclusion, the denial of benefits, and discrimination by reason of disability in programs or activities receiving federal funds.
1974 – Lau v. Nichols – Lau and 1,800+ Chinese-American students brought suit to demand bilingual education (language-based discrimination tantamount to national origin discrimination protected by the Civil Rights Act)
1974 – Equal Educational Opportunities Act – prohibits specific discriminatory conduct, including segregating students on the basis of race, color or national origin, and discrimination against faculty and staff. Furthermore, the EEOA requires school districts to take action to overcome students’ language barriers that impede equal participation in educational programs.
1975 – Education of All Handicapped Children Act (PL 94-142) – Four Purposes of PL 94-142: (1) “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” (2) “to assure that the rights of children with disabilities and their parents…are protected” (3) “to assist States and localities to provide for the education of all children with disabilities” (4) “to assess and assure the effectiveness of efforts to educate all children with disabilities;” “critics, primarily sociologists, began to formulate arguments for the expansion of educational services for mentally retarded children and for the development of those services in the context of what became to be known as mainstreaming. . .in the midst of court rulings calling for the inclusion of disabled children in public schools, calls for mainstreaming, and the realization that state residential institutions were no longer going to be an important option for retarded children, Congress in 1975 passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. Codified assuring student placement in the least restrictive environment.
1983 – A Nation at Risk; spurned the education reform movement (increased reliance on testing)
1990 – Americans with Disabilities Act - enacted to address discrimination against persons with disabilities. Title II of the ADA provides that no individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of the services, program, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by any such entity. Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in public accommodations, such as schools, operated by private entities. The Department of Justice has primary responsibility for enforcing Title II as it relates to education.
1991 - President H. W. Bush releases America 2000
1994 - President Clinton signs Goals 2000
1997 - Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
2001 – No Child Left Behind Act
Interesting factoids -
1901 paper – John Dewey described the introduction of curricular innovation cycles:
(1) Calls for school reform are generated as schools are attacked for being behind the times
(2) Public sentiment supports reform
(3) Changes are introduced
(4) Complaints about change enter
(5) Public sentiment rises to rescind reform
(6) Return to status quo
Tags: Citations