We are grateful today for parents advocating for inclusive education, like those in Pennsylvania and Washington DC that 50 years ago brought cases to the courts inspired by Brown vs Board of Education and other cases ending racial segregation, to ensure that no child would be deemed “uneducable” and excluded from a public school’s obligation to ensure equal access to education.
We are grateful for the parents and legislators that fought hard to pass Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975 and those that helped reauthorize and improve the act as the Individual with Disabilities Education Act.
We are also grateful to all the parents and the attorneys that helped them, who made it through the exhausting administrative process to seek to have that law enforced by the courts, over 48 years of inadequate and inequitable implementation.
Our deep gratitude is reserved for the researchers and education professors who have worked tirelessly over their entire career to prove that inclusive education is more effective, hampered by an unconscionable lack of opportunities to see it in practice and even more so for those who have developed piles and piles of research on best practices to support inclusive education while facing endless baseless claims that "there is still not enough research." It turns out that many of the researchers are also parents, siblings, and aunts.
And we are grateful for all the successful individuals with disabilities, living their best life despite this background of indignity and discrimination and returning to advocate for the inclusive education they were denied access to, as well as fighting for civil rights legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, guaranteeing access to all public services, including education.
Let's make their dreams a reality. Today in California most children with intellectual and multiple disabilities do not have access to inclusive education. Most are educated in segregated classrooms for most of their day. This is not a national problem that can be fixed by demanding for the 48th time that Congress fully fund IDEA. This is a California problem — since California ranks in the top four at excluding children with disabilities from the classrooms they would be educated in if they were not disabled. In other states, such as Vermont, with the same federal legislation and the same pitiful federal funding, 81.4 % of children with intellectual disabilities are included in general education for 80% of their day.
There are some among us who say “but I had to fight to have my child in a separate setting so I must be against you.” We say — it is the same failed system that we are fighting. It is the same system that fails to provide parents with reliable information or choices, fails to respect parent or student rights, and builds a special education system without reference to parent or student voices, approved by school board members with little or no knowledge of the special education system or what it feels like to be a parent sitting in an IEP meeting. We want a public education system in which inclusive education (with supports) is the norm, in which diversity, whether it be neurodiversity, lingusitic culture or LGBTQ+ identity, is valued and treated with respect, in which parents and students have a voice, and in which a combination of your income, your zip code, your race, your language, your gender, your communication style and your medical diagnosis, do not determine your access to public education.
We are most grateful for the 666 members of our Facebook group, and for the seven parents and one incredible student who have stepped up to reinvigorate a movement, and we ask you to join us.
Please visit Include-CA.org and visit it often — it is still largely under construction. What resources do you need on your journey? Please sign up for our newsletter - Issue No.1 will go out soon.
“In these days, it is doubtful that any child may be reasonably expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right that must be made available to all on equal terms.”
– Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the unanimous United States Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 493 (1954)
P.A.R.C v. Pennsylvania, 343 F. Supp. 279 (E.D. Pa. 1972)
Mills v. Board of Education of the District of Columbia, 358 F. Supp. 866 (D.D.C. 1972)