History changes slowly then suddenly
In 1956, Martha Rosen, the mother of a blind, deaf child with developmental delays, gathered with six other families, who also had disabled children, in her living room. Faced with the prospect of institutionalizing their children, they chose a different path. In their own home, they decided to start a school.
Today, their organization operates 23 residential sites for children and adults with severe disabilities. They created a school for children with autism, the New York Child Learning Institute, which is considered one of the world’s best. In other words, they made a lot of progress.
To put this progress in perspective, it’s important to understand the era’s public opinion. In 1968, the ethicist Joseph Fletcher wrote a column in Atlantic Monthly, one of the country’s most respected magazines. Here’s what he wrote about children with Down’s syndrome. There is
“no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down’s syndrome baby away, whether it’s ‘put away’ in the sense of hidden in a sanitorium or in a more responsible offense. It is sad, yes. Dreadful. But it carries no guilt. True guilt arises only from an offense against a person, and a Down’s is not a person.”
Three years earlier, Robert Kennedy toured Willowbrook, the state’s institution for disabled people. He said the people were “living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo.”
In other words, if your child was disabled, the outlook was bleak. Today, things we find unthinkable were normal. So, a group of parents fought for rights, built coalitions, and made history.
Martha was my great aunt. Growing up, I never appreciated her story. She died a few years ago and I’ve managed to put bits and pieces together from reading about the history of our country’s disability rights movement.
It’s an incredible history. And, frankly, a short one.
In 1975, Congress enacted the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, also known as the EHA and later known as the IDEA. At the time, U.S. schools educated only one in five children with disabilities, and many states had laws to purposefully exclude certain students, including children who were deaf, blind, emotionally disturbed, or had an intellectual disability. The Federal Government estimates nearly 2 million children were excluded from public schools at the time. That’s about double the number of children in New York City’s public schools, the largest school district in the nation.
So, when people say that public schools are the foundation of our Democracy, it makes me pause. For a long time and for a lot of people, that wasn’t the case.
Today, I work in public education. Like my Aunt Martha, I was lucky enough to start a school. My wife also has a disability and she has made me more aware of all the ways our society excludes people who are different.
When I read statistics, I sometimes get discouraged. However, when I step back and think about this history, I can’t help but marvel at how far we’ve come.
History changes slowly and then suddenly. It happens in courtrooms and Congress and it’s made by kings and Presidents. But it also happens in living rooms and kitchen tables. It gets made by moms and dads and their children. I hope that’s a little bit inspiring.