Living with Learning Disabilities and Disorders by Kogler Peter;

Author:Kogler, Peter; [Kogler, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
Published: 2019-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Fight Continues

Disability rights movements have a long history, with some activist movements dating back to the 1800s. In the 1930s and 1940s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was paralyzed from the waist down, worked to improve disability rights—but in those years, people believed disabilities should be hidden from the public eye. In fact, Roosevelt himself tried as hard as he could never to be photographed in his wheelchair. Smaller movements continued in America until the 1960s, when the major framework for disability rights caught the public eye and spurred more widespread changes. Inspired by the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, disability rights groups formed across the nation to help create new policies, laws, and special education. The movement started with efforts to protect the rights of the intellectually disabled but quickly spread to those with a wide range of disabilities, from cerebral palsy to hearing impairment.

People with learning disabilities joined the larger movement for disability rights in 1963, when a group of concerned parents whose children struggled to read called a meeting in Chicago. The parents argued that their children had nothing wrong intellectually; furthermore, they knew that the labels placed on their children were damaging to their children’s selfesteem. Samuel Kirk attended the meeting and delivered the speech in which he introduced the parents to the term “learning disability.” According to the Anti-Defamation League, “Parent advocates were at the forefront, demanding that their children be taken out of institutions and asylums, and placed into schools where their children could have the opportunity to engage in society just like children who were not disabled.”27

Educators slowly began to respond to the parents’ demands. In schools across the country, special education services started to expand. In some districts, schools began to “mainstream” students with mild to moderate learning disabilities into general education classrooms for a greater portion of the school day, while also offering them support in special education resource rooms. Despite this progress, schools at this time were still under no legal obligation to provide services for students with learning disabilities, and the quality of special education programs differed across America. In the 1970s, courts found exclusion of disabled children in schools to be unconstitutional. Today, students are offered many more rights and opportunities thanks to better laws and policies.

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