Equal Access for All Learners.

In 1971 a state case in Pennsylvania set the stage for a dramatic change in the treatment of retarded (the term in use at the time) children's education. The state court threw out a law that had allowed school psychologists to declare some students uneducable and untrainable and provided for a free public education for the state's one hundred thousand retarded students aged six through twenty-one. At this time it was estimated that 62 percent of the intellectually and emotionally handicapped students in the United States were not receiving public education. The Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973 set in motion what was to become a major transformation of federal policy in public education when it mandated, "No handicapped individual shall be excluded from any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." Since by this time every school district...