did occur. The optimism of the educators to successfully teach the disabled students faded during the 1930’s and the 1940’s. Special education classes were held under horrible conditions. The rooms were insufficient, with limited resources, the teachers were poorly trained and the curriculum was inadequate. Schools also often classified students as having disabilities when they did not. Additionally, students were often labeled with one type disability when they had another. This practice (misclassification) (Turnbull et al p16) was a common discrimination in American schools. One might wonder why the conditions were so deplorable. Why were the teachers so terribly unqualified? It appears that the common perception of the disabled students was like that of Quasimodo, in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. They were misunderstood, and considered to be monstrous--something to be hidden away, shunned and rejected by ‘normal’ people. The public’s attitude with disabled children was one of fear, as if the disability was somehow contagious. They were looked upon as ‘crazy’ people. This general outlook set the standard for educating students with special needs. They were classified as inferior, so why should the school system bother to work with ‘the retards’? The mind-set was that these students were ‘untrainable’ (Koch, p907) so they were not of worthy satisfactory conditions and competent teachers. In the course of the 1950’s, parents started to become vocal about the outrageous conditions of the special education classes. Then, greatly encouraged by the Civil Rights movement, advocates for students with disabilities began to sue state and local officials. Their main argument was that exclusion and misclassification violated the students’ rights to an equal educational opportunity under the United States Constitution. In Brown...
