"The time is always right to do what is right." ~Martin Luther King Jr.

The Rights Movement Diversifies

It is interesting that this chapter begins the second part of the book, which is labeled "The Decline". To me, it seems as though Peterson makes this distinction, not because he believes that granting rights to minority groups who lacked equality is a bad thing, but that rather the door that was opened ultimately led to more lawsuits and centralized control over school systems, which can be seen as negative. Rather than local school boards being solely in charge of their schools, city councils and state and federal governments also gained a foothold in decisions that were being made.

Shortly after the push for the racial integration of schools, another group began to think about the rights every child deserved toward an equal education. Like African Americans, the disabled were excluded from public schools based on the beliefs that they could not learn like other children. One case that helped propel the rights of disabled children was PARC v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

At the Pennhurst State School, a facility for the mentally retarded, in Altoona, Pennsylvania, a young boy died. The official cause was pneumonia, but one of the boy's friends had stated that he had died in a fire. The case was investigated but the truth is still unknown to this day. The story persuaded the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children (PARC) to pursue legal action against the school. The basis of the case was that the school was denying the children a fair education.

This was one of the first cases of its kind, and fortunately, the state (school) seemed unwilling to defend itself against the charges. The state's director of special education, who you would believe to be helping to defend the school, actually helped the plaintiffs by providing information. This information helped the plaintiffs to find experts who testified that all children, no matter their disability, can learn to some degree. In 1971, the state dropped its defense and came to an agreement that required all disabled children to be provided with a free, public education, while also being given whatever special assistance was needed. The beginning of special education.

Shortly thereafter, disability advocates decided to try for a federal statute, a bill that would would be proposed to Congress. It went through without opposition, and the Education of All Handicapped Children Act was born. (It later became known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, IDEA.) The impact of the bill on the states was that now states were required to provide "free and appropriate education" (91) to all children with disabilities, ages 3-21. This also gave parents a say in their child's special education, and thus the Individual Education Plan, IEP, was created in 1974. The impact? The IEP became a legal document that teachers, schools, and parents created for the child's customized education; an idea that went back to the beliefs of Rousseau and Dewey.

Another group that began to fight for students' rights were immigrants, specifically the bilingual and English-language learners. For many years, immigrants had tried to retain their home languages so that the cultural values might not be lost, but in the American schools this proved to be difficult. German immigrants, in the late 1800s, decided that in order to preserve their culture and language, they would create private schools for their children, with German being the language of instruction. Some public schools followed this example and began to offer bi-lingual education. Unfortunately, with the beginning of World War I, a national sentiment of anti-German feelings arose, and many states enacted laws that stipulated that all school instruction had to be in English.

It was in 1968 that the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) began in San Antonio, Texas, and started to file suits that proposed bilingual education. They believed that this was a remedy for the unequal education opportunities that had been offered to minority language groups. In three years, the group had succeeded in having a federal appeals court order some form of bilingual education.

However...this was not the only minority group to seek education reform. In San Francisco, another law suit was filed on behalf of the Chinese American students. Like the Mexican Americans complaint, parents argued that their children were denied an equal education because the instruction did not take into account their native tongue. The Supreme Court agreed by basing its decision on a clause found in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that forbade discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity. This required that schools address the linguistic problems that some minority students faced, but it did not clarify how this was to be done.

For many years, the bilingual debate remained below the radar, but as immigration, both legal and illegal, rose, the English-speaking majority began to take notice, launching it into a political issue once again. In 1998, California, a state inundated with Spanish-speaking immigrants, asked voters whether or not they wanted to ban bilingual instruction that was not specifically requested for by a child's parent. The voters voted in favor of the ban, while other states, Arizona and Massachusetts, both passed similar referenda (102). These decisions were not entirely based on an anti-immigration sentiment, but also on the immigrants' own beliefs that their native language and cultural values were not being threatened by English only instruction.

With the door that was opened with integration and the Civil Rights Movement, other minority groups were able to begin fighting for their rights to a fair and equal education for their children as well. Of the groups, special education seemed to receive the most attention, possibly due to the IEP that is required for all special education students, whereas the bilingual education debate raises its head only periodically. What was probably not anticipated was the fight for the rights of educators that also began during this time. In the next chapter the birth of teacher unions will be discussed, along with Albert Shanker, the man who helped bring to the table collective bargaining for teachers. But did the change he brought have a positive impact on education? We shall see...

Peterson, Paul E. "The Rights Movement Diversifies." Saving Schools: from Horace Mann to Virtual Learning. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2010. Print.