Two Landmark Cases

Between the years of 1960 and 1975, state legislatures, federal courts, and the United States Congress all worked towards guaranteeing the educational rights of children with disabilities (Martin, Martin and Terman, 1996). In that time, forty-five states passed laws mandating, encouraging and /or funding special education programs. Under equal protection and due process guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, federal courts ruled that schools could not discriminate on the basis of disability and parents had due process rights in relation to their children's schooling.

Two landmark cases in laying out these rights were the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children (PARC) v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and Mills v. Board of Education for the District of Columbia (PARC, 1971; Peter, 1972). The case of PARC v. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1971 contested a state law which specifically allowed schools to refuse services to children "who have not attained a mental age of five years" at the time they would ordinarily enroll in first grade. Under a consent decree, the state agreed to provide free access to public education to children with mental retardation up to age 21. This case established that a child can be offered education appropriate to his/her learning capacity, and established a clear preference for the least restrictive placement of each child.

In the case of Mills v. Board of Education in the District of Columbia in 1972,

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