ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
For a long time, children with disabilities had pretty dismal prospects when it came to schooling. Many were simply forced to stay home. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of a landmark federal law that helped change that by guaranteeing all children with disabilities the right to a free public education. But today, the costs of special education have led to a crisis for many schools. NPR's Cory Turner has been digging into the archives and has this look back at how we got here.
CORY TURNER, BYLINE: In the early 20th century, children with disabilities were commonly denied access to public school classrooms.
ED MARTIN: Mostly, it was just that they were invisible. They had been kept at home. Disabled people were segregated. Our goal was to end that.
TURNER: Ed Martin, who is now 93, began his career as a young professor of speech therapy at the University of Alabama. He was invited to Washington in the 1960s to work in government, and he believed the growing fight over special education was a new civil rights movement.
MARTIN: I knew nothing, really, about politics. I knew nothing about the Congress. I remember saying, I'm not even sure how many congressmen there are.
TURNER: When parents of children with disabilities began asking for help because their kids were being turned away by schools, Martin says he organized public hearings for lawmakers to hear their stories.
MARTIN: There was one mother who told us a story about the school bus stopping at the foot of her driveway and her daughter standing in the window, crying, saying, why can't I go with the other kids?
TURNER: In the early 1970s, Martin went to work writing an ambitious new bill. It would cement into federal law that students with disabilities have a legal right to get an education in America's public schools.
TAMMY KOLBE: This was a huge landmark piece of civil rights legislation that really protected the rights of students.
TURNER: Tammy Kolbe studies special education funding at the American Institutes for Research.
KOLBE: It's also one of the most substantial federal investments we have in public education.
TURNER: The bill offered federal dollars to help pay for things like classroom instruction and speech and physical therapy. After a lot of debate, lawmakers agreed to send schools up to 40% of the extra costs of special education. Remember that number - 40% - because lawmakers would never get there. The bill didn't say Congress had to, but it was the goal. The biggest obstacle at the time was the most powerful person in Washington...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GERALD FORD: The time has come for a coordinated national undertaking.
TURNER: ...President Gerald Ford.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FORD: I'm extremely happy to announce today that the first White House Conference on Handicapped Individuals will be held next year.
TURNER: NPR researcher Sarah Knight got this audio from the Gerald Ford Presidential Library. It's from a White House event in November 1975. Congress had just voted overwhelmingly to pass the landmark special education bill. But President Ford worried it would be expensive, and he wasn't sure he'd sign it. He told the crowd...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FORD: I'll give it my very, very personal attention, and I thank all of you for coming here today.
EUNICE FIORITO: Mr. President...
FORD: Yes.
FIORITO: ...May I have a moment?
FORD: Surely.
TURNER: That was Eunice Fiorito interrupting Ford. She was blind and one of the few women in the room that day. She used the moment to remind the president of what was at stake.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FIORITO: We, the disabled of this country, have the intellect and ability, rights and responsibilities to be participants in the destiny of our future lives.
TURNER: Soon after, Ford decided to sign what would eventually become known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.
MARTIN: When we sat down together and had dinner the night after Jerry Ford signed it into law, I think mostly we just felt tremendously moved.
TURNER: Ed Martin, the speech therapy professor turned landmark law writer.
MARTIN: It was just, like, an affirmation of the values of the country, thinking, wow. It's over. We've done it.
TURNER: But it wasn't over. After Ford signed the bill, he said publicly that he would try to revise it because he said that 40% funding goal was, quote, "excessive and unrealistic." Here's Ford a month later, January 1976, in his State of the Union.
(SOUNDBITE OF 1976 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS)
FORD: We must be more honest with the American people, promising them no more than we can deliver and delivering all that we promise.
(APPLAUSE)
TURNER: The original law included a multiyear roadmap to ramp federal funding up to 40%. The problem was, by 1978, schools had to deliver special education services. And as NPR's Cokie Roberts reported at the time, the federal government wasn't yet helping much.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
COKIE ROBERTS: Usually when Congress passes a law requiring states to do something, it sweetens the pot by sending along federal dollars to make the task easier. That's not the case with public...
TURNER: Forget the law's grand 40% goal. Congress was stuck around 10%.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
ROBERTS: And many school districts are complaining that the cost of special facilities, teacher training, etc. are great and that, at a time when the public is screaming about property taxes, the schools need federal help.
TURNER: By 1980, California's then-superintendent of education, Wilson Riles, sounded off to NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
WILSON RILES: You don't give mandates unless you follow those mandates with where you're going to find the money. I think it's self-serving to say, do all these great things that have great costs attached to them, and then don't provide for them. It is Congress' responsibility to see that the money is there.
TURNER: But through much of the 1980s and even into the 1990s, funding was below 10%. In fact, Congress has never gotten its annual appropriations to 40%. They haven't even gotten halfway, and that's with Republicans and Democrats in charge. To be fair, funding has risen nearly every year. And today, with nearly 8 million children receiving special education or interventions, funding to states sits at some $14 billion, which is a lot, but still just around 10% - not 40. And schools are saying what they were saying decades ago - that they need Congress to fully fund the law. Senate Democrats introduced a new bill last year to do just that, but it's gone nowhere. What would it take for things to change?
MARTIN: I don't know. I guess maybe we don't have the strong leader in the Congress who wants to do this.
TURNER: Ed Martin left government in the early 1980s to work as a disability rights advocate. He says, now, getting Congress to fully fund the law he helped write would likely take a lot of work outside Washington.
MARTIN: If the parents and the teachers and others organize themselves into a political force - meaning saying, we've got to have more money; we've got to do a better job - I think they'll make some headway.
TURNER: In other words, precisely the kind of civil rights movement that sparked action 50 years ago.
Cory Turner, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOLLY HAMMAR SONG, "SHORTCUTS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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