The number of special day classes for the retarded has been increasing by leaps and bounds.

The most
recent 1967–68 statistics compiled by the US Office of Education now indicate that there are
approximately 32,000 teachers of the retarded employed by local school systems—over one third of all
special educators in the nation. In my best judgment, about 60 to 80 percent of the pupils taught by
these teachers are children from low- status backgrounds—including Afro-Americans, American Indians,
Mexicans and Puerto- Rico Americans; those from non- standard English- speaking, broken, disorganized
and inadequate homes and children from other non- middle- class environments. This expensive
proliferation of self- contained special schools and classes raises serious educational and civil rights
issues which must be squarely faced. It is my thesis that we must stop labeling these deprived children
as mentally retarded. Furthermore, we must stop segregating them by placing them into our allegedly
special programs. (Dunn 1968: 5–6)The fact that this impassioned argument was being made by the
president of the premier body for special education in the United States over 50 years ago shows just
how long and circuitous the journey to inclusion has been. Similar arguments were being made at the
time in the United Kingdom, where research was also highlighting the over-representation of poor
children, especially those with black or brown skin (Graham 2012). The difference between the two
nations was in the ethnicity of those segregated but, while their ethnicity may have differed, their
backgrounds did not. In each case, segregated students were poor white children from the working
classes, the descendants of the African slave trade, and immigrants from other language and cultural
backgrounds. The Australian experience has mirrored devel-opments in the United Kingdom and United
States, but always with some delay. For example, research has documented the overrepresenta-tion of
Indigenous students in segregated special- educational settings (Graham 2012; Sweller et al. 2012), but
nothing has been done about 18Inclusive Education for the 21st Centuryit. This is despite a global
movement that began some 60 years ago, a decade and a half before Lloyd Dunn made his final address
as Pres-ident of the Council for Exceptional Children. What happened 60 years ago?Several factors
combined to create impetus for broad political, social and educational change, including but not limited
to the birth of an international human rights legal framework that led to the CRPD (United Nations 2008)
and which we discuss in Chapter 4. Among this combination of factors was the 1954 Brown v. Board of
Educationruling at the height of the civil- rights movement in the United States, in which it was declared
that ‘separate educational facilities are inherently unequal’ (Smith & Kozleski 2005: 272). While Brown
was concerned with racial segregation and the inferior educational opportunities offered to African
Americans, it influenced the outcome of another right to education class action, PARC v. The
Commonwealth of Pennsyl-vania in 1971, in which it was argued that the segregation of children with
intellectual disability violated the principles of Brown (Smith & Kozleski 2005). The successful PARC class
action led to the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, now known as the
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This US federal law enshrined two important doctrines:
(1) that all children were entitled to a free and appropriate public education, (2) in the least restrictive
envi-ronment. While interpretations of the words ‘appropriate’ and ‘least restrictive’ have proved
problematic over time, IDEA was a major step forward for American students with disability and their
families.

MLA 8th Edition (Modern Language Assoc.)

Linda Graham. Inclusive Education for the 21st Century : Theory, Policy and Practice. Routledge, 2020.
APA 7th Edition (American Psychological Assoc.)
Linda Graham. (2020). Inclusive Education for the 21st Century : Theory, Policy and Practice. Routledge.