SPECIAL NEEDS TEACHING

Special Needs Teaching

Special Needs Teaching

Brown v. Board of Education

The case that came to be known as Brown v. Board of Education was actually the name given to five separate cases that were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the issue of segregation in public schools. These cases were Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Briggs v. Elliot, Davis v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County (VA.), Boiling v. Sharpe, and Gebhart v. Ethel. While the facts of each case are different, the main issue in each was the constitutionality of state-sponsored segregation in public schools. Once again, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund handled these cases (Reschly, 2008).

When the cases came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court consolidated all five cases under the name of Brown v. Board of Education. Marshall personally argued the case before the Court. Although he raised a variety of legal issues on appeal, the most common one was that separate school systems for blacks and whites were inherently unequal, and thus, violate the "equal protection clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Furthermore, relying on sociological tests, such as the one performed by social scientist Kenneth Clark, and other data, he also argued that segregated school systems had a tendency to make black children feel inferior to white children, and thus, such a system should not be legally permissible.

PARC v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

Two cases, Mills v. Board of Education of District of Columbia (1972) and Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (PARC, 1971, 1972), were major elements in helping to lay the foundation for the 1975 enactment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Prior to that time, millions of students with disabilities were either excluded from public education totally or were admitted but did not receive appropriate services. While only heard at the federal trial court level, the decisions in Mills and PARC are truly landmark cases in the evolution of federal special education law.

PARC was a class action suit filed on behalf of 13 children with cognitive disabilities, each residing in a different Pennsylvania school system. At the time, Pennsylvania had a statute in effect that specifically allowed school boards to exclude any children that school psychologists deemed to be either “uneducable” or “untrainable” under the terminology ...