In part 1 and part 2 of this series, I described the five factors that shaped the past half-century of education reform focused on the rights and needs of individuals with disabilities: politics, deliberately designed policies and practices, history, emergent patterns of practices, and policy feedback. These factors can help explain some puzzles about this area of education reform – and education history more broadly. In some cases, the explicit and deliberative efforts have strongly shaped education – and here, the existence of political conflict does not take away from the fact that political dynamics are explicit and often deliberative. In other cases, outcomes follow the factors largely out of the control of delineated and deliberate effort: history, emergent practices, and policy feedback.
In part 1, I looked back at 50 years of education reform focused on students with disabilities and explained two of the five factors that shaped the last half-century of this history: political efforts to secure the educational rights of individuals with disabilities; and efforts to plan or design either education policy or educational techniques that could be used to help individuals, classes, or systems. These two factors lean heavily towards deliberative action, and I hinted that intentional action was not all that shaped the history of education for individuals with disabilities. Now it’s time to explore that other side.
Two major historical anniversaries in American education passed by this summer without significant public comment: consent decrees that ended two federal lawsuits in May and August 1972, lawsuits intended to open up educational access for children with disabilities in Pennsylvania and Washington, DC. Before these lawsuits, it had been regularly practice since early in the 20th century for school districts to simply deny education to children labeled mentally retarded or any one of a range of other disability labels that presumably rendered the children unable to benefit from education. These exclusions were the result of both prejudice and convenience, and the lawsuits forced public schools in Pennsylvania and the nation’s capital to open their doors to all school-aged children.
For the first time in my career, I’ve started receiving gifts that colleagues thought I’d enjoy related to a research project — i.e., they identify me with my current research into the post-1945 history of educational broadcasting in the United States, a project that is less than half a decade old. For an historian, that was fast!
Guano Point sits 75 miles north of Kingman, Arizona, on the southern lip of the Western Grand Canyon, and on it perches the remnants of a tramway system, a launching point for failed dreams and a missing 99,000 tons of guano.
We’ll return in a bit to the missing guano.
As Roger Smith tells the story in his book Batchit, Arizona, Harold Carpenter says he spotted a gap in the north canyon wall while boating down Granite Gorge in the Great Depression. Returning later, he spent several days climbing up to it.
Holy bat cave! Who spends three days getting to a literal hole in the wall? Apparently Mr. Carpenter, and he found a lot of … well, guano. That’s the term for what leaves the hind end of a bat.
