The twentieth-century public high school and preschool greatly altered the landscape of American education, lengthening at both chronological ends the years when children were in school. However, the most dramatic change in public education policy was not determined by a child's age, but by the existence of a disability.

With the exception of facilities for the blind and deaf, always a miniscule percentage of the general population, state-run institutions for the disabled in the early twentieth century housed far more adults than children and saw their purpose as custodial, not educational. Compulsory education's demand that children between the ages of six and sixteen go to school did not apply to those with handicaps. Most children with physical or mental impairments stayed home, condemned by the cruel language of eugenics as “human waste.”

Within this context, the changes in the second half of the twentieth century in rules governing education of the handicapped were astonishing. Senator Edward Kennedy rightly called them an effort to “rewrite one of the saddest chapters in American education.” No longer scorned, youngsters with disabilities were guaranteed a chance for “special” education, and they, alone among all groups of schoolchildren, could assert detailed substantive and due process rights, should such education be denied. This chapter examines the multifaceted origins and complex consequences of this transformative policy change. Regulations that remedied historic mistreatment also led to huge increases in vaguely defined categories of youthful disability.