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Nashville Special Education History
Sherman Dorn, Principal Investigator
Douglas Fuchs, Senior Investigator
Research project funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Grant H023N60001
Introduction
I am currently researching a case study of special education history in Nashville, Tennessee, since 1940. The origins of this project was an intellectual puzzle: Why was the reputation of special education practices in Nashville so mixed when the city was home to both university-based research in special education and also advocacy organizations since the early 1950s? The conventional wisdom in special education is that research and advocacy have been the prime movers of special education history since World War II (e.g., Biklen 1977, Blatt 1977, Dunn 1973, Kauffman 1981, Shapiro 1993, Turnbull 1990). Yet the conventional wisdom has underemphasized a critical player: public school systems. Researchers and advocates may have been very important in shaping special education history since 1940, but local administrators have had to do the work, and they have occasionally resisted changes in policy. The most brilliant research to improve state-of-the-art education for individuals with disabilities is of little value to students if unused by most teachers. This gap between research and practice exists because schools are not empty vessels. School systems have, within them, employees with their own ideals and self-interest. In addition, portions of school systems can sometimes operate is if they were single agents with at least semi-autonomous interests. To paraphrase Sarason (1990), schools have their own culture with which we must reckon if we wish to improve education.
The original plan of the project funded by the U.S. Department of Education was to explore how advocacy and research activities in Nashville shaped local special education practices and how the local schools mediated that influence. Along the way, I have found a good bit of other information, and I will be continuing my research long after the grant period is over. In that regard, the intentions of the competition which funded this project, the Initial Career Award, has succeeded. This project will become a broader case study of special education history in the second half of the twentieth century. Douglas Fuchs, Professor of Special Education at Vanderbilt University, has provided me with advice throughout the research and taught me a good deal about special education.
Into the Research
Mini-essays from the project
"The Lord Sent Cain and Abel": Heroic Myths in Special Education Paper prepared for the 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
How Research Gets Lost in Special Education, available in Microsoft Windows 97, WordPerfect, and Adobe Acrobat formats. Paper prepared for the 1999 Annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
How To Get in Trouble with the Law (coming soon)
You Can't Invade Public Schools (coming soon)
Archival materials transcribed and on-line
Public school records (coming soon)
Tennessee State Library and Archives (coming soon)
References
Biklen, Doug. 1977. Advocacy comes of age. In Burton Blatt, Doug Biklen, and Robert Bogdan, eds., An alternative textbook in special education: People, schools and other institutions. Denver: Love.
Blatt, Burton. 1977. Issues and values. In Burton Blatt, Doug Biklen, and Robert Bogdan, eds., An alternative textbook in special education: People, schools and other institutions. Denver: Love.
Dunn, Lloyd M. 1973. An overview. In Lloyd M. Dunn, ed., Exceptional children in the schools: Special education in transition (2nd ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Kauffman, James M. 1981. Introduction: Historical trends and contemporary issues in special education in the United States. In James M. Kauffman and Daniel P. Hallahan, eds., Handbook of special education (1st ed.). Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Sarason, Seymour. 1990. The predictable failure of educational reform: Can we change course before it's too late? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Shapiro, Joseph P. 1993. No pity: People with disabilities forging a new civil rights movement. New York: Times Books.
Turnbull, H. Rutherford. 1990. Free appropriate public education: The law and children with disabilities (3rd ed.). Denver: Love.