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The United States (US) system of special education committed three original sins that perpetuate inequities between children with disabilities and their peers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of the US system, contrast this history against international disability law and identify opportunities for leaders to transform policy and practice for inclusive education.

This paper explores the development of the three sins in US special education law: (1) weaving throughout it a medical model of disability, (2) failing to mandate inclusion and (3) hampering meaningful enforcement. The paper contrasts the US system with the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), an international law adopted by 180 nations that requires inclusion of people with disabilities at all levels of systems.

This paper finds that the United States has not embraced inclusion in education, but has permitted a continuum of segregation and integration. After a discussion of the three sins and the CRPD, the authors describe opportunities for international and US leaders to learn from the original sins of the United States and develop a system of true inclusion for all students through the transformation of policy and practice.

This paper contributes to the literature on policy development and implementation, with implications for future amendments to US education law and international public administration of education.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a clear and replicable methodology for conducting a policy archaeology. This paper articulates the steps in policy archaeology and the process is applied to a study of Discourses of disability in special education policy in Ontario, 1965-1978.

The metaphor of field archaeology guided the process of locating relevant texts through backward and lateral mapping and locating and interpreting artefacts. The artefacts were discursive representations of complex policy problem of disability in stakeholder texts. The Discourses were compared chronologically, within and across stakeholder texts. An explanatory narrative relates the Discourses to the socio-historical context.

There were significant contradictions in the discursive construction of disability. The texts of the Council for Exceptional Children presumed agreement that disability was an intrinsic, permanent deficit within the student with disabilities. In contrast, the other stakeholders stated that disability was the result of socially and educationally constructed barriers.

This paper makes no claim of universal truth. The interpretations and conclusions reached are influenced by the researcher’s knowledge and experience. Other scholars may reach other conclusions.

Scholars have a clear and replicable methodology for conducting a policy archaeology. This methodology is currently the most “true” to the metaphor of archaeology and uses Discourse analysis, interpretation and the creation of a narrative situated in a socio-historical context.

The study shows that the Discourses of disability in special education policy in special education policy in Ontario place children with disabilities at a serious educational disadvantage.

Since the passage of P.L. 94–142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, on November 29, 1975, mandating that handicapped students be educated in the least restrictive environments possible, there has been an increasing demand for information related to the education of the handicapped. A common observation of teachers and administrators is that tedious hours of paperwork and conferences are required to plan individualized programs and meet governmental mandates.

The articles published in this special edition were selected from papers offered by 82 participants at the second joint conference of the History of Education Society (UK) and the Australia and New Zealand History of Education Society. This conference was held at the University of Sydney from 8‐11 December 2008. The topic was Work! Work! Work!: Work and the History of Education! and presenters were invited to submit papers for publication on one of eight themes including: the work and play of the child; vocational education and preparing the young for work; the work and careers of teachers and administrators; and the work of teaching the young across colonial and national boundaries. These themes were built upon by two general symposia entitled: ‘A picture and a 1000 words’ where presenters, using the immediacy of the single image, offered briefer narratives to construct the notion of ‘work’ as a snapshot of different educational pasts. As such, the conference aim was to embrace many genres of history, to allow access for new scholars, whilst established writers could offer pathways for future individual and collaborative scholarship.

Attempts to include students with severe disabilities in mainstream classes are comparatively recent in the history of special education. A major motive for inclusion is recognition of the right of all individuals to community membership. However, views differ on the extent to which the goals of inclusive education should emphasise the acquisition of the skills needed to function as contributing members of the community. Inclusion of students with severe disabilities involves changes in teacher roles and responsibilities and flexible approaches to class organisation. The move from an emphasis on functional curriculum to participation in core curriculum with non‐disabled students requires creative adaptations of both curriculum and instructional strategies, including strategies that foster class membership. Challenging behaviour is a potential barrier to successful inclusion, and new approaches that enable both class and specialist teachers to minimise its occurrence need to be developed. Although barriers still exist to inclusion of students with severe disabilities, there is evidence that inclusion can work successfully.

During the last two decennia ‘disability’ increasingly has been considered by various academic disciplines like sociology, literature, social sciences, geography and history as a fresh and innovative analytical category with the transformative potential of race, gender, class and sexuality. At the heart of this development is a comprehensive transformation of what is understood by ‘disability’. Traditionally, ‘disability’ was considered to be nothing more than an objective and invariable part of the human body. Nowadays ‘disability’ is primarily presented as the contingent result of the complex and manifold interactions between an individual’s body and its surrounding multilayered reality. This new meaning of ‘disability’ especially has been put forward by what has come to be known as Disability Studies.

States that historically, students with disabilities in the public schools in the USA were subjected to discrimination in the form of segregation from non‐disabled students. Also reports that much of this discrimination has subsided in recent years owing to successful advocacy by parents and community organizations before the Congress of the United States and both the federal and state judiciary. Reveals that national legislation was created so as to protect the education rights of such students and the courts have provided tests for their integration into school systems. Notes that, currently, there is some concern that this advocacy has gone too far and that court decisions authorizing “full inclusion” misinterpret the full extent of the law. Examines the scope of education for disabled children and provides a legal analysis of the educational placement of students with disabilities in the “least restrictive environment”.

The purpose of the paper is to reflect on and respond to the papers contained in this Special Issue of Journal of Educational Administration.

A commentary is provided for each of the nine articles in the Special Issue.

The papers in the Special Issue constitute a substantial and important contribution toward incorporating international perspectives into an existing research discourse on educational leadership for social justice. One of the immediate challenges that will need to be addressed is how to systematically work against the hegemony of Western thought and colonialism that infiltrates all our discourses, even those that generate scholarship such as that found in this Special Issue.

The paper reflects on the current Special Issue, and provides directions for future research.

This paper has two purposes. One is to examine the ways mentally disabled children were disciplined and cared for in Berlin, Germany/Prussia, at the end of the 19th century, by considering the way the architecture of the asylum affected the practices within it. The second purpose is to examine the manner in which the practices at the Dalldorf Asylum, especially the administrative paperwork, fabricated and stabilized the medico-pedagogical category of “feeble-mindedness”.

This paper engages with reflections on asylum architecture and its connection to disciplining bodies as shown in Disability History and linking these insights to recent scholarship from the field of Science and Technology Studies on the fabrication of knowledge through observation. Drawing on microhistory as methodology it examines the fabrication of “feeble-mindedness” with and within the Dalldorf Asylum, focusing on architecture and design as well as administrative practices.

The analysis of the asylum's architecture reveals how certain ideas of hygiene and control derived from 19th century psychiatry, along with personal attentiveness and individualized learning were incorporated into the building, creating the notion of a “feeble-minded child” as being simultaneously dangerous and in danger. The paper further shows how the professionals involved were struggling with diagnosing these children, further showcasing that the space as well as the categorization of children, oscillating between psychiatry and pedagogy, has to be understood as contested.

This paper engages findings on the disciplining structures organizing everyday life within the asylum with concepts of fabricating knowledge as central to science studies. The Dalldorf Asylum, the earliest state-funded asylum for mentally disabled children in Germany and largely understudied, is used as the main research object. A microhistorical approach allows to make visible the intricate yet mundane practices involved in stabilizing the category of “feeble-mindedness”.

This article examines the educational decision-making of hearing parents for their deaf children born during a period (1970–1990s) before the introduction of new-born hearing screening in New South Wales, where the study was conducted, and prior to the now near-universal adoption of cochlear implants in Australia.

We present findings from an oral history study in which parents were invited to recall how they planned for the education of their deaf children.

We propose that these oral histories shed light on how the concept, early intervention – a child development principle that became axiomatic from about the 1960s – significantly shaped the conduct of parents of deaf children, constituting both hope and burden, and intensifying a focus on early decision-making. They also illustrate ways in which parenting was shaped by two key structural shifts, one, being the increasing enrolment of deaf children in mainstream rather than separate classrooms and the other being the transformation of deafness itself by developments in hearing assistance technology.

The paper contributes to a sociological/historical literature of “parenting for education” that almost entirely lacks deaf perspectives and a specialist literature of parental decision-making for deaf children that is almost entirely focussed on the post cochlear implant generation. The paper is distinctive in its treatment of the concept of “early intervention” as a historical phenomenon rather than a “common sense” truth, and proposes that parents of deaf children were at the leading edge of late-20th and early-21st century parenting intensification.