Remembering the times of PARC
Could anyone use a refresher on the world of children with disabilities when advocates chased their civil rights?
Over on The 74 for 18 December 2025 Beth Hawkins published an extensive look back at some of the history of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. In “Before Special Ed, There Was the School-to-Asylum Pipeline. How One Lawsuit Helped End It: 50 years ago, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ended the routine institutionalization of kids with disabilities. Advocates fear a return to that dark time,” Her piece not only commemorates the 50-year arc of the IDEA, it forces readers to consider what IDEA replaced—and what is at stake if its core commitments erode.
At the center of the narrative is the landmark law suit Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1971), often known simply as “PARC,” that was conceived and brought under the leadership of the late Thomas Gilhool. Ms. Hawkins situated PARC not as an abstract legal milestone, but as a response to a brutal reality, a time when children with disabilities were routinely excluded from public schools and, in many cases, diverted into large-scale institutional settings. These institutions—often euphemistically described as “care facilities”—were frequently overcrowded, understaffed, and isolating, with minimal educational or therapeutic services and little regard for civil rights or human dignity. Readers can gain perspective about what the facilities were like by reviewing the famous collection of images by Burton Blatt and Fred Kaplan, Christmas in Purgatory (mentioned by Ms. Hawkins) from the Disability History Museum.
In Ms. Hawkins’s telling, the PARC litigation emerges as both a legal and moral rupture. It was a declaration that children with disabilities were not “uneducable,” not wards of the state, and not disposable. They were entitled to schooling, opportunity, and protection under the law.
Ms. Hawkins’s article functions on two levels. It is, in part, a celebration of P.L. 94-142—the Education for All Handicapped Children Act—which later evolved into IDEA and fundamentally reshaped public education by establishing the right to a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment. And it is equally a cautionary history lesson. Ms. Hawkins explicitly connected the history with contemporary anxieties voiced by advocates: Underfunding, privatization, restrictive placements, and the quiet normalization of exclusionary systems all risk recreating, in modern form, the very pipeline IDEA dismantled.
Although there is a distinct tilt toward legal aspects of the story, in her coverage Ms. Hawkins provided much more than just the PARC case. This article should be a good resource for those who teach about disabilities, special education, and related topics. It also should be a good source for those Dear Readers who simply care about children and youths with disabilities.
The article’s underlying message is necessary: IDEA did not appear out of goodwill or consensus. Children’s rights were wrested from a system that had failed them and their families. We can help ensure that those legal protections endure by remembering why they were needed in the first place.
Reference
Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 334 F. Supp. 1257 (1971). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/334/1257/1743299/
Oh my gosh, this is so helpful. I'm going to be going over laws and litigation in the next couple weeks in several of my classes and I'm definitely using this because PARC is one of the ones I spend quite a bit of time talking about. What I've learned is if I can tell the case like a storyteller and give a follow up of what happened afterwards, the students seem to get more into it. So, I do a lot of that in the first few weeks of the semester so they get the necessary background of how we ended up where we are today.