If Michigan eliminated our state-imposed special education rules, other states’ would fall like dominoes. I could not let that happen. Not without waging a war on the MDE [Michigan Department of Education] and anyone working to deny children with disabilities an education, and hope for a future of independence, and access to the American Dream. Michigan had become a “national” issue.

~Marcie Lipsitt, longtime child activist for students with disabilities in the State of Michigan.

By Marcie Lipsitt

Michigan once had a proud heritage of believing in the educational rights of our students with disabilities.

But what has transpired over the past 46 years is not worthy of our history books or a wondrous fairy tale of children’s dreams come true. For Michigan’s 176,000 students with an Individualized Education Programs (IEP), it has been a long, treacherous, and disappointing road to what we call a “Free Appropriate Pubic Education.”

Source: The Short Rise and Faster Fall of Special Ed. in the State of Michigan