In this perceptive study of the education of disabled children, Robert Osgood describes the grown of Boston and its schools as both typical and a national leader among urban centers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He closely examines the emergence of individual programs that catered to students formally identified as having special needs: intermediate schools and ungraded classes; three separate programs for students with disciplinary problems; the city's groundbreaking day school for deaf children; special classes for mentally retarded children; and other programs established between 1908 and 1913. Osgood describes these programs and their relations with each other, and also the rationales offered for their establishment and support. This detailed account graphically depicts how patterns of integration and segregation in special education shifted over time in Boston, and provides a foundation for continuing the present-day discussion of the politics and realities of inclusion.
