Seguin moved to the United States in 1848 and established a number of schools in various cities for the education of mentally handicapped children. His publication, "The Treatment, Hygiene and Education of Idiots and Other Backward Children," is a landmark textbook dealing with the special needs of children with mental disabilities. Maria Montessori, an Italian pediatrician built on Seguin's work in the early 1900's and her work on the education of the mentally disabled became integrated into many schools around the world (Hallahan & Mercer, 2001). Special education in the United States remained marginalized until the early to mid-1900's. Samuel Orton, Marion Monroe and Samuel Kirk were especially instrumental in the development of special education during this time (Hallahan & Mercer, 2001). Orton worked extensively to develop ways of teaching reading to children with reading disabilities. He developed the Orton-Gillingham method for reading education, which consistently proved to increase the IQ scores of his students. Monroe developed diagnostic tests that effectively identified students with reading disabilities and created individual teaching programs based on the outcomes. Samuel Kirk advanced this assessment approach for identifying specific learning disabilities in children by developing the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA) (Hallahan & Mercer, 2001).

Kirk is credited with the terming of the diagnostic label "learning disabilities." He went on to define special education by eight specific features that became the foundation of a political movement to implement structured special education programs: special class organization, special materials, special diagnosis, special clinical teaching procedures, intensive use of learning principles, systematic instruction, individualized instruction, and parent education (Cook & Schirmer, 2003). These efforts led to the establishment...