[World War II conscientious objectors assigned to work in state homes for the mentally retarded] went public, writing in magazines such as Christian Century about the terrible conditions they had seen. Under Dwight D. Eisenhower, Social Security’s Disabled Adult Child program...went into effect.
The first Special Olympics were held in 1968, in large part thanks to the efforts of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, an anti-abortion liberal Catholic[;] Medicare and Medicaid, the two most important programs for financing the treatment and care of disabled Americans, were enacted in 1965 by Great Society liberals. Richard M. Nixon worked with Congress to enact Supplemental Security Income, which established income security for millions of people with disabilities...President Gerald R. Ford signed what is now the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, guaranteeing access to special education and other services. Senators Edward M. Kennedy and Robert Dole collaborated to pass the Americans With Disabilities Act, which opened many opportunities in public accommodations and the work force, and the business community later stepped up to find ways for adults with developmental disabilities to earn a paycheck for real work.
Today, social conservatives in the Knights of Columbus sell Tootsie Rolls on street corners supporting group homes and workshops, while liberal activists fight to ensure that disabled Medicaid recipients have access to proper dental care and other services....
Sixty years ago, the birth of an intellectually disabled child was viewed as a private tragedy. Families did the best they could, for as long as they could, or turned to forbidding public institutions for help. Now millions of men and women with intellectual disabilities live with greater dignity with their families or in human-scale group homes in their own communities....
Liberals and conservatives deserve credit for working together to promote genuine progress in these areas. It isn’t easy, because we have genuine differences regarding the size and role of government, abortion, separation of church and state. But Mr. Santorum wants to exploit these differences. Mr. Santorum faces an uphill political climb. But whatever happens with his candidacy, he can still tear this particularly delicate piece of our social fabric before he’s through. We can’t let him do that.

According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of disability and the fourth leading contributor to the global burden of disease, projected to reach second place by 2020. There is also strong evidence that it is an independent risk factor for heart disease, and several studies show that prolonged depression is associated with selective and possibly permanent damage to the hippocampus, a region of the brain critical to memory and learning.
Add the fact that 2 percent to 12 percent of depressed people eventually commit suicide, and the [supposed evolutionary] “advantages” of depression suddenly don’t look so good....
What is natural, the thinking goes, is best. If we are designed to suffer depression in response to life’s ills, there must be a good reason for it, and we should allow it to take its painful and natural course.
But unlike ordinary sadness, the natural course of depression can be devastating and lethal. And while sadness is useful, clinical depression signals a failure to adapt to stress or loss, because it impairs a person’s ability to solve the very dilemmas that triggered it.
Even if depression is “natural” and evolved from an emotional state that might once have given us some advantage, that doesn’t make it any more desirable than other maladies. Nature offers us cancer, infections and heart disease, which we happily avoid and do our best to treat. Depression is no different.

In Clackmannanshire, Scotland, a seven-year study [linked phonics instruction with] more progress in reading and spelling...<br />
A 2005 Australian report, Teaching Reading, found: <br />
[Children during the early years of schooling link spoken language to written language by mastering the alphabetic code–the grapheme-phoneme correspondences that link words to pronunciation. These foundational, essential skills for the development of competence in reading, writing and spelling] must be taught explicitly, systematically, early and well. <br />
The US National Reading Panel report of 2006 said:<br />
Systematic synthetic phonics instruction had a positive and significant effect on disabled readers[, who improved substantially in ability to read words and gained significantly in ability to process text. Phonics instruction benefits students with learning disabilities, low-achieving students who are not disabled, and] low socio-economic status (SES) children’s alphabetic knowledge and word reading skills...

'He renovated my carriage house when he was completely paralyzed and unable to speak, unable to breathe. And he won an award for historic restoration.'