President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act into law on November 29, 1975. It mandated that all children with any form of disability must be provided a free public education and that they be educated alongside children without disabilities “to the maximum extent appropriate.” This landmark legislation has improved the lives of generations of children with disabilities. In 1970, only one in five children with disabilities were educated in America’s public schools. Some states had laws explicitly excluding those whom schools deemed “uneducable.” Many of those children spent their lives in institutions. Others were homeschooled or received very little formal education at all. Today, 15 percent of public-school students are served by the law, which was reauthorized and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act in 1990.