David M. Bartley was Speaker of the House during the years 1970-72 that produced several major pieces of legislation that improved educational access and substance for kids that had been marginalized and, in some cases, altogether excluded as uneducable. He was an educator before he was a State Representative for Holyoke and he, like Senate President Kevin Harrington and my boss Mike Daly, House Chairman of the Education Committee – each of whom had also been teachers – treated education reform as a priority during their terms in office.  With Speaker Bartley’s recent death at the age of 88, all three of those civil rights champions have now passed.  (A fourth champion, if only because he enthusiastically signed Chapter 766 into law when it reached his desk 51 years ago, was Governor Frank Sargent; he and his wife Jessie were dedicated advocates for those with developmental disabilities.)

I write this both on my own behalf, as one of the first Research Directors to be appointed for a legislative committee when Speaker Bartley took on the task of professionalizing legislative staff, and also on behalf of all the stakeholders who have benefitted from his work with Representative Daly to create a responsive and accountable system of special education and related services for kids who need such interventions in our schools.

Daly was a legislative member of the Task Force on Children Out of School (now the Mass. Advocates for Children).  Inspired by that work, he brought two major missions to his committee chairmanship in 1971: one to create a system of transitional bilingual education for non-English-speaking students; the other to completely reform the requirements and procedures for educating kids with learning, emotional or physical challenges that undermined their access and progress in school. The Speaker wholeheartedly joined Daly as a co-sponsor of the bilingual education initiative in 1971 and, when his research assistant, Connie Kaufman (now Rizoli) put our proposed changes to special education law on his desk early in 1972, he did not hesitate for a second before he signed on as a co-sponsor of the complex overhaul of special education law that became Chapter 766. 

Bartley did not merely add his name as a co-sponsor of the special education initiative: his decisions at some key points in the process were critical to its ultimate passage and success as a system of rights and services.  Inevitably, major differences arose among those with interests in the proposal, especially when it came to costs, controls over programs, definitions that would govern access to services, and how much and of what nature access would be afforded to parents – the highest stakeholders of all, besides the children themselves.

Up to that point all educational decisions for public school students were solely and indisputably in the hands of school districts and state institutions, with little, if any, recourse for parents if they disagreed. Both Daly and Bartley, teachers and parents in their own rights, brought a clear determination to the mix to ensure both that parents would play a central role in the educational decisions for children who needed special attention and supports and that conflicting positions over what a child needed would be resolved with the input of experts from outside the school systems as well as from the school’s own personnel.

In a radical innovation within any known public education system to date, Bartley and Daly agreed to call for the establishment of a due process system, with independent hearing officers charged with deciding points in contention between schools and parents and with parents given rights to secure independent expert evaluations and recommendations, all to be litigated, if need be, through hearings and judicial appeals. Two years later, that due process system was joined by federal legislation – now called the IDEA –  modeled on Chapter 766, allowing for appeals up to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

When questions needed to be resolved between stakeholders with opposing interests, we submitted those to the Speaker.  Daly’s approach – unique at the time – to working up a complex piece of legislation like the bilingual education and special education proposals, was to invite all the stakeholders we could think of to meet at the offices of the Education Committee to review proposed drafts line by line, to identify questions that needed to be resolved and to debate proposed solutions.  Key disputes, sharpened through that process, were ultimately given to the Speaker to resolve.   

Bartley brought a well-grounded pragmatism to his work, even – especially, perhaps – when his mission was as revolutionary as were his and Daly’s missions with their bilingual education and special education proposals. He once said that he liked to appear conservative to the conservatives and progressive to the progressives; from my vantage point while working with the Education Committee, his approach paid off beautifully. Lessons could be taken today from his approach, as it really amounted to finding a point of compromise that, while challenging and uncomfortable, made the democratic process actually work for people who needed services.   

In that mode, for example, after we heard at one of the stakeholders’ meetings on the special education bill from agents of some of the state departments – in particular, DMR, DYS, DMH, DPH and DOC – that they did not want to give up control over school programs within their residential (including correctional) facilities to the Department of Education as the bill had been drafted, we put the dispute to Speaker Bartley.  The Speaker’s research assistant, Connie Rizoli, and we recommended that education for kids whose emotional or other challenges had led to their short- or long-term institutionalization be designed and overseen by educators, rather than primarily by therapists or physicians. Speaker Bartley readily agreed and the issue was resolved, leading to the creation of an office under the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education known as Special Education in Institutional Settings (SEIS) with authority over educational programs.

In another example of Speaker Bartley’s critical decision making, some school systems were distressed by the prospect, if the special education reform act came to be, of having to change their programs and procedures, much less add many to their staffs to meet what they saw as a major expansion of their obligations.  They could not – and for the most part did not – argue against the main premises of the proposal, though there was much anxiety about the prospect of having parents sitting at the table with educators over whether and what kinds of special education and supports would be provided for their kids – but they pressed relentlessly against having any such major overhaul required to begin only a short time after the law was signed. The Speaker worked with advocates and school systems alike to achieve a compromise: what came to be Chapter 766 would not be deemed immediately effective; instead, its effective date would be set two years out – September 1974. School systems breathed relief and then set to work to prepare their systems, their programs and their staffs to make it happen. 

In these and other ways, we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Speaker David Bartley. Working with Mike Daly and adjusting as necessary to the demands of advocates on all sides, his good sense and pragmatism was indispensable to the enactment and implementation of Chapter 766.  He committed himself to that success in the service of his total agreement to the merits of the special education reform that had followed so powerfully from the findings of excluded children made by the Task Force on Children Out of School, the creative analysis and recommendations of the Mass. Advisory Council on Education (with Larry Kotin’s legal input); and, let’s say, the strategic grunt-work and fine-tuning of the bill by the newly professionalized staff of the legislature.

Some years later, David Bartley and I were two of the speakers at an annual conference of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. The Speaker had retired from the House and was well into his new work as President of Mt. Holyoke Community College, but he was glad to take the time to talk with the MASC. It was great to hear him sing with pride of the special education law that he had played such a powerful hand in bringing to life and also to recognize the tone he’d brought to that mission in 1972 – a clear and unapologetic message to school committees reminding them of their deep obligation to those whose progress is undermined by special challenges, praising them for the progress that had been made across the state, and urging them to stay the course – i.e., not to put cost concerns over educational imperatives in their actions as an association or in their individual school systems. Dollars spent now, he said, are not only the ethical thing but also the sensible fiscal choice, compared to the loss of skills that could have been developed if the extra services had been provided.

Amen to that, Speaker Bartley. Rest in Peace.

Robert K. Crabtree is of counsel within the Special Education & Disability Rights practice group at Kotin, Crabtree & Strong, LLP in Newton, Massachusetts.  He is a founding member of the firm.

Reprinted with permission from the Federation for Children with Special Needs Newsline, Summer 2023 edition.