The emergence of the 1960’s version of alternative education has been altered to meet the current demands of high accountability levels in academic achievement over the years. By the 1960’s alternative education was embedded with political and social justice movements within social and civil rights. The public school system was scrutinized for being discriminatory to minorities, low-socioeconomic students, and English language development students that struggled in the traditional systems. Raywid (1981) stated schools were “cold, dehumanizing irrelevant institutions largely indifferent to humanity and the ‘personhood’ of those within theme” (p.551). By the late 1960’s, legislators passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 focusing on academic achievement; this legislation did not address the inequality and ethical issues within education, but established precedence for education in America, which included …show more content…
Free Schools, which entered the educational scene in the 1960’s, these programs were designed to allow students to freely explore their intelligence and creativity, some faulted these schools for either lacking “a systematic guiding philosophy” or for being “ahistorical” (Deal and Nolan, 1978, p. 7) compared this type of school to the Montessori school. The Free School method allowed students to be innovative, to be creative, to deign freely, these schools were supported from the theories of Jean Paiget and John Dewey. Alternative education has shifted to embody a wide range of options to serve students’ varying circumstances, interests, and abilities (Lange and Sletten, 2002). Alternative education settings have transitioned away from the typical public schools or special education settings to a less traditional setting where specialized programs are targeted to specific groups of struggling students (citation