In 1947, Dr. Strauss and Dr. Laura Lehtinen published their landmark Psychopathology and Education of the Brain Injured Child. Unlike most scientific studies, it not only analyzed the ways “feebleminded” children learned differently from children with normally developed brains, but it actually provided answers as to how to improve behavioral problems by helping patients tackle difficulties in academic learning. Some children were having trouble reading due to difficulty correlating sounds to written words, so they developed visual aids in pronunciation drills designed to make the child’s learning process more deliberate. Furthermore, they found that left-handed writers often had an inhibited mechanical understanding of the reading process, which once overcome, represented an astounding leap forward for the child. The study was deemed so useful that it was translated into layman’s terms and marketed to parents.

          Strauss’s and Lehtinen’s Psychopathology was the capstone for the body of research that represented the entire thrust of the WCTS's line of scientific inquiry since its very inception. It defined the Strauss Syndrome “without reference to intelligence level;” they were one step closer to distinguishing a new disorder, a condition that transcended a mere IQ score, something that was not an irreversible mental defect, but could be remediated or overcome. The concept of a “learning disability” was ready to be born, though it would not come to fruition for many more years. The idea of special education for “brain-injured” children even seems to have been their original idea; in 1945 they were given the “first opportunity to establish a special class for cerebral palsied children in a public school,” which occurred in a Dearborn school. Drs. Strauss and Lehtinen have also been credited with helping forge the way in recognizing what is now known as Attention Deficit Disorder.

          Strauss and Lehtinen left WCTS to found the Cove School in Wisconsin (with support from other WCTS scientists ), the “nation's first school founded exclusively for the education of children with learning disabilities,” which is still the premier school in its field. The Cove School could be seen as the direct legacy of the WCTS, one that still carries forth the ideal that Superintendent Haskell established it upon at the behest of its philanthropic founders almost a century ago. That ideal was the radical belief that the children whom the public schools could not educate were not hopeless. Although the work of Strauss, Werner, and Lehtinen set the stage for the naming of a potentially treatable clinical condition of learning difficulty, actually getting the problem addressed practically would require reforms on the part of government and public schools to help facilitate the needed treatments of the new disorder. The most natural way to mobilize this effort was through the parents of the affected children. The movement began in Milwaukee, almost immediately after the Cove School was founded there.

          Dr. Samuel Kirk too eventually left his position at WCTS to carry out his work elsewhere, and later gave a historic speech in 1963 at a conference held, fittingly, at the Cove School. It was during this speech that Dr. Kirk coined the term “Learning Disability” as a defined diagnosis. Kirk was by that time seen as the “leading voice in American special education” by parents, professionals and politicians. In 1968 he chaired the National Advisory Committee on Handicapped Children, which reviewed U.S. Office of Education programs, to seek to better define his “learning disabilities” concept so as to help encourage the establishment of actual public school programs to deal with them. Kirk was also the director of what would later become the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education, enabling him to make strides in constructing the legislation that would ultimately develop into current federal policy on special education. These laws came to fruition in 1969 and 1975, the Learning Disabilities Education Act (P.L. 91-230), and Education of Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142) respectively.