The genesis of “special education” itself within Detroit Public Schools can be traced back to Wales Martindale, who held the office of superintendent from 1897 to 1912, although the concept of what we call “special education” today was not coined until the 1960s. Martindale was the predecessor of Superintendent Charles Chadsey, who was Cody’s predecessor. During each of their successive administrations Chadsey and Cody in turn took greater strides in the expansion of the special education programs. Mirel notes that during Martindale’s tenure as superintendent, he introduced “key elements of the progressive educational agenda, including child-study, a more child-centered curriculum, expansion of the secondary curriculum, vocational education, and standardized testing.” Specifically, Martindale achieved these ends by implementing “playgrounds, kindergartens, summer schools, a committee for child study, annual age-grade surveys, and programs for crippled, blind, and mentally retarded children.” In 1910 Martindale sent two Detroit teachers to study with H.H. Goddard, who had pioneered the use of the Binet intelligence tests in the United States. Upon their return to Detroit, the teachers set up a psychological clinic for the Detroit Public Schools under Martindale’s supervision. ²⁶  It was the Chadsey administration however that marked a distinctive turn for special education in Detroit Public Schools, when he greatly increased the number of classes for “blind, deaf, incorrigible, ‘backward,’ and gifted children,” ²⁷  and likewise under Cody the scale of testing, tracking, and grading pupils was expanded even more dramatically than it had been under Chadsey and Martindale. In 1920 Cody introduced the Detroit First Grade Intelligence Test, which like the Binet test graded results into three brackets: low, middle, and high. Students were placed on a learning “track” commensurate with their score. Teachers could recommend upgrades or downgrades in a student’s track later.²⁸ 

          Though Barry Franklin’s analysis, From “Backwardness” to “At-Risk:” Childhood Learning Difficulties and the Contradictions of School Reform focuses on the development of special education in school systems in Atlanta and Minneapolis, he stops first to talk about Detroit for a few pages. Detroit’s first recognition that there was a class of children whose incorrigibility was causing a disruption in the schools came in 1873 under Superintendent Duane Doty, who recommended at that time that an “ungraded” school be established for these children apart from the normal grades, but this was not acted on until 1882 when the state of Michigan made compulsory school attendance into law. ²⁹

          Franklin also notes Superintendent Martindale’s recognition of the difficulty in effectively identifying and classifying the different grades of “backward” children, even after special classes for them had been established in 1901. He asked the school board to allow for a more precise delineation between the “low grade imbeciles” and those “of higher mentality” that were “bordering” on low grade, and furthermore to have the two groups kept separate so that those who had some chance of learning would not be held back by being lumped in with the lower grade of “backward” children. ³⁰  This is a direct foreshadowing of the exact program concept that the WCTS would be founded on less than 20 years later.