I was a nerd from birth. I learned to read at 4 years old, fell in love with the old Encyclopedia Britannica set my mom bought at a yard sale once, and chose Nancy Drew over playing spin-the-bottle every time. My parents were Deaf and didn't really read much, so I pretty well had to learn to love books on my own. You see, they were special education kids. They went to an "institution". (A residential school for the Deaf.) English is not their native language, American Sign Language (ASL) is.
In this "institution" my parents, along with thousands of other deaf kids all across the country, were told that they were required to learn to speak and learn to read lips. They were taught to read and write, which is a good thing, and they were forced to hide their native ASL while in public. They looked normal on the outside, but society viewed them as defective on the inside because they couldn't hear things  like music and radio programs and the neighbors screaming at each other after a good dose of alcohol. I have no doubt that they suffered. After all, most of the people running the Deaf school were hearing, from the Superintendent  and teachers to the houseparents and janitorial staff. What few Deaf teachers there were had the positions of Vocational Teachers (which at that time consisted mostly of training the boys to be printers and the girls to be seamstresses.)
And yet despite the fact that the hearing people from the teachers all the way to the parents (my grandparents) pretty much looked at the Deaf as lacking and to be pitied, my parents married, raised three children, worked for their family, bought a house, paid it off, and finally retired. And they did all of this without taking one dime from the government even though they truly were given a tough break from the get-go.
Now let's jump to the 1970's. Public Law 94-142 and the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 504 provided that any institution that received federal funds must now provide interpreters (more on the history of that on a later post) so that the few Deaf people who managed to break the bonds of their teachers expectations could attend college and actually get the information they needed without working at twice the pace of their hearing counterparts. These Deaf people went on to become teachers, finacial consultants, accountants, and professors. Some even went on to become PhD's. We are still seeing this generation going without government assistance. No food stamps, Social Security checks, TANF, or other government programs. Don't get me wrong, there were a few who took advantage, but not many.
Then in the late '70's some parents of kids with disabilities like Down's Syndrome and other developmental difficulties decided that their kids should be in "mainstream" classrooms. After all, some research was done that proved that kids who were slower at catching on did better when placed in a room with their "normal" peers. Of course, no one knew what this would do to the "normal" kids. So along comes the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). IDEA  allowed for extra federal money for any school that "mainstreamed" the "disabled" kids into their programs. A little paragraph known as Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) allowed parents to fight schools for the inclusion of their disabled kids. So the kids were put into regular classrooms where the speed of learning suddenly came to a crawl.
The speed of learning, and the type of material taught, is now geared to the lowest common denominator. So the kids who are given the LRE for learning have now caused the kids who could achieve at a quicker pace to lose momentum. While waiting for the slower kids to catch up, the kids who are finishing their work quickly soon become bored. This leads to "behavior problems". Of course, the rigidity of the configuration of a classroom can not allow for individual pacing, so now we have the "ADHD" kids who need to be medicated.
As for the Deaf? Well, they have been mainstreamed for the most part. They are put in "Least Restrictive Environments" where their only companion is often the over-paid, under-trained interpreter who is with them the majority of the day. They have no native language because the interpreter is more often than not liguistically lacking in ASL. The other kids don't want to hang around the Deaf kid because it takes too much effort to communicate. Of course, there is that wonderful new miracle medical solution called a Cochlear Implant that magically gives the deaf child the ability to "hear" and be "normal". But then there is the side effect of all the hours of speech therapy, mapping the computer programming now placed surgically in the child's head, and all the fun hours spent at the doctor's office making sure the implant isn't causing such things as facial paralysis or brain swelling or infection. Oh, and the other kids? Well, it seems they don't like hanging out with aliens that have weird appliances surgically implanted in their heads.
So now we have a generation of Deaf people who can barely read, barely write, and have been told all their lives that they are "special". How many millions of dollars do you suppose has been wasted on Social Secuity Disability payments for these kids? Let's just say the "Bridge to Nowhere" isn't necessarily only in Alaska.