In the field of education, those progressive service providers were special education teachers and administrators who worked outside of the regular education system. In the 1980s, for the first time, educators within the regular system who had been exposed to advocacy could make the connection between integration and their own objectives to improve the quality of education overall. The focus of the advocacy movement slowly shifted from a partnership with special educators to a partnership with general educators.

Similarly, the human rights movement was quick to ally itself with those seeking equality for persons with a mental handicap. The growing movement for human rights drew its early leadership from the women’s movement and from vigorous advocacy for persons with a physical disability. Its members saw the relationship between these groups’ experiences of discrimination and those of people who had been called mentally handicapped. These linkages were represented by the growing number of self-advocates who increasingly assumed leadership roles in both the human rights and mental handicap movements. Therefore, the struggle in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s undertaken by a small single-interest group to secure education for labelled children became the cause of a new, loosely organized coalition. It now included people who had long been advocating for individuals with a mental handicap, and leaders from the human rights movement and from the field of education.