Comparing Special Education: Origins to Contemporary Paradoxes

COMPARING SPECIAL

EDUCATION

Origins to Contemporary Paradoxes

John G. Richardson

and Justin J. W. Powell

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Richardson, John G.

Comparing special education : origins to contemporary paradoxes / John G. Richardson and Justin J. W. Powell.

      p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-6073-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Special education—Cross-cultural studies. I. Powell, Justin J. W. II. Title.

LC3965.R43 2011

371.9—dc22                                   2010039809

E-book ISBN: 978-0-8047-7913-5

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prefatory Note on Languages of Dis/ability and Special Educational Needs

Introduction: From Origins to Contemporary Paradoxes in Special Education

PART 1   THE ORIGINS OF SPECIAL EDUCATION

1   Ideas and Institutions: The Enlightenments, Human Nature, and Disability

2   Economic Change, State Making, and Citizenship

PART 2   COMPARING SPECIAL EDUCATION

3   The Global Institution of Special Education

4   Historical Models and Social Logics of Special Education Systems

5   The Institutionalization of Special Education Systems and Their Divergence over the Twentieth Century

PART 3   CONTEMPORARY PARADOXES

6   Special Education Participation and the Simultaneous Rise of Segregation and Inclusion

7   Rights, Liberties, and Education in Least and Most Restrictive Environments: Contrasting Futures of Public Education and Juvenile Justice

8   Between Global Intentions and National Persistence: From Special Education to Inclusive Education?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The collaboration that led to this book began, as has become commonplace, with an email exchange across many time zones and bilateral comments on current research. We owe many thanks to David Baker for encouraging that initial communication six years ago, for inviting us to present our research in a special session at the centennial American Sociological Association (ASA) meeting in Philadelphia in 2005, and for generally supporting our work on the (comparative) institutional analysis of special education. We presented further iterations at the ASA meetings in 2007 in New York and in 2009 in San Francisco, and we would like to offer our thanks to the participants for their helpful comments. And we owe a special thanks to Doug Judge, whose research collaboration into the case law for juvenile corrections was always strengthened by his theoretical contributions.

For the funding of research stays for the first author in Berlin and London and for workshops held in Berlin and San Francisco, we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the German-American Academic Relations Foundation (Stiftung Deutsch-Amerikanische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen im Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft). We also thank the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Volkswagen Foundation for fellowships granted to the second author that provided time in scholarly environments conducive to research and writing: the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies of the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, and the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. We wish to thank colleagues and staff members in those organizations and at Western Washington University and the Social Science Research Center Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung) for providing collegial environments in which to work.

Our grant also funded a workshop on disability history in Berlin in 2009 that provided an opportunity to present parts of the book. For their interest and commentary, we thank Catherine Kudlick, Michael Bochow, Michael Rasell, and Lisa Pfahl, who also read and commented on draft chapters, as did Leon Kinsley. Angelika Schmiegelow Powell proofread the bibliography, which we much appreciated.

Alongside the anonymous reviewers for Stanford University Press, a number of colleagues read full drafts of the manuscript, from which it benefited greatly. For their comments, we are especially grateful to Bernadette Baker, James Carrier, and Sally Tomlinson, each of whom inspired us with their own studies of special education. We thank our editor, Kate Wahl, for her continuous encouragement during these difficult times for scholarly book publishers.

Finally, we are grateful to our families, especially to Geraldine Walker and to Bernhard Ebbinghaus, for their support for and patience with our unending fascination with the development of special and inclusive education throughout the world.

JR & JP

Bellingham & London, May 2010

PREFATORY NOTE ON LANGUAGES OF DIS/ABILITY AND SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS

The issue of categorical boundaries and the process of labeling determine many contours of the phenomenon of disablement. Its significance derives from consequences of group belonging for every individual’s sense of self and identity. However, this belonging is often involuntary, and such categorical memberships are frequently stigmatized. Individual life courses are shaped by disciplinary discourses and professional actions, in many instances according to bureaucratic classificatory practices. Language also plays a central role in contemporary identity politics. Furthermore, the tremendous shifts over the past decades in categorical labels and their meanings require reflection on continuity and change, because the use of euphemistic and politically correct terms may deflect or subvert more substantive demands for equality and improvements in service delivery. Frequently, new categories are championed by a diverse set of interest groups. Battles ensue, as resources must be redistributed to meet newly defined, but authorized demands, such as special educational needs. Yet far from being ‘scientific facts’ based on objective, universally understood definitions of difference, the categories and labels assigned in different societies are contingent, temporary, and subjective (Barton and Armstrong 2001: 696; see also Chapters 6 and 8).

How people are talked about, how dis/ability is understood, and why certain terms are used in a particular cultural context cannot be relegated to the sidelines. Instead, historical and comparative analyses of categories and the classification systems they comprise tell much about the ideologies, values, and norms underpinning certain institutional arrangements, organizational forms, and policies. For example, in the United States over the past several decades, the categories of special education have been based on individual impairment and disability definitions, despite the growth of sociopolitical models of disability and rights-based legislation (see Chapter 5). In Germany in 1994, categories that fell under the need to attend a special school (Sonderschulbedürftigkeit) were replaced by pedagogical support categories, suggesting that school-based criteria should replace clinical priorities. Whereas the U.S. categories have always focused on individuals (wherever on the normal curve of measured intelligence they were found), the German categories have been transformed from organizational-administrative categories to those based on individual pedagogical supports (see Powell 2010). However, such changes in terminology may not affect either the categorical boundaries drawn in schools or the consequences of being classified if the (segregated or separate) school structures are not simultaneously transformed. In fact, countries routinely modify the labels within a classification as a response to scientific developments, as a gesture of goodwill, as an attempt to defuse the stigmatization and discrimination that often result from classification, or as a means to comply with the precepts of national and international bodies, such as the World Health Organization with its International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) (WHO 2001; see also Bowker and Star 1999).

The ICF has replaced the simplistic, linear model of impairment causing disability leading to handicap with a bio-psycho-social model that describes body functions and structures as well as activities and participation shaped by environmental characteristics. By including all of these factors, the model aims to ensure that the relationships between individuals and environments and functioning and disability can be recognized in the contexts in which they originate. In its recognition of the importance of contextual factors in the process of being disabled by barriers, the ICF signifies the increasing global influence of sociopolitical conceptualizations of disability, even within the clinical professions, international governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and national bureaucracies. The transformation of the disability research agenda reflects parallel attempts in scientific thought and in the international disability movement to shift away from purely biomedical discourse and toward addressing ethical, social, and legal implications. The debate surrounding implementation of the ICF emphasizes the fundamental dilemma of providing a universal linguistic and conceptual framework for disability across languages and cultures. And although it recognizes that the experience of disability is unique to each individual whose personal differences and varying physical, social, and cultural contexts influence those experiences (Üstün et al. 2001), the ICF’s model has only just begun to be applied in educational contexts (see, for example, Florian and McLaughlin 2008).

In special education, the overarching cross-national categories proposed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2004, 2007) follow a resource-based definition of special educational needs that orients itself to additional resources to access the curriculum and reclassifies national categorical data into just three categories: (a) children with disabilities; (b) children with learning difficulties; and (c) children with disadvantages. This typology emphasizes the main groups served by special education programs and policies. Such efforts at international standardization increase the risk of losing nuances of meaning that reflect particular cultural developments, which offer insights into the social construction of disability. This is especially so as the analyses reach beyond the developed democracies to the majority world. Yet such comparative data also demonstrate forcefully that the subject of special education and dis/ability is indeed global and universal. At the same time, considerable disparities emphasize the importance of social, political, and economic contexts, above individual characteristics, in analyzing student disablement, achievement, and attainment.

In many countries, the social status of people with disabilities has witnessed a remarkable shift over the past few decades. Yet myriad challenges remain, despite the human rights revolution in concert with the global disability movement and stronger within-nation minority groups, striving for emancipation, whose continued awareness-raising and political action is still crucial. Such national and local politicized groups of disability activists and academics may well choose terms different from those which political correctness would dictate—and such differences help to illuminate aspects of the disablement phenomenon. Within the Anglophone world, international debates continue to question the use of such terms as the handicapped and the disabled. Yet there is no consensus regarding even the terms disabled person and people with disabilities (see Zola 1993). Throughout this book, we have largely unified the disability terminology used to reflect the current North American standard (people first) language, except when a historical term provides enhanced understanding of a cultural context or is crucial for an argument. For non-English words, where possible, we include the original term after the translation.

In the end, like the categories themselves that await social situations to acquire their ultimate meanings, groups and individuals with and without disabilities must define for themselves which specific connotations they give to these categories, stretching or even rejecting the original impetus or official claim (see Corbett 1995; Hacking 1999). The global disability movement emphasizes the participatory principle nothing about us, without us (Charlton 1998). Yet we also emphasize that the resource-labeling dilemma remains in force in most education and social policies, as the receipt of additional and specialized resources continues to require bureaucratic classification in most countries analyzed herein. The ambivalence accorded the reification of disability categories in social science research is also a hallmark of special education. It must be tolerated if the research is to speak to contemporary dilemmas of equality and difference in education that begin with how we speak of ourselves and each other.

COMPARING SPECIAL EDUCATION

INTRODUCTION

FROM ORIGINS TO CONTEMPORARY PARADOXES IN SPECIAL EDUCATION

OVER THE PAST SEVERAL DECADES, special education has been the subject of a renascent interest, promoted by a global commitment to the rights of children generally and to their right to schooling specifically. Countries around the world have expanded their commitment of provisions to students with special needs. For some, this expansion has been a surge; for others, it has been a gradual increase—a continuation of policies, programs, and practices long in place. The salience of, even the controversy surrounding, special education has led its ideals and practices to turn the tables on regular education. At the very least, special education has moved out from under the shadows of regular education. In many respects, special education has seized the limelight, illustrating the diverse future of schooling itself, even as it offers its expertise in meeting the learning needs of diverse student bodies.

Some of the heightened focus on special education has been unwanted, coming from statistical evidence showing an overrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities and migrant populations in many categories of special educational needs. The often well-meaning or benign intentions of policies have been thwarted by practices that victimize many with inaccurate diagnoses and stigmatizing labels. Inclusive education and individualized supports attempt to reduce the unintended or unanticipated negative consequences of classification and separation or segregation, emphasizing that all learners have needs to be met and contributions to make.

Special education research sheds light on key issues in schooling, such as the importance of expectations for education and different measures of achievement and attainment, the professionalization and politics of teaching, the economics of education finance, the nexus of education and social policies, and broader cultural conceptions of disability and meritocracy.¹ As we argue herein, thinking about disability and early forms of special schooling preceded compulsory schooling and massification, and thus such analysis shows that disability and disadvantage are not marginal to schooling, they are central.

As a means to absorb problems of instruction in regular education and school failure, special education provisions, whether segregated schools or separated classes or supports provided in inclusive settings, can enhance learning experiences as they alleviate the strains teachers face on a daily basis. In this respect, special education has held a latent organizational power, even if the main supply of students has come from regular education classes. Yet this indirect power has been the source of its vulnerability, for it is often treated as a second-class citizen in terms of resources and recognition—and in terms of spatial position in countries that maintain segregated or separate settings. Nonetheless, this mixture of latent power and vulnerability, resulting in ambivalence, also gives special education and student disability a multidimensionality that often surpasses traditional instruction in regular education—and that demands research from multiple perspectives if we are to fully understand it (see Peters 1993; Skrtic 1995). It is no wonder, then, that much of the literature on special education concerns the politics that surround special and inclusive education, defining policy and pervading practice (see, e.g., Brantlinger 1997). Over the past few decades alone, this literature has grown in volume and diversity. Such productivity has, it seems, aggravated differences in viewpoint, theoretical framework, and methodological strategy. Like the students it serves, special education research is diverse, frequently focused only on one category of student. However, research on special education spans disciplines that range from education and psychology to sociology, history, and political science. Yet because special education remains a secondary area in these disciplines, research results are often not recognized in the mainstream of each discipline—and even less across the boundaries of scientific communities. This presents a challenge to the accumulation of knowledge about special education at different levels of analysis.

In fact, as we show, the range in conceptions of disability, in participation rates, and in the settings experienced by students with special educational needs is vast, even among the developed democracies. Such international and intercultural differences call for comparative and historical analysis if we want to explain how these persistent differences in special education systems came to be and have evolved. This book addresses this continuing diversity as a source of both enrichment and challenge. Theoretically and methodologically, one of the least prevalent perspectives is that of macrosociological and intercultural comparison. Yet we propose that any hope of understanding the diversity found among groups of disadvantaged students and those with special educational needs as well as the tremendous range of institutional and organizational responses to that diversity requires explicit comparative strategies. And such comparisons must go beyond collecting descriptions of national situations, as valuable as these may be (see Mazurek and Winzer 1994; Artiles and Hallahan 1997; Armstrong, Armstrong, and Barton 2000; Barton and Armstrong 2001). Thus far, too few studies of special education have explicitly compared the development and consequences of special education across countries (but see Carrier 1984; Fulcher 1991; Peters 1993; McLaughlin and Rouse 2000; Powell 2011). Utilizing a historical and cross-national comparative approach, this book explores the complexity and richness of special education as a key aspect of schooling by comparing across time and place, instead of viewing it at the micro level of individual interaction.

Neither comparative education nor educational sociology has given much sustained attention to special and inclusive education. Yet ongoing debates about inclusive education and rapid shifts in understanding the phenomenon of disablement emphasize the importance and richness of this field of inquiry. Beyond the significant discrepancies across time and place, the comparative sociology of special education may track variations in institutional and organizational responses. What learning opportunities do national education systems provide that also prepare youth to transition from school to further education, vocational training, work, and active citizenship? Whether special education has a negative or a positive effect on the life chances of those who participate in its programs, the considerable national and historical differences raise questions antecedent to those of education outputs. How did these systems develop and why? Whose interests are served by special education expansion and persistence?

As governments and international organizations alike rely more than ever on benchmarks of student competencies, performance, and achievement as well as on curricular standards to guide policy change and legitimate resource distribution, the growing proportion of students considered to have special educational needs has been widely debated; however, the myriad factors leading to this pattern need further explanation, as there is no consensus as to why this is so—or whether it is a positive or a negative development. Research thus needs to examine diverse historical and cultural understandings of student disability and special educational needs as well as the school structures providing learning opportunities. Especially as international benchmarks of school performance become ever more influential, the difficulties of constructing and utilizing cross-national datasets on education provisions and placements must be addressed (see Baker and LeTendre 2005). Part 2 presents comparative and historical research strategies for the in-depth analysis needed to make sense of the tremendous variance in special and inclusive education cultures and structures, even among developed countries.

THEORY AND SPECIAL EDUCATION

Attempts to theorize special education as a system, to not take these complex institutional arrangements for granted, are relatively rare (but see Tomlinson 1982). In Theorising Special Education, Catherine Clark, Alan Dyson, and Alan Millward (1998) tackle this challenge, declaring it inescapable. From the premise that any and all purposeful actions in special education are implicit theories, the authors highlight the many difficulties encountered when one attempts to extend the range, precision, and coherence of theory beyond local and particular practices. The goal of developing theory proper, a reference to a single, general theory, is always constrained in some way by the diversity of local practices and viewpoints. Yet this goal is not simply an ideal, for if action is ultimately to be rational in the sense that its purposes and its means of achieving those purposes are to be opened to principled and methodologically rigorous scrutiny, then the construction of ‘theory proper’ is essential (Clark et al. 1998: 3). The importance of extending theory beyond the diversity of local practices is that doing so renders action rational and accountable to the canons of scientific investigation.

The prospects for developing a theory proper, or general theory, were not entirely bleak for these authors. The way around the dilemma, the only viable path to a general theory, was to go up a level from the knowledge that was foundational to special education, namely, the facts of psychology and medicine focused on the individual. This upward movement, as it were, would challenge the rules and sorts of evidence of psychology and medicine by emphasizing the social processes that constructed psychological and medical knowledge as educationally relevant facts. As a consequence of this shift, the the process of theorizing [as] socially and historically located is accentuated (Clark et al. 1998: 4). Such a shift achieves two things: the diversity of types of theory is no longer a problem, but is indeed celebrated, and the search for a single theory of special education that can explain the complexity and contingency of disability and of special education systems implicated in the theory’s construction recedes as a precondition for research and explanation.

Although optional, the goal of developing a general theory was nonetheless strongly endorsed. Against warnings about the difficulties of developing such a theory, the authors closed their work with a suggestive proposal that endorsed a general theory of special education. With penetrating insight and rich terms, they suggested that dialectical analysis might be especially useful as a theoretical perspective. They proposed a compelling idea: that apparently stable phenomena—such as special needs education in a given national or local context—are actually the product of multiple forces and processes which temporarily find a point of resolution, but which create endemic stresses in that resolution which ultimately cause it to break apart (Clark et al. 1998: 170). Such an idea, they believed, had much explanatory power, specifically, the ability to relate the complexity of special needs education to the complexity of the processes that produced it, to include historical dimensions in analyses, and finally, to include the role of power, translated as the forces that reflect the groups that control how special needs education is produced and sustained over time.

By raising the level of causality and emphasizing social and historical contexts, the authors of Theorising certainly advanced the discussion of theory in special education. Yet by accentuating the social processes that produce psychological and medical facts, they may have overreached. The socially constructed nature of psychological and medical evidence does not by itself dispose of such evidence. The processes that produce psychological and medical facts do throw light on just how fluid and variable foundational knowledge can be. Yet social construction is neither more valid nor more general; it is another level that interacts with psychological processes and medical dynamics. The two levels are mutually contingent, and thus which level is more foundational varies by time and place—as does the interest of scholars of different disciplines.

DISCIPLINARY CONVERGENCE? INTERCONNECTEDNESS AND THE CONCEPT OF FIELD

Although the strategy of privileging a higher level can complicate more than it simplifies, the premise that the process of theorizing is socially and historically located has support from disciplines seemingly far removed from special education. In her exploration of the similar theoretical changes that have occurred in physics and literature, Katherine Hayles notes their common shift away from classical approaches to causality, in which objects and events are seen as discrete and occurring independently of one another and the observer, and toward a picture of reality that sees objects, events, and observer as belonging inextricably to the same field (Hayles 1984: 9). This concept of field, which refers to a point of convergence that arises independently, yet simultaneously within disciplines, called for a very different image of what should be studied and how. It was first evident in physics and mathematics, in the philosophy of science and linguistics, and in the structure of literary texts. Soon following these disciplines were the social sciences, in which the concept of field challenged standard, variable-based analyses. Following in the footsteps of Max Weber (1958), Howe states that elective affinities, or the logic of the interrelationships of networks of meanings of possible actions (1978: 382), between social, cultural, and historical features become the objects of interest.

The most notable change in what is studied and how it is studied is captured by the concept of interconnectedness. Elaborated most in physics, objects are not seen as discrete, but as being profoundly influenced by the disposition of the other. Their location within the field of objects binds them inextricably to each other; their interconnection constitutes an emergent whole that is more than the sum of the parts.² Just as objects are inextricably connected to each other, so also are observers connected to the objects that comprise their discipline, and theory can be entrapped by this connection. Inextricably connected objects require a specific language of causality that uses such untidy terms as nonlinear, chaos, and unpredictable.

Such a concept of interconnectedness, we argue, fits special education and disability well. The rise of attention given to special education from multiple disciplines derives in large part from its strategic interconnection to regular education, its close ties to families and their cultural contexts, and the needed collaboration across the genetic, biological, behavioral, and social disciplines, as evidenced in support teams in schools or in the multistage classification process based on educational, medical, and social recommendations. As we emphasize herein, the case of special education offers insights for institutional and organizational analysis. The multitude of professions, from pedagogy to psychology, that is engaged in the field results in opportunities to continuously renegotiate boundaries. Yet as special education has become more visible within and between nations, its practices have become subjected to a degree of scrutiny that is often motivated by the goal of uncovering what is really going on below the surface—extensive bureaucracy, battles for professional control, and challenges to secure financing and moral support. Empirical regularities, such as gender and ethnic disproportionality, are viewed as dilemmas, fueling cycles of reform—or at least debate.

Special education programs are deeply interconnected to myriad organizations in the fields of education and training, especially in those countries whose schools provide a range of therapeutic and other services. Special education also is inextricably bound to other parts of education systems as well as other key institutions, such as the health-care system, labor markets, and juvenile justice. In terms of individual life courses, special education is preceded by family life and ascriptive group memberships; it is followed by work, further education, or social assistance. This intermediate position means that special education is persistently subject to a variety of influences, some compatible with its principles, goals, and practices, others definitely not.

The concept of interconnectedness suggests that to fully grasp special education, we ought to study it not only directly, but also indirectly, from the angle of relevant institutions and organizational fields that address the everchanging population of children and youth served by special education. Thus, to more fully understand special education, we should also study such processes as juvenile delinquency, school dropout, vocational training, and educational and social stratification. Such a kaleidoscopic perspective resonates with relevant literature across the social sciences. In the study of crime, Rusche and Kirchheimer (2003) linked imprisonment and the dynamics of the labor market, and Melosi and Pavarini (1981) joined analyses of the prison and the factory. In the study of national differences in bureaucratic organization, Crozier (1964) derived differences from national culture; Dobbin (1994) linked national railroad policies to political cultures; and Guillén (1994) connected models of management with national culture. And in the study of mental retardation, Farber (1968) showed how the epidemiological rate of mental retardation is linked to shifts in the labor market, which results in those so labeled being defined as a surplus population. All of these examples go beyond mere juxtapositions. They demonstrate how institutions are symbiotic and that they evolve through particular combinations and complementarities with other institutions (see, for example, the literature on varieties of capitalism, Hall and Soskice 2001).

Ignoring special education systems’ interconnectedness with other fields promotes discrepancies between levels, particularly between the micro level of the classroom and the macro level where collective outcomes result. For example, a conspicuous and enduring feature of special education is the discrepancy between the best intentions of teachers, psychologists, counselors, parents, and administrators and outcomes that were neither wanted nor entirely anticipated. Analyses of individuals in school are often insufficient to explain the outcomes of special education and the effects of additional resources on the one hand and stigmatization on the other (as in the resourcelabeling dilemma). The enduring patterns of ethnic and gender disproportionality in special education are among the most conspicuous examples of such discrepancies between goals and outcomes. These outcomes do not necessarily result from prejudicial intentions; on the contrary, they often result from well-meaning or benign intentions or even from the absence of intentions. Yet they are stubborn regularities found across time and place, across nations that differ substantially in political and economic structures. This feature of special education has much in common with, and thus much to learn from, the dynamic of collective action, which is a mutual dynamic for how individual decisions result in unintended outcomes and how collective outcomes reflect and reinforce individual interactions and decisions.³ For special education, such empirical regularities as the disproportionate representation of groups along the lines of socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender, and ability may affirm individual perceptions, which can, in turn, perpetuate such outcomes as self-fulfilling or self-sustaining prophecies. The considerable disparities in classification thresholds—understood as the culturally determined propensity to be classified as having special educational needs in a given geographic area—underscore the need to assess the positive and negative results of being classified as having special educational needs (Powell 2003b, 2010). Such perpetuations are not just social dynamics; they can be reinforced by historical legacies that continue to shape the perceptions and vocabularies that compose the practices of special education in the present. Explicit analyses of institutionalization processes are required to determine how and why these systems developed, thereby shedding light on the ways in which children are taught and supported. Despite the tremendous rise of outcome assessment, evaluation, and control at all levels of education, information on the consequences of special education participation on subsequent educational careers and life chances is just beginning to be collected systematically. Which data are collected and which indicators are constructed depends on theoretical principles.

BARRIERS TO THEORY-BUILDING ABOUT SPECIAL EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT

Theories of special education development are certainly acquainted with interconnectedness. Yet such familiarity is largely indirect, employing different terms and concepts. For example, the importance of contextualizing special education generally and inclusive education particularly is increasingly acknowledged. This is owing to persistent disparities across and within nations. Context here means institutions and their network structures, macro environments that vary in shape and effect. In many other accounts, context and contextualization often refer to within-school settings or to the overlap of individual status characteristics, such as the considerable influence of gender, poverty, language, ethnicity, and geographic isolation (Mitchell 2005: 2). Without doubt, these characteristics are significant. Yet these students’ location in particular institutional contexts, education systems, economies, political structures, and communities of religious, class, and ethnic divisions is the source of these characteristics’ influence—and meanings. Race and ethnic affiliations do not inherently affect schooling, and explanations of ethnic and racial disparities in special education founded on presumptions of inherent difference are both ahistorical and misleading. Much like the classicism of physics and literature, the classicism of special education has consisted of themes, mainly at the individual level, that have plagued attempts to fully grasp the institutional interconnectedness of special education.

There is a notable tendency to portray the origins of special education in positive terms, and to link its contemporary, explosive growth to this confident, optimistic vision. The history of special education is often projected as a story of liberation, a movement away from exclusion toward a normalization of rights that entitle full membership and participation (Wang and Reynolds 1996). This depiction of historical change is explained in teleological terms, for the fundamental purpose of special education is akin to a mission to free individuals and groups from unjust restrictions. Especially in long-term perspective, there is much that supports such accounts. Poorhouses and asylums, dungeons of bondage, despair, and death, were prominent forms of controlling indigent blind, deaf, mad, and crippled children and adults. The closure of large institutional confinements and the rise of individualized rehabilitative treatments provided by professionals were doubtless considerable advancements. Yet despite the nadir of modern history experienced under Hitler’s disablist and racist regime, eugenic thoughts, policies, and practices are still with us (see Snyder and Mitchell 2006; Poore 2007; Powell 2011).

Such developments reveal an uneven history, discontinuous on one level, continuous on another. Indeed, as is clearly the case in several of the countries analyzed herein, increased segregation and inclusion rates can occur simultaneously as the population of students defined as having special educational needs continues to grow. As we show, this expansion occurs because of changing education ideologies, societal values, and dis/ability paradigms; the diffusion of compulsory schooling, worldwide human rights charters and equal rights legislation, and considerable resources devoted to schooling; the priorities of nation-states and governance structures; and the broadened awareness of disabilities and special educational needs and professional activities, not only within schools but also throughout contemporary societies.

The story of progress and the rhetoric of transformation have prevailed, over evidence of considerable continuity, in such aspects as structures (segregated schools, separate classrooms) and cultures (students in special education are classified as abnormal learners and thus stigmatized). At a general level, such a narrative of progress appears linear: more is better. Yet the challenge is one of incorporation, membership, and meaningful participation, which make up the model of inclusive education and social inclusion. But as one descends from the general, the narrative becomes complicated; empirically, the variance increases. Such complications are not limited to failures and digressions. The more revealing challenge is to explain the evidence of continuity, of institutional persistence in the face of tremendous advocacy and social movement mobilization for change. Shifts in disability labels, resting on professional knowledge or fashions and medial awareness raising, can mask the persistence of structural forms and social categories across different times and places. Unmasked, the narrative of progress reveals itself to be euphemistic change over substantive development, paradigm shifts without the transformation of practices.⁴

A recent example of this phenomenon can be found in 2006. A quarter century after the 1981 International Year of Disabled People, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (ICRPD) treaty. Its goal is to promote and protect the human rights, dignity, and freedom of disabled people around the world (UN 2006; see also Quinn and Degener 2002; Chapter 6). Crafted by a diverse coalition of nongovernmental, international, and local organizations and by dedicated individuals in the global disability movement (e.g., Charlton 1998), the ICRPD was the first human rights treaty adopted in the twenty-first century. As of March 2010, 144 countries had signed the ICRPD, and 82 countries had ratified it.⁵ And yet it indicates once again that the rhetoric of progress is disconnected from the global reality of ongoing oppression and discrimination. As did its predecessors, the ICRPD aims to raise awareness about disability while it insists on the reduction of discriminatory practices and stigmatization that have limited the participation and contributions of people with disabilities throughout history.

The narrative of progress not only shapes the everyday assessment of special education but also the character of debates and the strategy of research, which, when it goes beyond a cross-sectional snapshot, more often than not focuses on incremental change within the system instead of structural transformation, a more radical type of institutional change. Beyond the debate within the discipline, the disputes and contentions about special education are frequently characterized as politics, where the implied analogy is the realm of electoral contests with winners and losers. Without diminishing the political and normative character of such debates, their characterization as political inserts an essentialism into analyses and explanations by accentuating motives, beliefs, and attitudes of particular actors as major forces behind the dynamics of special education. The constant flux of labeling, the number of and changes in categories, the rise or decline of participation rates, and the persistence of institutional patterns are seen as outcomes resulting from wins, losses, and stalemates in a political and cultural struggle over special and inclusive education. They are said to be the results of human agency, a causal force that is often invoked when structural determinants and historical context are less visible or are difficult to measure (Fuchs 2001).

Alternatively, this volume shifts the attention onto institutional and structural patterns that are antecedent to the motives and intentions of individuals and groups. The politics of special needs education occurs within specific institutional conditions and decision-making processes, which must, in turn, be anchored to specific historical times and places. The choices that are most often made do not pierce foundational assumptions, remaining in line with the institutional logic of the education system. From this angle, the politicization of inclusive education is largely a projection of debates in western countries, which have exported this framework as applicable to countries that are widely different in economic level, cultural tradition, and political system. When, however, systematic comparisons are made between and across nations, regions, or localities, the intentions and motives of key actors can appear as fluid and momentary and recede as decisive causal forces. The political struggles over special education in western European countries reflect, among other things, the structural ramifications that resulted from prior and ongoing reforms of schooling more generally, such as reforms that imply substantial secondary enrollments and expansion in