Session Information
04 SES 11 A, Exploring Intersectional Oppressions in Education: Challenges for Europe and Latin America regarding children with disabilities
Symposium
Contribution
Chile has been a studied international case of social and educational segregation (Seppänen et al., 2015), in part explained by a voucher system and free school choice admission policy (Verger et al., 2016), where, until recent years, each school has its own admission policy and procedure. The Inclusion Law (2015) ended the selective processes from schools; with a new centralized and online school admission system (SAS), where families list their school preferences, and the students are assigned to schools based on the Gale & Shapley algorithm (Abdulkadiroğlu, Che & Yasuda, 2011). Thus, the SAS sets a neutral mechanism to access schools, eliminating selection policies from schools, and constraining the ways in which parents deploy social advantages to get access to schools, offering equal educational opportunities to the less privileged. However, regarding other social groups, there is no research regarding how inclusive this new policy is to parents of children with disabilities, which is the social groupwe focus on. The literature about school choice in parents of children with disabilities shows the specific influences towards their school choice decisions, such as biographic, affective and emotional factors, as a result of intense family experiences with their child. Furthermore, all the schools’ information regarding inclusion practices, integration programmes, or accessible infrastructure are important to these parents (Jenkinson, 1998; Bagley & Woods, 2001); in tension with other traditional academic features (Bagley & Woods, 1998). In this study we explored the experiences of mothers of children with disabilities from different socioeconomic backgrounds, who selected a school and applied through the SAS, encompassing gendered and social-class-based experiences. In-depth semi-structured interviews were applied to mothers from the cities of Valparaíso and Viña del Mar. In this research we ask about the school choice processes of parents of children with disabilities, and about the main factors, experiences, and intersections that play a role in these experiences. From this, we expect to delve into the experiences, lived stories, thoughts, and intersectional factors that play a role in this process. The findings include: (i) differences in terms of social class, regarding mothers’ affections involved in the diagnosis of their children and the process of school choice; (ii) a more relevant role of mothers in contrast with the absence of fathers in the upbringing and school choice processes; and (iii) a relation between the school choice processes and the future expectations for their children.
References
Abdulkadiroğlu, A., Che, Y. K., & Yasuda, Y. (2011). Resolving conflicting preferences in school choice: The" boston mechanism" reconsidered. American Economic Review, 101(1), 399-410. Bagley, C., Woods, P. A., & Woods, G. (2001). Implementation of school choice policy: interpretation and response by parents of students with special educational needs. British Educational Research Journal, 27(3), 287-311. Riddell, S., Brown, S., & Duffield, J. (1994). Parental power and special educational needs: the case of specific learning difficulties. British Educational Research Journal, 20(3), 327-344. Howe, K. R., & Welner, K. G. (2002). School choice and the pressure to perform: Déjà vu for children with disabilities?. Remedial and Special Education, 23(4), 212-221. Vincent, C., & Evans, J. (2005). Parental choice and special education. In Choice and Diversity in Schooling (pp. 115-128). Routledge. Jenkinson, J. C. (1998). Parent choice in the education of students with disabilities. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 45(2), 189-202. Seppänen, P., Carrasco, A., Kalalahti, M., Rinne, R., & Simola, H. (2015). Contrasting Dynamics in Education Politics of Extremes. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
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