Testing and Inclusive Schooling

International Challenges and Opportunities

Bjorn Hamre, Anne Morin, Christian Ydesen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351789837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Testing and Inclusive Schooling provides a comparative perspective on seemingly incompatible global agendas and efforts to include all children in the general school system, thus reducing exclusion. With an examination of the international testing culture and the politics of inclusion currently permeating national school reforms, this book raises a critical and constructive discussion of these movements, which appear to support one another, yet simultaneously offer profound contradictions.

With contributions from around the world, the book analyses the dilemma arising between reforms that urge schools to move towards a constantly higher academic level, and those who practice a politics of inclusion leading to a greater degree of student diversity. The book considers the types of problems that arise when reforms implemented at the international level are transformed into policies and practices, firmly placing global educational efforts into perspective by highlighting a range of different cases at both national and local levels.

Testing and Inclusive Schooling sheds light on new possibilities for educational improvements in global and local contexts and is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students interested in international and comparative education, assessment technologies and practices, inclusion, educational psychology and educational policy.

Section II

The agenda of inclusion

6 Quality and inclusion in the SDGs

Tension in principle and practice

William C. Smith

Introduction

In 2015, the 193 member states of the United Nations (UN) unanimously supported the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; UN, 2015). SDG 4 lays out the principles of education, aiming to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education’ around the world by 2030. The emphasis on quality is a marked shift from Millennium Development Goal 2, which focused on providing universal access to primary education. The expansion of education goals from an access-centric approach to one that has three core principles and a directive to provide access to free secondary education reignites a long debated question: are quality, equity, and inclusion compatible or competing aims in education?

Supporters of inclusive education often highlight the compatibility of the inclusion and quality goals of education. This is done partly to diminish conflict and maintain the valued position of inclusion in the global rhetoric around education (Clark et al., 1999). The argument suggests that inclusive education is quality education; pedagogical approaches that address the individualized needs of students with special needs (SSNs) can benefit all students (Anderson & Boyle, 2015).

In contrast, Slee (2013a, p. 6) has argued that inclusive education is ‘inaudible when located amid more strident educational discourses’. Other competing global discourses that can drown out the voice of inclusive education include standards and choice, preference for performance rankings, and lean testing regimes. These neoliberal principles generally promote competition between individuals, which can run counter to the larger commitment to educate all children (Slee, 2013a). Competing notions of global education discourse are well captured in Murgatroyd and Sahlberg’s (2016) comparison of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) and arguments for equity. The principles of GERM – school competition, a standardized curriculum and testing, privatization, and the deprofessionalization of teachers – are supported by multiple underlying assumptions. These include a belief that learning can be personalized, broken down and measurable, and that teachers are part of the problem. Additionally, free markets promote quality, with schools being responsible for student learning and cost management. Equity, alternatively, views learning as part of becoming a whole person, with a strong focus on compassion, values, and empathy. Teachers are central to quality education and inclusion and accessibility are improved as resources are aligned to individual learner needs.

Countries, in their push for world-class education and fast solutions, often adopt some of the policies included in GERM. However, frequently, ‘these policies are recognized as undermining countries’ efforts to promote a social inclusion agenda and as actively contributing to inequalities’ (Allan, 2012, p. 112). In addition to national policy, the larger principles of education can compete, in practice, at all levels of education. This chapter uses the expanded goals of the SDGs to re-examine the competing or complementary debate by focusing on a specific part of GERM that is increasingly used as the indicator of quality: standardized test scores. Recently, the global testing culture (GTC) has focused attention on test scores, which have been the taken for granted quality measure commonly used in education (Smith, 2016b). As a synonym for quality, the principles of the GTC can be compared to those of the global movement for inclusive education to see how these large principles compete or complement each other and how this plays out in the processes and purposes of education (Murgatroyd & Sahlberg, 2016).

To frame this examination, the chapter views principles and corresponding practices through the lens of Clark et al. (1999). These authors highlight how principles in education are more open and general, allowing them to be simply argued. Principles can remain pure and idealized, ‘without compromise and without constructing an a priori hierarchy of principles’ (p. 173). In practice, however, principles tend to be thrust into competition, as the restraints of reality force actors to prioritize their time and resources. Practice, therefore, ‘cannot embody every principle simultaneously’ and ‘will always be partial and compromised’ (p. 173).

The principles of the GTC can materialize as policy that increases or decreases inclusion into a given level of education, a specific school, or a specific class or group. Primary leaving exams pose a potential threat to inclusion and, in light of the expanded aims of the SDGs, are an appropriate policy to debate. Their embedded power to shape rhetoric around quality education in some societies exemplifies the GTC. Recognizing the role primary leaving exams can play in promoting exclusion may help overcome the ‘contextual disconnection’ (Slee & Allan, 2001), which leaves some to see quality as promoted in high-stakes standardized tests and inclusion as fully compatible.

This chapter proceeds by first reviewing the history of the global movement for inclusive education and the principles underlying the GTC and inclusion. It then introduces primary school leaving exams as a potential exclusionary policy, paying particular attention to the current debate in Uganda. The most likely response in Uganda is then evaluated against Anderson, Boyle, and Deppeler’s (2014) three factors for effective inclusive education: participation, achievement, and value of a person. A discussion with recommendations concludes the chapter.

The global inclusion movement

Prior to the 1970s, children with special needs were generally excluded from school systems (Hayashi, 2016). Early movements to integrate students took place in the United Kingdom and the United States. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the United Kingdom started to integrate students as part of their whole school approach and, in 1995, passed the Disability Discrimination Act (Slee, 2013a). In the United States, students with disabilities gained the right to public education in 1975, when Congress passed the Education for all Handicapped Children Act (Theoharis, Causton, & Tracy-Bronson, 2016). The act establishes a grants program providing funding to states that took measures to provide free and appropriate education for students with disabilities. In 1990, it was amended and rebranded as the Individuals with Disabilities Act, which required individualized education plans that contained measurable annual goals for students (Castro-Villarreal & Nichols, 2016).

The first signs of inclusion as a global movement were seen in the 1990s, emerging ‘as a response to the exclusion of students who were viewed as different’ (Artiles, Harris-Murri, & Rostenberg, 2006, p. 3). The 1990 World Conference on Education for All recognized that personalized education would increase access for all children, regardless of status (Anderson & Boyle, 2015). In 1994, 92 countries signed the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education, which emphasized the dual role schools play in contributing to student difficulties and meeting students’ needs (Clark et al., 1999). The Salamanca Statement started to expand the definition of special needs into any vulnerable group needing additional care (Hayashi, 2016). Inclusive education was further propelled by the Dakar Framework for Action, the culmination of the 2000 World Education Forum, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted in 2006. The UN convention provided an authoritative document outlining persons with disabilities’ right to education in an inclusive setting (Franck & Joshi, 2017). Article 21 of the convention guarantees the right to education ‘without discrimination and on the basis of equal opportunity to ensure an inclusive education system at all levels’ while article 24 focuses on the full and equal participation of all students in education (Cumming & Dickson, 2013). The global importance of inclusive education was cemented in the primary aims of the SDGs, where inclusion is placed alongside equity and quality as a core principle in education.

Narrow and broad understandings of inclusion

As the global movement for inclusion picked up in the 1990s, discourse shifted from integrating SSNs to including SSNs. Integration was limited to the physical placement of SSNs into mainstream classrooms (Allan, 2012) and ‘based on learners adapting to the schooling system’ (Franck & Joshi, 2017, p. 348). Inclusion, on the other hand, also paid attention to barriers to access and quality for such students (Allan, 2012). It involved ‘radical changes to the education system including adjustments in class sizes, specialist support and training, and challenging norms against which students are judged and labeled’ (Franck & Joshi, 2017, p. 348). Over the past 30 years, the understanding of inclusion has continued to transform and expand (Anderson, Boyle, & Deppeler, 2014).

Earlier, narrow versions of inclusion focused solely on SSNs. Policies worked to provide access for SSNs to regular schools, with curriculum, standards, and practices adapted to their needs (Allan, 2012; Franck & Joshi, 2017. This narrow understanding is often supported by a belief in expert knowledge, where SSNs are best served by specialist teachers or therapists (Slee, 2013a).

Broad understandings of inclusion zero in on exclusionary practices (Anderson, Boyle, & Deppeler, 2014). Proponents of this view see inclusive education as ‘a social movement against educational exclusion’ (Slee & Allan, 2001, p. 177) that works to meet the educational aspirations and provide quality education for all students. Here, inclusion is a tool for social justice (Anderson, Boyle, & Deppeler, 2014) and schools play an important role in overcoming the structural and cultural barriers that exclude students from education (Slee & Allan, 2001). Beyond SSNs, this broader understanding encompasses any group of students who have ‘historically been positioned as different from the dominant culture of schools’ (Waitoller & Pazey, 2016, p. 3).

Although, globally, the broad understanding of inclusion capturing any marginalized group in education is gaining momentum, more limited understanding focused solely on disabled children still dominates discourse and policy in developing countries (Miles & Singal, 2010). In many of these countries, inclusive education means special schools, classrooms, and rehabilitations centres (Miles & Singal, 2010). In Ethiopia, inclusive education is used interchangeably with special needs education in policy documents (Franck & Joshi, 2017), while, in Zambia, inclusive education is most concerned with SSNs, who are the responsibility of specialist teachers (Miles & Singal, 2010). This chapter absconds from this tradition by using the broader understanding of inclusion to examine primary school leaving exams in Uganda.

The GTC and testing as quality

The GTC is ‘a culture in which high-stakes standardized testing is accepted as a foundational practice in education and shapes how education is understood in society and used by its stakeholders’ (Smith, 2016a, p. 10). Much of its power comes from its core assumptions, which are often unquestioned. First, society’s positivist belief in objective measurement makes test scores an appropriate indicator of quality. Other attempts to measure aspects of education that are seemingly open to subjective interpretation are dismissed as less scientific and trustworthy. As Robertson (1999, p. 715) notes, ‘As long as the public maintains this irrefutable objectivity of statistics, a graph here and a chart there can leverage support for provincial reforms that could never survive nuanced deliberation’. The second core assumption is individualism. It suggests that individuals have all the information necessary to act in their own self-interest and choose to do so. In testing, individualism is linked to personal effort, with test scores evaluating personal effort and ability and the individual actors solely, or mainly, responsible for the outcomes (Smith, 2016a).

The belief in test scores as an important indicator for quality is reflected in the rapid expansion of assessments. Between 1999 and 2012, participation in international assessments increased by 50% (Smith, 2014). At the national level, over 1,100 national assessments were completed between 2000 and 2013 (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2015). Many countries appear test crazed, exposing students to numerous standardized tests throughout their primary and secondary education years. In Australia, 21 standardized tests are administered during primary and secondary school (Cumming & Dickson, 2013), in Denmark 36 (Smith, 2014), and, thanks to in-class practice tests, the US average is 113 (Kamenetz, 2015).

The power of test scores as a measure of quality results partly from the challenges of identifying and explaining the outcomes of education. Compared to the multifaceted short- and long-term effects of education, test scores provide a simple measure that can be tracked over time, with changes easily observable to stakeholders. The ability for countries to quickly and easily compare their achievement and progress against their peers is one reason quality, cross-nationally, is increasingly defined by international assessment score (Murgatroyd & Sahlberg, 2016). The belief in scarce resources and value for money encourage high-stakes drivers to identify the proper use of resources (Murgatroyd & Sahlberg, 2016). Although the stakes associated with tests were originally seen as an accountability component, the prominence of testing as an objective, unquestioned measure has led to a situation in which ‘testing becomes synonymous with accountability, which becomes synonymous with education quality’ (Smith, 2016a, p. 7).

Are inclusion and the GTC compatible?

At the level of global principles, evidence suggests that the global movement for inclusion and the GTC may be compatible. This is best seen in one of the dominant values of the GTC, education as a human right. From this perspective, education should be available to all, with mandatory policies in place for attendance (Smith, 2016a). Standardized curriculum and tests, then, are put in place to ensure equal access to the same quality education. Test scores are disaggregated by subgroup, with the information used to remedy equity gaps in society (Lemann, 1999).

In Australia, the Melbourne Declaration, in 2008, established the first national curriculum and the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN; Anderson & Boyle, 2015). To some extent, NAPLAN, which has high-stakes outcomes for schools, emerged in response to the Hobart Declaration and the Adelaide Declaration. The former emphasized equal opportunity for all students, while the latter suggested early intervention for those students deemed at risk (Cumming & Dickson, 2013). One of the central purposes in the controversial and high-stakes No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy in the United States was helping marginalized students (Castro-Villarreal & Nichols, 2016). NCLB required all students to be held to the same standards and increased support services for children with disabilities in mainstream classrooms (Theoharis, Causton, & Tracy-Bronson, 2016). With results broken down by subgroup, NCLB hoped to increase focus and commitment to mar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• The tension field between testing and inclusion: introducing a research endeavour
• Section I Testing and school reforms
• Section II The agenda of inclusion
• Section III Inclusion and psychological assessment
• Index
• About the authors