Abjected bodies searching for acceptance: the road to school choice in parents with children with disabilities

• In Event: 25 years after the Salamanca Statement, are students with special educational needs better off?

Proposal

Chile has been an illustrative case of educational segregation (Seppänen et al., 2015), in part caused by a voucher system and free school choice admission policy (Verger et al., 2016), where, until recently, each school has its own in-person admission policy and procedure. The Inclusion Law (2015) forbids selective processes from schools; with a new centralized and online school admission system (SAS), where families rank their school preferences, and the students are assigned to schools based on a transparent school allocation mechanism. Therefore, the SAS establishes an impartial structure to access schools, eliminating selection practices from schools, and restricting the ways in which families deploy social advantages to be admitted in schools, offering equal educational opportunities to the less privileged. From this standpoint, the SAS expects mainly to respond to a problem of educational inequality and segregation from a socioeconomic perspective.

However, regarding other socio-cultural minorities, there is no research regarding how inclusive this new policy is to inequalities that goes beyond socioeconomic factors. One of this social groups are students with disabilities and their parents, which are the families we focus on. International evidence about school choice in parents of children with disabilities alludes to the influences towards their educational decisions, such as affective and emotional factors, as a result of intense family experiences with their child. Moreover, the schools’ information regarding inclusion practices, integration programs, or accessible infrastructure -despite its lack of systematization in comparison with traditional academic information- are relevant to these parents (Jenkinson, 1998; Bagley & Woods, 1998, 2001).

Using post-structural notions of the body (Butler, 1993) and critical disabilities studies’ theoretical elements (Goodley, 2013), in this research we ask about the school choice processes of parents of children with disabilities who chose school and applied through the SAS, considering the main factors and experiences that play a role in these processes. In-depth semi-structured interviews were applied to 10 mothers and fathers from the cities of Valparaíso and Viña del Mar. The findings encompass the influence of biographical and institutional factors in these parents, from the birth of the child, the diagnosis and medical processes, until the early relations with educational institutions, which together compose a subjective and institutional experience which leads to their school choice and application process through the SAS. Families with children with disabilities are very affected by a fluctuant diagnosis process of the disability of their child, diagnosis which in different ways establishes the limits and possibilities of these students in the educational sphere. This medical knowledge influence parents in their criteria of school choice, which far beyond academic attributes and future opportunities, they look for a place where their children can be accepted in the short term. The SAS, meanwhile, emerges as a virtual and neutral process which makes the students’ bodies invisible, avoiding eventual discriminations, but also interfering in a previous in-person school admission process, which in cases is resented by parents which need their child to be personally known and accepted by the educational actors of a school.

Authors

• Juan de Dios Oyarzun, Centre of Educational Justice - P. Catholic University of Chile

• Camila Moyano, Center for Educational Justice

• Dominique Mangui, Pontifical Catholic University, Chile

• Alejandro Carrasco, Centro de Estudios Avanzados sobre Justicia Educacional, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

• Gerardo Godoy, Pontifical Catholic University, Chile