The Role of the School Unit Leader in the Inclusion of Students With Disabilities

Introduction

It is observed that in all educational levels, the idea of ​​meritocracy has been incorporated, which is also invoked by societies, and which leads to a constantly reproducing hierarchy. The school is described as a systemic framework in which children learn whether they are smart, mobilized, “valued” or not (Croizet, et al. 2017). In fact, to ensure comparability, students are classified and grouped according to their age, taught by the same teachers, receive the same educational material, and undergo the same “tests” (assessments).

Education, that is, aims to provide quasi-”equal” opportunities for competition (and not rivalry), so that students are distinguished by a single criterion of their individual value (Croizet, et al. 2017). In other words, there is a tendency for the responsibility for any academic success or failure to be passed on to the individual himself, his value and his abilities and ambitions. This educational institution can manage for the benefit of children in need of special education a leader with vision and moral sign in his choices.

Steven Ball (2010) harshly criticizes current education policies, pointing out that differences in resources and investments in families translate into individual differences or indicators of different skills. Student-centered school policies do not help to address social inequalities and have led, in England in particular, to increasingly targeted policies, including curriculum reduction, neglecting the social and moral aims of education and more exams for students than anywhere else in the world. Schools can do nothing individually to address social inequalities with the specific policies pursued (Ball, 2010,). In such an educational status, students with specific difficulties do not enjoy the same opportunities in learning and their equal treatment by the educational system. It therefore raises the moral dilemma of whether the educational leadership treats all students equally. In addition, issues of social justice in education are raised, which are often characterized by a lack of constructive coherence with the development of the respective educational policy, and this is probably due to the lack of clarity about what a socially just education system is (Francis et al., 2017).

Many of the policies designed and implemented, despite the good intentions of those involved to reduce inequalities, exacerbated them, widening the “distances” between the more and less privileged (Gillborn et al., 2017, p. 20). Many studies are now debating whether social justice in education is effectively and structurally involved in educational policymaking (Francis et al., Ibid.).

The theory of Bourdieu and Passeron (1970) argues that the process of school literacy as an educational institution contributes to the reproduction of inequality through a controlled process, mainly symbolic. More analytically, in the current educational systems, the differences in performance are described as related only to the individual differences and the “natural gifts” of the students. The “school” claims to adopt meritocracy. For over a century, education has been organized to recognize individual value, the “individual qualifications” (Croizet et al., 2017, p. 106).

The idea of ​​social justice in the educational context is related to the redistribution of resources, including the expertise of specialists, school facilities and other supportive teaching methods to remove barriers to learning faced by marginalized groups. It is also related to the importance of the curriculum and the pedagogical recognition of the pluralistic character of society by ensuring different approaches to issues of individual differences, individual skills, cultures, religions, lifestyles, which are represented in both pedagogical methods and teaching materials.