School reforms, market logic, and the politics of inclusion in the United States and Denmark

This chapter will compare parallel effects, differences, and potential contradictions in school reforms and inclusive politics in the United States and Denmark. Though inclusion is often associated with the intentions of the SalamancaStatement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education, the ideaof handling diversity in education is not new in either of the countries. Inthe United States, it primarily emerged from the civil rights movement’s fightagainst racial discrimination in society and all its institutions and, later, emphasized the constitutional rights of people with disabilities to not be segregatedin education and communities. In Denmark, as a welfare state committed tothe ideal of equality, the school has served as an important tool to mitigate theeffects from social inheritance and class background differences since the 1960s.Historically, there are examples of including students with special educationalneeds in regular classrooms before this was a stated political intention (Egelund,2000). We argue that the 2004 US Individuals with Disabilities Education Act(IDEA) – in conjunction with the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) –and the 2012 Danish Inclusion Act express political intentions of inclusiveschooling in the two countries. We use these and other policies to questionhow the intentions of inclusion may be challenged more broadly by some ofthe present tendencies related to testing, evaluation, accountability, market logic,and neoliberalism in the educational policies. These tendencies seem to focuson the ability and competences of the individual, which may be problematic interms of the inclusive approach to education, producing possible dilemmas forteachers and students