Abstract
China has implemented a home-delivery education policy to protect the equal education rights of children with disabilities. The policy is designed to give them more choices about how they are educated. However, we found that the teaching team transformed this well-intentioned policy into a false performance through the following three processes: the replacement of policy goals, propaganda of the idea ‘Home-Delivery Education for disabled children is useless,’ and finally, collusion. Throughout each of these processes, many children with disabilities are deprived of their right to an education.
POINT OF INTEREST
This study found that the teaching team transformed the well-intentioned policy of the home-delivery education into a ‘show’, depriving disabled children’s right to education.
This ‘show’ occurs through the following three steps: the replacement of policy goals (building a show stage), propaganda of ‘Home-Delivery Education for disabled children is useless’ (persuading the ‘actors’), and finally, collusion (setting the script).
Government departments, schools, and parents should all make their efforts to solve this problem.
Introduction
Research on disabled children’s education is a prominent theme in disability studies worldwide. According to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the education rights of children with disabilities should be realized without discrimination and on the basis of having equal opportunities. However, the fact is that children with disabilities disproportionately experience neglect, discrimination, exclusion, and bullying in the educational system (Moswela and Mukhopadhyay Citation2011; Reeves et al. Citation2022). To this end, China, like other countries, has made great efforts to resolve this issue.
In the 2014–2016 Promotion Plan of Special Education, the Ministry of Education in China proposed a new educational support project for disabled children: home-delivery education. Its purpose is to provide education to school-age disabled children by sending lessons to the children’s communities and families according to their needs. As a formal education placement, it plays a key role in providing compulsory education to disabled children. Statistics show that approximately 23% disabled children receive their education in this way. However, despite these contributions, we were surprised to find that the home-delivery education experience for many disabled children is just a ‘show’—instead of protecting their access to an ideal education, it maintains and exacerbates their segregation.
The literature on this topic is lacking. Related studies have mentioned the reasons for the lack of management and supervision systems, the shortage of teachers, and poor professional skills amongst teachers (Liu Citation2020; Xiang, Feng, and Wu Citation2021). However, these explanations only discuss some of the static and objective factors involved in the process of policy implementation, thus ignoring the complex interaction between different policy subjects under institutional restrictions and the harm caused by active or passive collusion in this interaction. This harm is more severe, harder to overcome, and has adverse consequences. Therefore, this paper first introduces the details of home-delivery education for disabled children. Second, through long-term field research on a teaching team in Shandong Province, China, this paper adopts a critical policy analysis approach to investigate how and why the teaching team created a ‘show’ that became a segregated system. Finally, this paper proposes a feasible way to improve the home-delivery education policy. The study has received full ethical approval from the Academic Committee of the School of Philosophy and Sociology at Jilin University. Verbal informed consent was obtained from all participants.
The home-delivery education policy for disabled children in China
In order to achieve the goal of a 95% enrollment rate of disabled children by 2020, in 2017, the Chinese government put forward a model of the compulsory education system that emphasizes ‘inclusive school education as the main body, special school education as the backbone, and home-delivery education as the supplement’. It follows the main principles of zero rejection, nondiscriminatory evaluation, free public education, least restrictive environment, and parental participation. Since then, home-delivery education has begun to develop rapidly. According to Regulations on the education of individuals with disabilities and local practices, it includes:
Service objects: Disabled children within the school-age (approximately 7 to 17 years).
Service providers: Special education or inclusive education schools where the service objects are located. Many schools set up a teaching team to delivery education.
Service content: Free teaching, rehabilitation training, social adaptability training, parent training, and the corresponding teaching allowance, etc.
Work process: Application, qualification examination, service delivery, and performance measurement. Disabled children are free to choose home-delivery education. After passing the nondiscriminatory evaluation administered by the local Education Bureau, they receive personalized service delivery from the teaching team. Each teaching team accepts various forms of performance measurement.
The policy implementation of home-delivery education for disabled children
In our field research, we found a phenomenon named false performance in the implementation of home-delivery education. It refers to the cooperation between the teaching teams and some parents and disabled students to create the ‘illusion’ that the teaching teams are providing quality education services. The local Education Bureau developed quantitative criteria to measure the performance of the teaching teams, which included implicit incentives and sanctions. To meet the criteria, the teaching team uses the ‘giving a show’ method, which can be broken down into the following three steps: building a show stage, persuading the ‘actors,’ and finally, setting the script.
Building a ‘show’ stage: the replacement of policy goals
The Chinese government’s fundamental goal in providing home-delivery education is to meet the needs of disabled children through service empowerment effectively. Yet faced with the pressure of strict assessments on the one hand and high caseloads, challenging work tasks, and insufficient human resources on the other, the teaching team, who therefore experience bureaucratic inertia, succumb to convenience. They at once demonstrate and replace the policy goal through dividing it into two vital tasks: the first is to persuade disabled children to enroll in schools to obtain education funds; and the second is to complete the process evaluation to either obtain rewards or avoid punishment.
Further, the teaching team also carried out goal replacements naturally when interacting with the service users. Influenced by conventional ideas concerning disability and shame in the Chinese context, many parents see disabled children as failures and invariably hide them at home, refusing to allow them to receive any attention from others. In Shandong, once the disabled child is enrolled in home-delivery education, the disabled child will receive an annual teaching allowance of 4,000 yuan to help with their learning. Therefore, to persuade disabled children to enroll, the teaching team provides a financial incentive, thus replacing the ‘education allowance’ for disabled children with ‘financial allowances’ for families. Most families with disabled children will adhere to this agreement since the amount of money they will receive is fairly reasonable. The success of goal replacement sets the stage for the following performance.
In order to get the parents to agree (to enroll), we just say we will give the family money. Many parents are willing to let us teach at home for money. (a teacher)
Persuading ‘actors’: the propaganda of the idea ‘Home-Delivery education for disabled children is useless’
Initially, the next step for the teaching team is to provide demand-oriented professional services. However, due to the currency of elitist education, disabled children are considered to have no future nor ability to compete in terms of academic performance or economic contributions. At the same time, providing them with a personalized, effective education is very challenging since it is very time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, the costs completely outweigh the benefits for the teaching team.
To overcome these difficulties, they decided that publicizing the idea that ‘Home-Delivery Education for disabled children is useless’ to both disabled children and their parents was the most feasible way. During the first few home visits, the teaching team, as experts, used medical discourse to convey authoritative standards of (not) deserving help to the disabled children and their parents along with expectations of what they should do regarding this. That is, instead of focusing their efforts on addressing the physical, social and environmental barriers that prevent disabled children from receiving inclusive education, the teaching team think that children with severe limb, intellectual or mental impairments are unworthy of education. Also, they persuaded the parents of disabled children to place their hopes on medical and care policies, rather than rely on education. The idea that ‘Home-Delivery Education for disabled children is useless,’ conveyed in formal, informal, and even implicit ways, affected the perceptions, identities, and expectations of disabled children and their families. It attributes the upcoming ‘show’ to the cause of disabled students’ individual deficiencies, rather than societal issues, such as structural barriers to education.
We explain that educating a seriously disabled child is no use. This kind of child has to be taken care of his whole life. Parents have to think about how to take care of the child when the child is grown and the parents are old. (a teacher)
Setting up the script: the implementation of the cooperative performance
In the first two stages, the teaching team transformed what were initially divergent interests through providing financial incentives and adopting discursive techniques respectively, thereby gaining the obedience of many families with disabled children. In the third stage, the teaching team provided these families with a cooperative plan that optimally benefits both parties. The plan requires the teaching team to give so-called ‘financial allowances’ to parents with disabled children in a timely manner. Parents who receive the allowance need to cooperate with the teaching team to complete various assessments, including photography, video recording, and the satisfaction survey. As the protagonist of the show, disabled children only need to perform the script designed by the teaching team and parents. While the parents completed their part, in the photos and videos, the actors performed a scene in which the teacher taught patiently and the students listened carefully. Nevertheless, beyond this script, there are almost no services.
Some parents also felt that our teaching was useless, so they said that we didn’t need to come here, just give them money. I said no. I had to take pictures and record videos as required before they could get the money. Most of the parents understand and cooperate. (a teacher)
Discussion and conclusion
As a new form of education placement, home-delivery education reflects the Chinese government’s strong desire for educational equality for disabled children. However, the practical results show that due to stereotypical perceptions of disabled children, task orientation and bureaucratic inertia, the teaching team demonstrate a show through replacing policy goals, communicating propaganda that Home-Delivery Education of disabled children is useless, and collusion. Disabled children become the tools of a capital exchange; through this process, their right to education is denied. More seriously, this process maintains the traditional understanding of disability as an individual tragedy and therefore, the exclusion and discrimination towards disabled children is normalized.
In accordance with the general principles and detailed terms of the CRPD, we propose strategies for improvement in four aspects. Firstly, we must leverage news media and the internet, to promote equality, participation and sharing of persons with disabilities, and eliminate discrimination in society. Secondly, it is crucial to build accessible physical and social environments in communities and homes to ensure that children with disabilities receive education in environments which maximize academic and social development. Thirdly, assistant with the goal of full inclusion, the government should provide appropriate training for educators and increase more support for family caregivers, and design effective educational plans tailored to individual requirements. Finally, education departments should build a comprehensive evaluation index system and supervision departments should increase various supervision methods, to detect and curb ‘false’ performance behaviors.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
References
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