THE MODELS OF LEGITIMIZING INCLUSIVE EDUCATION IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC

In the Czech Rep. 13, inclusive education obtains twofold status, legal (according to the recent Law about Education and obligations towards EU due to European Court to Human Rights judgment to the case of D.H. and others (2007) but not legitimized yet. While the Ministry of education, youth, and sports tried to establish regulations towards inclusive education, these attempts were blocked by local authorities. Surveys approve the high degree of resistance among various stakeholders to inclusion of Roma and disabled children into mainstream education. The question How to promote inclusion requires juxtaposing two research perceptivities, general evaluation of mechanisms towards legitimizing educational strategies and discourses applied by agents in favour of (de) legitimacy of inclusion. Typical of the post-socialist Czech education, the extreme decentralization demands the methodology placing the issue of legitimacy into the contexts of local governance. We apply the threefold concept of legitimacy (input, throughput, and output types) to scrutinize the operating system of education in order to: (1) avoid simplified mapping of actors on adherers and skeptics regarding inclusion, and introduce indices for recognizing potential agents able to implement the key role in each of the legitimacy type; (2) incorporate into the analysis such driving forces as coordinative and communicative discourses as the ideological grounds for promoting inclusion; (3) connect obstacles to developing inclusive education with the general tends in democratic governance. The data gathered from several public debates related to the inclusion have indicated three models legitimizing inclusive education. Local practitioners pose inclusion as a potentially efficient instrument for individualizing educational process, epistemic communities affiliated with Human Rights movements struggle for inclusive school as a new institution overcoming current selective educational system, and authorities try to apply inclusive ideology in order to develop systematic monitoring under the quality of education. Despite the opposite attitude to the worth whileness of joint education of children with and without special needs, actors expound compatible arrays of concepts around education and childhood emphasizing output legitimacy but remain in mutual opposition because of different vision on the indices of efficient education. The disclosed shortcomings in the idea of legitimacy map possible implications for integrating research, training, and policy-making towards inclusive education.