Gabriela Walker. International Journal of Inclusive Education. Volume 14, Issue 2. 2010.
Introduction
This paper presents an overview of Romanian policies and practices pertaining to inclusive education. These descriptions and discussions about characteristics and areas of need in the Romanian special education system are intended to serve as guidelines of reference for the development of special education in Romania, as an opportunity to notice the weak links, and as improvement suggestions. This survey could be of interest to international scholars from various disciplines, to students focusing on special education, to persons with disabilities themselves, and to special needs advocacy groups. It may suggest new directions for research, for both public and educational policy changes that could improve the lives and social participation of people with disabilities.
The author is unaware of any recently written surveys about the status of inclusive education of children with special needs in Romania. To supplement a literature review on this topic, the author uses her own observations as a Romanian, as a US resident, as a special education teacher in both Romania and the US, and as a scientist who has completed twelve years of tertiary specialised education in disability studies in both Romania and the US. In addition, the author contributes with data from her Master’s thesis research.
This paper comprises the current conceptual framework of special education terms used in Romania; a brief information about the author and the target country; a methodology that sets out the various ways that were used to put together the limited information available on the development of special education in Romania; descriptions of Romania’s inclusive education history, relevant policies and practices in Romania during Communism, the democratic transition, and European Union membership; a description of the social phenomena of street children and minority‐overrepresentation in special education, as negative legacies of the Communist regime and as an obstacle to inclusive education and to the rights of children; and a section with conclusions and recommendations.
Conceptual Framework of Special Education and Types of Disabilities in Romania
In general, ‘special education’ means modified or adapted instruction that meets the particular needs of students with unusual learning requirements. These students might have autism spectrum disorders, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, emotional or behavioural disorders, communication disorders, deafness, blindness, traumatic brain injury, physical disabilities, or giftedness. In Romania, special education exists for children with deficiencies and disabilities in order to prepare and integrate them into society (Verza 1995; Education Encylcopedia 2008). As in the United States, there is a special education network that provides specialised services at various levels of schooling, from kindergarten to post‐high school education.
The current review looks at the role of special education in the following categories in both the US, and Romania:
- Mental retardation (MR) or intellectual disabilities (ID).
- Learning disabilities (LD).
- Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or pervasive disintegrative disorders (PDD).
- Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
- Emotional or behavioural disorders (EBD).
However, not all of these conditions constitute a disability category in Romania, and some are defined differently. This is because special education or psycho‐pedagogy, as it is called in Romania, explains some of these conditions mainly using a psychological rather than a behavioural approach. For example, in Romania all children with learning difficulties or problems that impede accomplishments of abilities through learning are considered to have LD. ADHD is considered to be more of a correctable or educable behavioural problem resulting from insufficient discipline. EBD constitutes a separate entity and it is described as a set of disturbances (in the internal plan of the subjective experiences and in the external plan of the manifestations of the subjective emotions) during the development of the individual’s behaviour and personality (Verza 1995). Because there are no established eligibility criteria and categories for ASD, EBD, ADD/ADHD, and LD, there are no specialised services for students that may display such behavioural characteristics. Children with these types of impairments are very likely to be included in a general public education programme, particularly those students with an average IQ (e.g. high‐functioning ASD, Asperger’s syndrome, ADD/ADHD, and EBD). Other students with LD, low‐functioning ASD, and possibly EBD would be assigned to special schools to be educated together with the students with intellectual disabilities.
In Romania, as in developed countries such as the United States, UK, or Canada, the term ‘integration’ refers to the act of physically putting a child with special needs in a mainstream educational environment, hopefully providing the needed support, while inclusiveness implies the non‐discriminatory acceptance of all individuals in educational and social settings, providing equal learning opportunities, and welcoming diversity (Slee 1986; Popovici 1998; Porter 2008). In Romania, ‘disability’ is a term that describes an inability to do something or a lack of a particular ability, while ‘handicap’ is a social disadvantage imposed on a person as a result of a disability (Gheorghe et al. 1999; Gheorghe 2000). The term ‘special need’ refers to a unique educational condition that needs to be addressed in an educational setting. The term ‘ableism’ or an equivalent is not commonly used in Romania, except perhaps by scholars who studied abroad. Ableism implies discrimination against individuals who have developmental, emotional, and/or physical disabilities relative to the persons with full abilities.
General Information about Romania
Romania is situated in the south‐eastern part of Europe, being bordered by the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Ukraine, and the Republic of Moldavia. It has a total surface of approximately 91,700 square miles, smaller then the state of Oregon (Internet World Stats 2008). The Dacians who inhabited the territory which today comprises Romania were finally conquered by the Roman Emperor Trajan in AD106. This turn in history explains the name of the country and the birth of the Romanian language, which is the only surviving Latin‐based language in Eastern Europe. Currently, over 22 million Romanians live in the country and some other 9 million live outside the country. According to the 2002 Census, the following minorities coexist in the country alongside ethnic Romanians: Hungarian (6.6%), Roma (2.5%), Ukrainian (0.3%), German (0.3%), Russian (0.2%), Turkish (0.2%), and other (0.4%) (US Central Intelligence Agency 2008). The official estimates from 1992 conclude that approximately 97% of the total population of Romania is literate. Compulsory education in Romania starts at age 7 and requires attendance in nine school grades (i.e. up to age 16). For the school year 2004/05 there were a total of 4,403,880 students enrolled in public Romanian schools (Romanian National Institute of Statistics 2005). In 2004, it was estimated that there were 37,808 (approximately 0.17% of the total population and 0.85% of the school population) students enrolled in special education system in Romania, of which 1600 were in special pre‐schools, 23,533 were in special education primary and secondary levels, 782 were in special high school programmes, 11,682 were in special vocational and apprenticeship programmes, and 211 were in post‐high school and foremen special schools (Current National Statistical Compendiums 2004; Romanian National Institute of Statistics 2005).
Method
Four types of literature review methods were used in order to identify published data that investigated the most recent statistics and information available online and in print relevant to the topic at hand. First, electronic searches on ERIC, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, Professional Development Collection, and Education Full Text available through the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign Library databases were conducted. Descriptors for the electronic search included ‘special education’, ‘policy’, ‘inclusive education’, ‘inclusiveness’, ‘disability(ies)’, ‘ableism’, ‘Romania’, ‘statistics’, ‘school’, ‘Rroma/Roma’, ‘European Union’, other relevant keywords, combinations of these, and the names of researchers known to have published on these topics. Second, an extensive and advanced online search on widely available search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, revealed additional information pertaining to this topic. Keywords included ‘UNICEF’, ‘World Bank’, ‘UNESCO’, ‘EU Commission’, ‘UN’, ‘Ministry of Education, Research, and Youth’, ‘US Department of Education’, ‘Institute of Education Sciences’, ‘National Organization on Disability’, and ‘National Institute of Statistics’ in combination with the descriptors mentioned above. The professional help of an Assistant Government Information Librarian UN Specialist was solicited to find specific information, such as the number of Roma students and their socio‐economic status enrolled in special education in Romania. Third, a manual search of the Current National Statistical Compendiums (2004) was performed on microfilm. Fourth, references cited in identified and recent articles were used to obtain additional target studies. The text of each result was investigated. The search was narrowed to studies that met the following criteria: (1) the greater the number of keywords included in the text, the more relevant was the text; (2) the information was published or made available between January 1990 and May 2008; (3) the most recent and relevant information was included by comparison and selection; and (4) the investigations were published in English, Romanian, or French (languages with which the author is comfortable). Inclusion criteria and potential papers for this review were discussed with an experienced faculty member from the University of Illinois in Urbana‐Champaign. As mentioned above, the author also added observations from her own experiences in Romania and the United States to the available published data on this topic.
Personal Perspective
As a student of special education and subsequently a teacher in Romania (1996-2002), I knew that special education laws were comparable with the policy adopted in more economically advanced countries. However, the services needed to meet the mandates of those laws were not in place in Romania. During my six years of special education studies in Romania, I became aware of the scarcity of the literature on research studies. Framework methodologies and target‐specific methods of research of the sort that special education teachers and researchers from Western Europe and counties in other economically advanced parts of the world were working within were not reaching Romanian scholars. Hence, I decided that university studies in the United States would provide me with better training to become a researcher. After starting a graduate programme at the University of Georgia, I followed the evolution of special education policies and the public’s views on people with disabilities in Romania, and I was disappointed to observe few changes. During my student teaching experience at several elementary schools in the United States, I noticed that the differences between the special education systems in the two countries were even greater than what I had thought just from reading the research literature. The years that I have spent studying, working, and conducting research in the field of special education and disability studies have set the stage for my active participation in research on the policies and practices of the discipline of special education.
Inclusive Education in Romania
Development of Inclusive Education in Romania
In Romania, the history of special education is part of the history of education, because they developed simultaneously. However, the growth of education has to be analysed in the light of social and political development of a country. In the 19th century, education was seen as a public duty in the ‘Romanian Principates’. At the time (according to the enlightenment principle that people could be raised through culture), all children who wanted to become literate were allowed to learn at the expense of monasteries or churches, regardless of their socio‐economic status or type and level of impairment. Ion Heliade Radulescu was a scholar who reformed education in Romania by improving teaching methods, and, as a Minister of Education at the time, he declared education as a right of every ‘social subject’ without regard to his type or level of ‘incapacity’ (Manolache and Pârnuţă 1993).
During the Communist years (1948-89) the Romanian special educational system was separated from the mainstream educational system. The special education institutions were situated outside the residential areas and the number of the children with special needs was not publicly disclosed (Buică 2004). The government’s attitude was that such persons could not become ‘productive’ members of the socialist society, and as a result they were marginalised and ignored.
After the Revolution of 15-22 December 1989, the Romanian educational system and educational policies began to evolve towards the models of more developed countries. The educational and social policy became centred on the community, family, and child, rather than on the institution itself, as it had been before. Although the normalisation principle was being considered for application to individuals with disabilities (Westling and Fox 2000) beginning with the early 1970s, the concepts of ‘normalisation’ (of life standards of persons with disabilities) and ‘integration’ were presented to Romanian specialists and introduced as main principles in special education in 1991, when a symposium with international participation called ‘Education and Handicap’ took place in Bucharest. The normalisation principle foresees access to patterns and conditions of everyday life ‘as close as possible to the norms and patterns of the mainstream society’ (Nirje 1969, 181), and represents a solid ideological base for integration.
Primarily, the Ministry of Education, Research, and Youth (2006) is responsible for the development of Romanian general and special education. According to the legislation, Romanian special education functions according to democratic principles: the right to differentiated education and educational pluralism (for persons no older than 26 years with disabilities), and equal rights for all Romanian citisens to have access to all levels and forms of education, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, political or religious orientations, or other considerations that could lead to discrimination. Minorities have the right to study in their mother tongue, to organise special education classes and groups in minority languages, and the right to receive education that reflects the history and traditions of each minority through school books and other materials in their mother tongue, and by having teaching staff trained in those languages. By law, which is successfully implemented in Romania, special education students are entitled to free state education, free library information and documentation services (whenever available), free school books for pre‐school, primary and secondary state education, and also for vocational and high school pupils whose parents earn less than the national minimum wage. Other services provided by the state are: social assistance scholarships for students, local and national public transportation free of cost for students, and maintenance allowances (state alimonies) for pre‐school children, pupils, and students in boarding houses.
The integration of students from special schools into public schools began in the school year 2001-02. Consequently, the specialists in this field were looking for an original way to apply the integration principles to the Romanian educational system, with ‘original’ meaning that the general rules of integration have to be adjusted to the particular conditions in Romania. Currently, reform of special education in Romania is beginning with the integration of children with mild and moderate disabilities into regular schools at different levels, and it is following several models of integration.
‘Physical and social integration’ consists of enrolling or moving one or many students with special needs into a standard class within a regular school, but then following a special syllabus. When students with mild and moderate disabilities are placed in a regular classroom and taught the same subjects at the same level of difficulty as their peers, the process is called ‘school and social integration’ (Popovici 1998). In Europe, there are five known models of organisation of integrated education: (1) cooperation between special and regular schools, (2) self‐contained classrooms in a regular school, (3) resource room, (4) itinerant professor, and (5) common model (Popovici 1998), all working according to similar mechanisms as in the United States. The Ministry of Education in Romania chose to put into practice the models based on a self‐contained classroom and an adaptation of the itinerant model. The self‐contained classroom is moving from special to regular school for most of the classes, except for the vocational and physical education subjects, while studying a special curriculum with special education teachers. This process is called ‘physical and social integration’. The adaptation of the itinerant model is called ‘school and social integration’, which refers to placing one or more students with mild disabilities in a regular class and school, attending a regular curriculum. A main disadvantage of the latter Romanian model is that it does not provide the student with any special service, i.e. he has no special education teacher support, nor special resources appropriate for his disability. For these reasons, a few of these students, with very good chances of earning a special school diploma, abandon school without any hope of returning.
In a survey that I conducted for my MSc thesis at the University of Bucharest I discussed how nine students from the 4th to 8th grades, who had mild intellectual disabilities and who attended Special School no. 9 in Bucharest were integrated into Public Schools no. 136 and no. 148 also in Bucharest (Anton 2002). In the special school, the students from my investigation benefited from an eight‐hour schedule comprised of four hours of classes with a certified special education teacher and four hours of homework with a non‐certified special education teacher, three free meals a day, and free school supplies provided from the state. Once integrated in the public schools, the students had to cope with a four‐hour condensed daily schedule, no free meals, no school supplies, and social rejection from their classmates. These students benefited from their ex‐teachers’ help, as after they attended classes in public school, they sometimes came to the special school and worked on their homework. However, the special education teachers had to interrupt their work with other students in order to work with the integrated children. In addition, they received help from the public school counsellor or psychologist and from their current general education teachers, who spent time after mandatory classes to explain again some of the delicate matters of what they taught in class. These teachers were not required by the school system to spend extra time with the integrated students, but their humanitarian sense dictated that they should do it. Educationally, the integrated students had to face the following problems in the general education school: (1) the school subjects are more diverse (for example, instead of eight subjects, the child integrated in 4th grade has to study twelve subjects); (2) the number of teachers increased, each having a distinct personality and demands; (3) the degree of difficulty of the new information increased since they followed an adjusted public school curriculum, where no Individual Education Plan (IEP) goals and objectives were considered; (4) the discrepancy between the knowledge acquired and the knowledge required was all the more obvious if the grade that they were transferred to was higher (for example, the gap was less obvious when the student was transferred from 3rd grade to 4th grade and it was larger when the student was transferred from the 7th grade to the 8th grade); and (5) a new style of learning as these students were used to receive the information by small amounts and learn ‘step by step’, with many practice and consolidation exercises. Overall, the two students from the 4th grade integrated successfully, but the student from the 6th grade and three students from the 8th grade had great difficulties in obtaining passing grades, and the rest of the three students from the 8th grade abandoned school altogether.
The special education teacher‐to‐student ratio typically ranges from several to 20 students per teacher, depending on the location of the school, the number of special education teacher positions the Ministry of Education and Research opens for each school, and the number of students with special needs referred in the respective year. Special education is offered at the following levels: kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, and vocational schools. The school year follows the same organisation as the general education system (i.e. two semesters). In the rural schools there are relatively few possibilities for children with mild disabilities to be referred to special education classes due to a lower emphasis on education and to the need for help on farms.
In Romania, the diagnosis of children with special needs and their placement in special education settings involves the Territorial Commission of Diagnosis and Selection and the Commissions of Complex Assessment. The diagnosis process is mainly comprised of psychological instruments designed to assess the level of development of typically developing children (Verza, Gheorghe, and Popovici 2004). Because there are no established eligibility criteria and categories for ASD, EBD, ADD/ADHD, and LD, there are no specialised services for students that may display such behavioural characteristics. Children with these types of impairments are very likely to be included in the general public education, particularly those students with an average IQ (e.g. high‐functioning ASD, Asperger’s syndrome, ADD/ADHD, and possibly EBD). Other students with LD, low‐functioning ASD, and possibly EBD would be sent to special schools to be educated together with the students with intellectual disabilities. For the students with hearing, visual, and intellectual disabilities, there are special schools and classes where they can receive specialised services from trained special educators.
The model of the IEP was adapted for Romanian special education by the special school inspector and psychologist Petruţa Lungu, and it began to be applied in the school year of 2001-02. The Romanian version of the IEP, called the Personalised Intervention Programme, has the same basic components as the IEP used in the United States. It therefore has the following sections: Basic Information about the Student, Current Status of the Student, Assessment Tools Used, Description of Abilities and Needs, Goals, Objectives, and Recommendations. However, the IEP is designed according to the special teacher’s decision without parents’ cooperation, and is approved by the school principal. The goals and objectives specified in the IEP align with the national special curriculum for the respective grade and with the needs of the child. On the other hand, because the school curriculum was developed by the Ministry of Education, Research, and Youth and applied nationwide, and because it proves to be inflexible and inconvenient at times, changes in students’ IEP that would record a large discrepancy between the special curriculum and the child’s performance are very difficult to design and get approved. After all, a student from a special school is less likely to repeat school years since the low‐rate performance is the reason he or she is in a special school. Furthermore, the special education teacher cannot work differentially with each student in the class because there are up to 20 students in one classroom. ‘The education of students with moderate, severe or multiple disabilities is still performed in special separate, small‐sized residential community institutions that represent the unique alternative to satisfy the best interests of the child pursuant to the Convention on the Rights of the Child [UNICEF 2008, articles 3, 23]’ (Popovici 2003, 164).
Inclusive Education in Romania after Accession to the European Union
Currently, there is a global trend of disability policies that pushes for social and educational inclusion of people with special needs, rather than limiting their experiences to physical integration (Armstrong and Barton 1999). Although the term inclusion was introduced in the early 1990s (Farell et al. 2004), Romania adhered to an inclusional policy when educational integration was introduced in 2002 when the discourse about inclusion was being globally debated. According to Sapon‐Shevin (1992), inclusion supposes full membership and participation of people with disabilities in general classroom activities. The inclusion policy refers to ‘the extent to which a school or a community welcomes such pupils as full members of the group, and values them for the contribution which they make’ (Farell et al. 2004).
The current trend is that equity rather than equality should be targeted in the inclusive education discourse and practices, for the benefit of not only the individuals with special needs, but of the entire society. This is recognised as a progressive step towards accepting diversity. Because education is the outcome of the interconnectedness of the circumstance‐specific (social, economic, cultural, and historical) factors, it should be seen within the context of human rights, social justice, and equity of opportunities (Barton and Armstrong 2007).
Today, although Romanian specialists are currently working for solutions by adapting regular school services to the needs of the students instead of expecting the students to adapt to school requirements, ‘children with severe disabilities, children with autism, and children who are deaf/blind are among the most marginalised in terms of education often due to insufficient capacity of the educators and support staff in addressing children with special needs’ (UNICEF 2007, slide 1). In Romania, there are still a series of obstacles to the development of special education to the standards of advanced nations with a tradition in educating learners with unique abilities. Some of these barriers are discussed herein. In terms of services, children with special needs receive special education from kindergarten level (3 to 6 years old) to special schools (6 years old and above to eighth grade—the age may vary), and to professional schools (three years of practical training). Home‐schools provide education for children and home‐hostels for adolescents considered ‘educable’ or ‘partly recuperable/recoverable’. In home‐hospitals, the children and adolescents receive mainly medical care, and there is less emphasis on education due to the severity of the disability. Thus, the students with mild and moderate disabilities are educated in special school settings or in the general schools according to an IEP. Students with severe disabilities enrol in special schools, but special educators do not have enough time to work closely with each child, so progress is very slow. Parents of students with severe and profound disabilities choose not to enrol their children in school, for various reasons: (1) there are no educational programmes for their degree of impairment; (2) there are no medical services to continuously assist them; (3) the staff is not trained to deal with teaching functional skills; (4) there is no mean of transportation, which should be provided by the state at no cost for the parents; and (5) even if the child is mobile or transportable, there is no enough number of staff, that would allow educational progress. Learners with severe and profound disabilities more often spend their youth years at home or in a state institution. School‐aged children with moderate and severe disabilities from rural areas have a smaller chance to be sent to school by their parents. Most children and adults with special needs are provided a special disability allowance from the state, but this monetary support is not correlated with the cost of living and it cannot fully support their survival (Inclusion Europe 2002). Moreover, the poverty rates are nearly double in the households with a disabled member (World Bank Social Development Department 2007). Children with mild physical disabilities and no intellectual impairment attend general public schools. If they display mild or moderate intellectual disabilities and they are transportable, then they may be enrolled in a special class or school. If their physical disability impedes them to attend school and function independently, then it is likely that they will be kept at home and educated by parents or private tutors be hired by their parents. They may be educated in a state institution also, but assistive technology and other accommodations are not readily available in the state special classes or schools due to the high costs of these devices and lack of staff training in using such high‐technology devices. There are timid attempts to set up programmes for children with autism, but they have been funded by private and foreign initiatives, such as the TEACCH school, the Day Centre for Children with Autism St. Margaret [Centrul de zi pentru copii autişti Sf. Margareta], and an Autism Romania Association (2008) classroom. There have also been some efforts to improve the diagnosing process of ASD children at the Titan Clinic, where MD Dr Urziceanu diagnoses children according to yet unknown guidelines (L. Toader, President of the Autism Romania Association, The Association of Parents with Children with Autism, personal communication 2005).
The universal design in architecture that accommodates wheelchairs and the adjacent infrastructure is not yet widely implemented. Examples include: the sidewalks are not equipped with ramps; there are no ramps or elevators as an alternative to stairs that would make public institutions more accessible; the ‘handicap spaces’ from parking lots are scarce and they are occupied by cars not displaying the universal disability sign, partially because seldom are there instances when the owners of these cars are penalised and partially because the parking ticket has not a significant value, correlated to the offence; and the absence of school buses equipped with special devices for lifting wheelchairs, which pick up children with special needs to bring them to school or get them home.
A special education teacher most commonly has a college degree, which serves as the certification necessary in other countries to teach a special education classroom. The teacher training is ‘psycho‐pedagogical’ oriented, i.e. mostly cognitive in nature, and the practicum classes are loosely supervised by faculty with a heavy load of students on their roasters. Future teachers have little access to the latest scientific information in this field due to the small number of recent books acquired by the College of Psychology and Educational Sciences Library, and to a lack of an electronic database of the College with recent domestic and foreign scientific publications. In a presentation of the educational reform under his mandate, Andrei Marga, the former minister of education from 1997 to 2000, mentions that a beginning general education teacher in the pre‐university education system had US$112.29 gross income per month in the year 2000 (Marga 2002). Even today, a special education teacher’s monthly wage (somewhere around US$250-350, depending on credentials and experience) is not correlated to the cost of living, given that the prices have increased since Romania joined the European Union. The absence of paraprofessionals who would work together with the special education teachers keeps the student‐to‐teacher ratio high (still 1:10-1:15) and elevates the pressure the teachers are under to develop IEPs, lesson plans, and educate their students. The lack of materials, non‐behavioural teaching methodologies, and lack of access to documentation about teaching materials are other problems that teachers confront in Romania.
Advocacy for persons with disabilities is much impeded by bureaucratic paperwork and lack of funding. Launched in 1994, RENINCO Romania Association (National Information and Cooperation Network for Community Integration of Children and Youth with Special Educational Needs) is the main national association that promotes integration of children with special needs in society and public schools and facilitates communication among its members, namely associations for children with disabilities from throughout Romania (RENINCO 2005). The RENINCO Association has 74 organisations and over 400 individuals as its members, among which the Autism Romania Association, set up in 2001 by a group of parents of children with autism. Last, but not least, the lack of journals and periodicals that would invest in publishing manuscripts in the special education field are mostly limited to the ones powered by the RENINCO and Autism Romania Associations, the latter being ‘Autism Connexions’ (Autism Conexiuni), and a handful of publishing houses which occasionally publish special education books.
Street Children in Romania
In 1966, the Communist regime declared the measures of abortion and contraception as illegal, taking all possible measures to compel women to obey these laws. The ‘Securitate’, the national intelligence at that time, the ‘Militia’, the former police, and other state‐funded organisms wanted to make sure that Romanian women did not transgress these ‘fertility laws’ (United Nations 2002a; US Library of Congress 2008). ‘Mandatory pelvic exams in the workplace, the presence of the security police personnel in maternity hospitals’ (Chavkin 1998, 732), and threatening a person’s life to obtain confessions were frequent practices during the Ceauşescu Communist period. Many human rights were violated, and common citizens felt powerless and hopeless. Caught up in a daily fight for their own survival, most Romanians had little time to feel compassion towards people with special needs. In addition, the media was under the total control of the government, and people were uninformed about what was happening behind closed doors or in restricted governmental circles.
Many of the children who were the victims of failed illegal abortion attempts were born with some type of disability. Such children were often abandoned or put into an orphanage if they had no disability, or into a state institution if they had even the smallest physical defect. Regardless of their condition when they arrived in the institution, the children were all the more debilitated by the inhuman conditions they were forced to comply with. The documentaries broadcasted in the US in the early 1990s by television shows such as Turning Point, 60 minutes, 20/20, showing the deplorable conditions in which orphans with disabilities were kept shocked viewers. Such children were classified as ‘irrecuperable’ by the government, and almost no attempt was made to improve their situation. Hancock (1997) reported that:
Because of a lack of human love and contact during their first years of life, a frightening number of the children have underdeveloped motor and communication skills; some are unable to speak or walk or feel normal human emotions. Some are filled with an excruciating rage which they don’t understand and cannot control.
Moreover, Hancock (1997) points out that most of those institutionalised children were Roma (or Romani). ‘Although Romani Romanians constitute only between 10% and 20% of the national population, they make up as much as 80% of the children in many of these [institutions].’ These facilities were isolated from the residential communities, and treated as ‘forbidden zones’, with no visitors allowed to see the children. Snippets from those shocking documentaries and the latest developments on the conditions of today’s much improved situation from the Romanian orphanages can be accessed on YouTube in the ‘Lost Children—Romania’ video (YouTube 2008).
Some of the children that were institutionalised in orphanages or in the state institutions for children with disabilities, most of them being the result of the legislation forbidding abortions during the Communism era, were adopted by Romanian or foreign families, and some of them became ‘street children’. The permanent (spending all their time in the streets), temporary (spending time in the streets on and off), or day‐time (spending time in the streets only during the day) ‘street children’ represent a social phenomenon that has gradually extended in Romania since 1989. However, this phenomenon had existed also before 1989, but it had been much less significant and hidden to public consciousness. The attempts to estimate the number of the ‘street children’ lead to a count of about 2000 ‘street children’, with almost 1000 of them living in Bucharest. In general, the ‘street children’ live in groups, in sewers, slap dash homes, huts, or in the entrance halls of the apartment buildings. About 71% are boys; 52% are between seven and 15 years old, 25% are between 16 and 18 (Save the Children (Romania) 1999). Most of them live from begging or various occasional unskilled jobs, such as cleaning the windscreens and carrying luggage. Most of them have to with deal with theft and prostitution during their sojourn in the streets. Among them, there are a very large number of delinquents of any kind, and this is the reason why the people are very suspicious and reluctant to have them around, seeing them as potential aggressors. The majority of these children have tried living in one or more shelters, but they left because the programmes of social reinsertion elaborated by the non‐governmental organisations are not quite coherent and adequate. There are also street children who passed through almost all specialised institutions in Bucharest, which they preferred to leave eventually not wishing to trade the apparent freedom and lack of constraints of an organised environment. Many of them use some inhalant drugs. The street children usually come from disorganised, low socio‐economic status (SES), violent, alcoholic, and/or not fostering affective growth type of families. There are also some ‘street children’ without parents, who leave illegally the orphanages (A. Bărcuţean and N. Dumitraşcu, ‘The psychological drive profile of the “street children” in Bucharest’, personal written communication 2003).
Minority Over‐Representation in Romanian Special Education Programmes
The term ‘Roma’ is accepted as the official name of the nation of Romany people, of Indian descent, in the European Council documents. There is no connection between the Roma ethnicity and the city of Rome, ancient Rome, Romania, the Romanian people, or the Romanian language (Wikipedia 2008). In Romania, 2.5% of the total population has considered itself to be of Roma ethnicity during the 2002 Census (Romanian National Institute of Statistics 2002). The number or percentage of Roma students enrolled in special education was not available as of 28 October 2007, and not a required figure by the Committee of the Rights of the Child as of 2002. However, Nica (2005, 15) discusses the disproportionately high number of Roma children in special schools that ‘indicates that assessment process should be carefully monitored to ensure that individual capacity and potential are evaluated fully and without discrimination’. My personal observation is that the majority (perhaps more than 70%) of the students enrolled in special education programmes are of Roma origin.
Worldwide, ‘disability has become a more socially accepted, even normalised, category of marginalisation for students of color’ (Ferri and Connor 2005, 454-5). Thus, educational and social separation became segregation, which led to the over‐representation of the Roma minority in the Romanian special education programmes, as a low ability school track. Another for the high percentage of the Roma population in the special education programmes in Romania is the economic one. The raised level of poverty of the majority of the Roma population from Romania is acknowledged internationally (United Nations 2002b; UNICEF Romania 2006). A more complete set of social reasons for which a high number of Roma students were enrolled in special schools are: meals, school supplies, accommodation, therapy, and clothes (Moisă et al. 2007).
Because of social and cultural conditions, it appears that Roma students come to school unprepared to learn at the same rate as the majority of students, or they come to school behind, not gripping the basic requirements for their grade level. The achievement gap increases over time between the Romanian students and Roma students because of a combination of family values, material support for child education, assessment team members’ perceptions, teachers’ expectations, and students’ access to high quality guidance throughout their academic study.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Unfortunately, there are few accounts and no systematic study of Romanians’ perception of the concept of disability and of persons with special needs either before or after the fall of the Communist government in 1989. To the best of my knowledge, no study has analysed original data concerning the differences in development of the inclusive education field along the three historical periods (the Communist era—before December 1989; the democratic transition period—January 1990-December 2006; and the beginning of European Union membership—January 2007-present). The conclusions of this research are compared with the status quo of the special education in Western developed countries as state‐of‐the‐art standards at the present moment in history in terms of the investment and commitment of ending ableism and improving the quality of life of persons with special needs.
Taking into account on the one hand the longitudinal path of the special education field in the last couple of decades, especially the growth of the field in the last few years in Romania, and on the other hand acknowledging the gaps, various understandings of concepts, and the system differences between Romania and developed countries, I consider that inclusive education can be applied in Romania, but the system is not well prepared, especially when it comes to students with moderate and severe disabilities.
The educational process is moving slowly towards integration of students with special needs and of minority students, but there are still many modifications and adaptations to be made until the current policies could be put into practice. I believe that refining eligibility criteria for ID, ASD, EBD, ADHD and broadening of the spectrum of disability categories would decrease the number in the ranks of Roma population in the ID classrooms and possibly making them eligible for EBD services. Even if misdiagnosed as displaying EBD features, due to cultural differences subjectively interpreted by members of the majoritary population, this would be a step forward in educating a segment of the Roma population who would have the intellectual ability to study at a comparable rate with the regular students, instead of covering the quality and quantity of one‐year school material in two years, as they do while being identified as having ID. In this case, their cultural needs would be dealt with in a different way with a possibility of improvement over time. Another solution for preventing Roma parents to preferring that their children be enrolled in special education programmes would be to provide symbolic meals to a certain segment of the school children or all school children. This action may also prevent school drop out.
The profound changes will take place gradually by consistently pairing the old with the new or facets of the old with aspects of the new, so that eventually the new replaces the old. If we take a look at other European Union Member States that are continuously developing a diverse and complex network of special schools, thus proving the need for such institutions and also their usefulness, and notice that their educational systems are still implementing residential systems based on integrated education while maintaining special schools (Popovici 2003), we can be more optimistic about the policies and practices in Romania. Changes are taking place slowly but surely and towards the right direction.
In conclusion, in Romania, changes are necessary in several areas, such as the following:
- Legislative scope—improved or new laws must be drawn up according to the current Romanian reality, as well as in accordance with international legislations.
- Institutional and provision of services—transforming regular schools into inclusive schools with special or mainstream classrooms.
- Special education curriculum—a special curriculum for use in regular classrooms by students with disabilities must be developed.
- Financial incentive—a raise in salary as an incentive for attracting more future teachers interested in working with children with disabilities.
- Training curriculum—a move of the field of special education from a ‘psycho‐pedagogical’, i.e. cognitive in nature, towards a behaviourist instructional methodology.
- Teacher training has to be appropriate to the reality of educating individuals with special needs in regular settings, which may require training of professionals in other countries with a good tradition in educating students with disabilities; locally recognised accreditations for continuous professional development followed by raises in salary contingent upon professional learning curves and implementation of good practices.
- Paraprofessional training—the creation of a course to provide them with basic knowledge in special education behaviour modification principles, and employment support upon graduation from this course; adding paraprofessionals in the organisational chart of the schools would represent a financial viable solution to decrease the teacher-student ratio.
- A refreshening of university‐level faculties by accepting new members among already renowned professors. Preferably, these new members would be experienced teachers encouraged to go through a PhD programme at a local university and scientists that earned their graduate degrees in other countries.
- Setting up new courses and departmental divisions where students can study global educational policies.
- Diagnosis criteria—behaviourally defined for easier identification of different categories of disabilities in Romania; assessment and evaluation tools should be more precise in pinpointing a wider variety of internationally already established categories of disabilities for better consistency and standardisation.
- Setting up programmes for children with autism, severe and multiple disabilities, and other ignored disabilities within public schools.
- More emphasis on human rights and an increase in disability advocacy movement.
- Collaboration across scientific fields and among institutions responsible with educating learners with special needs, adults with disabilities, street children, ethnic minorities, orphaned minors, etc.
- Country reporting on detailed statistical data concerning the population provided with special education services would be beneficial for research purposes, such as (1) the number (or percentage) of students belonging to various minorities who are males or females and are served under special education provisions; (2) the number of students diagnosed with disabilities broken down on the type of disabilities, on gender, on ethnic background, on SES, etc. (e.g. how many students with mild ID, who are served in public education programmes, come from low‐income families, or from a Roma background, or are males); (3) the number of Roma students in the general schools; and (4) the number of minority students with mild intellectual disabilities who are receiving some type of financial state support.
- Access to up‐to‐date research and state‐of‐the‐art standards in educating learners with special needs.
- In general, building a national and global citizenship where members of society take responsibility for the development of their community.
Again, this paper is meant to inform academics, educators, politicians, and interested parents about the status of special education in Romania, namely, the rights of children with special needs, educational services, initiatives, efforts of Ministry of Education, Research, and Youth professionals, and parents of learners with diverse needs. Future studies may: (1) bring further information to the status of policies and practices in special education in Romania; (2) increase the body of sound research in special education field in Romania; (3) focus on one domain in the area of disabilities, such as funding, social acceptance, awareness of differences among disability categories, and teacher training; and (4) comparative studies with other Eastern European and Balkan countries that have undergone similar changes in government in the last 20 years would be interesting for policy‐makers. The last thread of future research would provide the opportunity to portray the Romanian experience in a European or Balkan context and have responses to the question of whether the experience Romania is going through is representative of a larger experience in the region.