Limits to and possibilities for educational reform

Abstract

Commencing with a restatement of the objectives of the first International Inclusive Education Colloquium at the University of Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne, this article considers whether inclusive education has taken up the challenges issued at that time and considered the weighty challenge to special education by this emergent political imperative. Utilizing J. K. Galbraith’s notion of innocent fraud, this brief essay advances the proposition that the political challenge is diverted by institutional predispositions consonant with the normalizing project of traditional forms of special education. Not all is despair as there are cultural break outs in theory‐making and school reform at the local level.