Educational interventions to overcome social exclusion: Marginalisation: Action and reaction

No abstractOne way to evaluate the interest of a political system in introducing and supporting an educational reform or innovation is to explore the interaction between the primary actors of this system from the very beginning of the reform up to its final implementation, whereby not only the consensus-building among the partners involved in the reform, but also the capability of the political party (or coalition) spearheading the official educational policy to translate its reform plan into educational reality, are of paramount importance. An additional way to test the political system’s motivation in introducing an educational reform is to study the government’s reaction toward the resistance that the reform may trigger. A half-hearted educational reform may not survive the opposition which is expected to come both from its external (educational and social) and its internal (administrative) environments, especially when the cumulative effect of the reaction cannot be easily assessed before the implementation of the innovation, due to the invisibility of the inter-relations and the dynamics of the resistance-developing agents. A case study of the course taken by a recent educational innovation dealing with the school integration of Roma children in Greece (2002-2004) shows that multiple resistance agents motivated by different plans and ideas were nearly successful in constructing a powerful ‘social capital’ for the opposition toward the specific course of the reform in order to politically control and patronize it, in an attempt to redefine its educational meaning and scope through extremely negative administrative measures