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Inclusive Education in Romania: Policies and Practices in Post-Communist

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Inclusive education in Romania: policies and practices in post-Communist

Romania
Gabriela Walker a
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 International Journal of Inclusive Education
2009, 1–17, iFirst Article

Inclusive education in Romania: policies and practices in

post-Communist Romania
Gabriela Walker*

Educational Policy Studies Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,

Champaign, IL, USA
(Received 13 May 2008; final revision received 15 July 2008)
Taylor and Francis
TIED_A_350587.sgm

International
10.1080/13603110802504192
1360-3116
Original
Taylor
02008
00
Mrs
gab_rielaa@yahoo.com
000002008
GabrielaWalker
&Article
Francis
(print)/1464-5173
Journal of Inclusive
(online)
Education

This paper discusses current inclusive education policies and practices in

Romania. There are few accounts of and no systematic study published on this
Downloaded By: [Walker, Gabriela] At: 18:25 22 September 2009

topic. The Romanian special educational policies began to evolve towards

integration and inclusion. Today, Romanian special education functions
according to democratic principles and Romanian specialists are currently
working for solutions to inclusion by adapting regular school services to the
needs of the students and the specifics of the current educational system. Today
there is still a series of obstacles to the development of special education to the
standards of developed countries with a tradition in educating learners with
unique abilities.
Keywords: Romania; special education; inclusive education; disability;
inclusiveness; integration; street children; Roma (Romani)

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.

*Email: gwalker4@uiuc.edu.

ISSN 1360-3116 print/ISSN 1464-5173 online

© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13603110802504192
http://www.informaworld.com
 2 G. Walker

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; descrip-
tions 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
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have autism spectrum disorders, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, atten-

tion deficit hyperactivity disorder, emotional or behavioural disorders, communica-
tion 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 catego-
ries 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 distur-
bances (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 estab-
lished 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
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 3

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 welcom-
ing 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
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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 (Inter-
net 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%), Ukrai-
nian (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 educa-
tion 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
 4 G. Walker

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
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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 inves-
tigations 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.
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 5

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 educa-
tion 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).
ct[ed]li ab[evre]

During the Communist years (1948–89) the Romanian special educational system
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was separated from the mainstream educational system. The special education institu-
tions 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
abe[vre]

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 educa-
tion 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, polit-
ical 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 documenta-
tion 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
 6 G. Walker

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
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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 integra-
tion’, 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
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 7

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 person-
ality 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
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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 organisa-
tion 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 intel-
lectual 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
cte[]dli

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 Abili-
ties and Needs, Goals, Objectives, and Recommendations. However, the IEP is
 8 G. Walker

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 perfor-
mance 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 multi-
ple disabilities is still performed in special separate, small-sized residential commu-
nity 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,
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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 educa-
tional 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 interconnected-
ness 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 oppor-
tunities (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 stan-
dards 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
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 9

‘partly recuperable/recoverable’. In home-hospitals, the children and adolescents

receive mainly medical care, and there is less emphasis on education due to the sever-
ity 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
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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 (Inclu-
sion 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 technol-
ogy 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)
sc[e]dli

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 side-
walks 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.
 10 G. Walker

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 elec-
tronic 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
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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 Connex-
ions’ (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 sc[e]dli

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 govern-
mental circles.
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 11

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 excru-
ciating rage which they don’t understand and cannot control.
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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 insti-
tutions 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
 12 G. Walker

are also some ‘street children’ without parents, who leave illegally the orphanages
(A. Bărcuţean and N. Dumitraşcu, ‘The psychological drive profile of the “street
abe[vre] cte[]dli s[ce]dli

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
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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 ab[evre]

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 educa-
tion, 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’ percep-
tion 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 begin-
ning 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
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 13

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 understand-
ings 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
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services. Even if misdiagnosed as displaying EBD features, due to cultural differ-

ences 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 class-
rooms 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.
 14 G. Walker

● 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 employ-
ment 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 experi-
enced teachers encouraged to go through a PhD programme at a local university
and scientists that earned their graduate degrees in other countries.
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● 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
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 15

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 catego-
ries, 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.

Notes on contributor
Gabriela Walker is a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(UIUC) in the Educational Policy Studies department. Before entering UIUC, she obtained her
BA and MS degrees in psychology and special education and, respectively, inclusive education
at the University of Bucharest, Romania, and continued to study special education at the
University of Georgia, USA, where she earned an Education Specialist degree. Her research
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interests include global educational policies, with an emphasis on European and special educa-
tion policies, and applied teaching methodologies for students with Intellectual Disabilities and
Autism Spectrum Disorders. Her work experience includes news-related editorial work for
several newspapers in Romania, teaching children with a range of special education needs
in both Romania and the USA, and teaching undergraduate and graduate level courses in
the USA.

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