Rewidening the lens to ethnic and socioeconomic diversity? ‘Othering’ through inclusion and assessment in Israeli educational policy and practice

This paper examines how Israeli integration and inclusion educational policies, and their associated assessment policies, might shape definitions of ‘the other’ and of those to be proactively included in mainstream education. Guided by critical policy analysis, this study adopts a comparative lens of the historical and the contemporary, comparing past and current national policy addressing diversity and how these policies address assessment. Drawing on interviews with teachers and principals from Israeli schools and on current and past educational policy documents, the study explores how the other is constructed within the context of two policies in two different eras. Analysis suggests that both policies have had a unidimensional view of their target students as the other, which was part of a group intended for inclusion. The intersectional perspective that teachers and principals had of their students and their efforts to personalise their educational response to attend to students’ individual needs attempted to bridge this unidimensional approach in practice, with varying success. Assessment practices and other aspects of the inclusion/integration policies analysed seemed to reinforce preexisting inequalities among students with different needs and from different socioeconomic backgrounds, further segregating the groups.