Education Reform in Hong Kong : What Will Happen to Special Education?

Kim Fong Poon-McBrayer

Reform of any kind signifies an effort to improve, reorganize, restructure, modify, and/or transform. In the last few decades of the 20th century, education in many countries was involved in a number of reforms. Education reform is closely tied with a nation's economic and political developments. The globalization of economy and polities provides an impetus for even more education reforms and continues to reduce education to a subsection of the economy. Education being used as a tool to produce citizens for what a nation needs becomes a standard practice.

Education reforms may target at increasing and improving free public education, decentralizing power and supervision to local authorities or schools themselves, improving the standards of the majority of students and learning of skills necessary for the information technology era. The market-and economy-driven reforms focus on producing citizens who can further advance the economy and create more wealth for their nations. Therefore, the majority of recent education reforms are standards-based such as those in the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, Hungary, Thailand, Taiwan, and China.

In the midst of raising standards, ensuring accountability, outcome-based evaluation, resource shortage, and inclusion movement, provisions for children with special needs are naturally and easily neglected in these reforms. In late 1990s, Mexico did also make an effort to address needs of children with disabilities and children from diverse backgrounds when formulating education reforms. Meanwhile, the United States government in the 1997 re-authorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act called for inclusion of children with special needs in general curriculum and standardized testing as part of the effort of moving toward the standards-based and outcome accountability education reform.

The globalization of capitalism has certainly exerted its influence on Hong Kong and its education provision. In 1999, Hong Kong launched an education reform through a massive review of the current education system. This reform proposal has much in common with reforms implemented in other countries. How this proposed reform will affect the provision for children with special needs deserves attention but has not been discussed or investigated. The purpose of this article is to examine the reform proposal in light of how the provision of special education will be like when this reform is implemented. Key points to be discussed include developing school-based curriculum to meet diverse needs, availability of resources to support schools to make the changes, teacher preparation for participating in this reform, and what children with special needs will receive under this reform.