SCHOOL FAILURE AS EDUCATIONAL EXCLUSION: COMPREHENSION, POLICIES AND PRACTICES

This article offers an approach to school failure from the point of view of social and educative exclusion. After underlining certain ambiguities, problems and paradoxes related to the blurry term "school failure", the article uses a few of the conceptual and theoretical contributions that have been proposed in studies concerning social exclusion. Eventhough the very concept of exclusion is elastic, there are big coincidences concerning the diverse deprivations experienced by people whose wealth, essential rights and resources have been taken away. In order to clarify meanings, discourses, policies and practices involved in educative exclusion, we will argue that specifying those things students and groups are deprived from (essential learning processes) is mandatory. We then explain why failure or exclusion must be understood as ongoing phenomena, since they represent a path and not an isolated event. We will pay especial attention to the relational essence of school failure, which cannot be understood without paying attention to a certain educational order that not only verifies and certifies it, but also constructs and justifies it. The prevailing logic leads us to think that the victims are to be blamed for their failure. This mechanism, which is used by the current system to protect itself, is at the base of educative exclusion, and it manifests itself in certain policies that, even when they try to be inclusive, are still insufficient. The Program of Curricular Diversity, which is being deployed in the Spanish school system as a response to those students with serious problems, is pondered from the perspective of educative exclusion.