Abstract
This article deals with the educational arrangements and the multiple inequalities that they reproduce from a comparative perspective. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted in six countries (Austria, Hungary, Netherlands, Portugal, Turkey, and the UK) as part of a multinational research project concerning justice in Europe, the article explores the mechanisms through which education sustains and reproduces “categorical inequalities.” Although equal access to education is granted by constitutional laws as well as by incorporation of international treaties in the national legal frameworks, it is commonly the educational arrangements that identify the features of access to good quality education in a given context. Dealing with different country cases that have their path dependencies in the arrangements of education, the article provides insights on understanding how different features of segregation in education operate as mechanisms of exclusion for students from a disadvantaged background. Hence, the disadvantages manifest themselves concerning socio‐economic status, ethnicity, race, and minority background. By focusing on the country‐based debates around school segregation, which goes together with the segregated character of urban settings and school choice patterns, the article shows how the institutional context with or without residency‐based registration rules and different types of schools with different resources perpetuate multiple inequalities. In a context where educational arrangements operate as a mechanism of sustaining categorical inequalities, identity‐based differences, combined with economic disadvantages lead to a situation where students from vulnerable and minority groups face multiple forms of exclusion.
Highlights
This article deals with the institutional arrangements of education and the multiple inequalities that they repro‐ duce from a comparative perspective
The research has had two phases: The first phase was the collection of various types of data on the educational arrangements in different country contexts, which provided a comparative illustration of institutional framework; the second stage was the document analysis and the qualitative interviews with the relevant parties in the area of education, which provided a comparative analysis of the debates around the educational arrange‐ ments that operated as mechanisms of inequalities
The debates in the country cases examined in the article vividly illustrate how the mechanisms of school segregation intertwined with spatial segregation, residency‐based registration, school differentiation and school choice could repro‐ duce “categorical inequalities” in a given context
Summary
This article deals with the institutional arrangements of education and the multiple inequalities that they repro‐ duce from a comparative perspective. Feminist research demonstrated that different social cate‐ gories intersect and lead to complex forms of inequalities (Collins, 1998) In this respect, the “categorisation of dif‐ ferences” (Knijn & Akkan, 2020) and reproduction of “cat‐ egorical inequalities” through educational arrangements (Domina et al, 2017) operate as mechanisms that sus‐ tain persistent inequalities in society. Capability deprivation as a result of the exclu‐ sionary mechanisms of education reinforces the persis‐ tent inequalities transferred over generations In this framework, first, the article provides a descriptive ana‐ lysis of the various institutional frameworks of the edu‐ cational arrangements in the countries under study; sec‐ ond, it presents how educational arrangements operate as different mechanisms of exclusion, yet yield similar results concerning the role of education in the mainte‐ nance of “categorical inequalities.”
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