Educational opportunities in East-West perspective: A comparative analysis of The Netherlands, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia

Abstract

In this chapter the developments in educational opportunity are reviewed for countries belonging to different socio-political systems, namely the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. In addition to a sharp rise in participation rates, the socialist countries differ with respect to the degree in which explicit policies were introduced to improve educational opportunity for children from lower social classes. The study of social reforms is mostly contaminated by the fact that two important effects occur at the same time. Firstly it has to be established that indeed differences between the systems occur. Secondly it has to be investigated whether these changes are in concordance with policy measures within countries at the appropriate moments in time. The findings are presented from empirical analyses on the basis of large representative samples from the beginning of the eighties. Different birth cohorts — from 1925 to 1955 — are being compared in order to separate out the rising levels of education and the changes in opportunity. On the basis of log-linear models it can be concluded that indeed the countries differ with respect to the rise in educational levels. But the anticipated effects of educational reform — both within and between the countries — do not occur. On the contrary, with regard to educational opportunity it seems that there is much more stability than expected. The paper concludes that large scale reforms on the macro level might be less effective than usually thought and that possibly much more success might be expected from investments at the level of individual behaviour in the classroom.