Abstract
This study examines why countries adopt or do not adopt pro-equality educational reforms from the political economy and historical perspective. Our study steps into a century-long debate on advantages and disadvantages of less selective schooling and analyzes the conditions, which enable the spillover of international and domestic educational discourse into policy discourse, adoption of policies increasing equality of educational opportunities and successful implementation of these policies. We document a stable balance of political and social forces. Parents with high socioeconomic status and teachers in elite academic schools oppose less selective schooling and frame later tracking as a threat to the quality of schooling. In contrast, primary school teachers tend to be in favor of more comprehensive schooling, which raises their status; however, their attitudes are often ambiguous. Not surprisingly, the mobilization of parents with low socioeconomic status is low and interests of their children tend to be promoted by scholars, non-governmental organizations or international organizations. Left-leaning parties tend to be in favor of later tracking. In contrast, right-leaning parties tend to favor earlier tracking. However, under certain circumstances – such as electoral demand or needs of the local industry – they are willing to shift their attitudes in favor of comprehensive schooling. We document that reforms occur in both extraordinary times, such as economic crisis or regime change, and ordinary times, where the successful adoption of the pro-equality educational policy depends on bi-partisan consensus or a re-framing of the later tracking as a pro-growth measure.
Highlights
Educational attainment is a powerful predictor of life chances, such as occupational attainment, earnings, health or longevity
To determine factors that enabled or hampered the introduction of less selective schooling, we rely on a comparative case study of five European countries, which represent five distinct outcomes of reforms aimed at later tracking: success (Sweden), failure (Germany), formal implementation of the reform and informal transfer of selection to the private schooling sector (United Kingdom), success followed by the reversal (Czechoslovakia), and success associated with increased dropout rates (Spain)
As comprehensivization of schooling is likely to trigger the resistance from those whose status and power is at risk, we identify the key actors of the educational reform and examine how they try to re-define the issue of later tracking to their advantage
Summary
Educational attainment is a powerful predictor of life chances, such as occupational attainment, earnings, health or longevity. Following from this, the case study starts out by focusing on why pro-equality educational reforms were adopted by Social Democratic governments in the 1960s, the content of the comprehensive school reforms, the context in which they were carried out and the conditions that made it possible to adopt such reforms, the actors that promoted the reforms as well as the resistance to them, and the effects on equality. The study focuses on the aim, content and potential effects of the most recent school reform of 2010 carried out by the centre-right wing government in power since 2006. The debate around educational reforms – and late tracking - has once again been re-sparked in Germany: two main catalysts have been (1) the recent shift of the Germany-wide distribution of political powers towards parties supporting comprehensiveness of the school system (Der Spiegel 2011a, Der Spiegel 2011b) and (2) the publication of unfavorable PISA2 results for Germany in 2004 and 2007 (Schlicht 2009:1). There was no attempt in this period to offer a common curriculum across different type of schools
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