“Good school” as a self-fulfilling prophecy

Abstract

Problem and purpose. The theoretical problem considered in the article is the effect of the phenomenon of “self-fulfilling prophecies” in the context of students’ and their parents’ choice of educational institutions. To illustrate, the emergence of a situation is investigated in which the choice of future strong students is determined by the level of the school, which depends on the choice of previous strong students. Research methods. A simulation experiment was conducted using MS Excel. A small community of “students” was modeled who get into “schools” during several cycles. Each “student” was assigned a randomly generated score, which is an integer number in the range from 2 to 5. For each student, the probability of going to one of the schools was calculated. Based on this distribution, a “rating” was calculated for each school – the average score of the “students” who have “chosen” this school. Starting from the second cycle, the distribution of “students” to “schools” was based on the average score received by schools in the previous cycle. Based on the results of all admission cycles, the indicator of leadership reproduction was calculated – the number of repeats of leading position that belongs to each school. Results. The main result of the experiment is the possibility to analyze the constant reproduction of leadership (fixing the random advantage of a school occurred in the first cycle in subsequent cycles of choice) in connection with selectivity. The relationship between these two indicators is non-linear, and as the level of selectivity grows, the probability of “good schools” appearing as perception artifacts increases rapidly, quickly reaching 100%. Interpretation of the results allows to conclude that individual orientations on the choice of educational institutions, being aggregated, contribute to the effect of “self-fulfilling prophecy” in relation to the appearance in the public consciousness of the perception of a particular educational institution as “good”, “prestigious”, etc. Conclusion. This pattern of behavior allows to predict the stratification of educational institutions by prestige under the influence of selective preferences, which must be taken into account in decision-making when forming educational policy.