Politics and Secondary School Tracking in Socialist Czechoslovakia, 1948-1989

Abstract

This paper analyses the impact of politics upon secondary school tracking in formerly socialist Czechoslovakia. Using multinomial logistic regression, the author focuses on the effects of family background on the likelihood of making the transition to vocational, professional, or academic secondary schools. He hypothesizes that socialist policies had a threefold influence on educational attainment at the secondary level. First, they may have reduced the extent of educational reproduction. Second, they may have trimmed down the educational gap between lower and higher status children. Third, they may have established a new inequality based on parental political status. Educational expansion, unlike ‘communist affirmative action’, noticeably reduced educational reproduction at the secondary level. Positive and negative discrimination on the basis of parental occupation considerably diminished the advantage of higher status children in the transition to vocational and professional secondary schools in the early 1950s and early 1970s, but never affected access to academic secondary schools. The political status of parents played a historically variable role in determining their children's educational chances, representing an advantage in the periods of orthodox communism and a disadvantage in the years of relative political liberalization.