Elite Secondary Schools Research Articles

Intersecting capitals: Economically and racially minoritized Black and Latino/a students navigating independent high schools and selective postsecondary institutions

AbstractWe explore how Black and Latino/a students from economically marginalized communities drew upon dominant capitals accrued by virtue of attendance at elite secondary schools in conjunction with non‐dominant family and community capitals to chart their postsecondary lives through college and beyond. In so doing, we point to affordances offered by the authors’ longitudinal qualitative research investigation, as we work to understand individual and collective class and race positioning practices and outcomes post high school.

Students’ experiences of extracurricular activities in elite secondary schools in Lahore

ABSTRACT Drawing on discussions on extracurricular activities in interviews with eight students in elite secondary schools, this article aims to understand the experiences of young people navigating aspirations and identifications in the postcolonial, globalising context of Lahore, Pakistan. In this study, extracurricular activities are conceptualised as spatial and commodification practices of elite schools. A focus on third spaces and their relationship with cultural and structural influences is preferred for understanding students’ experiences. Inductive thematic analysis led to three themes: students’ reasons for participation and the role participation plays in accessing particular pathways; the role school administration plays in organising activities and popular selection criteria; and lastly, the ongoing negotiation with parents regarding participation and the social expectations of a student’s behaviour. The study aims to offer an in-depth understanding of students’ experiences in this context by raising significant questions while contributing to conversations pertaining to social justice, inequality, and mental wellbeing.

King Faisal College: An educational initiative in Baghdad, terminated in 1948

Analysis is made of the circumstances that could have led to the demise of a unique Iraqi Government educational initiative in the 1940s established in Baghdad of an elite secondary school with the name of King Faisal College. It was intended to provide special educational programmes while catering exclusively to gifted high school boy students chosen from all over the country. The analysis serves to show an abject example of how an educational project planned to serve the long-term national interests could be irreversibly damaged by petty political squabbles among its young students. It shows how political, religious and sectarian juvenal dogma could have been nurtured also by external interests targeting young students who were largely destined otherwise to have a very bright future.

‘Cultural capital in the wrong currency’: the reflective accounts of scholarship students attending elite secondary schools

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the awarding of scholarships to students from historically disadvantaged communities to attend elite schools in South Africa. Specifically, the article analyses the narrated accounts of former scholarship recipients who reflect on their experiences of entering an elite secondary school as scholarship students. Using Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital to explain the interviewees’ experiences in the elite school space, the article shows that success in one part of an educational field does not necessarily equate to success in another. Further, providing students with the financial means to access elite education does not mean that they enter into the school contexts as ‘equal players’. As such, what the article highlights is that the acceptance of a scholarship for students from historically disadvantaged communities is far more complex and multi-layered than is anticipated by all stakeholders.

MOBILE AND ELITE: DIASPORA AS A STRATEGY FOR STATUS MAINTENANCE IN TRANSITIONS TO HIGHER EDUCATION

ABSTRACT This article investigates elite young people’s transitions from the Leysin American School in Switzerland, an elite secondary school, to international higher education. These young people often moved to the UK or the US for higher education – locations associated with global status in the education market. However, I argue, new configurations of race and racism in those spaces may challenge some students’ elite status, despite their wealth. This article demonstrates that to navigate such issues in their transition to higher education, these young people leaned on their diasporic networks. By doing so, they strategically and pre-emptively ascertained whether their power and privilege would travel with them when they became mobile. Significantly, then, this article attends to the differential experiences of members of the transnational elite and highlights the racial discrimination that they may face in mobility. It thereby complicates the notion of mobility as an effective strategy for elite status maintenance.

Applying a ‘glonacal’ framework: the education choices of academically elite students in Singapore in relation to state scholarships

ABSTRACT This study is an attempt at better understanding the education choices of top-performing students in elite schooling. It applies a ‘glonacal’ framework (Maxwell 2018, “Changing Spaces – The Reshaping of (Elite) Education Through Internationalisation.” In Elite Education and Internationalization: From the Early Years Into Higher Education, edited by C. Maxwell, U. Deppe, H. Kruger, and W. Helsper, 347–367. London: Palgrave Macmillan.) and focuses on the case of academically elite students who have graduated from an elite secondary school in Singapore, and their attitudes toward a scheme of undergraduate state scholarships. Drawing on life history interviews and focus group discussions with such individuals, I uncover how Singaporean informants portrayed aspirations of moving abroad for university education, and of returning to Singapore, commensurate with the state’s strategy of tying them to the local through contractual bonds. Their characterisation of the scholarship in terms of ‘comfort’ and ‘stability’ must be contextualised within a nationalistic regime linking an elitist education system via scholarships to the local sphere of social and political power. The discussion serves to demonstrate relations between transnational mobility, the school and the local political economy, and how these have an influence on student subjectivities regarding education choices.

Costs and benefits: Scholarship students’ reflective accounts of attending an elite secondary school

Situated within the context of elite education, the empirical focus of this article is on the reflective accounts of former scholarship students from historically disadvantaged communities who attended elite secondary schools in South Africa. Drawing on studies of scholarship students in educational institutions, the article discusses the costs and benefits, as narrated by the students, of their experiences of elite schooling. While there exists a growing body of literature on elite education globally, there is limited research on elite schools in South Africa and scholarship students within these institutions. Thus, the key contribution of the article is the discussion provided on scholarship students in elite schools in South Africa and their experiences of assimilating into the incongruent terrain of the elite school context.

Elite global citizenship, a case of a secondary school in Bogotá, Colombia

ABSTRACT Global citizenship education has been in the world agenda for some time. However, different understandings of global citizenship are at play not only on the official curricula but also in the daily enactments of students within each institution. The research presented in this article seeks to investigate the notions of citizenship practices in an elite secondary school in Bogota, Colombia’s capital city. Following Andreotti,, I argue that this particular school educates under the light of a soft global citizenship that reproduces the country’s status quo and its inequalities. Empirical data were collected through classroom observations, interviews and group interviews.

The Contribution of Dr. Dimitar Mutev (1818-1864) for the Construction of the Bolgrad High School as a Bulgarian National Educational Centre

The article is dedicated to the 200-th anniversary of the birth (September 4, 1818) of the Doctor of Philosophy Dimitar Mutev. A prominent Bulgarian Revival Enlightener, who has an outstanding contribution to the creation of the first Bulgarian secondary school. During the Renaissance it gained popularity among the people, such as Bolgrad High School “St. St. Cyril and Methodius”. Dr. Mutev became its director on October 15, 1859, and remained in this post until his death – 14 January 1864. For just over four years he attracted well-trained pedagogues such as: Vasil Popovich - a teacher of Bulgarian language and literature; Teodosii Ikonomov - lecturer in Old Bulgarian language; Ivan Filipov - teacher of mathematics; Nikola Kazanakli, a teacher of history and geography, and Dimitar Mutev a teaches physics and natural history.Dr. Mutev is working on the Bolgrad High School to become a center of spiritual awakening and national consciousness of all Bulgarian colonists and also of the Bulgarians in the enslaved homeland. To fulfill his plans he opens to a high school a boarding house, where both the children of the Bessarabian Bulgarians and those coming from enslaved Bulgaria are accommodated.Dr. Mutev creates the first in the history of the Bulgarian school: modern physics cabinet, equipped with 140 objects, models and other materials purchased from Vienna; a high school library, which has a rich book fund and receives almost all Bulgarian revival periodicals and plays the role of a large Bulgarian community center. On August 6, 1863, the first school printing press was opened in high school, the content of which is aimed at educational and educational literature. In the first place, textbooks are required, both for the high school and for the schools in the Bessarabian villages and especially for the enslaved Bulgarian lands. Books with religious themes, different socio-political literature and artistic works are published.In the city began its activity and the theater company. Whose actors are teachers and high school students who bring residents to theater art. That same year, for the first time in Bessarabia, the feast of St. St. Cyril and Methodius, and for the first time in Bulgarian history is celebrated as a public holiday - St. Ivan Rilski, which in the 20th century became a “Den na narodnite buditeli”.The greatest historical merit of Dr. Dimitar Mutev is that for four years he turned the Bolgrad high school into an elite secondary school on a European level; in a Revival educational, cultural and social center not only for the Bulgarian emigration, but for the entire nation.

STUDENTS’ SATISFACTION WITH PEDAGOGY TEACHING

Satisfaction with the training process is seen as one of the main criteria for accreditation of all higher education programs, according to the requirements of the National Evaluation and Accreditation Agency in Bulgaria. Students’ satisfaction is connected with the students' perception of the extent to which their needs or expectations have been met in the learning process. The aim of the research was to study students' satisfaction with the quality of pedagogy teaching at the National Sports Academy. The research involved 65 students (33 men, 32 women). The satisfaction survey was conducted using an online-based questionnaire (Google-Form). Subjects did not indicate their names, but only their group and gender. The results obtained show that, as a whole, students were satisfied to a very large extent with pedagogy teaching. Gender did not affect satisfaction. However, the attendance rate affected it. Students who attended all lectures had the highest degree of satisfaction, while students who did not attend any lectures had the lowest. Students who had finished elite secondary school (which is related to very high expectations of teaching), were the least satisfied and they were the ones who most often skipped lectures. The most important factor affecting students’ satisfaction was the behavior of lecturers and their interaction with the students.

In service of the western World: Global citizenship education within a Ghanaian elite context

ABSTRACTThis article employs postcolonial perspectives to examine the possibilities and limitations of drawing on Pan-African ideas to establish practices and meanings for global citizenship education at an elite secondary school in Ghana. In this examination, the authors explore the ways in which the school’s interventions to reinforce sameness/unity produce different understandings of global citizenship between students from different social class backgrounds. The article addresses how the school attempts to dissociate students from their native cultures for the purpose of teaching them the ways of knowing and doing necessary to live and work/study in the West. The authors illustrate the ways in which the lessons students are being taught about what it means to be a global citizen reinscribe hegemonic discourse through Pan-African rhetoric. The article concludes by calling for alternative forms of global citizenship education that emphasize critical consciousness.

Comparing the use of number sense strategies based on student achievement levels

ABSTRACTThe aim of this study is to compare students’ use of number sense strategies based on their mathematics success levels. Participants were 129 seventh graders from three elite secondary schools in Trabzon. Data were collected through a written examination with 10 problems and semi-structured interviews. Interview data were analyzed by considering students’ mathematics success and the differences and similarities among responses. Interviews were held with six students from two schools with different levels of mathematics success. The findings showed that students rarely used number sense strategies and mostly solved problems by using rules and algorithms. Even successful students seemed to have adopted the rule- and algorithm-based solution approach, making it necessary to investigate teacher criteria of mathematical competence. Another noteworthy finding from the interviews with students was teachers’ embrace of rule- and algorithm-based solutions when solving problems. The study finishes with an evaluation of the inclusion of number sense dimensions in secondary school mathematics textbooks in Turkey and recommendations for improving students’ number sense.

Schooling the National Orphans: The Education of the Children of the Easter Rising Leaders

This essay explores the educational history of the children of the 1916 Easter Rising leadership in Ireland. These children of the martyred revolutionary elite were the prototypical new citizens; as such, they merited an education worthy of the sons and daughters of the Rising leaders, the founding fathers of the new state. An examination of their schooling both before and after the Rising illuminates the very broad range of educational experiences evident in Ireland in the early twentieth century, from elite secondary schools to the truncated education of the working classes, along with the question of female education, the prevalence of religious orders, and the embedding of republican ideals into education. It also reveals the highly variegated class profile of the Rising leadership, which continued to shape the lives of their children thereafter and which was only partly alleviated by official welfare provision.

BRAIN DRAIN – BRAIN GAIN: SLOVAK STUDENTS AT CZECH UNIVERSITIES

The Slovak Republic is experiencing a growing brain drain of elite secondary school students. Slovak human capital flows chiefly to Czech Higher Education Institutes (HEIs). The aim of this paper is to analyse who these Slovak students are to create a complete profile of Slovak students at Czech HEIs. We used a unique dataset based on the surveys EUROSTUDENT V and DOKTORANDI 2014 to explore differences between Czech and Slovak students, their financial situation and the functionality of the intergenerational transmission mechanism. We have found that Slovak students at Czech HEIs come from highly educated families and from the middle and higher class families significantly more often than Czech students at Czech HEIs or Slovak students at Slovak HEIs. Approximately 80% of them came from grammar schools. Slovak students also often have better language skills. We have discovered that Slovak students at Czech HEIs enjoy certain social benefits, slightly more often they have higher monthly income compared to Czech students, and they work slightly less often during their studies. Finally, according to our findings, Slovak doctoral students are often reluctant to return back to the Slovak Republic or to stay in the Czech Republic.

Approaching methodology creatively: problematizing elite schools’ ‘best practice’ through a film about perfection and imperfection

Elite schools around the world aspire to produce perfect students and yet there are always obstacles to this perfection being achieved. In this paper, we suggest that this process of perfectionism and obstruction can best be understood using a methodology that looks to the creative arts, rather than the usual social science orthodoxies. Our focus in this paper is therefore not on methodology as a technique, but rather methodology as a resource for thought. Using Lars Von Trier’s film The Five Obstructions as a point of departure, we suggest that the quest for perfect students, or indeed perfect humans, is one that ignores the inherent obstacles that block pathways to perceived perfection. Our research draws on ethnographic fieldwork from six elite secondary schools in Argentina, Australia, Barbados, England, Hong Kong, and South Africa. We posit a creative methodology permits a coming to terms with the abstractions required when analyzing and interpreting large amounts of data from a multi-sited ethnographic study. This approach makes it feasible to draw some conclusions about a common characteristic – perfectionism – among elite schools around the globe.

A comment on class productions in elite secondary schools in twenty-first-century global context

In this closing essay, Lois Weis offers a broad overview of the contributions of this Special Issue on class production in elite secondary schools in the twenty-first-century global context. Drawing upon her own research within US privileged secondary schools, Weis explores the contemporary social, economic and political landscape as connected to much larger global shifts and increasing social stratification. The author further reflects upon the potential of multi-sited, longitudinal and global ethnographies as powerful methodologies and argues that this issue's contributions offer a new set of lenses through which we can begin to empirically investigate and theorise class production in a globalised context.

‘Class work’: producing privilege and social mobility in elite US secondary schools

Drawing upon two ethnographic studies of affluent and elite co-educational secondary schools in the United States, Weis and Cipollone spotlight the explicit ‘class work’ of a now highly insecure middle/upper middle class, as they attempt to maintain advantage via entrance to particularly located post-secondary destinations. Affirming the notion that class position must now be ‘won’ at both the individual and collective level, rather than constituting the ‘manner to which one is born,’ the authors track and theorize intensified preparation for and application to particular kinds of post-secondary destinations in an increasingly segmented national and international marketplace for higher education. Although the US media have taken note of such ‘application frenzy,’ little scholarly work tracks and theorizes this ‘frenzy’ as a distinctly ‘class process,’ one that represents intensified ‘class work’ at one and the same time as class ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ become ever more apparent in the larger global arena.

Legitimating status: perceptions of meritocracy and inequality among undergraduates at an elite British university

Given the frequent critiques of elite universities for admitting low numbers of state school graduates and, more recently, British Afro‐Caribbean students, how do students attending those universities make meaning of the admissions process? Through an analysis of 46 one‐on‐one in‐depth interviews with undergraduates attending Oxford University, we show that students believe in the fairness of the admissions process, while lamenting the lack of opportunities for educational advancement faced by some disadvantaged youth in British society. Despite their understanding that many British youth do not have access to educational experiences that make Oxbridge an attainable goal, most students do not support changes to make access more equitable across class or racial/ethnic lines. This perspective, which legitimates the status students gain through matriculation at an elite university, supports the maintenance of unequal access to an Oxford education despite the advantages that education is known to confer to graduates. The findings demonstrate elites acknowledging the disadvantages of particular groups in society without acknowledging their own advantages in the same system. They do so by recognizing two elements of merit: (1) intelligence, which most students assumed led to their own admission; and (2) cultivation of that intelligence, which requires elite secondary schools and which most students see as disadvantaging particular groups in society. In the paper we highlight differences in meaning‐making between graduates of grammar, comprehensive and private schools.

The elite school as ‘cognitive machine’ and ‘social paradise’: Developing transnational capitals for the national ‘field of power’

In this article we draw on Bourdieu’s The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power and his associated conceptual apparatus to examine Singapore as a ‘field of power’ and the formation of Singapore’s ‘state nobility’ through an elite secondary school. We ask how well Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus travels, given Singapore’s geo-political history and its strategic positioning with regard to what it calls its ‘global hinterland’. We work with Bourdieu’s notions of ‘social alchemy’, ‘cognitive machine’ and ‘social paradise’ to illuminate how an elite school in Singapore carefully and successfully grooms the future state nobility for Singapore’s field of power, in part through the development of students’ transnational capitals. We show, however, that Bourdieu’s conceptual resources are not fully portable and point to their merits and limitations in explaining the workings of power in Singapore and in relation to one of its most elite schools.

The Determinants and Consequences of School Choice Errors in Kenya

School choice systems designed to help disadvantaged groups might be hindered by information asymmetries. Kenyan elite secondary schools admit students from the entire country based on a national test score, district quotas, and stated school choices. We find even the highest ability students make school choice errors. Girls, students with lower test scores, and students from public and low quality schools are more likely to make such errors. Net of observable demographic characteristics, these errors are associated with a decrease in the probability that a student is admitted to an elite secondary school, relegating them to schools of lower quality.