Social Inequality In Education Research Articles

“I Just Don’t Fit There!” Anticipated Cultural Mismatch and Social Disparities in Students’ Intention to Enter Higher Education

Despite political and societal efforts to reduce social inequality in education, students from nonacademic households (no parent holds a university degree) are less likely to enter higher education than their peers from academic households. Drawing on Cultural Mismatch Theory, we tested whether social disparities in enrollment intentions are related to students’ anticipated mismatch between their self-construal and expected higher education culture. Experimental data ( N = 264) revealed a corresponding mismatch effect between students’ self-construal and expected culture on their anticipated fit in a higher education program. In addition, field data ( N = 574) from upper secondary school students revealed that students from nonacademic households more strongly anticipate a mismatch and, in turn, have a lower intention to enter higher education. Corroborating our theorizing, these social disparities are contingent on the expected culture in higher education. These findings highlight the role of students’ self-construal and anticipated fit for higher education enrollment.

Model of effects of cultural capital and educational Habitus on Pisa competencies of pupils: An example of Serbia and Croatia

The results of a secondary analysis of the empirical data collected during PISA 2018 on the sample of pupils from Serbia and Croatia are presented in this paper. Based on the theoretical model established by Pierre Bourdieu, we examined the effects of cultural capital in all three forms (objectified, embodied and institutionalized) on reading, mathematical and science competencies of pupils, measured through PISA tests. As a mediator of given variables, we put certain indicators of habitus, which is also one of the key concepts of Bourdieu?s theory. The indicators which were included are adjustment to the educational system and education expectations, specifically marked as educational habitus. The results showed positive effect of all tree forms of cultural capital on a specific type of competence, while education expectations are confirmed as a mediator between cultural capital and competences. A comparative analysis of Serbia and Croatia showed that there are some differences regarding objectified cultural capital and education expectations which have stronger effect on pupil?s competences on the sample from Croatia. The results of this research can be used for creating implications for educational policies which would be focused on obtaining cultural capital among pupils, therefore improving their competencies and, consequently, reducing social inequalities in education by more equal distribution of this form of capital.

Middle-class parental engagement in pandemic times: developing strategies and mobilizing capitals

Despite the rhetoric of ‘we are all in this together’ during the COVID-19 pandemic, not all families experienced schooling disruption in 2020–2022 equally. middle-class parents typically enjoy significant advantage over parents in working-class occupations. To illuminate class-based differences in parental engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic, here we present data from interviews with 15 middle-class Canadian parents. We found that middle-class parents successfully mobilized their economic, social, and cultural capital to manage challenges they faced: lack of structure and routine, lack of communication with the school, perceived low quality of instruction and resources, student isolation during online learning, and parental stress about children’s schooling during the pandemic. The main implication of the study is that although middle-class parents in the study acknowledged their privilege more compared to prior research on middle-class parental engagement, ultimately, their individual solutions to pandemic challenges merely exacerbated existing social inequalities in education.

Understanding how institutional dynamics can contribute to educational inequality in Nordic cities

ABSTRACT This article explores the institutional dynamics that contribute to educational inequality within Nordic cities. The persistent issue of social inequality in education remains a prominent challenge for the Nordic welfare states. By investigating the gaps between educational policies and their practical implementation, this study sheds light on the mechanisms that drive educational inequality. Through the application of qualitative methods, the research examines the impediments to achieving educational equity within three distinct municipalities in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The study identifies several contributing factors to the prevailing educational inequality, encompassing housing policies, urban spatial segregation, diverse principles governing school choice and marketisation, and variations in organisational models intended to promote equity. The research not only offers novel insights into the gaps between educational policy formulation and implementation but also underscores their pivotal role in both generating and perpetuating educational inequality. In the subsequent discussion, the study addresses these identified gaps and outlines their potential implications for future policy-making and practical implementation in Nordic education.

Following in the parents’ footsteps? Using sibling data to analyse the intergenerational transmission of social (dis)advantage in Scotland

Abstract This study provides new evidence about the extent to which individual occupational status is determined by family of origin (ascription) and by educational attainment (achievement). Using linked administrative data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study, we measure intergenerational mobility using sibling correlations and we assess the effect of siblings’ education on their occupational status by examining between- and within-sibling differences. We show that about 36 per cent of siblings’ variation in occupational status in Scotland is attributable to shared family factors. Our observed measures of family background explain about 40 per cent of the shared family effect, meaning that family-based advantages in the Scottish labour market largely arise from unmeasured factors. We also find that siblings’ educational attainment accounts for 80 per cent of the variation between families in occupational status. While this may suggest that the Scottish labour market is highly meritocratic, previous research that showed a very strong family effect on educational attainment leads us to a different interpretation, namely that social inequalities in education are the main mechanism through which inequalities between families are reproduced (and perhaps legitimated) in the Scottish labour market.

Feasting on Blackness: educational parasitism, necropolicy, and Black thought

In 1933 Carter G. Woodson wrote the Miseducation of the Negro, an essential—yet often overlooked—text in educational studies. In the text, Woodson documents the pervasive and subtle inequities that saturate schooling for Black people. Over 80 years later the enumerated issues Woodson discussed remain and are reflective of and contributory to what Gloria Ladson-Billings has termed the “education debt.” This conceptual article aims to trace why efforts to address racial and social inequality in education remain on the hydraulics of elusiveness. In doing so, I argue that a central issue debilitating transformative educational justice initiatives for Black people is what I term “educational parasitism.” Educational parasitism is a form of racial capitalism that “funds” and supports the larger body of white supremacy by dispossessing and “eating away” at Blackness. As such, educational parasitism is a mechanism of profit accumulation, power solidification, and ontological sustenance for whites; overall, it is a necropolicy that looms in the shadow of stated reform aims. While the phenomenon of educational parasitism is longstanding, I center neoliberal reform efforts in post-Katrina New Orleans to illustrate this phenomenon. Most specifically, I focus on the dispossession of Black educators to illuminate educational parasitism. Analytically, I draw from Black Studies and Critical Race Theory to frame and situate the analysis. Lastly, I end with meditations and implications for practice, theory, and research.

Potentials of Collaborative Educational Welfare Research - Theorizing Voice Plurality and Social Empowerment

Childhood marginalization is the result of complicated processes that appears difficult to address for policymakers worldwide. Neo-institutional theory enables studies of the complexity of educational organizations, showing how they evolve in responses to their contradictory surroundings and generate unintended social inequality. Three Nordic municipalities are currently participating in a project that focuses on the increasing polarization between exposed and privileged schools in urban areas and on the significance of institutional and organizational factors in their local welfare models in ensuring childhood equity. The project we report on combines data in contrasting urban school areas. After showing some examples of voices in the project, the authors discuss how municipal actors are informed about social problems in school organizations yet lack research-based tools to counteract social inequality in education. They theorize how collaboration between researchers and welfare providers can contribute to counteract social inequality. Lessons from the project indicate a need for further collaboration between different stakeholders that includes different voices to ensure that research on childhood inequality is relevant and has an impact.

STRATEGIC ANALYSIS OF DUOLINGO LANGUAGE LEARNING PLATFORM

The rising number of Internet and mobile device users influence the growing demand for educational technology solutions. Duolingo is a commercial language learning platform that offers courses on the web and a mobile app, launched in 2012 as a free website with the goal of addressing social inequalities in education. This article aims to analyze the company’s strategic capabilities which led to Duolingo being the top grossing education app since 2019. The evaluation was carried out by using methods of SWOT, VRIO, and Porter’s Five Forces analyses. The results suggest that Duolingo targeted a wide market segment and developed an attractive product by gamifying the learning process, thus securing a large share of the market in a competitive sector by taking advantage of technological advancement and social media.

Investigating the co-development of academic competencies and educational aspirations in German primary education

Academic achievement and educational decisions, which are strongly related to primary and secondary effects, are the two main drivers behind the emergence of social inequality in education. To understand this process in more detail, even before final decisions have to be made, the reciprocal influence of achievement and aspirations is of greatest interest. By not simply looking at an ultimate outcome but investigating its antecedents in a longitudinal fashion over the course of multiple years more insight is gained. Using German large-scale NEPS panel data, it is possible to demonstrate this co-development quantitatively. Cross-lagged panel models are utilized to show that the achievement in mathematics (measured by comprehensive achievement tests) and parental realistic aspirations influence each other positively in a statistically significant way over the course of primary education from grade one to four, even under the control of various potential confounding variables. Further analyses reveal that this process is socially stratified and works differently for lowly and highly educated families. Lower educated parents pay more attention to the performance of the child when adjusting their aspirations than tertiary educated parents, who always hold high aspirations. The results are of interest to understand in more detail how social inequality emerges at a very early point in the highly tracked German educational system.

“I Have Always thought that, If I Am Poor, I’m Also Supposed to Study Poorly”

The goal of this study is to highlight the embodied nature of social class inequalities in education. Drawing from a larger study that examined educational outcomes and work careers of young people whose families received welfare benefits in Croatia when these individuals were of high school age, the article focuses on biographical narrative interviews with three young individuals. These strategically selected cases were characterized by a shared experience of living in poverty that was, nevertheless, marked by very different initial intersections of social advantages and disadvantages (middle-class fall into poverty, intergenerational poverty, and poverty intersecting with anti-Roma racism). Based on the comparison of these three life stories, this study utilizes Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a conceptual tool, incorporating both cognitive and affective schemas, to examine how these young individuals framed their lives and educational trajectories. In doing so, this study builds on the work by scholars such as Reay who extend the explorations of embodied social inequalities in education into the realm of emotions, which are—in line with the growing body of work in the sociology of emotions—understood as embedded in (unequal) social relations. Therefore, the analysis of this study focuses on how, in the three examined life stories, the horizons of probable, possible, and unimaginable were perceived very differently and shaped by distinct affective structures. The findings of this study suggest that cognitive and affective schemas function jointly, as integral elements of a social inequalities’ mechanism rooted in the compounding of advantages or disadvantages.

A comparative study of social inequalities in education as an effect of Covid-19 pandemic: A case of schools in Saudi Arabia and Kenya

The Coronavirus epidemic is a major source of concern for global education systems and their ability to provide equity in education. Hundreds of countries closed schools during the Covid-19 in its first year to contain the mass spread of the virus. Over one billion students were denied an education as a result of Covid-19 school closures. This study compares the social inequalities experienced in schools in Kenya and Saudi Arabia following the outbreak of Covid-19. An extensive questionnaire on data collection methods was completed by educators, learners, and parents from public schools in these two countries. The statistics were calculated using the SPSS program while qualitative data was analyzed thematically. Covid-19 had a significant impact on the time used for learning, the content learned, and the quality of learning that was experienced in the sampled countries. The findings show that during the Coronary Syndrome outbreak, many learners and educators relied on technology to access continuing education. Unfortunately, inadequate infrastructures such as lack of network availability, structure, and proper policies hampered virtual education and expanded the social inequality between learners of the two sampled countries. The findings of this study highlight the devastating impact Covid-19 had on the education sector: schools, educators, learners, and parents. In brief, the success of continuity in education depended on the government policymaking and implementation that geared towards equity in the provision of education.

School market and the democratization of education: one step forward, two steps back. The case of the Canadian Province of Quebec

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to show that since the 1980s, educational inequalities in Quebec have gradually been reconfigured through the school market. The results obtained from a sample (N = 24,085) of a cohort of students who entered their first year of secondary school in 2002–2003 and who were observed for up to ten years (2012–2013) show that the influence of social origin on educational inequalities operates in large part via mediation of the type of institution attended. The results indicate that enrollment in selective schools, whether public or private, is closely associated to the social characteristics of the students: socioeconomic and ethnocultural origin, gender and mother tongue. In addition, there is a strong association between attendance at these same institutions, access to higher education and graduation. We conclude that the persistence of the reproduction of social inequalities in education is the result of the interactive and combined effects of social power relations related to class and ethnicity, and the current organization of public policies in education. This reveals a paradox as school markets have been promoted by public policies in the name of strengthening democratization and improving the quality of education.

(Mis)Matched College Aspirations and Expectations: The Role of Social Background and Admission Barriers

AbstractNot all high school students who wish to study think that they will be able to realize this wish. This article examines whether admission barriers to higher education (HE) are a potential reason for this mismatch between educational aspirations and expectations and whether they are more constraining for students from socially less advantaged backgrounds. It does so for the German context in which the role of admission barriers for social inequality in HE has long been neglected. Empirically, the paper uses a unique combination of individual data on high school students’ educational aspirations and expectations and institutional data on admission barriers that vary by field of study. Findings indicate that the socially most privileged students stick to their college aspiration regardless of admission barriers to their aspired field of study. However, they seem to be willing to compromise their preferred field of study if this comes along with high admission barriers. Contrastingly, socially less privileged students seem willing to compromise both their general college aspiration and their aspired field of study if admission appears difficult. The concluding section discusses the implications of these findings for social inequality in education.

COVID-19 and its effects: On the risk of social inequality through digitalization and the loss of trust in three European education systems

This paper develops informed assumptions on the potential loss of trust as an unintended side-effect of the measures in education to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Well-founded concerns according to which the pandemic-induced closure of educational facilities and the shift to digitalized distance education are contributing to increased social inequality in education serve as a starting point for the argumentation. The paper contends that together with the temporary changes in the style of educational governance, in the medium term an exacerbated social inequality in education can cause a potential trust problem for the central actors imposing the measures. To support this line of reasoning, the exploratory study describes the context conditions which are relevant for the implementation and participation in digitalized distance education (measures, access and competent use of digital devices in education, level of trust) and combines them with the findings of a qualitative analysis of relevant documents from three European countries (Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany). A neo-institutional view is applied to exploring the implications of the changes in education governance and their potential side-effects on trust.

Impacts of the COVID-19 Control Measures on Widening Educational Inequalities

COVID-19 has resulted in a global public health crisis. Measures adopted by governments across the world to reduce transmission have resulted in the closure of educational institutions and workplaces and reduced social interaction. The aim of the article is to reflect on the consequences of the COVID-19 global pandemic for the lives of young people from different social groups, with a special focus on education. It is a desk-based review of empirical research that has emerged in the wake of COVID-19 that has explored the impact of the control measures adopted, resulting in ‘learning loss’ and the widening of the ‘learning gap’ among students. The review shows that rather than utilizing the current situation to tackle pre-existing social inequalities in education, current debates often narrowly focus on immediate rather than long-term measures. The article calls for a broader research agenda on the short- and long-term compensatory measures needed to re-engage students, especially those from more disadvantaged backgrounds.

Social context of educational failure of students

Introduction.The article considers the educational failure of students as a social problem. Its relevance is due to the growth of educationally unsuccessful students and the need to overcome this phenomenon.The aimof the present article was to analyse the nature of the influence of the social context on the educational failure of students.Methodology and research methods.The research is based on the interdisciplinary methodology, which integrates the principles of sociological, psychological, socio-psychological, economic, and pedagogical approaches in the study of educational failure and ways to overcome it. The empirical basis of the article is the results of an interdisciplinary study using a qualitative mix strategy (2019–2020). The following methods were employed: semi-formal expert interviews, focus groups with school, college and university students, and the analysis of essays by high school students.Results and scientific novelty.The novelty of the research consists in the interpretation of educational failure, its social context, and in showing the limitations of the educational approach to the analysis of the phenomenon under consideration. The main results presented in the article involve the interpretation of educational failure as an educational and social phenomenon and its social context; the characteristics of the main contextual factors, which are analysed as social inequality in education, educational policy, the place of education in the system of social values and in the model of social success. The results of the empirical research reveal the understanding of educational failure as a social phenomenon, its social causes. It is concluded that the modern social context of Russian education limits the possibility of overcoming this phenomenon and needs to be changedPractical significanceof the article is the possibility to take into account the results of the research to improve social technologies for overcoming educational failure.

СОЦИЈАЛНО ПОРЕКЛО СТУДЕНТСКЕ ОМЛАДИНЕ И ИЗБОР СТУДИЈСКИХ ПРОГРАМА ФАКУЛТЕТА УНИВЕРЗИТЕТА У НИШУ

Based on the tenets of the theory of cultural capital (P. Bourdieu) and the results of studies on the social dimension of education, the paper analyzes the connection between the social origin and educational orientation of the student population of the University of Niš. It also focuses on family socio-economic status and cultural-educational status as socially differentiated factors of educational orientation (choice of program of study).The paper presents the results of the study carried out from April until June 2019. The sample included 374 students from 13 faculties of the University of Niš. A comparative analysis of the social origin of the students (operationalized through the educational and socio-professional status of their parents and the financial status of their families) represented the starting point for the study of the social determination of their educational orientation. The findings indicate that children of agricultural workers and farm laborers more often choose the Faculty of Agriculture, Faculty of Pedagogy and Faculty of Economics, while children of business professionals and professionals with a non-business background more often choose the Faculty of Science and Mathematics, Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Law, compared to the students with origins from other socio-professional groups. Since the research has confirmed the existence of social differentiation in educational orientation, it is necessary to design and realize adequate educational policy measures to overcome social inequality in education.

Conceptualising the sociology of education: an analysis of contested intellectual trajectories

This paper presents an account of the development of the sociology of education in the UK, by means of an analysis of papers published in the field’s flagship journal, the British Journal of Sociology of Education and its US equivalent, Sociology of Education. In particular, we examine the representation of two contrasting traditions in addressing social inequalities: ‘political arithmetic’; and the more recent ‘cultural turn’. We find that in the UK, the cultural turn dominates; whilst in the US, it is political arithmetic which does so. In accounting for these contrasting national profiles, we argue that they are underpinned by divergent social infrastructure and organisation. We also discuss some of the implications of the dominance of the cultural turn in the UK, specifically in terms of the relationship between the fields of academic research and policy and the development of a cumulative evidence base to address social inequalities in education.

Wealth stratification in the early school career in Germany

Recent research has established parental wealth as an important determinant of children’s educational achievement. However, parental wealth is often ignored in research on social inequality in education, or its influence is only considered at later stages of children’s educational careers. Our paper contributes to this research by examining the relationship between parental wealth and (1) children’s math competences at the beginning of primary school; (2) the development of children’s competences throughout primary school; and (3) children’s transition from primary to secondary school. We are looking at Germany, where the early ability tracking may make an early investment in education particularly important. Analyzing data from the German National Educational Panel Study, we find that parental wealth has a distinct association with children’s educational outcomes that adds to social disparities by other measures of parents’ socioeconomic status (SES). Our results indicate that children in wealthy households have higher competences already in the first grade. This advantage remains stable throughout primary school and translates into a higher probability to attend the highest secondary school track. Moreover, children in these wealthy households are more likely to attend the highest secondary school track, net of differences in competences and performance. Our results imply that ignoring wealth as a component of parental SES leads to an underestimation of the level of social inequality in education in Germany.

Education of Refugee Adolescents at the End of Secondary School: The Role of Educational Policies, Individual and Family Resources

In the recent wave of refugee immigration to Germany, many children and adolescents were among the migrants. Their integration into the German educational system will be a major challenge for the years and decades to come. The paper’s aim is to examine both general and refugee-specific mechanisms that likely explain ethnic and social inequality in education among refugee adolescents. The study is based on ReGES (Refugees in the German Educational System) data collected in five German federal states. Our results show that refugee adolescents attend lower grade levels and lower school types than the general pupil population in Germany. We further posit that established mechanisms to explain social and ethnic inequality are also applicable to refugee adolescents. Among refugee-specific aspects, we identify factors at the federal state level that influence the school placement of young refugees. Furthermore, at the individual level, post-traumatic stress disorder is associated with differences in educational achievement among refugee students.