Socio-economic segregation of disadvantaged children between schools in Pakistan: comparing the state and private sector

The distribution of children in different school-types and regions in Pakistan suggests that access and opportunities in education are not evenly accessible for many children. Segregation at school level is an important concern for equity and social justice because the adverse effects of segregation increase the pre-existing gap in opportunities between rich and poor, preventing the disadvantaged children from equal access to better life and success opportunities. This paper presents an analysis of segregation by poverty and pupil performance between schools, with a comparison of private and government schools in Pakistan. The data obtained for this study is from the Annual Status of Education Report 2014 survey of households and schools. The analysis includes 27,979 children aged 5–16 years for whom the information could be linked with their schools, and parents’ socio-economic status. Segregation levels have been assessed using the Gorard Segregation Index. The results show that segregation by academic performance is higher than segregation by poverty, and segregation by poverty is higher in the private sector compared to government schools, whereas segregation by performance is greater in the government schools. A regional level analysis shows that segregation in urban areas is higher in both school types compared to rural areas. In addition to insisting on full attendance for children of school age, the government should work towards decreasing segregation in the state sector, perhaps also involving an increase in the number of schools maintained, and therefore reducing the need for cheap private provision.     

Do the rich get richer and the poor poorer?: The effects of an intervention programme on reading in the home and school language in a high poverty multilingual context

There is little research on differential reading performance in multilingual contexts in less than ideal learning conditions. This article reports on a reading intervention project in a poor multilingual primary school in South Africa where reading levels in Northern Sotho (home language) and English (language of schooling) were initially very low amongst Grade 7 learners. The nature of the reading intervention is briefly sketched and the outcomes after three years of implementation presented. Results at the intervention school showed some Matthew effects in both languages. Differential reading performance is discussed in relation to the high poverty and multilingual context of the school. Although this is a single case longitudinal study, implications for reading interventions and classroom instruction are considered in the context of disadvantaged multilingual primary schools.     

School quality and learning gains in rural Guatemala

I use unusually detailed data on schools, teachers and classrooms to explain student achievement growth in rural Guatemala. Several variables that have received little attention in previous studies – including the number of school days, teacher content knowledge and pedagogical methods – are robust predictors of achievement. A series of decompositions by student ethnicity and type of school shed some additional light on important questions in the Guatemalan context, and beyond. The large indigenous test score gap is not explained by differences in an extensive list of observable features of schools. The large effect for community characteristics suggests peer group effects or more general institutional differences related to services or labor markets. PRONADE community schools are associated with moderate gains vis-à-vis public schools in areas related to utilization of capacity, such as days worked. But these gains are largely offset by lower teacher capacity, which highlights the challenge of improving school quality in poor, rural areas.     

School assignment,school choice and social mobility

We estimate the chances of poor and non-poor children getting places in good schools, analysing the relationship between poverty, location and school assignment. Our dataset allows us to measure location and distance very precisely. The simple unconditional difference in probabilities of attending a good school is substantial. We run an analysis that controls completely for location, exploiting within-street variation and controlling for other personal characteristics. Children from poor families are significantly less likely to go to good schools. We show that the lower chance of poor children attending a good school is essentially unaffected by the degree of choice.     

Presence and Persistence: Poverty Ideology and Inner-city Teaching

This paper examines the role of poverty ideology in determining whether a teacher comes to teach at a poor school (presence) and whether s/he remains at this type of school over time (persistence). A sample of 400 teachers in San Diego California was administered a questionnaire that evaluated respondents’ attitudes toward poverty. Teachers who believed poverty was rooted in social structure were more apt to be present in and to persist at poor schools. It is argued that this presence and persistence in poor schools was because these teachers had developed a “structurally mitigated sense of occupational competence”. This sense of competence made these teachers more likely to understand the problems they encountered in the classroom in structural terms, and thus they were more likely to be both satisfied with and persist at their jobs.     

School quality signals and attendance in rural Guatemala

This study analyzes school dropout in rural Guatemala using event history data and unusually detailed data on schools and teachers. Significant results for language of instruction, teacher education and fighting between students demonstrate the importance of accounting for school context influences on an outcome that has, historically, been analyzed mainly as a function of family background. Less support is found for the contention that dropout is lower in schools that are better at maximizing student achievement. Finally, using interaction analysis some of the school effects vary significantly by student gender and ethnicity. The various linkages between school features and dropout highlight the complicated reality of identifying the kinds of features of schools that are valued by poor families.     

The complex determinants of school intake characteristics and segregation,England 1989 to 2014

The extent of between-school segregation, or clustering of disadvantaged students within schools, in England varies depending on the indicator of interest. For example, the trend over time for segregation by student poverty differs from those for ethnicity or special educational need. Additionally the causes of the level of segregation for any indicator will be different from the causes of changes in that level over time. This new paper uses data for all state-funded schools in England from 1989 to 2014 to identify the possible determinants of segregation. The results are summarised for England and its economic regions, and presented in more detail for local authority areas. The long-term underlying level of segregation of each indicator appears to be the outcome of structural and local geographic factors. However, the annual changes in segregation for most indicators can be explained most simply by changes in the prevalence of each indicator. For example, the UK policy of inclusion has considerably increased the number of students with statements of special needs in mainstream schools, and this has resulted, intentionally, in less segregation in terms of this indicator. Segregation by poverty varies at least partly with the economic cycle. Some of the explanatory factors, such as the global economy or the prevalence of specific ethnic minority groups, are not directly under policy-makers’ control. This means that it is the more malleable factors leading to the underlying levels of poverty segregation that should be addressed by any state wanting a fair and mixed national school system. In England, these controllable factors include the use of proximity to decide contested places at schools, and school diversity as represented by the growth of Academies and Free Schools, and the continued existence of faith-based and selective schools.     

Does community poverty reduce children’s school attendance more at primary education than at secondary education? Evidence from post-conflict Sierra Leone

In Sierra Leone, the number of primary schools is almost seven times more than junior-secondary schools (JSS). Living in a poor community has been shown to reduce children’s school attendance because of lower access and poorer quality of education in these communities. However, it is unclear whether living in a poor community reduces attendance at primary school more than at JSS, given the wide disparities in school supply between the two educational tiers. Random effects logistic regression models are applied to the 2008 Sierra Leone Demographic and Health Survey for analyses. The results show that living in a poor community reduces primary school attendance but increases attendance at JSS. These results reflect post-war reconstruction in Sierra Leone where: (1) primary schools were rapidly reconstructed without inspection, leading to poor-quality schools; and (2) the redevelopment of JSS was concentrated in war-torn areas, which had minimal access to post-primary education in the pre-war era.     

Teacher contact with parents of children with special educational needs: a comparison over two decades

The paper addresses aspects of teacher contacts with the parents of children with special educational needs in the broader context of parent–teacher relations. Data are presented from a large-scale survey of teachers of Key Stage 2 children (7–11-year-olds) in England in 1998 and are compared with data from a similar survey in 1981. Levels of consultation with parents have increased across the two surveys and it is very unusual for a teacher not to have had a meeting with a parent of a child with SEN during the current school year. There is a tendency for levels of contact with the parents of ethnic minority pupils to be lower than that for other pupils. There is also a markedly higher level of non-contact in schools serving areas of poverty compared with more affluent schools. A tension is identified between an agenda of home–school partnership and a set of attributions for the causes of children's difficulties which locates these in deficiencies in the home. However, teachers in the later survey were less likely to identify the home as the source of problems than were teachers in 1981. The paper suggests that considerable progress has been made towards fulfilling the conditions for home–school partnership, but that there remain areas of concern.     

What aspects of schooling are important? School effects on tertiary entrance performance

The purpose of this paper is to identify school effects on student performance for tertiary entrance in Australia, taking into account student-level predictors using longitudinal data from the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study. It finds that aspects of schooling, such as positive attitudes to school and disciplinary climate, affect student performance at the student level but not generally at the school level. The socioeconomic context of schools has no effect on student performance when taking into account schools' academic context. Apart from academic context, teacher shortage, academic press, and teacher efficacy were the only school factors that had positive significant effects on student performance. The policy implications are that school-based policies are unlikely to improve performance or promote equity, but, instead, policies should focus more on students falling behind, who are found across the school system, not limited to a small proportion of schools with particular characteristics.     

Affordability of private schools: exploration of a conundrum and towards a definition of ‘low-cost’

The affordability of private education is a contentious issue. While the extent of ‘low-cost’ private schooling is widely accepted, there is no agreement on what ‘low-cost’ means in this context and how this relates to affordability for poor families. This paper addresses the lacuna in the literature by defining ‘low-cost’ in relation to what poor families could afford if they were to send all their children to school while restricting their expenditure on schooling to a fixed proportion of their total family expenditure. This approach links the definition of ‘low-cost’ to internationally accepted poverty lines. Two examples from recent research in South Sudan and Liberia illustrate the flexibility of the new method. The paper also addresses the ‘conundrum’ in the research literature, which suggests low-cost private schools are unaffordable for poorest families, when the same literature typically shows some of the poorest using these schools.     

Teaching Children in Poverty: three Australian primary school responses

Studies of pedagogical relationships offer insights into policies and practices which have the capacity to promote progressive change in educational practice for children in poverty. This paper focuses on relationships established in three differently‐located Australian primary schools: Greytown, a medium sized inner‐city school in New South Wales; Mungar, a large suburban school in Queensland; and Meiki, a small rural school in New South Wales. Each school is a designated disadvantaged school and funded accordingly through a federal Disadvantaged Schools Program, is located in a working class area, and is ethnically diverse. The schools’ pedagogical responses to children in poverty are contrasted and analysed in terms of their capacity to contribute to socially just outcomes from schooling.     

Assessing elementary school support for inquiry

Increasingly in elementary schools, there has been a focus on the influence of school-level factors on students’ learning. The way in which the learning environment is organised in schools and classrooms is likely to influence students’ opportunities to carry out inquiry. Most studies have focused on the effects of the amount of schooling, rather than effects attributable to support for inquiry in the school context. This study clarifies aspects of school contexts that support inquiry at the school level and describes the development of an inventory to assess school contexts. The Primary School Characteristics Inventory has three components named Motivation for Student Inquiry, Organisational Structures to Support Inquiry and Structures to Support Inquiry Strategies in School. The instrument was effective for identifying schools with varying levels of support for inquiry, suggesting that some schools might need to modify the school context if students are to carry out inquiry in a self-directed way.     

Effects of school quality,school citizenship policy,and student body composition on the acquisition of citizenship competences in the final year of primary education

This study examines the effects of general educational quality of schools, school citizenship policy, and ethnic homogeneity of the student body on the acquisition of citizenship competences in the final year of primary education. The theoretical framework is based on developmental, psychological, and sociological studies into effects of social context on educational outcomes and research into effective schools. The effects of school quality, school policy, and student population were analysed using 2-level (students, school) multilevel models. The results show that differences in citizenship competences between students and schools are mainly explained by factors at student level. Although the school also appeared to play a role, the school variables used in the analysis did not offer sufficient explanation for these differences. In order to further investigate the relationship between school factors and students’ citizenship, more insight is needed into characteristics of citizenship practices of schools.     

Factors influencing the academic achievement of the Turkish urban poor

This study estimates the individual and combined effects of selected family, student and school characteristics on the academic achievement of poor, urban primary-school students in the Turkish context. Participants of the study consisted of 719 sixth, seventh, and eighth grade primary-school students from 23 schools in inner and outer city squatter settlements. The findings indicated that the set of variables comprising student characteristics, including well-being at school, scholastic activities and support, explained the largest amount of variance in academic achievement among the urban poor. Although the effect sizes are small, family background characteristics and school quality indicators were also found to be significantly related to academic achievement. The implications of this study for improving primary schools in urban poor neighborhoods are discussed.     

A study of the association of attitudes to the philosophy of science with classroom contexts,academic qualification and professional training,amongst A level biology teachers in Harare,Zimbabwe

The responses from 33 A level biology teachers to a questionnaire were analysed to test for association between attitude to the philosophy of science and academic qualification professional training. The teachers in Harare, Zimbabwe, also self-reported on their school contexts. From the school context data the teachers were clustered to give two different clusters - richer and poorer schools. Teachers in the poorer school context cluster showed statistically significant differences from those in the richer school context cluster in their attitudes to the philosophy of science. Teachers in the richer schools had more relativist and deductivist attitudes while teachers in the poorer context clusters were more positivist and inductivist. Richer schools are able to employ teachers who are academically and professionally better qualified. This evidence suggests the differential distribution of facilities and resources across school contexts reinforces the differential distribution of attitudes to the philosophy of science.     

The impact of primary school quality on learning in Egypt

In many industrialized societies it is suggested that school quality has less than the anticipated impact on student achievement once the influence of the family has been considered. Since schools are more easily amenable to government intervention, the ambiguous showing of schools has not augered well for a public philosophy which portrays schools as agents of social change.This report re-examines the relationships among home, school and achievement performance in the Egyptian context by assaying the relative impact of families and schools on student test performance. This re-examination is undertaken, in part, because in LDCs one of the strongest associations with level of per capita income is the proportion of school age population enrolled in primary classes. This link between primary school attendence and national development places importance on the need to improve the quality of numeracy/literacy skills in order to further increase the efficiency of the Egyptian economy.Similar to findings in other third world primary school systems, the impact of school quality on achievement performance explains more variance than does the influence of the home. Apparently, Egyptian primary schools do provide a learning milieu independent of home resources which affects pupil test performance on basic literacy skills.Given the impact of separate home and school inputs to achievement performance mentioned above, the last question raised in the paper asks whether school quality in Egypt affects the learning of socially disadvantaged children more than others. This can be checked by examining the interactive term between home and school when a regression is performed on student achievement. Findings reveal that indeed the incremental effects of school quality on the poor are greater than those found for children of advantaged backgrounds. Apparently, Egypt's longstanding egalitarian ideology espousing educational opportunity has paid some dividents to those children of the poor who have remained in school.     

10 School decentralization and empowerment

School results for children of poverty ‐ those forced by that poverty to live in inner‐city neighbourhoods ‐generally indicate educational failure at a much higher rate than is seen for students nurtured by wealthier school districts. This failure in school severely limits chances of social and economic upward mobility, which translates into a waste of human capital for the nation's business‐industrial‐political complex, and dashed hopes, dreams and self‐esteem for the individual. Parents and concerned citizens from across socio‐economic strata, long aware of the general inadequacy of schools in poor communities, have demanded improvement, often seeking it through legal and political means. Important strategies among the various federal, state and local school reform efforts to make schooling a meaningful process for all students, and particularly the minority poor, are decentralization and citizen/parent empowerment, the focus of this chapter. The movement to decentralize school governance ‐ an effort to place control into the hands of the people being served ‐ has gained momentum and exists in some form in most large‐city school districts today. An extension of administrative decentralization, citizen/parent empowerment is seen as one of several factors, including teacher and administrator preparation, curriculum renewal, school financing, and school restructuring, vital in the improvement of schools. A look at the meaning and scope of decentralization, operationalized through citizen/parent empowerment, and its probable effectiveness in improving school outcomes indicates that, alone, it is insufficient to ensure positive academic and social performance in school.     

The perceptions of stakeholders of the implementation of a state funding model in South African public schools

The government has made great strides in redressing past imbalances in education through the National Norms and Standards for School Funding (NNSSF) policy that focuses on equity in school funding. This NNSSF model compels the state to fund public schools according to a poverty quintile system, where poor schools are allocated much more funding for resources than affluent schools. Using qualitative research, school management teams, school governing bodies and principals of six public schools located within the Gauteng West District were interviewed to determine their views of how the NNSSF policy had been implemented. One of the findings revealed that equity in public schools has not been fully achieved since funding provided by the state is insufficient to address the backlog in educational resources. It is recommended that the state abandons the policy of funding schools according to quintile rankings but instead, fund schools based on resource needs.     

Parents,quality, and school choice: why parents in Nairobi choose low-cost private schools over public schools in Kenya’s free primary education era

Low-cost private schools (LCPS) are widespread in Kenya, particularly in urban areas. This study examines the reasons that parents send children to fee-charging schools in a context of free public primary education. Drawing on parent survey and interview data, as well as interviews with national policy makers, we found that parents who chose LCPS for their children were more driven by quality concerns than were public school parents. We also present data on the costs of the school types, compared to household income. Despite being termed ‘low cost’, the fees charged by schools primarily serving the poor were often a heavy burden on families. We conclude with recommendations for maximising the impact of LCPS on educational access and quality.