Educational choice (vouchers) and social mobility

A quantitative approach to study the impact of vouchers is thought to yield more meaningful results than theoretical arguments. This paper makes use of a model of the behavior of young people and schools to simulate the effects of vouchers of varying sizes on students in different income categories, living in three communities — poor, average and wealthy — under two assumptions about how public schools spend their resources. The first assumption is that public schools minimize their offerings to individual students (i.e. maximize their surplus) in order to further objectives not valued by students. The second assumption is that public schools act as competitive firms, maximizing their educational offerings to individual students.Findings from the simulation are neither uniformly positive nor negative. They do not support the argument that poor young people will be better off with a voucher system. Even in the most favorable case — when public schools maximize surplus — a systemic choice system would not come close to equalizing educational opportunity across income groups.     

School violence,school differences and school discourses

This article highlights one strand of a study which investigated the concept of the violence‐resilient school. In six inner‐city secondary schools, data on violent incidents in school and violent crime in the neighbourhood were gathered, and compared with school practices to minimise violence, accessed through interviews. Some degree of association between the patterns of behaviour and school practices was found: schools with a wider range of well‐connected practices seemed to have less difficult behaviour. Interviews also showed that the different schools had different organisational discourses for construing school violence, its possible causes and the possible solutions. Differences in practices are best understood in connection with differences in these discourses. Some of the features of school discourses are outlined, including their range, their core metaphor and their silences. The authors suggest that organisational discourse is an important concept in explaining school effects and school differences, and that improvement attempts could have clearer regard to this concept.     

Pupil mobility,attainment and progress in secondary school

This paper is the second of two articles arising from a study of the association between pupil mobility and attainment in national tests and examinations in an inner London borough. Our first article examined the association of pupil mobility with attainment and progress during primary school. It concluded that pupil mobility had little impact on performance in national tests at age 11, once pupils’ prior attainment at age 7 and other pupil background factors such as age, sex, special educational needs, stage of fluency in English and socio‐economic disadvantage were taken into account. The present paper reports the results for secondary schools (age 11–16). The results indicate that pupil mobility continues to have a significant negative association with performance in public examinations at age 16, even after including statistical controls for prior attainment at age 11 and other pupil background factors. Possible reasons for the contrasting results across school phases are explored. The implications for policy and further research are discussed.     

Pupil mobility,attainment and progress in primary school

This article presents an analysis of the association between pupil mobility and educational attainment in the 2002 national end of Key Stage 2 (KS2) tests for 11‐year‐old pupils in an inner London education authority. The results show that pupil mobility is strongly associated with low attainment in the end of key stage tests. However, the negative association with pupil mobility is reduced by half when account is taken of other pupil background factors known to be related to educational attainment (such as special educational need and socio‐economic disadvantage), and is eliminated entirely when account is also taken of pupils' prior attainment as indicated by end of KS1 test scores at age 7. Thus there is no indication that changing school has a negative impact on educational progress during primary school. Pupils who join their school during KS2 from other schools in England are more likely to be ‘at risk’ of low attainment due to higher levels of socio‐economic disadvantage, a greater need for support in relation to English as an additional language, a higher incidence and greater severity of special educational needs and pre‐existing low attainment at the end of KS1. A key factor in understanding the relationship between mobility and attainment is the reason for mobility. One‐third of mobile pupils had arrived from schools outside of England, often as refugees, asylum seekers or economic migrants, and these pupils accounted for the major part of the effect ascribed to ‘pupil mobility’. The low attainment of these pupils is the result not of ‘changing school’ but of a broad range of factors including substantial cultural, educational and social adjustment.     

Residence-based priorities and school choice

Many countries use centralized school choice procedures to assign pupils to schools. To address excess demand for a particular school, ties are broken according to priority points granted based on various criteria, such as proximity to the school. Using a unique reform undertaken in Madrid (Spain), we estimate the impact of abolishing residence-based priorities on families’ school choices, the stated motivation for choosing a school, and the final school allocation. Utilizing several administrative datasets on school applications, we find that the reform increases families’ out-of-district school assignments and assignments to schools further away from their home address. Parents of immigrant children did not change their application behavior in the first years of the reform but caught up with natives three years after its implementation. Children generally accessed slightly better-performing schools, particularly those from lower-educated backgrounds.     

Caught in the triangle of mobility: social,residential and pupil mobility

This article examines the school choices of families who have recently experienced downward mobility during the economic crisis in Spain. Based on semi-structured interviews we analyse the educational strategies of the families in a Bourdieusian framework, focusing on how they cope with the loss of their perceived social status. Prior to the crisis, these families of working-class origin improved their social position as a result of their success in economic capital accumulation with a humble increase in social and cultural capital. Our research suggests that the concerns of families confronted with downward social mobility are manifested in tensions related to their school choice in terms of their strategies of resistance and negotiation with regards to the ownership, social composition and corresponding perceived quality of the school. School can symbolically represent the last resort, an indispensable investment in one’s own future and that of the next generation.     

CCTV,school surveillance and social control

Burgeoning fears for safety in UK schools have resulted in a rapid growth in the use of various security measures, most notably closed‐circuit television (CCTV) systems. Utilising semi‐structured interviews and non‐participant observation this research examines how CCTV is used in schools, explores the manner in which this facilitates social control and considers the wider implications of such surveillance technology. It is argued that this technology, which is predominantly focused on students, is effective in facilitating direct observation, but does little to foster self‐surveillance in the longer term. It is concluded that CCTV use in schools represents an underlying shift in values, away from exercising social control through enculturation towards system integration. This has important ethical implications.     

Every school a school of choice: school choice in Ireland as viewed through American eyes

‘Choice’ and ‘freedom’ as measured by the ability of parents to select their children's schools are deeply embedded in the national ethos of the United States of America. Wealthy American parents have always exercised school choice but minority and lowincome students are often trapped in failing schools. This paper is based on research conducted in a purposive sample of Irish primary schools into the nature of school choice. The authors examine five aspects of the Irish national primary school system that could provide models for American educators, whose vision often stops at the boundaries of the United States: education law, school choice for all, a national curriculum framework, the role of assessment, and the role of parents and educators in the creation of new schools. While arguably the five relate directly to school choice of different degrees, they collectively weave a web whereby school systems in the Republic of Ireland and the USA may productively be compared to the benefit of both.     

School organization,school location and student achievement

Conclusions The results refer to grade 6, at the class-teacher level. We cannot deny the possibility that centralization at higher levels may have other pedagogical and organizational consequences. There seems no doubt that centralization to large units has a number of obvious advantages. It gives students greater possibilities of choosing lines of study and of specializing. It makes it possible to care for handicapped students better, makes better equipment available, and so on. Nevertheless, what has been found shows that care must be taken in centralization, particularly of young pupils. Centralization may have an upper limit; the distance between home and school may be so great that the negative results outweigh the positive ones. Further, the school to which centralization is made may be of doubtful quality, and the gains expected may not be forthcoming. In other words, the larger school must be able to take advantage of its greater pedagogical possibilities. It is not least this that justifies research on the school problems of sparsely populated regions, the problems of small schools and of long journeys to school. In the long run, it may help not only students living in rural areas, but all students.

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Schulorganisation, Schulweg und Schülerleistung

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Organisation scolaire, trajet habitation-ecole, resultats scolaires

     

Educational quasi-markets,school effectiveness and social inequalities

Over the past few decades, the figure of the market has clearly made its way into the field of education. For some authors, it represents an alternative to regulation by the public authorities, a different form of co-ordination which is better able to meet the objectives of the education systems. Through a secondary analysis of the PISA 2006 database, we test this hypothesis, as well as an alternative one which suggests that the quasi-market, rather than being linked positively to effectiveness of the education systems, would be associated with the students’ achievement dependence on their socio-economic and cultural background and on the social composition of the school they are enrolled in. Our findings suggest that the quasi-market regulation (school autonomy and competition for student recruitment) (1) is not linked to effectiveness and (2) tends to be associated with a stronger link between schools’ social composition and student achievement.     

如何有效设计中小学课外作业

"减负"一直是教育界一个键词,甚至一度成为近几年两会期间热议的议题之一。如何减负,在现行教育制度下要优化课外作业设计,一方面要有科学的课外作业设计的理念,另一方面要有效设计课外作业形式。     

School subjects,subject communities and curriculum change: the social construction of economics in the school curriculum

The place of economics in the curriculum in England and Wales provides a lens through which we may view the ways in which the curriculum as a whole is fought over and remains shifting terrain. Conceived of as social movements, school subject communities are made up of competing factions giving rise to contest and conflict both within themselves and with other subjects. A social constructionist perspective, such as Goodson's, would suggest that the form and content of the curriculum are outcomes of such ongoing struggle, involving the interplay of power and control that reflect deep‐rooted traditions. Bernstein's notions of school subjects imply complex interplay of official and pedagogic agents in determining their fates as singulars, regions or generic entities. The rise and fall of economics lay substantially outside the control of its subject community and the social movements within it. At post‐16, a search for new content and pedagogies seemed to take little heed of its curricular market position. During the compulsory phase, the emergence of sub‐factions interested in vocational rather than economics education ensured its consignment to cross‐curricular theme status and relative oblivion in the post‐1988 National Curriculum.     

School Organization and Market Ecology: a realist sociological look at the infrastructure of school choice

Programs of school choice are based largely on the idea of a free market’. Recent reform efforts have been based on the assumption that market‐driven educational systems would bring higher achievement levels and greater satisfaction among clients. According to popular views, parents would shop for a school just as they do for any other commodity and competition between schools would ensue, with each school trying to improve itself thereby attracting consumers. There is a major drawback to this reasoning. Markets are rarely completely free from regulation and control, and the desires of individuals do not fully explain the social facts of school choice. As a complement to current school choice studies, a structural explanation of school choice within the theory of network analysis is presented. The study analyses choice in terms of inter‐school student transfers and explains choice as the combined result of two factors. The first is the organization of student mobility in schools, in terms of vacant positions (timing and volume) and student body composition, which posits nine ideal types of school organization. The second factor is the ecology of the market, given in the number of schools in each type. Research conducted in a large city in Israel serves as an example for the approach. The more general implications of the study suggest directions for the theoretical refinement of mobility and attainment studies in sociology.     

Lifelong learning,income inequality and social mobility in Singapore

Singapore has been assigned the role of a ‘model’ nation state primarily for two reasons: its rapid rate of economic growth and its outstanding performance on cross-national tests of educational achievement, such as PISA. This has resulted in advocates of reform citing it as illustrating ‘best practices’, especially in the field of education, and it has more generally been viewed as demonstrating the benefits of economic globalization. This paper analyses from a comparative perspective the more problematic and relatively unexplored third dimension of being a model ‘global’ nation, namely its impact on income inequality and the quality of citizens’ life. We focus on the role of the system of lifelong learning which was designed generally to upgrade the skills of the workforce and specifically to provide low-paid/skilled workers with opportunities to improve incomes and enhance their socio-economic mobility. We demonstrate that despite the remarkable economic growth at a national level and the significant expansion of lifelong learning provision, productivity rates have not improved, income inequality has increased, social mobility has declined and the ‘quality of life’ is, in comparative terms, poor.     

中国的译校问题

This article examines school choice, one of the most debated issues in Chinese education beginning in the early 1990s. To start with, it depicts the origin of school choice. Secondly, the main reasons contributing to school choice are analysed: the disparity among schools, political and economic changes, the system of promotion to the next stage of school, and historical and cultural reasons. The reason why schools enrol school choice pupils is also analysed. Then, the reactions of the government to school choice, insisting on the policy of neighbourhood admissions, supporting weak schools, and encouraging the development of nongovernment schools, are analysed. Finally, the debate about school choice is discussed. To sum up, school choice in China is a completely urban phenomenon. It is a demand of social group with high social economic status. While the social gap widens, school choice is an unavoidable issue in education. Therefore, the problem faced by the government is not simply to prohibit it, but how to deal with it.