| Abstract: | The socioeconomic changes that took place in Russia in the 1990s defined both the ideology and practice of educational reform. The answer to the question: ‘Was the educational system democratized?’, is of key importance in evaluating the social outcomes of the educational reforms. In this paper, I discuss three aspects of the problem of inequality in school education in Russia: (a) social stratification and institutional changes in the school system; (b) regional features and inequality in education; and (c) the school as the site of social differentiation. The first and second aspects are concerned with macro tendencies, and I use official statistical data in discussing these. The third aspect has a socio-psychological orientation, and here I draw on material from research undertaken by the Centre of Sociology of Education in the Russian Academy of Education. |
