Spatial Econometrics in Wuppertal
Ksenia Tenisheva has recently returned from her two-week trip to Wuppertal.
On her working meeting with colleagues, Ksenia Tenisheva (Junior Research Fellow of SELS) has told about her two-week internship at the Center for Economic Research of Education (Wuppertal, Germany). For two weeks she worked with Kerstin Schneider and Anna Makles. In April, Dr. Schneider came to St. Petersburg to speak at the international conference "School Choice and School Differentiation in Comparative Perspective” organized by our laboratory. Dr. Schneider is the head of the Centre, and at the University of Wuppertal she works at the Department of Taxes and gives a course in economics for bachelor’s degree. Anna Makles recently received a PhD in economics, and currently she researches the impact of armed conflicts on mental faculties in children.
For these two weeks, Ksenia was mastering the method of spatial econometrics. This method helps to reveal the differences between schools of different types that are located close to each other, and to study their inter-connection. Such a study was performed on 180 schools of St. Petersburg, and the data for this research were collected by the SELS staff and students. The research sample included gymnasiums and lyceums, magnet schools, and standard schools without any special attention to some subjects. An analysis of segregation between these schools was performed based on the average scores of the Unified State Exams on Russian language and mathematics taken by the graduates.
The primary analysis was aimed at revealing school clusters based on their density on the city map. It was found that often one school in the district would absorb all most capable students, and all other schools in the area would take the remaining, less talented students.
A further analysis was aimed at collating the distance between schools with their success. A comparison of schools located at the distance of 1.5 km from each other has shown a clear segregation based on the USE results: gymnasiums and magnet schools would have the highest scores in their districts, whereas the results for standard schools would fall far behind.
These results are very important for the scientific community, because they challenge the opinion on the lack segregation between Russian schools, which is prevalent among international organizations that study education processes. The recognition of segregation will affect the sample types and the analytical models, which will be applied to further analyses of the data collected in Russia, which, in turn, should change the conclusions and recommendations provided by the experts from these organizations.
Therefore, we can consider that the beginning of our cooperation with our German colleagues has been successful.
In the future, we plan to expand our analysis and incorporate the data on the socio-economic status of the families of children from different schools; these data have been already collected by our laboratory.
Ksenia plans to travel to Wuppertal again very soon and to continue her work on this project.
We shall be glad to welcome the German colleagues at SESL as well. We also plan to write and publish a joint paper with the results of our recent studies.