Education: Tax or Investment?
Between April 14-16th, the HSE hosted a conference called "School Choice and School Differentiation in Comparative Perspective”, which was organized by SELS.
School Choice and School Differentiation in Comparative Perspective, 2014School Choice and School Differentiation in Comparative Perspective, 2014School Choice and School Differentiation in Comparative Perspective, 2014
Researchers believe that the education system solves two problems at once: reproduction of class inequality on the one hand, and social mobility on the other. On April 16th the International conference "School Choice and School Differentiation in Comparative Perspective” finished in St. Petersburg. The conference was organized by the Laboratory of Sociology of Education and Science, and hosted by the HSE.
The conference was attended not only by researchers who study the selection of schools and social differentiation in education, but also by social workers, which added a live practical aspect to academic discussions. The conference participants hailed from Russia, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, England, Germany and France.
Just a few decades years ago parents had the ability to choose a specific school for their children. Soon, researchers began to study the conditions and background for these choices. The gist of the educational problem is that the education system maintains a social distance between classes, but, at the same time, “it should bring people to the specific positions where they would be able to fulfil their potential properly, in accordance with their abilities and interests,” the convener and SESL director Daniel Alexandrov says. “The abilities of one person would let them become an excellent doctor or a teacher, but for someone else, a combination of economic abilities would make them a successful programmer or engineer who better deals with things rather than with people. "
The neo-liberal economic paradigm suggests that the market is the best mechanism for sorting out goods, services and people, since freedom of choice lies at the heart of the market mechanisms. In the area of education, the idea of parents being able to select specialized schools for their children has become a basis for educational reforms of the last 30 years. Over many decades, the Scandinavian countries have displayed a universalist approach to school education. For example, regardless of the educational level of parents, all children should attend local schools where they can choose specific courses based on their own interests. “The moment when Sweden announced that parents should be able to choose a specific school for their children and allowed changes in schools can be considered as a marker for the transition of European countries towards the freedom of educational choice" says Alexandrov.
In their presentations, many researchers were pointing out that this free choice leads to increased class and ethnic segregation between schools, but this process has not yet been studied in detail. In the early 1990’s in Russia, the differentiation of specialized schools and options for free transfer of children from one school to another created a quasi-market of educational services in large cities.
These problems have been discussed from a range of various viewpoints and research methods, including the paradigm of qualitative sociology, the stratification of the middle classes and social policies, and statistical modelling based on quantitative data. There were also a number of studies on simulation models of the educational choices of students and school segregation. Sometimes, during the presentations of qualitative sociologists, the modellers would drift away and start programming their models on their laptops, and vice versa: during the modellers’ presentations, the sociologists would get bored because they didn’t understand the maths. However, a degree of mutual understanding was ensured by the common topics and objects of the research. During the conference and after it, the participants were expressing a wish to get better acquainted with the educational systems of different countries, to look at the situation through different "national research glasses." Sonia Exley (London School of Economics) noted that "the conference opened her eyes to the educational processes in other countries, because, before this conference, she underestimated the national educational systems and wasn’t interested in schools outside of England."
The highlight of the conference was a speech by the dean of the Institute of Education at the Higher School of Economics, Alexander Sidorkin. He described school attendance by high school students as a form of state tax imposed on their families, rather than as the consumption of services and investment in their future. He pointed out that, in the USA, the average salary of a high school graduate is slightly higher than the salary of a school dropout. For the poorer social strata, two additional years in school are considered more like a financial reward rather than a profitable investment. The Russian education system should be revised with this point in mind.
On the third day of the conference, the attendants were exploring possibilities of research cooperation and joint projects in a series of workshops. Having looked at the presentations of the colleagues and spotted similarities in their research, many participants were open to the possibility of comparative research.
The researchers were discussing the possibility of writing several reviews on the policy of school choice in different countries, of compiling a special issue of a research journal with conference abstracts, and submitting joint applications for research grants that would fund joint projects. Several researchers from various countries offered the SESL staff their help in data processing. In particular, Kerstin Schneider (Wuppertal University, Germany) said that her department is willing to accept graduate and post-graduate HSE students for internship, which would help them to apply econometric methods of data collection and to write their research papers.
By Tatiana Chernova