The policy implications of the regional pattern of inequities

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3. Policy overview

3.1 The policy implications of the regional pattern of inequities

As it was seen in the previous sections the huge majority of educational disparities that can be described by the traditional indicators of participation dropout and repetition rates, enrollment in low value added programs and dead end strands of education, early school leaving, etc. are generated by the failures of learning. Identifying inequities in terms of learning outcomes allows for better understanding the reasons for school failures and allows for adjusting the policies to the specific context within which inequities are generated. We also saw that this context have certain very important similarities in the Central-European countries, especially the selective nature of the education systems that is demonstrated by the social sorting of students and by the strong power of between school differences in explaining the variance of learning outcomes. In fact, unfair selection increases the negative impact of the different dimensions of social inequalities on learning and individual schools are not able to compensate for these effects. What are the implications of this pattern for the policies aiming at reducing educational disparities that are considered to be illegitimate? At this point it might be worth returning to the already mentioned three regional patterns along the north-westsouth-east axis of Europe. In the Scandinavian countries that are characterized by low social sorting among schools, i.e. the mainstream system is rather equitable direct targeted development of the students at risk of failure is appropriate. In the South-Eastern European countries, where social sorting of the students is lower than in the Central-European countries, but the internal effectiveness performance of education is poor, heavy investment into the improvement of quality of educational services of all schools seems to be the appropriate approach. In between of these two regions, the most effective policy alignment might be also a type of policy in between: addressing the quality of education in those schools that are underperforming. It was already suggested by the PISA 2003 report: “Another key issue is whether to target low-performing schools or students. The proportion of performance variation between schools, … can provide a useful indicator in judging the appropriateness of particular policy approaches. If there is little performance variation between schools, as in Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland or Sweden, then within-school policies aimed at improving the performance of low performing students are likely to be more effective. By contrast, in countries such as Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Turkey, large performance differences between schools would suggest that policies should target low-performing schools, at least within each type of school where the education system is stratified.” OECD PISA 2003. This – unfortunately not very much noticed conclusion of the PISA survey – also suggest that the type of intervention that offers greater chances for success are targeted at certain schools, and not certain student groups. It does not mean at all, that certain measures addressing specific obstacles to learning success of certain student groups are not important. There are specific problems that can’t be dealt with effectively by the targeted development of underperforming schools, such as language barriers, social disadvantages, segregation, etc. Let’s take the example of the education of Roma students. The educational failure of the huge masses of Roma students is caused by the combination of four different types of problems. Each type of problems can be addressed by a 25 policy toolkit policy model that designed to respond to the specific obstacles to learning success : The roots of Roma underachievement The appropriate type of policy Poor quality of educational services Roma students are enrolled to underperforming schools Targeted school improvement color blinded mainstream policy, targeting underperforming schools regardless of the ethnic composition of students Interethnic relations status differences among Roma and non-Roma, demography, institutional support Affirmative action - often called: positive discrimination supplementary, color conscious preferential and developmental measures Minority rights access to culture and mother tongue instruction, involvement of self-organized minorities Minority education programs supplementary, mother tongue, bilingual, cultural or multicultural programs Human rights hidden or institutionalized discrimination, segregation Anti-discrimination policies and anti-bias training supplementary, color conscious Source: Radó, 2001. If we look back to the last decade of educational policies of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary what we see is huge investment into the improvement of the education of Roma students with very modest result. The same applies to all sorts of programs of international donor agencies. Of course, sometimes there are illusionary expectations towards education in this respect. However, the relative failure of education is well documented. One of the underlying reasons for this failure is the fact that these policies and developments fall under the category of supplementary policies, while – due to the lack of targeted school improvement - the main features of the education system remained untouched. In other words: what really matters is the capacity of the whole education system, especially, that of the individual ordinary schools to achieve a minimum level of equity for all students regardless of their ethnic background. This logic does not apply only to the education of Roma students. Without the targeted development of underperforming schools the separationsegregation pressure of the system hardly can be reduced and the impact of supplementary measures will remain relatively limited. Also, this is the main reason why the many good practices of particular schools remain isolated and can’t be scaled up. Obviously, without generating demand by generating development in the underperforming schools the available good practices and working solutions will not be applied in other schools. Having this problem in mind, let’s look at the recent measures and programs of the participating countries as they are outlined in the country reports. The brief overview of policies in the following sections is based on the distinction between mainstream and supplementary policies. Mainstream policies are changes in the whole education system that – intentionally or not – have an impact on the equity of the system, or on the conditions that allow for the implementation of other policies aiming at making the system more equitable. The use of the term of mainstream policy is not identical with the widely used 26 “mainstreaming” for the integration and inclusion of particular students groups. Nevertheless, in most cases successful mainstreaming is the results of successful mainstream policies. Supplementary policies are targeting certain student groups or may target entire levels or segments of the system for the sake of solving specific problems of particular students groups. “Mainstream policies” “Supplementary policies” The self-evaluation based school improvement efforts of the staff and management of schools is in the focus The additional support provided to students, teachers, schools and other actors is in the focus Aims at improving equity of the entire system Aims at improving the leaning success of specific student groups Target underperforming schools Target specific student groups Based on the identification of underperforming schools Based on the classification of targeted students groups Uses the instruments of governance of education that are adjusted to this purpose Its specific measures are implemented by incremental policy making or by development projects

3.2 Mainstream policies for greater equity