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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