Aim of this presentation is to show how research on education can address ambigous issues and provide relevant results. More exactly, I try to answer how can educational research contribute in analyzing the phenomenon of school inequalities understood as form of social inequalities. To prove this, I link „classical” topics of educational research (such as school performance, school curricula, teaching activities, working in the classroom) to cultural anthropology and policy oriented accounts. In doing so, the framework of audit culture is applied; this term coined by Chris Shore and Susan Wright denotes „the way in which individuals construct themselves as professional subjects.” (Shore - Wright, in Strathern, 2000:58). When applied to education, the notion of audit refers to performance, quality, control, discipline, accreditation, good practice, and the way these principles are coined by an external from-above control and internalized by lower levels of power and agency (ibid., 61). Due to its capacity to encompass and link top-mid-low levels of the educational system, audit culture is capable to broaden the context of everyday school work, and connect it to the legal framing, policy making in the field of education. This “blowing up” of school activities and school experiences may help to answer questions like absenteeism, abandoning school, low school performance, educational inequalities etc., see and approach them as complex social phenomena. So it may help us to understand, why certain categories (migrants and undocumented people in Western Europe, ethno-racial minorities in Western and Eastern Europe) fall out from the tuition-free and compulsory system of the elementary education. Applying this framework to the field of Romany studies may have a special importance. Making the „Romani ghetto schools” or „Gypsy schools”  all over Eastern Europe is commonly acknowledged as evocative of educational inequality for Roma (Danova or Surdu in Rekosh – Sleeper, 2004). These institutions are outcomes of residential segregation and the rejection of Roma children by “better” educational units; such schools have ill-equipped infrastructure, unqualified teachers, and predominantly Roma children (Rekosh – Sleeper, 2004). Although existence of the above-mentioned forms of exclusion can hardly be denied, the making of „Gypsy schools” can go back to many different reasons; this framework may show us, why?

David B. Grusky - Szonja Szelényi : The Inequality Reader.Contemporary and Foundational Readings in Race, Class, and Gender. Westview Press, 2011 Marylin Strathern (ed.): Audit cultures.Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, Francis and Taylor, 2000 Edwin Rekosh - Maxine Sleeper: Separate but Unequal.Combating Discrimination Against Roma in Education: A Source Book, 2004