Session Information
ERG SES H 02, Transition
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
Allmendinger (1989: 233) has derived a typology of educational systems from the dimensions stratification and standardization. Standardization refers to transitions, curricula and the uniformity of school-leaving examinations, whereas stratification is related to the existence of different school types which lead to certain certificates. In highly stratified educational systems, students are sorted after a short period of primary schooling into hierarchically arranged secondary school types on the basis of their scholastic achievement. Due to curricula based on school type, upward mobility in these educational systems is low during lower secondary education. For this reason, the first transition from primary to secondary level is of crucial importance for students’ future educational and employment perspectives.
In such highly stratified educational systems, three issues are often discussed. The first of these issues is the fairness of evaluation methods and the ability of teachers to diagnose student eligibility for a certain school type. A number of studies have shown that teachers’ diagnostic competence in evaluating students’ scholastic potential is rather low. Teachers more often fail to identify the scholastic potential of capable students and send them to less challenging school types than sending incapable students to school types beyond their ability. There is clearly a need for studies which examine factors influencing the diagnostic competence of teachers.
Second, highly stratified systems are often seen as producing a high degree of social inequality in educational participation. In particular, students from ethnic minority backgrounds do not have enough time to develop their cognitive and scholastic capabilities. Despite this, these students and their parents have high educational aspirations which they often fail to realize at the first transition point in the educational system. The genesis and development of educational aspirations and achievement motivation of these groups before and after this first transition point is a widely unexplored field of research.
Third, students who have not been sorted into an adequate school type at the first transition point have to have the possibility to attain higher certificates in their later school career. This is especially true for students from lower social strata and ethnic minority backgrounds. However, there is empirical evidence that these students are, again, less able to translate their educational aspirations into the obtaining of higher certificates. Studies which explore the reasons for this result are still rare.
In this symposium, the contributions deal with Luxembourg, Austria and Germany, countries with highly stratified educational systems. In all countries, after 4 (Germany) or 6 (Austria, Luxembourg) years of primary schooling, the process of sorting into different secondary school types begins. In all countries, the impact of social and ethnic origin on educational opportunities is relatively high and the need for upward mobility is still an unsolved challenge. Despite the fact that the number of transition studies with progressive research designs is still small, all contributors use data from experimental or longitudinal studies. They will therefore be able to explore the issues described above in a detailed way and present reliable causal explanations for the underlying phenomena.
Allmendinger, Jutta (1989): Educational Systems and Labor Market Outcomes. European Sociological Review, 5, (3), 231-250.
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