Abstract
The current focus on the role of egalitarianism in advancing academic excellence has been brought about by the international comparisons of educational achievement, measured either by performance in school curricula (TIMSS) or by the development of critical thinking skills (PISA). Importantly, the extent of societal inequality is found to be significantly correlated with a lower level of average student achievement. Furthermore, national educational structures themselves play a role in promoting or hindering disparities in performance. Statistically, across educational systems the low variance in student achievement within schools and the low variance in achievement between schools translate into more equitable student performance. Conversely, high variance in the above two may indicate the segregation of low-performing and high-performing students in different types of schools and/or in ability grouping or tracking within schools. The consistently top PISA/TIMSS performing nations turned out to have more equitable educational structures, including comprehensive schools for all. Medium-high-performing nations are not as equitable as the top ones, and among these there are several Central European nations that have shown increasingly inequitable student performance over time. It is noteworthy that these post-socialist nations once relied on comprehensive schools but in more recent times have tended to abandon the comprehensive school model. This chapter will review how the ‘egalitarian comprehensive school’ was constructed, demystified and discredited in the countries formerly under socialism and the extent to which these nations differ in the level and inequality of their educational structures and student achievement today. Will inequitable educational structures ultimately hinder the academic achievement of the post-socialist societies? Alternately, will more equitable school structures such as the comprehensive school for all become the new ‘global ideal’?
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Notes
- 1.
See the reviewed literature later in the chapter.
- 2.
For the 1929–1979 cohorts’ sample of 4,809 Russian respondents in Theodore Gerber’s study (2007), only 17 % of those who graduated from post-secondary technical educational institutions (SSUZ) entered higher educational institutions (VUZ) after the mandatory three years of work in their profession. And only 15 % of those who graduated from vocational schools (PTU) went on to some kind of post-secondary education, 13 % of them entering SSUZ.
- 3.
The author witnessed a heated discussion in the 1993 conference session at Columbia Teachers’ College between the two parties providing such opposite views based on their own experience and intuition rather than on the systematic data that could be generalised.
- 4.
As equality on paper, or “statistical justice” (Štech 2008).
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Bain, O. (2012). The Comprehensive School and Egalitarianism: From Demystification and Discreditation to Global Ascendance?. In: Griffiths, T., Millei, Z. (eds) Logics of Socialist Education. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4728-9_10
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