The Issue of Educational Results’ Contextualization: Schools, Their Social Structure and a Territory Deprivation Level

Abstract

Gordey Yastrebov - Senior Research Fellow, Laboratory for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Development, National Research University Higher School of Economics. E-mail: gordey.yastrebov@gmail.com

Alexey Bessudnov - Research Fellow, Centre for Advanced Studies, National Research University Higher School of Economics. E-mail: abessudnov@hse.ru

Marina Pinskaya - Leading Research Fellow, Centre of Social and Economic School Development, National Research University Higher School of Economics. E-mail: m-pinskaya@yandex.ru

Sergey Kosaretsky - Director, Center of Social and Economic School Development, National Research University Higher School of Economics. E-mail: skosaretski@hse.ru 

Address: 20, Myasnitskaya st., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation.

The authors discuss a conceptual framework of educational results’ contextualization, that is of account taken when formulating education policy of the fact of differentiating schools according to pupils’ social and economic char­acteristics, as well as according to the schools’ physical and human resourc­es. There is an extensive literature review in the article where the authors analyze in detail foreign and national hands-on experiences of account taken of territory factors in educational inequality studies. In Russia the basic problem that didn’t let to work out an accurate and differential estimate of territory de­velopment at the level of municipal units until quite recently was an absence of the corresponding statistics. In 2011 the Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) for the first time opened access to a database with information from municipal units’ statistical passports. The authors analyze how differences in educational results between Russian schools are connected to their differences in 1) social and economic characteristics of pupils and their families; 2) physical and human resources; 3) certain territory development indicators depending on where the schools are situated. The authors used data from so­cial passports collected during surveys in schools of the Moscow and the Yaroslav regions in 2011–2012, as well as municipal statistics data which enable to estimate a level of social and economic deprivation in settlements of different types on the basis of a limited set of indicators. In the statistical analysis a two-level regression model was used. A multilevel analysis enables first of all to find out how variables measured at the level of both schools and settle­ments are connected to an average mark for Unified state exam; in the second place it enables to check if a nature of connection between variables meas­ured at the level of schools and the average mark for USE depends on charac­teristics of the settlements (by means of interaction effects); and in the third place it enables to estimate to what extent a connection between characteristics of schools and the average mark for USE in different settlements is different (by means of the so-called random effects). The analysis results make it possible to state that the academic progress determined on the basis of aver age marks for Russian language and Mathematics USE is indeed consistently different in schools with 1) different social structure and 2) different physical and human resources. A level of territory deprivation in itself does not influence educational results: typically poor training outcomes that are observed for example in country schools can be explained by resource scarcity and their specific social structure characteristics.