Are we all given equal opportunity to do well in school? Professor Herman van de Werfhorst explains in this video why inequalities in education are produced by the education system.
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Herman van de Werfhorst is professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, and co-director of the Amsterdam Centre for Inequality Studies (AMCIS, www.amcis.uva.nl).
Tracked educational systems are associated with a greater social inequality in children’s educational achievement. Until now research has assumed that the impact of tracking on the inequality of educational opportunity is independent of other educational institutional features. Using data from the 2006 PISA survey, we study how central examinations affect the association between tracking and inequality. We find that parent’s social class has a larger effect on student achievement in systems without central examinations, whereas in systems with central examinations this relationship is attenuated. We argue that central examinations help hold schools accountable for their performance, thereby making it more likely for schools to allocate students to tracks and reward them on the basis of objective indicators, thereby reducing the impact of parental status on children’s performance.
Curricular Tracking and Central Examinations: Counterbalancing the Impact of Social Background on Student Achievement in 36 Countries
Authors: Thijs Bol, Jacqueline Witschge, Herman G. Van de Werfhorst and Jaap Dronkers
Bron: website UvA
Amidst worries about growing inequalities in citizenship competences of younger generations, policymakers increasingly call on education to equip students for functioning in a democratic society. The degree to which teachers may address inequalities in citizenship outcomes of their students, may depend on the cognitive composition of the classroom, however. Here, we investigate to what degree cognitive peer characteristics are associated with citizenship knowledge and citizenship attitudes in primary education. Our findings suggest that particularly low language ability students benefit from being surrounded with classroom peers that display both variation in and high average levels of cognitive ability for the acquisition of citizenship knowledge.
Working paper 2014/3
Inequalities in Youth Citizenship Knowledge and Attitudes:Does Cognitive Classroom Composition Matter?
Authors: Bram B. F. Eidhof, Geert T.M. ten Dam, Anne Bert Dijkstra and Herman G. van de Werfhorst
Bron: website UvA
We use data from the 2009/10 Wave of the Netherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study to analyze the employment participation and occupational status of Moroccan and Turkish Second Generation Migrants (SGM) in the Netherlands. By considering measures of family background (i.e. parental education, cultural capital) and skills (i.e. linguistic proficiency, numeracy abilities) we provide a more refined analyses of ethnic differences in the labor market than previous studies on SGM. Results show important ethnic differences in how family background and human capital affect labor market outcomes. We find that men’s employment participation is unevenly low amongst Moroccan and Turkish SGM, even after controlling for family background, education, and skills. For women, the low levels of employment participation of Moroccan and Turkish SGM are largely explained by family background, whereas linguistic proficiency also reduces substantially their low employment participation, especially amongst Turkish SGM. For occupational status, men from Turkish origins are the only disadvantaged group, yet this is entirely explained by their social origins. Finally, women from Moroccan and Turkish origins are not disadvantaged in their occupational status, and clearly achieve higher occupational positions than their counterparts with Dutch-born parents coming from similar family backgrounds.
Working Paper 2014/1
Are Ethnic Minorities Disadvantaged? The Employment Participation and Occupational Status of Moroccan and Turkish Second Generation Migrants in the Netherlands.
Authors: Pablo Gracia, Lucia Vazquez and Herman G. van de Werfhorst
Bron: website UvA
In this paper, I argue that our understanding of the increase in economic inequality in advanced welfare de- mocracies could be enhanced by taking account of the changes which took place in the housing regimes of many countries. I demonstrate how one could derive testable hypotheses concerning a direct relationship between both social trends, which can at least theoretically go in both directions (i.e. changing housing regimes influencing inequality trends, or inequality trends influencing characteristics of housing regimes), while the ‘classical’ driving forces of increasing inequalities function as intermediate variables in a multivariate model. Alternatively, a simple interaction model could guide future research, in the sense that social trends which are routinely considered as ‘driving forces’ of increasing economic inequality – but altogether do not explain that much of the observed long- term trend – could theoretically work out in a different way under different housing regimes.
Bron: Wilde, C. 2011. The Interplay between Economic Inequality Trends and Housing Regime Changes in Advanced Welfare Democracies: A new Research Agenda. Amsterdam, AIAS, GINI Discussion Paper 18
