Will Brehm  1:57
Michael Sciffer and Laura Perry, welcome to FreshEd.

Michael Sciffer  2:00
Hi, Will.

Laura Perry  2:01
Thank you. Hi, Will.

Will Brehm  2:02
It’s really great that you can both join me today for the first episode of 2022. And we’re actually going to be talking a lot about schooling and issues of socioeconomic status and segregation. But to start, I guess, the broader question is, why is it that we see schools so often as sort of a social leveler? As a way to sort of decrease inequality? Why do we assume that?

Michael Sciffer  2:23
I think it’s because we view schools as a place where we offer the same opportunities to learn to young people no matter what their background, what their advantages, or disadvantages may be. So, it’s really a hope that the academic sorting of students is based on the effort and talents of the students, not on their family background. So, a talented or hard working child from a disadvantaged background can achieve excellent academic results without any barriers from their background. I think that’s what they hope.

Will Brehm  2:51
So, there’s some sort of meritocracy at play where you are rewarded for the merit that you can display and show and schools will live up to that meritocracy regardless of the student, whatever their background is?

Michael Sciffer  3:06
I guess that’s how I hear it expressed in Australia. That’s a pretty common message. I guess, across all political spectrums, that’s commonly expressed.

Will Brehm  3:14
I guess not all schools are the same, though. And that notion of meritocracy and living up to this ability to be a social leveler doesn’t always happen. So, I guess what might start impacting the ability to decrease inequality, or to live up to that meritocracy? Like what might actually happen to prevent meritocracy from being enacted?

Michael Sciffer  3:39
Well, there’s many factors that can act as those barriers. Differences in resourcing of schools, geography, students from different cultural backgrounds that may not be catered for, students with disabilities, students in areas with high concentrations of poverty, or students coming from backgrounds where family culture may not match up with the dominant culture that’s valued in a school. Those sorts of things can act as barriers, that can be a real challenge for schools to address, and for school systems to address.

Will Brehm  4:12
And what about the school system itself? Like if the school in different countries is just sort of organized in different ways? Does that impact it as well?

Michael Sciffer  4:20
That’s certainly what our research has found. And I think it’s pretty consistent with a lot of research, is that the way curriculum is structured in schools and differentiated across schools makes a big difference to student’s ability to participate, to have that opportunity where all children have the same opportunities. So, for example, differentiation between schools straightaway puts up a difference between schools that creates barriers that stop, or impede, young people from being able to access opportunities as other students may have within the same system.

Will Brehm  4:52
So, what do you mean by differentiated between schools? What does that mean?

Michael Sciffer  4:55
In some education systems, the curriculum is differentiated quite significantly between schools. So, you’ll have different streams between schools so that some schools will offer an academic curriculum aimed at preparing young people for university education. And then you may have another stream that’s a vocational stream, where very strong focus on preparing young people for the workforce after school. Then you may have another stream that is somewhere in between that may offer both. And so those differences put young people on different academic tracks that have long term consequences for their future opportunities in terms of academic participation.

Will Brehm  5:35
If you were a child, what would it actually be like to pass through some of these different systems that Michael is bringing up?

Laura Perry  5:41
So, in a country with a differentiated secondary school system where you have these different tracks, they’re academically selected. The one that’s the academic preparation one, and that would be called gymnasium in Central Europe, lyceum in France or grammar school in England back in the day. The academic preparation ones are academically selective. And what that selection is based on depends on the country. Germany, for example, when kids are moving into their track at a very young age, it’s one of the youngest in Europe, after about I think year five. So, this would be at lower secondary, or upper primary, depending on how you define it. Those kind of trajectory into the academic stream, which is more highly valued generally in society, is based highly on teacher reports and teacher recommendations. And right away, this sets up issues for students from certain backgrounds that maybe don’t necessarily fit that kind of expectation of what a student is. And this gets back to this whole idea about meritocracy, is that whenever we have a stratified system -where some schools lead to better opportunities than others, or some types of schools lead to better opportunities than others, or some types of schools are more highly valued than others- whenever there’s that kind of stratification where some are better than others, you’re setting up a system where people are going to be competing for what’s more highly valued. And people that have more resources and families that have more resources are always going to be advantaged by that because they have more resources to bring to the competition. If you think about a sporting analogy, you have a kid that’s been taking tennis lessons for 10 years versus one that might have a lot of natural talent but has only had lessons for a year. The kid that’s had those resources, that more training, is going to be more successful on an admission test that’s based on tennis skills. So, this is what is really, the kind of the heart of the problem. It’s not a pure meritocracy. And when the stakes are high, can be really complicated.

Will Brehm  7:42
So, in these differentiated schools, where there’s these different streams that children get tracked on to, you’re saying that in some systems, a child has to be evaluated by a teacher or teachers, that then determines the path that that child ends up taking in future years. Does it also happen by examinations in some systems, which systems?

Laura Perry  8:01
Well, I can speak about the Czech Republic, for example, which is where my children have gone to school for part of their secondary school. At about 25% of students go to gymnasium, which is that academic type of school, and admission to gymnasium is definitely quite rigorous and competitive. So, there would be many kids that will not be successful. And this raises another little interesting -it’s a bit of a segue, but I think it’s an interesting dynamic- is that gymnasiums in the Czech Republic, for example, this would be true in most many places in Europe, their public system is quite strong. And the most prestigious gymnasium are public, and they’re free. But there’s a growing market that’s emerged of private gymnasium that charge fees. And they’re basically there for kids from families that have resources to pay for the school fees but whose kids were not successful getting into the public gymnasium. It’s a weird kind of little development that actually in a way ties in with the study that Michael and I have published about that private school-public school, plus the tracking.

Will Brehm  9:03
That is quite fascinating and thinking beyond systems that are differentiated by these different tracks, such as things called comprehensive education, where every child goes to the same type of  schooling, and you don’t necessarily get tracked. You can still have some of this inequality crop up in those systems, too. Is that correct?

Michael Sciffer  9:22
Yeah. I think it’s probably pretty common that there are variations of tracking within comprehensive systems. And so, for example, there may be different levels of mathematics that are offered to students once you get to senior levels of high school. Maybe different levels of languages or literature. And then most likely, the special education stream as well within those systems. In Australia, we also have selective schools, which are public schools that entrance is gained through academic merit. But again, the curriculum is actually the same in those schools as it is in the neighboring comprehensive high school. There’s certainly tracks within comprehensive schooling systems.

Will Brehm  10:01
And I guess private tutoring would really play a role in something like that where you can take these exams to get into a selective comprehensive school. But it depends on if you’re able to study and get good tutors for a long time before you take that exam.

Michael Sciffer  10:14
There’s an industry for that here in Australia, in New South Wales and in Sydney in particular. There’s quite an industry for tutors, and young people are often being tutored from a very young age in primary school to be prepared for the test where in New South Wales, they are in end of grade five, I think. So, there’s a lot of competition. The vast majority of kids don’t get through the test. And I guess sounding similar to what Laura was saying in the Czech Republic, then the next alternative is to attend a high fee private school. That’s often what happens if you can afford that.

Will Brehm  10:47
Why? I wonder why parents think that’s the sort of second-best option.

Michael Sciffer  10:52
I guess there’s a lot of reporting in the media of school results, end of school results. In particular tertiary entrance, our ranking is reported quite a bit. And schools certainly promote that in their marketing as well. So, there is one particular selective school here in New South Wales that dominates the top student results every year, and has done for since it’s opened. And then the next few schools are usually some elite private schools. And then it’s a mixture from there of public and private.

Laura Perry  11:20
I just got one little thing to add on to that is that, Michael, you would probably know this a bit more than I do. But I think in Australia, the default higher status type of schooling is private. And the public selective school system, while it has a tradition in New South Wales, has really grown in the last couple of decades as a way for the public school system to compete for desirable students. So, it’s kind of that flip. It’s like the default, good, highly valued is private but yet you have these selective schools as a way to kind of compete for those students. And so, for many families, they’re looking at, you know, we can save maybe $300,000 if our child gets into the selective public school versus the high fee private school.

Will Brehm  12:03
And so, what about other countries? Like what do we know about socioeconomic status and sort of segregation by different tracks? Like what else do we know about it in different countries?

Michael Sciffer  12:14
The research which has looked into that shows that there’s quite a strong relationship between tracking and socioeconomic status. I think there’s a couple of factors behind that. One is, you know, the relationship between academic achievement and socioeconomic background. So, students who do well on the test tend to be from higher socioeconomic status families. And so those are the students who get into the academic streams in differentiated systems. At the same time, families from different social backgrounds may have different expectations and values around their expectations for their children’s futures and their occupations. And so, then that also differentiates other sort of families, which may apply for an academic test to get into an academic stream versus families who may intentionally pursue a vocational stream for their children. There is quite a strong relationship. It’s been shown consistently on the PISA assessments that systems that track students into different types of schools, there’s quite a strong relationship between the type of school and the social background of a child.

Will Brehm  13:20
And so, in your particular study, in this paper, what did you actually look at, in this sort of larger phenomenon that we’ve been discussing?

Michael Sciffer  13:28
What we looked at is what’s called the socioeconomic compositional effect, which is the effect of the socioeconomic status of your peers on your academic achievement. So, I guess there’s two levels there. There’s your own family background, which is predictive of academic achievement. And then there’s the socioeconomic status of your school, which is also predictive of academic achievement. So, we looked at that level two effect on how that differed among developed countries. And we found there was quite a bit of difference among developed countries. And then we looked at policy settings that moderate or vary the strength of the compositional effect among developed countries.

Will Brehm  14:09
So, in terms of some of these developed countries, what did the differences look like?

Michael Sciffer  14:13
Well, quite low, really, on one end of the spectrum, in terms of the effect of school composition. Those at the other end, it was basically a standard deviation difference in the effect of school composition between developed countries.

Will Brehm  14:28
And what countries would be on that more extreme end?

Michael Sciffer  14:31
So, right at that extreme end, it’s the Netherlands, Japan and Belgium would be right at that end.

Will Brehm  14:38
So, those countries, the Netherlands, Japan, are on one end, and what are the some of the countries on the lower end?

Michael Sciffer  14:46
So, at the lower end, they tend to be Nordic countries. And then one kind of difference was Spain had the lowest effect in terms of school composition on predicting academic achievement in their school system. But besides Spain, then the rest of the countries at that very low level tended to be Nordic countries.

Will Brehm  15:06
So, looking at some of these, you know, cross national comparisons, did anything jump out at you, like surprise you?

Michael Sciffer  15:12
I guess this research for me was a bit of an eye opener, as I was not very familiar with tracking and tracked school systems. I mean, my personal background, in Australia, I went through comprehensive public education. And I became familiar with this but it wasn’t until I did this research, where I really became aware of how different school systems are internationally in terms of differences in curriculum offerings, particularly to secondary school students. And so, I guess I was surprised at how different the school compositional effect is, particularly in European countries, compared to Nordic countries and English-speaking countries as well. It was almost like, if you wanted to group countries into different levels of this effect, the weakest effect is amongst Nordic countries. And then you’re looking at English speaking countries. And then European countries, which there’s quite a spread, even amongst European countries and the size of this effect.

Will Brehm  16:08
In terms of then looking at these systems and sort of the national policies that guide these systems, are there any policy settings that are associated with these differences that you’re finding?

Michael Sciffer  16:19
So, we found two policy settings that predicted these differences. One was age of tracking. So, the younger a decision is made around what track a student goes into, the stronger the school compositional effect is in a country. And the other predictor was the proportion of students in public education. So, the higher the proportion of students in public schools, the lower was the school compositional effect.

Will Brehm  16:46
Based on those insights, what’s the policy implications that you could draw from them?

Michael Sciffer  16:51
I think, reforms around increasing the age at which young people have to make a decision or families or school systems have to make a decision around the type of curriculum people are studying, I think that is an obvious one. And there have been reforms around that in European countries. And there are some research showing that that has improved opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. There’s actually some economic research around that looking at post-school outcomes and income outcomes for people in our systems where there’s some history change around that. So, certainly, delaying the age at which young people are attracted to vocational versus academic streams, particularly making that choice beyond compulsory school age, I think is fairly important. I don’t know about you, but I mean, for me, as an individual, I had no interest in university until I got into my last year of high school. And that didn’t matter because I was in a comprehensive school system. And it gave me that flexibility to be able to make a choice at that stage. And I think for many young people, that’s what they need. So, that’s one way of addressing this as a problem. And I think another is to look at ways of promoting and encouraging public education in national school systems and moving away from some of the market-based reforms where you’re trying to introduce competition between public and private schools through funding, creating vouchers, things like that. Those sorts of policies create segregation within school systems as well. And then that segregation increases the school compositional effect.

Will Brehm  18:23
Do you think some of these compositional effects go beyond socioeconomic status? Like also in terms of race, or ethnicity or some of the other factors that you brought up that can be found within education systems?

Michael Sciffer  18:37
Our paper focused purely on socioeconomic status but there’s certainly research that does look at race. And obviously, there’s a lot of research in the United States that’s looked at racial segregation within a public education system. I think migration status is probably a factor as well, but that one would vary between countries as well. So, some school systems, for example, here in Australia, students from migrant backgrounds actually score higher in academic achievement than students who are born here in Australia, whereas in other countries, it’s the opposite. So, I would imagine in countries where migrant students are scoring lower in systems where they are being segregated you would see that effect on school composition.

Will Brehm  19:21
And do we know anything about sort of non-developed countries, you know, low- and middle-income countries? Is there any research about a similar topic of the socioeconomic composition effect on students in those countries?

Michael Sciffer  19:38
There’s been some research but certainly none that compares systems to look for policies that moderate that effect amongst low-income countries. So, unfortunately, no. There’s not a lot of research in that area but there certainly is research that shows that school compositional effects are impacting school systems in developing countries, in low-income countries but not enough.

Will Brehm  20:04
I think the private international school market is sort of exploding in Asia, and in particular China right now. And I just wonder if there’s, you know, just future research, there’ll be so much to explore in this sort of regard across a wider range of countries in a way.

Michael Sciffer  20:21
Oh, yeah. Most definitely. And I guess, in my mind, in a system where there are fees that are charged for entry into schools, that creates a barrier based on family income, even if the fees are low. And that to me, in my mind, I would imagine that that would predict some level of school segregation. It certainly does in developed countries.

Laura Perry  20:39
I guess, just to follow up on that idea of fees. I mean, I agree completely. And whenever a school charges fees, that’s sending a signal that a society of ‘you get what you pay for’ kind of idea. So, if you have to pay for something, it’s better. And I think that sentiment is alive and well, in many contexts, in many countries. Not everywhere. Like I said, in some countries, if you have to pay for it, it means you weren’t smart enough to go to the real one, the one that’s free. And you see this in universities in Europe as well. I mean, university education is free in many European countries but it’s rationalized. It’s hard to get into. And then there’s a whole then secondary private kind of university setting that exists for students who weren’t able to get into the free universities. I think Japan is probably like this too. So, the issue of fees is an interesting one. And one thing that I found interesting from our study was looking at Holland where there’s a very large proportion of private school students. I’m not 100% sure about this but I believe those schools are private in the sense that they’re privately managed, but they don’t charge fees. They receive the same kind of per capita student funding as public schools would. Again, I’m not 100% sure about that but I do think, for the most part, that private schooling in the Netherlands is more about Catholic schools versus other schools. And the same Ireland, same in the UK. So, for me, the fact that you could still have large school composition effects even when there’s not a big fee issue going on, for me, was interesting and a bit sobering. And that’s something I think that could be certainly looked into further.

Will Brehm  22:21
It brings us back to the beginning about this issue of meritocracy because some of these findings really begin to challenge the discourse that we might have around schools as being social levelers. And when in fact, what you’re finding is that, no, it’s not necessarily the case. And socioeconomic status is so hugely important to the compositional effect of schools.

Michael Sciffer  22:43
Yeah, I would hope we would still want to see schools as an opportunity for social leveling. But we also have to be aware of the current realities and the limitations that we have in those systems. And if we truly want schools to be a place where equal opportunities are offered, then we have to address those barriers. And currently, in many developed countries, our schooling systems are actually entrenching inequality and contributing to intergenerational social inequality. If we want to have that social opportunity to be equal, then we have to address those barriers.

Will Brehm  23:16
Well, Michael Sciffer and Laura Perry, thank you so much for joining FreshEd.

Michael Sciffer  23:20
Thanks, Will.

Laura Perry  23:21
Thank you.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Related Guest Project/Publications

Does School Socioeconomic Composition Matter More in Some Countries than others?

Appropriate modelling of school compositional effects

Critiques of Socio-economic School Compositional Effects: Are They Valid?

The Role of the Socio-economic compositional effect in systemic School Effectiveness and Equity

Curricular Differentiation and Stratification in Australia

Related Resources

Educational Differentiation and Secondary Education and Labor-market Outcomes

Models of Secondary Education and Social Inequality

Secondary School Differentiation and Inequality of Educational Opportunity in Germany

Consequences of School Segregation of Roma in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia

Tracking and Inequality: The Result from Turkey

The Role of Tracking in Comparative Perspective?

Early Tracking and Social Inequality in Educational Attainment: Reforms in 21 European Countries

School Tracking, Educational Mobility and Inequality in German Secondary Education

Vocational Education and Social Inequalities in Within-and between-School Curriculum Tracking

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com