Article
Основные подходы к проблеме равенства образовательных возможностей
The article describes the principal theoretical approaches to the problem of education equality. The author shows that discussions about equality usually start with the question of ensuring equal access to education for a certain social group, but then switch to the question of equal education results. The article also systematizes the pedagogic mechanisms that increase the inequality in education.
The current situation of growing up is characterized by "breaking" the educational space: several decades ago leisure and educational activities were concentrated in the school, today the city provides more "children's" services. To plan the strategy for the development of additional education, the school needs to assess the environment in which it is located, because different territories even in the same city are very differently saturated with offers for children. We propose the methodology for assessing the quality of the school territory taking into account its capabilities in organizing the educational space for various categories of schoolchildren.
The objective of this paper is to estimate the factors of intergeneration educational mobility in Russia and Soviet Union, that is to test the equality in accessing the continuation of education at the next level for children from different social groups (families with various levels of the family capital), estimated for different cohorts. The data source is Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) in 2006-11. There are panel data collected in 1994-2011. The sample is representative for Russia population as a whole. In 2006 there were some questions about respondent parents, that allow us to test if there is the dependence between educational level of respondent and some parameters of his/her parents, including their educational level, Communist Party membership and several other.
We estimated the model of probability to get the education of the given level depending on gender, age, nationality, characteristics of parents and birthplace for Russian people born in 1946-1990. Data about respondents' education are collected in 2006-11, about their parents - in 2006. The method of this model estimation is multinomial regression. The model was estimated for the pooled sample, as well as for three cohorts separately: born in 1946-60, 1961-75, 1976-90. It was found out that the family capital (first of all, the educational level of parents and urbanization level) represent an essential obstacle for educational opportunities of Russian high schools graduates. Regression estimation for the pooled sample demonstrates the significant level of dependence of respondents' education on that of their parents.
Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.