Article
Family Background and School Choice in Cities of Russia and Estonia: Selective Agenda of the Soviet Past and Present
In this article, we demonstrate the size of family background eff ects in various regions of Russia and Estonia, concentrating on urban and rural diff erences, addressing the idea that the family background effect is moderated by school level admission policies. Having common path-dependent educational institutions from the communist period, the countries diff er in both the extensiveness of the welfare state and system level school choice policies. However, we see many commonalities in both systems, especially at the urban school level. The family background eff ect is defi ned as the dependence of student achievement on family background characteristics, such as parental education, income and social status. In operationalising family background, the number of books at home and parental education are used as proxies, and its eff ect is measured as a percentage of the individual level PISA 2012 score. We contribute to the literature by studying school choice, its key characteristics and moderating eff ects by school level admission policy in an urban environment.
This two-part overview of contemporary Russian anthropology focuses in detail on the work of several scholars and situates it in the changing landscape of Russian academia. The main issue I address is debates about an academic identity of Russian anthropology as ‘historical science’. Given that in Western anthropology, history has become one of the leading modes of anthropological analysis and that the turn to history marked a radical repositioning of anthropology’s very subject, it is important to explore how such configurations of history and anthropology work in other anthropological traditions and what the reasons are for turning to history or, conversely, avoiding it, for specific national, continental and transnational anthropological schools. In this article, I explore these questions by focusing on anthropology in Russia with an aim of reassembling the relationship between anthropology and history from the point of view of the anthropology of time. I ask what temporal frameworks underscore the relationship between anthropology and history. I explore these understandings ethnographically, that is, through ethnographic interviews with Russian scholars in addition to close readings of their works.
The application of «protective reservations» is a fundamental principle of modern codifications of the private international law. The post-graduate student of the Private International Law Department, Faculty of Laws, National Research University «The Higher School of Economics», the advocate E.A. Kruty (e-mail: ekrutij@yandex.ru) minutely analyses provisions about the reservation about the public policy and mandatory rules which are included in the international acts and ten national codifications of XXI centuries (Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Estonia, Mongolia, Russia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Macedonia, Turkey). Despite the apparent prevalence of the negative construction of the reservation about the public policy the lawmaker prefers in some situations its positive variant. An appeal to codifications allows to identify the certain conditions on which protective reservations take effect. Their most detailed description is contained in the Belgian and Bulgarian codes. Not less interesting is a regulation of the legal consequences coming as a result of application of these legal institutions for private legal relations with a foreign element including in the international civil procedure.
The book is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Russian parliamentarism. The analysis of historical experience and actual problems of development of parliamentarism in Russia, Germany and a number of other European countries is presented. The authors are leading Russian and foreign experts from a number of research centers in Russia and Europe. Materials on the analysis of the development of parliamentarism in Germany and other European countries are based on the results of the European project "Parliamentary representation in Europe: recruiting and the career of legislators in 1848-2005", implemented during the last decade.
The book is addressed to a wide range of readers - scientists, politicians, public servants, teachers and students, everyone who is interested in the history and modern experience of Russian and European parliamentarism.
Many mid-income countries face a significant and challenging problem of low educational achievement. This research looks at a Full-Time Primary Schools Programme implemented in Mexico, to work out if extending the time pupils spend at school can enhance skills in language and mathematics. The results of matching plus difference-in-differences point to a positive impact on schools value-added. The effects are concentrated among poorer schools, with gains after policy adoption of 0.11 standard deviations (SD) in both subjects. However, quantile regressions show that the lowest-performance schools are not benefiting from longer school days, posing questions on programme effectiveness to improve the achievement of those who are more in need. Analysis of causal channels suggests that gains reported by the programme do not come from changes in the composition of teachers and pupils in treated schools, and that richer schools are more prone to devote the extra-time of instruction to non-core subjects, notably sports and arts.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.