Education Policy and Urban-Rural Disparities in Schooling in Post-Soviet Countries

Journal of Economic Sociology. 2026. Vol. 27. No. 3. P. 99–128.

Iskakova B., Kosaretsky S., Zair-Bek S. I., Anchikov K.

The issue of urban-rural inequality is recognised as one of the most pressing and unresolved challenges, particularly in post-Soviet countries. This article examines territorial inequality in educational outcomes across seven post-Soviet countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Moldova, Georgia, and Kazakhstan. The study analyses how students’ PISA test scores vary by urban–rural location and investigates whether national educational policies, particularly school funding mechanisms and school network, have contributed to reducing or widening these disparities. Drawing on the generative theory of rurality, the study employs a mixed-methods design combining multilevel regression analysis of PISA 2009 and 2018 data with content analysis of national policy documents addressing post-Soviet educational reforms. The findings indicate a persistent and growing performance gap between urban and rural students, with the largest disparities observed in Moldova, Russia, and Lithuania. Rural location remains a statistically significant predictor of lower student achievement even after controlling for socio-economic and institutional variables. Estonia emerges as an exception, combining relatively high reading scores with a weak rurality gradient in 2018. The policy analysis suggests that per-capita and voucher-based funding mechanisms, together with large-scale school closures, have only weakly addressed the structural sources of rural disadvantage. The discussion highlights institutional and governance-related factors that may explain the limited effectiveness of these reforms and offers tentative recommendations concerning school funding design, teacher recruitment, and policy coordination in education. The article concludes by discussing study limitations and directions for future research.

Keywords: education policy, PISA, comparative research, mixed methods, post-Soviet countries, urban-rural disparities