论青年学生和谐人格的培育

改革开放三十年,中国特色社会主义建设事业进入了新的三十年的关键时期,同时也是社会矛盾多发期。实现科学发展,构建和谐社会,一方面,党和国家必须着力创造必要的经济、政治、文化、环境及制度等前提条件;同时,还必须努力培养社会成员和谐的人格,为和谐社会提供根本的主体条件。     

面向未来的埃及教育改革

埃及实行免费教育体制,长期和持续的国家投入保证了教育在大众中间的普及,使埃及教育长期在阿拉伯国家和非洲地区处于领先地位。但随着全球化的日益深入以及埃及国内经济形势的变化,单纯依靠政府投入越来越不能满足人民群众对高质量教育服务的需求。埃及教育主管部门根据形势发展的迫切要求,一方面大力推进教育体制改革,力行非中央化的政策,在教育投入和管理上,加大社会力量参与的力度,加强了教育基础设施建设,提高了教师待遇;另一方面用先进的信息技术手段改造传统教育模式,并在教学过程中引入问责制度,保证教育质量不断提高,使其更好地服务于社会经济的发展。     

The optimism trap: Migrants’ educational choices in stratified education systems

Immigrant children's ambitious educational choices have often been linked to their families' high level of optimism and motivation for upward mobility. However, previous research has mostly neglected alternative explanations such as information asymmetries or anticipated discrimination. Moreover, immigrant children's higher dropout rates at the higher secondary and university level suggest that low performing migrant students could have benefitted more from pursuing less ambitious tracks, especially in countries that offer viable vocational alternatives. We examine ethnic minority's educational choices using a sample of academically low performing, lower secondary school students in Germany's highly stratified education system. We find that their families' optimism diverts migrant students from viable vocational alternatives. Information asymmetries and anticipated discrimination do not explain their high educational ambitions. While our findings further support the immigrant optimism hypothesis, we discuss how its effect may have different implications depending on the education system.     

Young people's educational aspirations: psychosocial factors and the home environment

Utilising data from Understanding Society (2010–2013), this study examined the contribution of young people's psychosocial and background factors and home environment to their educational aspirations in the UK. Young people's general well-being and self-efficacy emerged as good predictors of their educational aspirations as did some aspects of their home environment. Interestingly, filial dynamics such as emotional closeness to parents and cultural capital (e.g. participating in cultural events, discussing books) were better predictors of 10–15-year-olds’ aspirations than were more school-driven parent–child interactions (e.g. homework, extra-curricular activities). Furthermore, the findings from this study showed no shortage in young people's educational aspirations although interesting demographic trends emerged with certain groups (i.e. preadolescents, males) being less aspirant than middle adolescents and females. These findings have significant implications for family and educational policy, especially with regard to ‘raising aspirations’ and reducing early school leaving and, also, for reconsidering the role of the home environment as a web of emotionally and intellectually charged relationships between parents and children rather than an extension of the school day. Finally, discussions on young people's educational aspirations should not be polarised but informed by notions of opportunity (structure) and what young people make of it (agency).     

Invention and repair: disability and education after the UK Coalition Government

This short paper examines the extent to which the UK Coalition Government has been inventive or reparatory in their approach to policies governing the education of disabled children and young people. Of central concern here is the extent to which policies contribute to the invention of the disabled child by conceptualising their education as a constant process of reparation. I argue here that this landscape of policy proposals creates particular problems for the ways in which the pedagogic relationship can be conceptualised, reinforcing teaching as a complex negotiation of deficit and anxiety.     

Nominal comparability is not enough: (In-)equivalence of construct validity of cross-national measures of educational attainment in the European Social Survey

Educational attainment is a core social background variable covered in each and every survey of individuals. Since educational institutions and qualifications are difficult to compare across countries, cross-national surveys pose a particular challenge to the measurement of educational attainment. This study performs a comparative construct validation of a number of cross-national measures of education using the European Social Survey. The measures comprise two versions of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), the education scheme developed in the project ‘Comparative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations’ (CASMIN) and hypothetical as well as actual years of education. The first ISCED measure corresponds to the well-known main ISCED levels. The second one, the European Survey Version of ISCED (ES-ISCED) developed for this study, represents an effort to reflect different types of education within levels of education by considering ISCED sub-dimensions, most importantly ‘programme orientation’. Using linear regression models, it is shown how much explanatory power educational attainment loses when different cross-national variables are used, as compared to country-specific educational attainment variables (CSEVs), and how these losses vary across measures and countries. The dependent variable used for the construct validation is social status as measured by the International Socio-Economic Index (ISEI). Results suggest that harmonisation always entails some loss of explanatory power for at least a few countries. However, there are clear performance differences between the comparable measures in terms of both the average amount of losses as well as the distribution of losses across countries. The use of actual years of education as well as the levels-only ISCED strongly attenuates the education-social status association on average, but also to very different degrees across countries. CASMIN and ES-ISCED fare considerably better: they show the lowest losses of explanatory power and the lowest variation of losses across countries. Hypothetical years of education lie in between. Some practical implications are then proposed, e.g. on how to implement cross-national measures of educational attainment in international surveys.     

转型期农村教育社会分层功能弱化的制度性因素

学校教育制度应该促进农村学生的向上社会流动,然而在我国社会转型过程中的教育制度以城市教育为中心,优先发展城市教育,以"市场能力"和学业成绩作为学校选拔规则,以及重点学校制度对农村学生获得高一级教育机会的制约,导致了对农村学生的"教育排斥"。教育制度的城市化、市场化、精英化取向是转型期农村教育社会分层功能弱化的制度性原因。将现阶段农村教育主要功能定位于促进农村学生城市化和社会地位升迁,确立教育制度的正义原则,实现对农村学生的"差异补偿"是解决这一问题的主要思路。     

Social and behavioral skills and the gender gap in early educational achievement

Though many studies have suggested that social and behavioral skills play a central role in gender stratification processes, we know little about the extent to which these skills affect gender gaps in academic achievement. Analyzing data from the Early Child Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort, we demonstrate that social and behavioral skills have substantively important effects on academic outcomes from kindergarten through fifth grade. Gender differences in the acquisition of these skills, moreover, explain a considerable fraction of the gender gap in academic outcomes during early elementary school. Boys get roughly the same academic return to social and behavioral skills as their female peers, but girls begin school with more advanced social and behavioral skills and their skill advantage grows over time. While part of the effect may reflect an evaluation process that rewards students who better conform to school norms, our results imply that the acquisition of social and behavioral skills enhances learning as well. Our results call for a reconsideration of the family and school-level processes that produce gender gaps in social and behavioral skills and the advantages they confer for academic and later success.     

Whither the virtuous cycle? Past and future trends in black-white inequality in educational attainment

The inequality in the relative years of education between blacks and whites has diminished dramatically over the 20th century. One possible explanation for this convergence is a virtuous cycle of parents passing on educational advantage, from one generation to the next, leading to an overall educational upgrading. In this paper we test the virtuous cycle hypothesis by estimating the three way interaction of cohort, race, and family background. We find that the convergence in educational attainment between blacks and whites over the past century was driven by processes unrelated to family background.