L’École républicaine

The longstanding image of the French school as an engine of national unity, egalitarian democracy and republican citizenship is, in the postcolonial era, faltering. Students from working class and/or non-European immigrant backgrounds struggle in a school system that, despite its egalitarian claims, favours students from wealthier families of European descent. The former thus feel excluded from full participation in French society. Such academic inequality casts doubt on the viability of republican universalism, a pillar of French schooling that treats students as autonomous rational actors and resists adjusting the curriculum to cultural particularities. Rooted in the Enlightenment rationalism of the Revolutionary period, this universalist doctrine views the school as a sanctuary where the student develops her or his intellectual faculties in an environment protected from the influence of outside opinion emanating from family, religion, or cultural particularities. Contemporary debates about the integration of France’s multicultural student population thus challenge the very philosophical foundations of French republicanism.

Do Schools Reduce or Exacerbate Inequality? How the Associations Between Student Achievement and Achievement Growth Influence Our Understanding of the Role of Schooling

This article explores how the associations between student achievement and achievement growth influence our understanding of the role schools play in academic inequality. Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–2011 (ECLS-K:2011), we constructed parallel growth and lagged score models within both seasonal learning and school effects frameworks to study how student- and school-level socioeconomic and racial/ethnic backgrounds relate to student learning. Our findings suggest that seasonal comparative scholars, who generally argue that schools play an equalizing role, and scholars focused on school compositional effects, who typically report that schools exacerbate inequality, come to these contrasting findings not only because they ask different questions but also because they treat student initial achievement differently when modeling student learning.

Manifestations, Factors of Actualization and Theoretical Explanations of Academic Inequality

The article deals with the study of academic inequality in the context of globalization. The prerequisites for the appearance of modern forms of inequality in education and science are considered. The aspect of the declarativity of official educational discourse is analyzed. It is reflected in the contradiction between articulated priorities and reality. In addition, it is noted that the official educational discourse is inherent in an apologetic reflection of the topics of rankings, which is displayed in attempts to naturalize them. The heuristic potential of the world-system approach is characterized in the framework of the study of the problems of academic capitalism. An analysis of the key concepts of the concepts of F. Braudel, I. Wallerstein and A. G. Frank is carried out, and a substantiation of their applicability for studying the relations of inequality in the sphere of education is given. The main theoretical concepts of "uneven" development of territories are considered, a comparative analysis of concepts is carried out and the author's scheme based on the synthesis of concepts of the world of system analysis and capital analysis by P. Bourdieu is proposed. The author's definitions of the concepts “academic inequality”, “construction of inequalities” and “academic capitalism” are provided. The role of university rankings in the processes of constructing academic inequality is analyzed. The interrelation of the commodification processes in education and science with globalization processes is grounded. The specific features of constructing academic inequality in modern conditions are revealed. The conclusion about the dual structure of academic inequality is formulated. Further prospects for the development of the topic in the context of studying the transformation of the institute of education are indicated.

The Coleman Report, 50 Years On: What Do We Know about the Role of Schools in Academic Inequality?

Achievement outcomes for U.S. children are overwhelmingly unequal along racial, ethnic, and class lines. Whether and how schools contribute to educational inequality, however, has long been the subject of debate. This article traces the debate to the Coleman Report’s publication in 1966, describing the report’s production and impact on educational research. The article then considers the field’s major findings—that schools equalize along class lines but likely stratify along racial and ethnic lines—in light of current policy debates.