Educational inequality in the Kebribeyah Somali refugee camp in Ethiopia: an autoethnography

Due to the Somali Civil War of 1991, more than 10,000 Somali refugees resettled in Kebribeyah, a town in the Somali region of Ethiopia. For nearly three decades, the local and resettled refugee communities shared the resources the region had to offer, adopted a new common cultural norm, and fostered some levels of social cohesions. It is the education sector, however, that caused social conflicts and hatred between resettled Somalis and the native Somali-Ethiopians. Currently, the education of Somali refugee children is funded by various international organizations, such as the United Nations. On the contrary, the local Somali-Ethiopian children pay their way to schools which leads to poor educational experiences. Using autoethnography as the research method, this article examines the formation of educational gaps between the local and refugee children. Findings suggest that educational inequality can exist between refugee and host communities, if not properly managed, and can ultimately impact social cohesion and stability in the refugee-hosting regions.

Searching of the Source of Educational Inequality

Various approaches to investigating the sources of inequality in education are discussed in the paper. It is noted that data on the representation of students from families with various parental status at levels of education do not give a full picture of what is happening. Full-fledged interpretation requires to turn to a much larger amount of information, primarily because an influence of the family and the environment during the period of primary socialization is of decisive importance for the formation of chances in the educational sphere. The social experience of the family, the models of social behavior based on it, the developed cultural patterns, strategies, and tactics are important. At the same time, the orientations towards education are not fixed once and for all; they can be transformed if the general situation changes (for example, economic) or a directed influence is made (for example, pedagogical). The formed orientations are, as it were, a starting position and later sets the direction and speed of possible reflection on certain influences. The pandemic and the resulting intensification of distance learning have sharply increased the importance of motivation and other students’ qualities, formed during the period of primary socialization: they are critical for academic success. The accompanying growth of inequality in education has actualized the search for its sources to find means to overcome or at least reduce it. Equalization of opportunities for young people from all social groups is especially important for the growth of human potential.

God, Grades, and Graduation

It’s widely acknowledged that American parents from different class backgrounds take different approaches to raising their children. But missing from the discussion is the fact that millions of parents on both sides of the class divide are raising their children to listen to God. What impact does a religious upbringing have on their academic trajectories? Drawing on 10 years of survey data with over 3,000 teenagers and over 200 interviews, God, Grades, and Graduation offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers’ religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. God, Grades, and Graduation introduces readers to a childrearing logic that cuts across social class groups and accounts for Americans’ deep relationship with God: religious restraint. This book takes us inside the lives of these teenagers to discover why they achieve higher grades than their peers, why they are more likely to graduate from college, and why boys from lower-middle-class families particularly benefit from religious restraint. But readers also learn how for middle-upper-class kids—and for girls especially—religious restraint recalibrates their academic ambitions after graduation, leading them to question the value of attending a selective college despite their stellar grades in high school. By illuminating the far-reaching effects of the childrearing logic of religious restraint, God, Grades, and Graduation offers a compelling new narrative about the role of religion in academic outcomes and educational inequality.

Social-psychological reasons for the spread of the“AUE” subculture (hidden factors of the problem)

The article identifies the deep causes of the new wave of minors criminalization in the Russian society. The authors considered the expert opinions on this issue and found them inconsistent; described the main forms of behavior associated with the adoption of criminal values - primary, game, and re-criminalization which usually have different social localization; summarized the historical aspects of adolescent criminalization in the Russian society and its social-cultural factors. Based on the analysis of the official statistics and the results of the empirical studies conducted in 2019-2020 within the project Deep causes of teenage (neo)criminalization in contemporary Russia supported by the RFBR, the authors assess the scale of real and virtual criminalization, features of legal outlook, social-psychological well-being, and worldview of criminalized and ordinary teenagers. In addition to the traditionally identified causes of criminalization (social-economic and cultural-educational inequality, deprivation, territorial-geographical specificity, etc.), the authors consider social-cultural factors: first, violations in socialization and child-parental relations - as leading to the deprivation of the need for love and recognition of minors by their parents and to the attempts to compensate this deprivation destructively, with criminal practices; second, the types of minors heroes, which determine the normative and gender inversion and the spread of the criminal subculture - as a source of the surrogate pseudo-masculine discourse. The authors make a conclusion that the prevention of minors criminalization should be based on psychological-pedagogical and social-cultural technologies, the main actors of which are the family, school and state information policy, while the normative-legal technologies of social control, the actors of which are administrative and law enforcement agencies, should focus on the crime-deterrent function.

The increasing educational divide in the life course development of subjective wellbeing across cohorts

Labour market, health, and wellbeing research provide evidence of increasing educational inequality as individuals age, representing a pattern consistent with the mechanism of cumulative (dis)advantage. However, individual life courses are embedded in cohort contexts that might alter life course differentiation processes. Thus, this study analyses cohort variations in education-specific life course patterns of subjective wellbeing (i.e. life, health and income satisfaction). Drawing upon prior work and theoretical considerations from life course theories, this study expects to find increasing educational life course inequality in younger cohorts. The empirical analysis relies on German Socio-Economic Panel data (1984–2016, v33). The results obtained from cohort-averaged random effects growth curve models confirm the cumulative (dis)advantage mechanism for educational life course inequality in subjective wellbeing. Furthermore, the results reveal substantial cohort variation in life course inequality patterns: regarding life and income satisfaction, the results indicate that the cumulative (dis)advantage mechanism does not apply to the youngest cohorts (individuals born between 1970 and 1985) under study. In contrast, the health satisfaction results suggest that educational life course inequality follows the predictions of the cumulative (dis)advantage mechanism only for individuals born after 1959. While the life course trajectories of highly educated individuals change only slightly across cohorts, the subjective wellbeing trajectories of low-educated individuals start to decline at earlier life course stages in younger cohorts, leading to increasing life course inequality over time. Thus, the overall findings of this study contribute to our understanding of whether predictions derived from sociological middle range theories are universal across societal contexts.

Bringing the Local Back In: How Schools Work Differently in Different Neighborhood Contexts

Local settings have not been central to the debate on educational inequality. If researchers have taken neighborhoods into account, they have focused on (social) compositions, peer group effects, or school access. Yet I draw on interviews and observations at two Berlin schools to suggest that neighborhoods are also important as they shape the organizational practices of teachers and other educational professionals. Combining a Bourdieusian perspective and new institutional theory, I show how local settings become important as social, symbolic, and administrative units. As such, neighborhoods structure the interplay of institutional pressures and objective power relations both within and between schools. This perspective not only allows for a better understanding of the processes producing educational inequality; it also highlights that institutional changes might play out differently in different contexts, with consequences for neighborhood inequality in the field of education and beyond.

Educational Inequality and Urban Development: Education as a Field for Urban Planning, Architecture and Urban Design

Educational inequalities and spatial disparities can be intertwined; consequently, education has become a field of action for urban planners, architects, and urban designers. To establish this key argument of our contribution, we start by explaining the background of education as a field of policy and action in urban development and planning in Germany. We establish how strategies for the development of deprived neighborhoods are focused on a growing variety of education-related topics and measures. Subsequently, we discuss so-called sociospatial educational landscapes as projects in which educational policy, urban planning, architecture, and urban design are particularly closely interwoven. We introduce two examples: “Morgenland Neighborhood Education Center” (Bremen) and “Campus Rütli” (Berlin). Drawing on an in-depth analysis of eight socio-spatial educational landscapes we reconstruct seven motives, describing the deeper meanings stakeholders attribute to the projects. We conclude with a critical reflection on the pedagogization of spaces of childhood and youth inherent in the policies discussed throughout the contribution.

Exploring how the national COVID-19 pandemic policy and its application exposed the fault lines of educational inequality

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many surveys in education were conducted. These revealed alarming statistics about learners losing half of the academic year, parents' anxiety about sending children to school, and a minority of education institutions being able to offer online teaching. In response to a cacophony from teachers' and students' unions, school governing body representatives, scientists and education experts, the government decided to close education institutions as part of what was known as the hard lockdown. Against this background, we used critical policy analysis (CPA) to explore decision-making by education departments and the enactment of these decisions at schools. This qualitative study revealed iniquity and inequity as departments of education made decisions to close and reopen institutions. The findings revealed a tension between expectations of producers of policy and enactors of policy within unequal school settings. We recommend a repositioning from the perspective of the dispossessed to inform future policy.