The Legitimacy of Private Schooling: Education Preferences in Nine European Contexts

ABSTRACT

Motivated by empirical reality of differences in the scope and meaning of school choice and private schooling this article focuses on the public demand for increasing diversity of educational options In Europe and the division of public and private provision in it. We aim to test self-interest and ideology-driven logics of education policy preferences in different educational contexts. We operationalize this variety of contexts by the share of private education spending and between-school inequality. We show that, on average, more resourceful individuals are less pro-private-education and those that are ideologically right-leaning are more so. At the system level, private schooling feeds back positively, and this does not differ across educational or ideological divides. Educational inequality, at the same time, de-legitimizes the support for private schooling and its effect differs – higher educated and ideologically right-leaning turn to prefer more public schooling the higher the educational inequality. Thus, the more equal the educational provision, independent of public-private mix, the more entrenched pro-private school preferences will become.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative politics
• school choice
• private schooling
• quantile regressions
• feedback effect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Between-and within-school variances are common measures among OECD PISA educational inequality indicators. However, we rely on (Stumbrienė et al., 2019) indicator that additionally calculates the association between peers’ ESCS (the PISA index of economic, social, and cultural status) and PISA performance at school level. In other words, between-school variance here indicates how much schools differ across their children socio-economic status. The bigger the index, the greater the differences among schools.

Additional information

Funding

This work has received support from the the Personal Post-doctoral Research Funding (PUTJD) under Estonian Research Council Grant PUTJD953 and Estonian Business School ASK grant T9ASK-2021.