Universal patterns or the tale of two systems? Mathematics achievement and educational expectations in post-socialist Europe

Abstract

Although communist ideology claimed to destroy former class stratification based on labour market capitalist relationships, de facto during socialism one social class hierarchy was substituted for another that was equally unequal. The economic transition during the 1990s increased stratification by wealth, which affected educational inequality. This study examines the relationships among parental education, gender, educational expectations and mathematics achievement of youths in five post-socialist Eastern European countries, comparing them with three Western countries. We employed the 8th-grade data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 1995 and 2007. The findings point to the universal associations between parental education and student outcomes, whereas gender comparisons present interesting East-West differences. The theoretical and policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Keywords:

• student achievement
• educational expectations
• gender
• Eastern Europe

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the seed grant of the Population Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, which is supported by an infrastructure grant by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Development (R24-HD041025). The authors would like to thank Aaron Benavot, David Baker, Soo-yong Byun and two anonymous reviewers for Compare for their insightful comments, as well as Jill Armington and Yunyi Deng for their help with the literature search.

Notes

1. Our choice of countries was limited by the availability of data on our variables of interest and thus somewhat weakens the theoretical argument about both historical and ‘East’ versus ‘West’ comparison. More recent waves of data should allow more meaningful, theoretically guided comparisons.

2. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thus the 1995 wave for Russia represents even more so the relationships during the old regime.

3. We treat mathematics achievement as an indicator of academic achievement in general for our purposes of the examination of educational stratification. Future studies should consider examining specific changes that occurred in teaching mathematics, such as changes in pedagogical approaches, teachers’ preparation and mathematics curriculum.

4. We are aware that our literature review is based on English language publications, which leaves publications in the Eastern European languages beyond the scope of our review.

5. See, for example, the collection of articles organised by Willms et al. (2006).

6. For Tables 4–5 the calculations for Italy, Sweden and the USA are available upon request.

7. We did not include the respective tables due to space concerns. The analysis is available upon request.