Session Information
07 SES 01 B, Empirical Studies into Careers, Identities and the Capacity to Aspire
Paper Session
Contribution
In the debate surrounding the current education reforms in Italy equity concerns about the role of education in improving children’s life chances have explicitly emerged, and the goal of “contrasting socio-cultural inequalities” (MIUR, 2015) figures in the forefront of the government’s agenda. In this paper I will focus on a key aspect of the Italian education system with important consequences for social stratification: the choice Italian students and their families are faced with at the end of lower secondary school. The Italian system of upper secondary school is structured in tracks that, while they all enable students to access university, have a distinct and diverse curriculum. Tracks still predict very different outcomes in terms of additional schooling acquired and labour market performance (Checchi and Flabbi 2007). They also produce substantial between-school segregation (OECD, 2012) and ‘horizontal inequality’ with a strong association between social class of origin and the choice of the academic track (Panichella and Triventi, 2014). While research has pointed at the large impact of what Boudon (1974) defined as “secondary effects” of social background (Contini and Scagni, 2011; 2013; Ress and Azzolini 2014), the literature has done little to explain how and why these effects come about. Because we lack a thorough understanding of families’ decision making processes contributing to differential school choice behaviour, this research set out to fill the gap by employing mixed methods and focusing on a specific case study: the goal is to explore in-depth the decision making processes underlying school choice from the perspective of the participants, extending the methods used by previous research in the Italian context and focusing on the roles students, parents and school services respectively play. I thus construct a framework to understand choice of upper secondary school in Italy and offer a tentative explanation of how and why there exist social class differences in engagement with the school choice process. This understanding is essential, if the government’s goal is to devise policies likely to succeed in lowering social segregation and increasing educational equity.
The purpose of the study is thus to establish 1) what are the factors that influence the choice of upper secondary school and 2) whether they can explain educational inequalities and self-segregation. In answering the first, more general question, the paper tries to establish a) what the rationales for choosing different types/tracks of school are and b) what the dynamics within families in this process are.
The paper develops a preliminary framework to understand the dynamics underlying the process of choice of secondary school in Italy but further research is necessary to explore the theorized relationships and the way in which they play out in other contexts. While the influential work conducted by Ball (1995, 2003, 2010) and Reay and Ball (1997) provided a key reference in the development of the resulting framework, the categories of analysis were derived inductively. Moreover, a core commitment of the study is to provide a thorough investigation of the context of choice, focusing on a single case study. The idea that contexts are not ‘neutral’ and that we can analyse ‘choice architecture’ in different components has become popular across disciplines, and in particular in behavioural economics literature, where it is employed to help us explain behaviour and rationality failures (Thaler and Sunstein 2009; Oliver, 2013; Bradbury et al 2012). I employed elements emerging from the ‘choice architecture’ literature to understand the particular context of choice and referred to Dolan (2012) in particular.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Ball, S.j. Bowe, R., Gewirtz, S. (1995), Circuits of schooling: A sociological exploration of parental choice in social class contexts, Sociological Review, 43:1, pp. 52-78. Ball, S.J. (2003) Class Strategies and the Educational Market: the middle classes and social advantage, London: Routledgefalmer. Ball, S.J. (2010) New class inequalities in education: Why education policy may be looking in the wrong place! Education policy, civil society and social class, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Vol. 30 Iss: 3/4, pp.155 – 166. Boarini, R. (2009) ‘Towards better Schools and more Equal Opportunities for Learning in Italy’. OECD Economics Department Working Papers, No. 727, OECD Publishing. Boudon, R. (1974), Education, opportunity and social inequality. Changing prospects in Western Society, Wiley: New York. Bradbury, A., McGimpsey, I. and Santori, D. (2013), Revising rationality: the use of ‘Nudge’ approaches in neoliberal education policy, Journal of Education Policy, 28:2, 247- 267. Checchi, D. and Flabbi, L. (2007) ‘Intergenerational Mobility and Schooling Decisions in Germany and Italy: The Impact of Secondary School Tracks’, IZA Discussion Paper No 2876. Bonn: Institute for the Study of Labor. Contini, D., & Scagni, A. (2013). Social-Origin Inequalities in Educational Careers in Italy. Performance or Decision Effects? In M. Jackson (Ed.), Determined to Succeed? Performance versus Choice in Educational Attainment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dolan, P., Elliott, A., Metcalfe, R. and Vlaev, I. (2012), ‘Influencing Financial Behavior: From Changing Minds to Changing Contexts’, Journal of Behavioral Finance, 13:2, 126-142. Gewirtz, S., Ball, S.J., Bowe, R. (1995), Markets, Choice and Equity in Education, Buckingham : Open University Press. MIUR (2015) ‘Disegno di Legge “La Buona Scuola”’, https://labuonascuola.gov.it/documenti/00000196.pdf?v=4fc8cf2 (accessed June 2015). OECD (2012), ‘Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools’,OECD Publishing. Oliver, A. (2013), From Nudging to Budging: Using Behavioural Economics to Inform Public Sector Policy, Journal of Social Policy, 42, pp. 685-700. Panichella, N. and Triventi, M. (2014) Social Inequalities in the Choice of Secondary School, European Societies, 16:5, 666-693. Ress, A., & Azzolini, D. (2014). Primary and secondary effects of social background on educational attainment in Italy. Evidence from an administrative dataset. Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, 6(1), 53-80. Reay, D., Ball, S. (1997) Spoilt for Choice: The Working Classes and Educational Markets, Oxford Review of Education, 23(1), pp. 89-101. Thaler, R.H., and Sunstein, C.R. (2008) Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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