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Discrimination or Explained Differences: Individual Level Effects from Linguistically Divided School Systems of Estonia and Latvia

Europe (Central and Eastern)
Governance
Institutions
Public Policy
Immigration
Quantitative
Education
Triin Lauri
Tallinn University
Triin Lauri
Tallinn University
Kaire Põder
Tallinn University of Technology

Abstract

Until recently, neither social intergenerational mobility nor concerns about flattening income distribution or cultural diversity were on the core of educational policy agenda in many countries. However, at the light of recent migration crisis in Europe the educational system and policies designed, in many cases, for the single nation educational purposes have been contested. Estonia and Latvia, being marginal contributors in today’s crisis, have, however, histories of integration by school systems as similarly to many other Eastern-European countries they became host of sizeable Russian-speaking community after World War II. Therefore, in Soviet times, Estonia and Latvia had linguistically divided school systems. In 90s educational reforms took root in both countries, while two major ideational paradigms had strong influence in shaping their educational landscapes. First, the neoliberal ideas encouraged by international organizations creating the selectivity and choice elements into the former universal systems. Second, the language reforms of Russian language schools to integrate the linguistically divided school systems. However while similar in background the reform agendas, educational governance and achievements of Estonia and Latvia are diverse whether it to be timing and the magnitude of reforms, uncontrolled choice mechanisms or ethnic gap in educational outcomes (Hogan-Brun 2007; Lindemann 2013). For instance while Estonian students are ranked very high in international comparisons, a significant difference between the scores of Estonian- and Russian-language communities exist. At the same time Latvia do not have as high scores nor as huge ethnic educational gap. We aim to analyse the factors behind these differences in native-non-native educational achievements and explore whether and how the forms of educational governance and reform agendas in these countries have effected these. In order to explain the ethnic gap, the Blinder-Oaxaca (1973) decomposition technique for linear regression models will be used to be able to disentangle between “explained” and “not-explained” gaps. We distinguish between three main categories of explanatory components - background characteristics (individual level), governance related characteristics (school level) and reform agenda related characteristics (country level). More specifically, we ask which background related and which governance related characteristics contribute to the so called explained gap and which to the unexplained gap. The former, explained gap, enables to determine the extent of ethnic educational gap which is explained by differences in individual level characteristics such as language at home compared to institutional language, socioeconomic status and similar. The latter, the unexplained gap at the same time enables us to determine how the individual-level differences “behave” in different school governance related contexts. Latter can be interpreted as cultural discrimination. Our data originate mainly from PISA 2015. We aim at policy implications, which contribute to the literature related to educational equality and policy feedback.