The Impact of Educational Inequality in Secondary Schools on Democratic Attitudes of Adolescents in Europe

There is a clear tendency throughout OECD-countries to assess educational systems in terms of their efficiency in gaining high scores on cognitive skills. PISA-scores are used as benchmarks to evaluate and adapt educational policies and curricula throughout Europe. The policy discussions are about investments in education as compared with output or about the educational outcomes of early versus late tracking. Even the latest “Beyond GDP” debates focus on education as a form of capital or as an investment. Schools perform however also a socializing function. The whole policy debate tends to ignore the impact of educational systems on political attitudes or civic values. The current contribution focuses on the impact of the organization of education in European societies on the civic attitudes of adolescents. Starting from the empirical claims by Wilkinson and Picket that inequality is corrosive for societies, we dig deeper into the impact of inequality in the organization of schooling on attitudes towards solidarity and tolerance of adolescents. Using the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) data of 75,747 pupils from 24 European educational systems (2009) supplemented by aggregate data of the Program of International Student Assessment of 2009 we assess the impact of academic segregation on the basis of math-scores on democratic citizenship attitudes of 15-year old adolescents. Controlling for background variables, the multilevel multivariate analyses shows an impact of segregation according to cognitive skills on their conceptions of solidarity, tolerance and support for democracy. Early segregation in school careers (e.g. as in the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Flanders, Austria, etc.) correlates with a lack of tolerance. Countries that postpone segregation (e.g. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, etc.) tend on average to have more tolerant and democratically minded adolescents. Early tracking and academic segregation seems to have a cultural spill-over and to foster an “aristocratic” conception of society.