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Session Submission Summary

The role of tests and family resources in social mobility in a highly educated society: the case of Russia

Thu, April 18, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Pacific Concourse (Level -1), Pacific D

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Education is touted as an important mechanism for improving social mobility, and there is considerable evidence that it is a source of social mobility (Hauser et al, 2000). Much research has emphasized that children from low-SES background can move up economically and socially by doing well in school and reaching higher levels of educational attainment (OECD 2016). Nevertheless, such mobility can be severely constrained by social class barriers to higher achievement and higher attainment. The educational achievement gap between students coming from different social class backgrounds can be explained by conditions in the families and communities where children grow up, before they ever enter school (Rothstein, 2005). Market societies are unequal in many ways that reinforce family differences in economic academic resources, such as unequal access to health care, unequal access to information about child care and child health, and unequal nutrition, clean water, and early learning opportunities. In societies that have managed to reduce child poverty to very low levels, these insidious effects on children’s capacity to learn later in school are greatly reduced. But even in such low poverty societies, children who enter school from low-income, low academic resource families have enjoyed fewer opportunities to acquire academic skills in their family and community environments than those from higher income, higher academic resource families. Academic expectations for children also can differ among lower and higher resource families. Further, even higher achieving lower social class students appear to have significantly lower levels of attainment than higher social class students with lower levels of achievement.

This panel will present four papers related to the role of achievement and social class in educational trajectories and social mobility, focusing on the educational and economic opportunities of lower social class students compared to higher social class students in a large middle-developed country—the Russian Federation. Three of the papers use a longitudinal survey that collected detailed data on social class and several measures of students’ achievement during their schooling, thus giving researchers the possibility of assessing how “efficient” the Russian school system is in creating similar opportunities for young people coming from families with different levels of human and cultural capital. The fourth paper uses regional data to show that students living in less well-resourced regions perform significantly less well on the national college entrance exam and therefore have less access to university education. The results suggest that even in a society such as Russia’s, which, under Communism, was socially differentiated but still more equal economically and socially than societies in Northwestern Europe (Gerber and Hout, 1995; Gerber, 2000), higher achieving lower SES young people are much less likely than those from middle achieving higher SES families to attain higher education. The papers also show that different tests may work differently in making the educational system “SES blind,” with the college entrance test—the USE—playing a particularly important role in identifying who gets to attend university, but is also much less likely to be taken by lower SES students, even some of those who did well on earlier low stakes tests, such as the TIMSS.

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Individual Presentations

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