Educational Inequality

Several leading development agencies had posited education and equity as key themes at the onset of the 21st century. The United Nation's Millennium Development Goal (MDG) No.2 “Achieve Universal Primary Education” and MDG No.3 “Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women” are devoted to educational attainment and equity on a global level. UNESCO's Institute for Statistics (Sherman & Poirier 2007) recently published a book that compares education equity among 16 of the world's largest countries. Although the focus of this UNESCO volume was limited—using access to formal schooling and allocated resources to education as operational definitions of equity in the case countries— the selection of this topic by UNESCO emphasizes the urgency of education inequality analysis by and for educators, researchers, and policy makers. The World Bank's World Development Report(WDR) features a global development issue thought to be especially timely. The WDRs are generously funded and typically of high professional rigor. The discipline of economics is always well reported as expected. The WDR for 2006, in a line of such reports dating back to 1978, is titled Equity and Development. Equity or equality and its ubiquitously maligned antonym, inequality, is a theme that appears with uniform regularity in the publications of major development agencies as well as finding a home in the development prospectus of the smallest nongovernmental organizations. Linking equity to development in the title of the WDR 2006 will provide grist for the mill of only the most hardened of World Bank critics. Like us, many development professionals recognize the World Bank, with its enormous reach and prestige, for placing equity front and center on the development stage.But why the urgency now? And, in any case, should our concern with equity go beyond the ideal of social justice to the heart of a development agenda? What is the known relationship, if any, between equity and development? And what role, if any, does inequality in educational attainment or learning achievement play in a nation's development ranking?

As violence and crime within and around U.S. schools has drawn increased attention to school security, police, surveillance cameras, and other measures have grown commonplace at public schools. Social scientists commonly voice concern that exclusionary security measures are most common in schools attended by poor and non-White students, yet there is little empirical basis for assessing the extent of differential exposure, as we lack research on how exclusionary measures are distributed relative to school and student characteristics. To address this gap in the research, we use nationally representative school-level data from the School Survey on Crime and Safety to consider the security measures employed in elementary, middle, and high schools. Results indicate that while security measures are ubiquitous in U.S. high schools, those considered more exclusionary are concentrated in elementary, middle, and high schools attended by non-White and/or poorer students.

The transformation is signifi cant in many aspects. For example, it lifted the high-stakes test requirement for senior high school admission (in principle), and also mandated multi-stakeholder (including students) participation in the review of the national curriculum. The details of the Twelve-Year Basic Education system shall be discussed later in depth. 20 K-12 Education Administration, Ministry of Education. 2020. Briefi ng of Experimental Education. (https:// www.k12ea.gov.tw/fi les/common_unit_id/d8533636-0498-4fd6-b456-2bcda3a8b4d9/doc/109%e5%af%a6%e9% a9%97%e6%95%99%e8%82%b2%e7%b0%a1%e5%a0%b1.pdf); Department of Statistics, Ministry of Education. 2021. 專業教育、實驗教育及偏遠地區教育概況. [Overview of Professional Education, Experimental Education, and Education in Remote Areas]. (https://stats.moe.gov.tw/fi les/analysis/110professional.pdf).

Two processes made this volume of critical writing on pedagogy possible. The first involved the collaboration and synergy of two organisations based at the University of Johannesburg (UJ): the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD), at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA), and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Art and Design (STAND).

The second process that we, as editors, consider fundamental to the formulation of this publication is the activist work of student and worker protests that in 2015 and 2016 culminated in the #FeesMustFall movement.

It is our belief that these synergies and collaborations – between the formal and informal, the official and the marginal, the invited and invented – are part of what has made this volume possible, as a collection of critical approaches to, and re-imaginings of, pedagogy in South African art, design and architecture education.

This paper explores how philosophical inquiry and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can mutually benefit from each other to produce new methodological and reflexive directions in neo-liberal policy research to examine the phenomenon of ‘What is (going on here)’. Through this we argue that augmenting linguistic analysis with philosophical perspectives develops and supports CDA scholarship more broadly by accommodating the shifting complexity of social problems of ideologically driven inequality that are inbuilt through, in our case, social policy texts. In discussing philosophical-methodological issues, the paper argues for the need to continually adapt CDA to the particular data so as to remain sensitive to and avoid hegemonic tendencies in analysis. Through adopting the principles of a working methodology, we discuss a micro-meso-macro CDA framework that draws on the analytical concepts of movement, metaphorical superfluidity, thematic condensation, and surrealism to conceive of a research approach capable of examining and comprehending evolving discourses of political economies. The most immediate benefit of this framework is its capacity to illustrate how forms of valuations perpetuated by and through policy discourse are the motivational locus of meaning making insofar as they strongly inform the moral underpinning the ideology of economic growth.

Muitos dos jovens - que não concluíram o ensino básico e evadiram da
escola - estão querendo voltar a estudar, motivados, principalmente, pelos imperativos da sobrevivência econômica e social e pela busca de maior qualificação para o trabalho, se deparando com um mercado de cursos particulares profissionalizantes, o chamado Sistema-S (SESC, SENAC, SENAI, etc.) e com a modalidade de Educação de Jovens e Adultos (EJA) no ensino básico. Eles se veem movidos a “escolher” uma escola para continuar seus estudos, o que muitas vezes pode se configurar como uma “não escolha”, como veremos ao longo deste texto. os objetivos da investigação foram: analisar a visão e o projeto
educativo, profissional e pessoal dos jovens em situação de volta aos estudos; entender a percepção que têm esses jovens da oferta e das chances de acesso às várias opções de estudo; identificar e analisar os fatores que pesam na decisão de volta aos estudos (transporte, custo, tempo, horário, segurança etc.); entender a dinâmica familiar e geográfica em torno do projeto de retomada dos estudos; e contribuir com a produção de conhecimento que possa fundamentar a elaboração de políticas públicas de acesso ao ensino público socialmente justas. Como metodologia, o estudo adotou uma abordagem exploratória, socio-geográfica (Windle, 2013) e mista, com um survey quantitativo seguido de pesquisa a base de entrevistas, dando atenção à organização espacial (Costa e Koslinski, 2011). Dados foram coletados em duas cidades da Região dos Inconfidentes com perfis sociais similares, Ouro Preto e Mariana. Identificamos as principais instituições nas duas cidades envolvidas na formação de jovens adultos, principalmente escolas estaduais e alguns cursos do Sistema-S, onde aplicamos um questionário a 275 jovens na faixa etária de 15 a 29 anos, visando, principalmente, a coleta de dados quantitativos sobre a origem social, a trajetória escolare os planos para o futuro (N=275). Dessa amostra, foram selecionados cinco (5) jovens de cada cidade pela etapa qualitativa da pesquisa, seleção feita com atenção à representatividade da amostra maior. As entrevistas trataram dos objetivos, das estratégias e das perspectivas desses jovens na procura pela reinserção escolar. Trataram também de sua biografia pessoal e educacional, das condições de vida e de trabalho e das demais circunstâncias sociais.

Education has been extremely affected by the coronavirus disease crisis, with almost all countries temporarily closing their schools in 2020. After the first stage of the pandemic, in which national governments focused on guaranteeing the academic year's continuity, key international organizations emphasized the need to adopt structural policy reforms to face the challenges posed by the crisis. Based on international and European countries' policy documents, this paper analyzes long-term responses articulated in the education sector. The analysis has allowed us to identify three preponderant areas of response: the digitalization of the educational system, educational inequalities, and teachers' development. The agendas and policy instruments that international organizations have so far pushed for in relation to each of these areas do not differ substantially from the agendas and instruments they promoted in the pre-pandemic era. It is still early to assess the deepness of the transformations in course, but in most cases, prevailing responses represent the intensification of change processes initiated before the pandemic. Nonetheless, the type and intensity of country responses vary among the European Union member states. Although the pandemic represents a common thread, countries have experienced the crisis differently according to the characteristics of their educational systems and the main problems the crisis has revealed.

This paper presents detailed methods for constructing a flexible philosophical–analytical model through which to apply the analytic principles of CDA for the interpretation of metaphors across policy texts. Drawing on a theoretical framing from Foucault and the augmentation of Nietzsche’s views on valuation, we sketch a framework for examining ways in which evaluative semantic categories can be linked to sociological theories in order to bring out their relevance for the purpose of critical discourse analysis. This multi-level research framework draws upon a relationship between language analysis, the philosophical study of valuation, and political economy as a composite formulation of values through which neo-liberalism is discursively entwined and progressed through a system of principles of e/valuation.

TOPIC
Social inequality is at the very heart of the challenges of our late modern times. In our contribution, the term of social inequality refers to unequal chances of school success in German-speaking countries like Austria. In the Austrian education system, success and failure largely depend on a student's 'origin', that is: a family's migration history, education and language biography. The reasons are found in the education system's shortcomings in coping with growing diversity in the classroom. Traditional segregation processes are maintained to this day, for example, thereby systematically disadvantaging students with a migration history, economic poverty or illiteracy in the family, and with family languages other than German.

PROBLEM
And while these facts are well-covered in research, there is a still persisting gap in our understanding of the problem: little is known about migrant groups that have been exposed to migration, poverty and illiteracy, and whose languages have been subject to far-reaching discrimination not only in Europe but already in their countries of 'origin'. We illustrate the complex inequalities on the example of Kurdish families in Austria. This includes such issues as forced migration, economic poverty, educational deprivation, and highly stigmatized multilingualism with up to five laguages spoken in everyday life (e.g. in Turkey), accumulating with above-named disadvantages after migration (to Austria). The complex history of these migrant groups leads to highly multilingual students facing the risk of never successfully participating in education and society. In other words: in our globalized and multilingual times, the most vulnerable or 'unheard' voices are paradoxically also the most multilingual ones.

METHODS
We positioned 'unheard', vulnerable 'voices' and their biographies at the heart of our study - i.e., students from groups who are both underrepresented in higher education and yet a blind spot in scientific research. Unlike classic data collection, our conversations with families and teachers are intended to provide a stage for expressing, reflecting and discussing experiences in multiple languages. The subsequent analyses ties in upon three different autobiographies and languages (German, Turkish, Kurdish) and three linguistic approaches (educational, interactional and discourse linguistics). In this way, we proceed from individual 'voices' to collective experiences of being 'unheard', and ultimately approach the larger picture of 'polyphonies' in the education system - i.e., conflicting discourses and resulting inequalities.

FINDINGS
Our findings illustrate, first, how societal macro structures are translated into serious individual disadvantages. Second, our findings show how multilingual, socially disadvantaged students express particularly strong ambitions, and how their ambitions, in turn, fall victim to particularly problematic interpretations by their teachers - teachers who have never been trained to 'hear' vulnerable 'voices'. And third, our findings reveal how this process may lead to the loss of common ground between teachers, parents and beyond. Nevertheless, we also take a look at academic research and its problematic impact whenever scientific studies remain unaware of their power in reproducing inequalities.

CONCLUSIONS
And yet, we also intend to present ways of breaking this vicious circle. We envision our work to not only reach out to the education system but to extend the critical debate to research as well. In consequence, we envision a linguistics that is aware of the tremendous impact of its methods, and deals with these methods in a responsible, transdiscipliary way.

In the wake of Education for All (EFA), educational equity and equality, educational researchers and sociologists have continued to raise concerns over savage inequalities that have continued to perpetuate two parallel school categories in Kenya. In particular, the mushrooming of private schools with a concentration at the primary school level has raised issues of critical concern touching on EFA and the question of education as a democratic practice.  For more than a decade, academic achievement as depicted by the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) results has continued to register troubling differences between private and public schools in Kenya, with such statements as: Private schools and academies rank first in KCPE; The first 10 students are from private schools…Literature and research studies have confirmed a positive correlation between teaching/learning resources and overall school climate and culture with academic achievement and overall learners’ efficacy. Authors in this study adopted a triangulation convergence model to better understand implications of mushrooming private schools to public schooling by comparing and corroborating survey results and interview data from a cross section of stakeholders (head teachers, teachers, pupils, parents and educational officers) drawn from urban and rural contexts. Quantitative and qualitative data from 11 rural and 9 urban schools revealed major differences on school characteristics, social class, school environment, determinants of school choice and overall learners’ efficacy. Study further found out the existence of non-formal schools that further complicated the meaning of private schools and learners’ efficacy. A t-test of independent sample means on head teachers and teachers  attitudes towards selected variables about public and private schools revealed no significant statistical difference (t=1.441, df 18, p>0.05; and t=-1.574, df 126, p>0.05. The study recommended theoretical, practical and policy implementation strategies to address the savage pedagogical injustices and inequalities.
Keywords: educational equity and equality; public and private primary schooling; learners’ efficacy; triangulation convergence design

Oxfam India’s second rapid survey of government and private schools captures the experiences of the three most important education stakeholders- viz. teachers, parents and children at the moment of reopening of schools before they began closing again as part of the government reaction to the Omicron variant. As such, it captures the extent of which children were able to return to school, whether the school environment is responsive to their learning and pedagogic needs and how well teachers have been to deal equipped with resulting problems.

EDITORIAL (Ondrej Kaščák)

ARTICLES

Melissa Andrade-Molina: The Adventure of the Deceitful Numbers

Jana Sedláčková: Approaches Applied by Mothers of First Graders to Dealing with their Perceived Reading Difficulties

Zuzana Danišková, Ivan Lukšík: Primary Teachers Go Beyond the Slovak National Curriculum

Luciana Benincasa: Word Problems and Make-believe: Using Frame Analysis and Ethnomethodology to Explore Aspects of the Culture of Schooling

Kate Berniz, Andrew Miller: English Language Support: A Dialogical Multi-literacies Approach to Teaching Students from CALD Backgrounds