Yossi Shavit

Persistent inequality : changing educational attainment in thirteen countries

Changes in educational stratification in Taiwan who gains and who loses in a socialist redistribution: educational attainment in Czechoslovakia? changes in educational stratification in Japan inequalities in post-war Poland educational attainment in a changing British educational system the 1968 reforms and the changing effects of family on educational attainment in the Netherlands changes in the educational stratification of the Federal Republic of Germany family and school continuation decisions in the Netherlands making the Grade: educational transition rates in the US 1925-1985 do school reforms matter? social background and educational attainment in Israel cohort and gender in the changing educational attainment process in Hungary.

From School to Work. A Comparative Study of Educational Qualifications and Occupational Destinations.

1. The institutional embededness of the stratification process: a comparative study of qualifications and occupations in thirteen countries 2. The transition from school to work in Australia 3. Education and occupation in Britain 4. From education to first job: the French case 6. Investment in education: educational qualifications and class of entry in the Republic of Ireland 7. The transition from school to work in Israel 8. Occupational returns to education in contemporary Italy 9. Educational credentials and labour market entry outcomes in Japan 10. From high school and college to work in Japan - meritocracy through institutional and semi-institutional linkages 11. Education and early occupation in the Netherlands around 1990: categorical and continous scales and the details of a relationship 12. Allocation processes in the Swedish labour market 13. The transition from school to work in Switzerland: do characteristics of the educational system and class barriers matter? 14. The transition from school to work in Taiwan 15. The early returns: the transition from school to work in the United States

Educational Reforms and Inequalities in Israel: The MMI Hypothesis Revisited

Israeli secondary school students sit for national matriculation examinations that result in their receiving either a plain or a university-qualifying diploma. During the 1990s, the Ministry of Education implemented policies that were designed to raise eligibility rates for the diploma. This article evaluates the consequences of these policies for gender, ethnic, and socioeconomic inequalities in the odds of obtaining the two forms of the diploma. The results show that the reforms reduced socioeconomic inequalities in the odds of obtaining the plain diploma but increased inequalities in the odds of obtaining the university-qualifying diploma. Overall, the results refute the prediction of Raftery and Houts (1993) hypothesis of maximally maintained inequality that inequalities are maintained as long as privileged groups have not reached saturation vis-à-vis an educational level. Rather, they are consistent with Lucass (2001) claim that the differentiation of a given educational credential can substitute qualitative inequalities for quantitative ones.

Sibship Size and Educational Attainment in Nuclear and Extended Families: Arabs and Jews in Israel.

We examine the relationship between number of siblings and educational attainment for three groups in Israel: Ashkenazi Jews, Oriental Jews, and Moslem Arabs. For both Jewish groups number of siblings has a negative effect on educational attainment. However, this pattern is not replicated for Moslems whose social organization is based largely on the extended family and the patrilineage (the hamula). Among Moslems the extended family plays an active supporting role vis-a-vis the nuclear family. While the size of the nuclear family does not affect educational attainment for Moslems in Israel, the size of the hamula does. This suggests that when the nuclear family draws on the support of an extended kinship, its size is less important for the educational attainment of children.

Tracking and Ethnicity in Israeli Secondary Education.

Secondary education in Israel uses curricular tracking. The academic track is selective on the basis of scholastic aptitude and prepares students for higher education. The vocational tracks maintain low curricular requirements and are said to enhance educational attainment of low-aptitude students. Ethnicity is highly correlated with measured aptitude. Hence, Sephardim are typically assigned to vocational tracks whereas Ashkenazim are more likely to attend the academic track. The investigation concerns the extent to which tracking reinforces the effects of ethnic aptitude differences on ethnic inequalities in educational attainment. An analysis of data on educational histories for a subsample of Jewish men reveals that educational persistence at the secondary level is virtually unaffected by track placement. Academic track placement enhances eligibility for higher education of all but the least able students. The availability of the vocational track does not enhance educational participation of Sephardim. Rather, it inhibits further their already low likelihood of receiving higher education.

Age, Crime, and the Early Life Course

The age distribution of criminal activity peaks in the mid to late teen years and declines thereafter. Recently, Hirschi and Gottfredson have argued that the shape of the age distribution is invariant across social groups and that this shape is unexplained by any known st of sociological variables. They also assert that longitudinal data and models are not necessary to explain delinquency. The present investigation employs longitudinal data on the early life histories of an Israeli male birth cohort to test these assertions and fails to reject them. The shape of the age distribution does not vary sigificantly across ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious orthodoxy groups; nor can it be explained in terms of age variations in marital status, employment, and schooling. However, contrary to Hirschi and Gottfredsons assertion concerning longitudinal data, it is demostrated that in the absence of such data, several parameters of the estimated models would have been biased.

Educational Transitions in Israel: A Test of the Industrialization and Credentialism Hypotheses.

The industrialization hypothesis predicts a decline in the effects of social background variables on educational attainment across cohorts, whereas the credentialism hypothesis predicts a decline of these effects on the attainment of lower educational levels and stable or rising effects on the attainment of higher levels of schooling. Employing a model developed by Mare (1981) and analyzing data from the 1974 Israeli Mobility Survey, the authors found that the effects of fathers education and occupation on the various educational transitions were stable across cohorts who attended school during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. However, the effects of ethnicity, a major axis of the Israeli system of social stratification, declined in the transition from primary to secondary schooling but remained constant on subsequent educational transitions.

Ethnic Stratification and Place of Residence in Israel: A Truism Revisited

Abstract The aim of the present study is to examine whether, and to what extent, community type affects ethnic inequalities in educational and occupational attainment in Israel. During the period of mass immigration in the 1950s, the government built several dozens of development towns in the periphery with the aim of settling the flow of new immigrants while, at the same time, realizing Jewish sovereignty over state-controlled lands. The development towns were settled mostly by new immigrants, especially those from North Africa. To this very day, the vast majority of development town residents are descendants of those immigrants. Past research has shown that education level, occupational status, and income in development towns are substantially lower than in other urban communities. These findings led some scholars to conclude that development towns have a depressing effect on the attainments of their residents, and since most of them are of Middle East and North African origins, development towns are responsible for the inequalities between these groups and the more privileged Ashkenazim. Similarly, the low educational and occupational achievements of the Arab citizens of Israel are usually considered to be the result of a dearth of educational resources in the Arab localities, and the lack of a reasonable occupational infrastructure. We believe that these conclusions, nearly all of which are based on cross-section surveys, are premature. In order to achieve a better understanding of the stratifying effects of the peripheral communities, we analyzed an integrated data set that contains individual-level information from the 1983 and 1995 population censuses as well as parental information from the 1983 census. The data set includes 13,285 records of young adults who, in 1995, were between the ages of 27 and 34. We found that residence in a development town negatively affected the chances of achieving a matriculation certificate, but not the likelihood of receiving higher education or occupational achievements. Furthermore, we found that the differential distribution of population groups among localities is not an important factor in creating educational and occupational inequality among different ethnic and national groups.

Two Decades of Educational Intermarriage in Israel

The propensity of people from various social groups to marry one another reflects cultural similarities or differences between groups and indexes the degree of integration among them. In addition patterns of mate selection can help predict changes in the social structure. For example increasing rates of ethnic intermarriage may indicate that ethnicity is losing its social significance and ethnic tensions are declining (e.g. Schmeltz et. al 1991). Increasing rates of educational homogamy may lead to greater educational inequality in the population because some children will benefit from having two educated parents while others will have none (Mare 1991). Thus, society’s patterns of assortative marriages mirror its past and its present, and shape its future.

The Association Between Student Reports of Classmates’ Disruptive Behavior and Student Achievement

Classroom disciplinary climate and its correlation to students’ performance is a widely debated issue. Policy reports tend to assume that classroom disruptions interfere with the learning experience. Empirical evidence for this assumption, however, which carefully distinguishes classroom climate from the school climate in general, is still wanting. This study examines the relation between student reports regarding disciplinary infractions to student achievement, with a special focus on classroom disruptions. Multilevel regressions were used to estimate the contribution of classroom and school disciplinary infractions on eighth-grade students’ test scores. Reports of disruptive behavior proved to correlate negatively with test scores, whereas the effect of other school and classroom characteristics, including teachers’ attitudes and school disciplinary policy, were insignificant (controlling for students’ prior achievements). We conclude that a disruptive classroom climate can hinder the learning process and lower the achievement of the entire class, regardless of the conduct of any particular student. Therefore, a special focus on disruptions in the classroom, in contradistinction with school disciplinary climate in general—which is lacking in most studies—emerges as instrumental to the understanding of how school climate relates to student achievement.