Another Look at Persistent Inequality in Israeli Education

This is a study of change in inequality of educational opportunity in Israel. Recent studies in Israel and elsewhere have found declining inequality of opportunity at the primary and secondary levels of education coupled with more persistent inequality at higher levels. However, these studies ignore the fact that the relative value of qualifications change as education expands over time. Many scholars agree that that the value of qualifications lies in their relative position in the distribution of education. And yet, in empirical research education is typically represented in absolute rather than relative terms. I analyze all available Israeli mobility data for the cohorts born between1951-1981 and estimate models of both absolute and relative education, as well as of education recoded into its earning value. When education is defined in absolute terms, I find the familiar decline in the effects of parents’ education. When it is measured in terms of its earning value or in relative terms, the results show significant increases in the effect of parents’ education on education. I also study change in the effects of ethnicity and of gender.

Permanent inequalities - changes in the impact of social background on educational opportunity in thirteen industrial nations

Im Aufsatz wird über die Ergebnisse eines international vergleichenden Projekts berichtet, in dem die Veränderungen der Bildungsungleichheit in dreizehn industrialisierten Ländern systematisch untersucht worden ist. Die einbezogenen Länder spiegeln dabei eine breite Palette wichtiger Konstellationen von Hintergrundvariablen hinsichtlich industrieller Modernisierungsstufe, Kultur, politischem System, historischer Entwicklung und verschiedener Grundtypen der Bildungssysteme wider. Das Hauptergebnis der Untersuchung ist, daß in elf dieser sehr verschiedenen dreizehn Länder (Ausnahmen: Schweden u. Niederlande) trotz der zunehmenden Bildungsbeteiligung unterer sozialer Schichten die herkunftsbezogenen Bildungschancen weitgehend unverändert geblieben sind. Auf dieser Grundlage wird die These vertreten, daß die Bildungsexpansion sogar eine der entscheidenden Voraussetzungen für die fortwährende Ungleichheit der herkunftsbezogenen Bildungschancen darstellt. (DIPF/Ko.)The authors report the results of an international comparative project in which changes in educational inequality in thirteen industrialized countries were systematically analyzed. The nations included in this analysis reflect a wide range of important constellations of background variables regarding the level of industrial modernization, culture, the political system, historical development, and different basic types of school systems. The countries compared are the United States, the former Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland, Taiwan, Japan, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Israel. The main result of the analysis is that in eleven of these thirteen extremely different countries the impact of social background on educational opportunity has hardly changed - despite the fact that the lower social strata increasingly participate in education. On the basis of these findings, the authors argue that educational expansion is in fact one of the decisive prerequisites for the continuing social inequality in educational opportunity. (DIPF/Orig.

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

Secondary Vocational-Education and the Transition From School to Work

This article reevaluates the effects of high school vocational education on students' odds of being unemployed and students' occupational attainment in the transition from school to work. The question posed is whether vocational secondary education actually benefits its clientele or is simply the crude mechanism of social exclusion that some claim it to be. The authors find that although vocational education inhibits students' likelihood of attending college and subsequently of finding employment in the professions and managerial occupations, it also reduces the risk of unemployment and increases students' chances of employment as skilled workers. Therefore, for students who are unlikely to continue on to college, vocational education is a safety net that reduces the risk of falling to the bottom of the labor queue

Age At Marriage, Sex-Ratios, and Ethnic Heterogamy

This paper focuses on the effects of age at marriage and the sex-ratio on patterns of ethnic homogamy among Israeli women. We hypothesize that later marriages are more likely than early marriages to be heterogamous as the 'marriage market' shifts from school to the work-place. By the same token, when facing severe marriage squeezes women will be forced to out-marry. Employing data from the 1983 census, we model mate selection of women from Afro-Asian and Euro-American origin in various birth-cohorts. The results do not fully support our hypotheses: we find that in and of itself, age at marriage does not enhance ethnic heterogamy. Women of both ethnic groups who marry later are more likely to marry men of Euro-American origin than those who marry early but this seems to reflect educational rather than ethnic assortative mating. We also find that Afro-Asian women born to cohorts which face severe marriage squeezes are more likely to stay single and those who marry are more likely to out-marry