May 2024
AERA recently published Inequality in Key Skills of City Youth: An International Comparison, edited by Stephen Lamb and Russell W. Rumberger. The book addresses the topic of educational inequality from a global perspective. It includes 16 chapters from an international group of scholars who examined how well city school systems around the world were preparing young people, particularly poor and minority students, with the skills they would need for further study, work, and life overall.
The topic of the book itself is high on the agenda of education research scholars and education policymakers across continents and hemispheres. The book offers findings and wisdom on global educational inequality and also thoughtful guidance on undertaking such international comparative research. This Q&A piece with a highly experienced team of co-editors offers a window on why this volume and the chapters therein are a resource worth a read.
Lamb is an emeritus professor of education at Victoria University. Rumberger is a professor emeritus in education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Lamb and Rumberger discuss important takeaways from the book in the following Q&A.
What led you to undertake this book?
A group of scholars from different countries began meeting regularly about 20 years ago to discuss shared interests in research on student success and failure in school and the transition pathways to college, careers, and life beyond high school. Initially, the group met annually to present and discuss similarities and differences in how their school systems worked and how well they worked for students from different backgrounds. It became clear in the presentations and discussions that, in every country represented, educational inequality existed, with varying numbers of young people succeeding in school and beyond, and varying numbers missing out on the benefits of education as they progressed into adulthood.
The discussions initially led to a journal volume which provided outlines of educational structures in a number of countries and related estimates of flows of students through schools and programs, including differences in student progress and outcomes. The discussions then shifted to the issue of high school dropouts, leading to the publication of an edited book with chapters from most of the participating countries.
What was missing in the work was some way of comparing more directly what was happening in each system for different populations of students, particularly in promoting achievement, the acquisition of skills, and post-school transition to further study and work. To compare systems in a meaningful way would require a common framework for measurement and comparison. The International Study of City Youth (ISCY) project emerged as a logical step as it provided the basis for an original international study of urban high school students with common survey and assessment items that would facilitate cross-country comparisons.
Why is it important to conduct research in international education?
Educational inequality is a feature of school systems across the globe, and nations share a concern with how effectively their schools are preparing young people from all backgrounds with the skills needed to succeed. Research offers potentially valuable insights into the nature of inequality and, more important, into ways of reducing inequality by studying the issue internationally. Global perspectives that take into account how various countries approach social inequality and promote mobility can provide insights into possible solutions and effective design.
How young people relate to the social world and how well schools equip them with the skills to participate well in that world are linked with a variety of individual and school factors. It is through comparative international study that we can capture the extent to which the institutional framework of a school system either aggravates or attenuates the force of such factors. Examples of how institutional arrangements differ include early or delayed selection into academic or vocational tracks, comprehensive or segmented schooling, the organization of vocational training, and “open” and “closed” sectors of higher education.
International comparative research can help highlight the ways in which institutional arrangements shape student experience, opportunities, and outcomes and contribute to creating persistent social patterns which are usually interpreted as a function of individual factors. A broad theoretical framework is required to study the ways in which institutional arrangements differ between countries.
Could you talk a little bit about the International Study of City Youth project?
ISCY was designed as a study of how well young people were being prepared in high school for their journeys to further study, training, and employment. Initially, research teams from 14 cities in Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia (Barcelona, Bergen, Bordeaux, Ghent, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Montréal, Reykjavík, Sacramento, San Diego, Santiago, Tijuana, Turku, and Wrocław) were invited to participate in the study. Each research team selected a representative sample of schools and students with a design to facilitate estimating school effects on student outcomes.
Rather than focusing on an age group, such as 15-year-olds (as in PISA), ISCY was based on samples of 10th-grade students in each city. The idea was to select students at the end of junior high school or the beginning of the senior secondary year, depending on the school system, who would be drawn from a single grade at a similar point in the schooling cycle. Thus, the study was able to capture a full cohort of students not yet very much affected by school dropout. ISCY was initially designed as a longitudinal study to measure the longer term school and initial post-school outcomes of this cohort. Tracking 10th-grade students would enable an examination of skills and school experiences for a whole cohort of students in each city and relationships with program choices and pathways in school and beyond. The study design was chosen to provide comparisons and insights into the structures of opportunities and alternative pathways that high school provided in each city.
Researchers in each participating city were responsible for recruiting schools. In smaller cities, all schools were recruited. Schools were given the option to have all 10th-grade students participate or to work with the researcher to select a representative sample of students. Most schools surveyed all students.
The base-year data collection was completed in eight of the cities during the 2013–14 school year and in the remaining six cities during the 2014–15 school year. A total of more than 40,000 students were surveyed from more than 400 schools in the 14 cities.
What are the key issues addressed in the book?
Doing well in school and being prepared well for further study and future careers requires more than just subject content knowledge and academic skills, as important as they are. Social and emotional (noncognitive) skills, positive dispositions toward learning, and active engagement in school are part of a broader array of attributes that can also impact school achievement and, in the longer term, influence outcomes in adult life in areas such as employment, attainment, earnings, health, and active citizenship.
The ISCY study measured and compared student cognitive and noncognitive skills, dispositions, and engagement as part of a broader international study of educational inequality. The results presented in the book, provided through a comparative analysis using data from all 14 ISCY cities and then a set of case studies of nine individual cities, provided insight into how well the selected school systems in different nations were equipping young people with the skills, dispositions, and behaviors needed for success in school, further study, and work.
Key questions included:
What is the value of the book to policymakers and the public?
An important question is whether the decisions that system authorities and policymakers implement around school organization, programs, and rules and requirements make a difference. Do opportunities to acquire skills vary by city thanks to the design of school systems?
Evidence from ISCY suggests that the city students live in might well matter to their opportunities in education and how well they do in school. Skill levels, both cognitive and social and emotional, vary across cities, and not all of the variations are due to population, economy, and resources (though some are); many are due to the policies and practices associated with the organization of schools and courses and the various approaches to teaching, assessment, and certification.
Policymakers are often under pressure to prove the quality of their policies for schools and the impact that schools have in promoting good student outcomes. Most systems stress the importance of young people’s having access to high-quality education, and measure schools accordingly. Some districts in the U.S., for example, have in place frameworks of indicators used to measure how well schools are doing. In some districts, schools receive an annual progress report and a quality review assessment based on school environment, student performance, and student progress. Some of the assessments include comparisons against other schools in the same district or state.
However, what systems do not have is comparisons of their schools with those in high-performing systems in other countries. ISCY provides an opportunity for system authorities in each of the cities studied to compare, in a unique way, the performance of their schools as a system against those in other cities of the world, at least on some dimensions of performance. It is an opportunity for education authorities to measure through comparison how well their systems are working to serve the needs of all young people.
Did any of the takeaways from the book surprise you?
The school authorities associated with the ISCY cities pursued quite different approaches to the design and organization of schools and school programs. The different arrangements influenced the extent of segregation, both social and academic, within and across schools, and the nature and extent of inequality in skills.
This is not surprising, given that we know from other comparative work that the effects of policy and design decisions by school authorities—particularly those around school organization, curricular programs, credentials, selection, and advancement—do matter to students’ acquisition of skills and inequality in skills.
What is a little more surprising, however, is how success or failure in acquiring skills linked to system design can be interpreted by students as being due to themselves. It is a paradox that the 10th-graders in the city with the highest levels of math and reading skills displayed some of the highest levels of self-doubt and lack of hope, and the most anxiety about the future. That city had a highly competitive academic system where many students did not graduate high school, despite high-level math and reading skills. Students recorded high levels of anxiety and low levels of certainty about the future, providing an example of how system structure and policies shape individual outlook or mindset. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and Kurt Lewin before him, described this kind of phenomenon in terms of individuals internalizing the objective probabilities associated with the structure of opportunities, or incorporating external reality into their own feelings and thinking and expressing that as personal failure.
If you were to study cities not covered in the volume, which would you focus on, and why?
High school systems represent a range of models or approaches. Given the objectives of ISCY, it was important that the choice of cities reflect the range. However, the final list of cities did not cover all of the various models. There were four basic criteria which we employed to consider covering the range: (a) strong or weak structure, (b) academic and vocational elements, (c) graduation requirements, and (d) early or delayed academic selection.
The final list of ISCY cities covers models that contain (a) structured programs combining academic and vocational elements of variable emphasis and with minimum graduation requirements; (b) loosely structured programs and set graduation requirements; (c) a system with a loosely structured mainstream program and minimum graduation requirements, but with an alternative high school certificate; (d) a system with largely academic programs offered at different levels and with no graduation requirements; and (e) a system with differentiated streams, offered in different types of school, with delayed academic selection.
It would have been useful to include a city with a differentiated school system based on early selection with academic and terminal types of school- and workplace-based vocational training. Munich or a similar German city would have provided a useful model of this.