Sociologický ústav AV ČR, v.v.i.

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2001:02 The Role Of Political, Social and Cultural Capital in Secondary School Selection in Socialist Czechoslovakia, 1948-1989

Martin Kreidl

In this paper I analyze secondary school tracking in socialist Czechoslovakia. Despite the importance of the transition from primary to secondary school in the Czechoslovak educational system, previously attempts to model this transition have been fatally flawed. Using multinomial logistic regression, I show the effects of family background on the odds of making the transition to vocational, technical, or academic secondary schools. I test various hypotheses regarding trends in educational reproduction and the effects of parental Communist Party membership on educational attainment. 'Communist affirmative action policies' had some impact on inequalities in access to vocational and technical secondary schools, but did not affect status differences in access to academic schools. I also show the effects of parental involvement in the Communist Party upon the transition from primary to secondary schools. The effects of parental party membership were highly variable across time and were sensitive to historical variations in the official communist ideology. I also show that people from certain demographic categories benefited more from post-war expansion of the educational system than others. While larger numbers of lower class, rural and female students enrolled in secondary schools, their higher enrollments were largely confined to vocational schools. Though a large number of higher status children were enrolled throughout the 1948 - 89 period, their enrollments in vocational schools dropped as they began to fill positions in the growing technical and academic schools.

Summary

Secondary school tracking unquestionably occurred in Czechoslovakia. Children were placed into tracks after primary school graduation at the age of 14. Since students only very infrequently switched between tracks or dropped out, their track placement had a fatal impact on their subsequent educational trajectories. The choice of a vocational training represented the end of one's educational career for 88% of students, while all students at technical and academic schools maintained the opportunity to proceed to the university. The selection of the remaining 12% who proceeded to complete their secondary education after finishing the vocational training still remains to be analyzed.
Earlier approaches misrepresented the transition from primary to secondary schools in Czechoslovakia by ignoring secondary school tracking. However, we have seen that students in individual tracks varied greatly with respect to their background characteristics. A thorough investigation of secondary school tracking also reveals its crucial historical dynamics. As the system expanded, high status children increased their participation in academic and technical schools and left the vocational schools. The expansion of the former schools did not appreciably raise the chances of lower status children to obtain a complete secondary education. Their augmented secondary school participation resulted from more available spots in vocational schools, which were no longer attractive for high status students. Only a multinomial transition model can portray the above-mentioned trends and depict properly the track placement in the course of the system expansion.
Educational expansion, unlike 'communist affirmative action', dramatically reduced educational reproduction. The remarkable growth of secondary education opened the system to virtually any student and eliminated any socioeconomic advantages in access to secondary education. But the effects of the sizably advanced opportunities were curbed to apprenticeship programs. The impact of parental education upon the transition to technical and academic schools remained unaffected by the expansion. The system of 'communist affirmative action' per se exhibited no impact upon educational reproduction, not even in the Stalinist 1950s.
Positive and negative discrimination on the basis of parental occupation considerably diminished the relative advantage of higher status children in the transition to secondary schools. However, the destratification policies achieved only a partial success. First, their outcomes were largely confined to two short periods in the early 1950s and early 1970s. Second, only vocational and technical secondary schools were affected, whereas higher status students maintained their advantages at academic secondary schools.
The consequences of parental involvement in the party for children's education display remarkable historical variation, which is unmistakably responsive to modern Czechoslovak history. Children of active communists were advantaged in the two periods of the most explicit communist orthodoxy: first after the communist revolution between 1948 and 1953, and then after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia between 1970 and 1974. During the liberalization in the 1960s, the odds of going to a secondary school were higher for non-party children. This continual liberalization culminated in 1968 just before Warsaw Pact troops took over Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately, data used in this paper cannot adjudicate the two competing views of Communist Party affiliation, one ascribing its effects to social and the other one to political capital.
Disadvantaged students, particularly female and rural students, benefited the most from the growing size of secondary education in Czechoslovakia. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a complete abolition of urban-rural and gender gaps in access to secondary education. The latter was most probably due to the educational reforms in the late 1970s, which made secondary education essentially universal, and therefore fulfilled one of the communist goals in education. Many others were not accomplished though. Status based preferential policies had noteworthy outcomes, but many important inequalities in access to secondary education remained. Particularly the most desirable types of schooling continued to be highly selective on social status and were not affected by 'communist affirmative action'. As a result, educational expansion seems to be the most efficient strategy for achieving equal access to schooling.

Keywords

Education, educational attainment, secondary school tracking, social inequality, educational reproduction