Education in Hungary 2000

Chapter 10 - Inequality and Equity in Public Education

Social, regional and local inequalities have considerably grown in Hungary during the 1990s. The number of unstable families has increased, the prospects of integration for the handicapped have become more difficult, and the position of Gypsies has worsened dramatically. In the middle of the decade, these challenges and the problems these processes raised became one of the central issues of education policy. Today’s pedagogy and education policy focus on compensating for the social, financial, linguistic and cultural disadvantages of students. In the 1970s and 1980s education policy-makers attempted to solve these problems by way of the so-called alternative approaches in pedagogy, and later by focusing on, and redefining, the quality of education. The dividing lines between equal opportunities (access to services regardless of social background), positive discrimination (instruments used to compensate disadvantaged groups), and quality slowly grew indistinct. The problem of inequality within the educational system basically became a question of quality.

The efficiency of education, and the inequalities observable in terms of efficiency, can be grasped with the help of two kinds of data: one is advancement in the school system, and another is measurable school performances. One of the most important indices of the efficiency of education is the number of students who fail to complete their studies, i.e. the rate of dropouts. In Hungary this category comprises students who fail to complete primary school, students who complete primary education but leave school before the compulsory age-limit for school attendance, handicapped students who complete special schools, students who drop out from secondary education, and students who complete vocational training programmes that do not increase their chances of employment.

With regard to advancement in the school system, the rate of dropouts is relatively high. 25% of youngsters leaving education fall into this category. This is indicated by the high rate of young people, between the ages of 16 and 19, who do not attend school and are unemployed (Table 10.1). Research done over the past decades suggests that approaches which aim to explore educational inequalities by focusing solely on indicators of advancement in the system, fail to reveal important dimensions that are increasingly significant in the light of trends in the labour market. In addition, we come closer to an understanding of the problem of selection within education if we use the results of school performance surveys to supplement the picture presented by school statistics. As a consequence of all this, in addition to the above-mentioned student groups labelled as ‘dropouts’, we can include other groups on the list. The term ‘dropout’ may be extended to students who leave school without acquiring learning skills, personal conduct and the skills necessary for employment, to students who fail to learn the so-called culturally important instrumental skills (such as reading comprehension or basic computer skills), and to students who, upon leaving the education system, complete programmes that have a low additional pedagogical value.

Table 10.1    Status of young people from 15-24 in education and in the labour market, 1992 and 1997 (%)

10.1 Types of Educational Inequality

The influence of different inequalities and differences on the school career of children is exerted through a complex system of effects. For example, inequalities between settlements not only have an indirect effect on school career by means of the conditions provided by the schools, but they also have a direct effect on the accessibility of cultural materials or on the characteristics of early socialisation within the family.

The issue of inequality within the educational system can be studied in three dimensions: (1) access to educational services; (2) teaching and learning process within the educational system; and (3) students’ achievements.

As regards access to educational services, the factors worthy of primary attention are the geographical location of the different educational institutions, the system of allotment of financial resources, and the stock of professional teachers. As for the inequality that can be traced in the teaching-learning process, the quality of schools, the content of education and the quality of teaching and educational activities should be mapped. When we are drawing up the ‘map of problem areas’ concerning educational inequalities, we have to take into account all the above listed factors. On the one hand, we must pay attention to the social environment of education, i.e. the categories for describing the ’background’ of students (social inequality and differences). On the other hand, we must also include the inequalities occurring within the education system, i.e. access to educational services, the quality of those, and inequalities in connection with the efficiency of education.

Social Inequality

All research done in this field shows that qualification, occupation, income and the risk of unemployment are closely related to each other. In Hungary, like almost everywhere in the world, ‘the strongest trend is to pass on the level of qualification and occupational position’. The interrelation between social inequality and educational performance is an issue typically raised in Hungary in connection with socially disadvantaged students. There cannot be any doubt that there is a strong statistical connection between parental background and the different risk factors that play a key role in school failure. Nevertheless, among the possible reasons behind school failure, there are many, which cannot be mechanically linked to the qualification, the occupation or the income of parents. Such are, for example, drug-taking, and the divorce or the impaired health condition of parents. Another problem is that the different types of risk factors (for example, behavioural disorders and criminalisation) and the indicators of school failure (for instance the dropout-rate) often merge into one another. There are more direct correlations between the social position of parents and the success of children in education. For children growing up in families of low social status the environment outside the school often lacks the stimuli necessary to meet the knowledge and skill requirements of the school. In other words, their environment often lacks the conditions for distraction-free learning. Problematic family circumstances make it difficult for children to integrate into their age group, which often results in aggression, which in turn draws retributions from the school. Different relative disadvantages lessen students’ degree of motivation, shorten their span of attention, and generally lead to failure. There is a serious problem in connection with the costs of education, both direct (textbooks, school equipment, travel) and indirect (clothing, food), as these are becoming a reason for concern for a growing number of families. The increasing role of private tuition in the success of children in the school is another problem that can be linked to the financial capacity of families.

As for the success of students in their school career, skills development at an early age plays a highly significant role. Although the number of children attending nursery school in Hungary is high by international standards, it is notable that this number is the lowest in social groups that would need nursery education the most (for example, Gypsy children and children of unemployed parents). There are certain signs that ‘gap-bridging’ programmes in schools have a positive influence on the performance of children, however, their effect has failed to live up to expectations. Generally speaking, in Hungarian schools the culture of supporting individual learning methods has not evolved, the problem of identifying students in need of ‘compensation classes’ or supplementary pedagogical attention is not solved, schools employ a very small number of non-teaching professionals (for example psychologists, skills development teachers or social helpers), and the pedagogical development and service providers indispensable for this kind of work are still under-developed. At the same time, the financial aids specially granted for catering, travel and textbook expenses often prove to be insufficient.

In the past decade a significant number of primary educational institutions that focus their objectives on developing the children’s personality and the acquisition of skills necessary in their future school career have been established. These initiatives, however, hardly had an effect on the management of the institutions with many of the most endangered students, partly because they undertook the education of highly gifted or middle-class students, and also because the experiences they gained have rarely become widely known. One of the reasons behind this is that Hungarian public education has no established system for evaluating and analysing different unique or experimental models. Another is that both the information web and the system of school-developing services that could make these models exert a widespread influence on a large number of institutions are underdeveloped. The close relationship between the family background, suggested by the qualification of parents, and the educational inequalities between students can be observed by other means than outlining different school careers. The differences are clearly documented in the dissimilar school performances as early as the 8th grade. Taking the highest and lowest qualified parents, the difference measured in the knowledge of students exceeds 20 percent everywhere. Considering that in many developed countries the difference in performance between the children of the highest and lowest qualified parents is less than 10 percent, the social inequality measured in school performance can be declared fairly large in Hungary.

Regional and Institutional Inequality

There is practically no issue in education that does not involve inequality in connection with regional aspects. The differences observable along the lines of some regional dimensions (regions, settlement type, size of settlement) can be considered natural to a certain degree and in a certain sense. However, these differences count as inequality only if the place of living becomes the source of educational disadvantages, as regards the funding of education, the access to different levels of educational services, the quality of education or school performances, inequalities that are hard to work off.

Within the educational expenditure of local governments, the rate of normative subsidies by the state was constantly declining until 1995, but has slightly increased since 1996. The analysis of educational expenditures of local governments per student indicates that the inequalities in the expenditure of local governments have not decreased in the nineties, in fact, except for 1996, they have been growing. The shortfall of settlements whose educational spending is below average remained unchanged in terms of material expenditure until 1995, however, in 1997 their relative situation worsened. This goes to show that the system of state subsidies did not succeed in closing the gap between local government expenditure on education. One of the reasons behind the persistent inequalities in expenditure is that a significant number of local governments can adapt to decreasing student numbers to a limited extent only, since they cannot restrict the number of classes and employees accordingly. Therefore, the drop in demand can raise local average expenditure, which makes the differences in the per-student expenditure persist or even rise.

As for access to educational services, regional differences manifest themselves most in the continuation of studies at secondary level. For example, the rate of students going on to secondary grammar schools is the lowest, except for Baranya County, in North-Hungary and in Central-Transdanubian areas, but relatively high in the Great Plain and in Central-Hungary. The larger differences are present in the gaps between settlement types, and in the size of the settlements within the types. The number of public education institutions the settlement is provided with, for example, strongly depends on its size. There are 716 settlements in Hungary (nearly one-fourth of all settlements) where there are no public education institutions. The majority of these are small settlements with less than 500 inhabitants.

In the settlements that may be considered most typical, with 1 000 to 5 000 inhabitants, there are usually two types of institutions: nursery and primary school. Ninety percent of cities offer a full range of public educational institutions and 96 percent of secondary schools are in cities. The rate of secondary students living in other settlements than the one where their school is located is the highest in the case of secondary schools in township communities. This rate is radically decreasing with the growth of cities, but still every fifth secondary student in Budapest commutes from other settlements.

The inequalities measurable in the regional dimension can be apprehended fairly well with the help of the specific indices of education. Similarly to inequality in connection with access to education, differences in settlement type and settlement size are significant. For instance, considerable differences can be observed in the use of available nursery school capacities: in villages below 500 inhabitants, the rate of nursery school children compared to available capacities is below 80 percent, whereas in settlements above 5 000 inhabitants nursery schools are definitely crowded, the same rate being 113.2 %. In primary education the largest differences in the number of students per teacher and per school are also between small villages below
1 000 and large settlements above 5 000 inhabitants.

The inequality between settlement types can also be traced by looking at the different skills students develop, and at their level of knowledge. Between students learning in Budapest and in villages the largest difference is in reading comprehension, but they are fairly significant in civic education and cognitive abilities, as well. The differences are not that large in mathematics and informatics, and they are small in the case of natural sciences. The differences in the abilities of students in schools of different settlement types become more marked in the field of reading comprehension, which suggests that the language gap between villages and towns is widening.

Differences Between the Genders

Educational differences between boys and girls may basically occur in three areas: (1) their advancement in the school system, and the school careers they choose or can choose, (2) their school performance, and (3) the socializing effect of education.

Between the data on the nursery and primary schooling of the two genders there are no significant differences in Hungary. Although the number of boys leaving education without primary qualification (completing eight grades in primary school) is one and a half times as large as that of girls, the rate of boys and girls leaving education after primary school is nearly the same (Table 10.2). Nevertheless, after the completion of primary school, the differences in the career of students of the two genders become stronger. The difference is striking between the rate of boys and girls dropping out without taking the secondary school-leaving exam: 52 percent of the boys and 41 percent of the girls belonged to this group in 1998. In technical schools there is an invariably distinct difference between training courses preparing students for ‘male’ and ‘female’ trades. The differences observable in the secondary qualification structure are also fairly marked: roughly twice as many girls leave education with secondary general school qualifications, whereas the number of boys taking the secondary school-leaving examination in vocational schools is considerably higher. The rate of girls completing post-secondary training programmes is slightly higher than that of boys leaving at this level.

Table 10.2    The number of boys and girls leaving education according to educational levels, 1998 (thousand people)

According to data from the Monitor surveys, the differences in the level of knowledge between boys and girls are not significant: the cognitive abilities of eighth-former girls exceeded that of boys, and there was only one domain of knowledge where the performance of the latter was better, namely reading comprehension. In recent years, however, differences in the favour of boys have increased, for example, in the domain of mathematical thinking or ICT knowledge and skills. All this suggests that the pedagogical practices of primary schools ensure better conditions for the development of boys. The interrelation of socialisation in the school and socialisation at home is demonstrated by the fact that the higher the qualification of parents, the smaller the difference between the two genders, except for computer science and natural sciences. The third possible dimension to educational inequality between boys and girls, which has not been explored in Hungary as yet, is the socialising effect of education: the typical gender roles the school transmits, and how these affect the future social position and life prospects of boys and girls.

10.2 Possible Education Policies and their Instruments

Opinion is divided as to how the problems arising in connection with educational inequality should be interpreted. The different international organisations (OECD, EU, World Bank) put the issues concerning the quality of education in the centre, whereas in Hungary considerations concerning the structure of schools are more dominant. One of the crucial reasons behind the structure-oriented thinking is the lack of information on the pedagogical efficiency of education, and the failure to take a survey of the inequalities within the educational system. There is little doubt that the instruments for improving the quality of education are expensive (such as the monitoring of individual student performances). On the whole, it can be said that (1) the issue of social and regional inequality has received marked attention throughout the decade, (2) the issue of the education of minorities in general, and that of Gypsies in particular, has been given more attention since the middle of the 90s, but it is not fully integrated into the whole of education policy, (3) the education of special needs students is invariably one of the peripheral issues of education policy, and (4) the issue of the equality of the genders has not appeared on the agenda of policy makers.

Programmes that pronouncedly aim at reducing inequalities have been rarely launched. One of these was the Programme for the Educational Development of Gypsies, introduced in 1995, and another the PHARE-programme of 2000, which intends to ‘support the social integration of the multiply-disadvantaged, primarily Gypsy children’. The programme, with a total budget of 9.6 million euros, contains three major elements: (1) decreasing the dropout rate in primary school, (2) the support of special secondary training, and (3) the improvement of the social situation of the Gypsy minority, and their social integration.