❝The Slovak system of education does not mitigate the effects of social disadvantage on students.❞
In this study from 2020, I show that in Slovakia, students leaving elementary schools with high ratios of socially disadvantaged children are more likely to stop attending schools and less likely to continue at academic strand schools. Actually, in some schools with many socially disadvantaged children, a quarter of all students do not continue anywhere. It shows that Slovakia has a massive problem of reproduction of poverty. Those born into the poorest families have much higher chances of not getting any higher-secondary education. Unfortunately, I was not able to get to the student-level data, therefore, it was impossible to separate the effect of social disadvantage and school composition.
The table below shows that in the sample of schools with high proportions of disadvantaged students, the students’ destinations greatly differed from the Slovak average.
On the other hand, a small number of low socioeconomic composition schools (n1 and n2 in the table) showed similar or better record of students’ destinations than the Slovak average, which suggests that some schools are able to mitigate the effects of poverty on students’ education.