Education and social reproduction: Educational mechanisms and residential segregation in Athens and Dortmund

Abstract

Based on quantitative data depicting two different, but equally crucial transitions within the educational career of pupils in Athens/Greece¹ and Dortmund/Germany,² the paper focuses on the main social selection processes reproducing educational inequalities in each city. It draws on discussions on education as a mechanism of social reproduction, on parental strategies as well as on local research regarding educational inequalities. Though the different educational strategies of middle-class parents in Athens and Dortmund can be related to differences between the two cities in terms of school systems and policies as well as of segregation levels and housing market conditions, they seem to follow a similar logic, with their objective being to create further advantage for their children.

Keywords

educational inequalities residential segregation social reproduction

Introduction

Over the last few decades, the importance of education has moved up the political agenda in many Western countries. This is on the one hand related to the emergence of a post-industrial knowledge economy, where economic success and long-term economic growth are dependent on the availability of a highly qualified workforce, and on the other hand to the extent to which access to, or preservation of, the middle-class status is increasingly dependent on the equitability of educational opportunities among citizens. At the same time, the increased importance of education on political agendas is also related to the fact that education is a necessary condition for an individual’s participation in today’s society. However, in many countries, access to education is clearly unequal, thereby ensuring the reproduction of existing class divisions (Butler and Hamnett, 2007) as well as heightening the risk of poverty and social exclusion for disadvantaged population groups.

Educational mechanisms are of fundamental importance in reproducing social inequality, and they do this in intricate and context-dependent ways based on different national educational systems, curricula and selection mechanisms as well as differences in the significance of private education. One crucial factor is the influence of parental aspirations. Research shows that middle-class parents adopt a range of strategies to give advantage to their children, mainly ensuring their access to the ‘right’ schools (Butler and Robson, 2003; Raveaud and Van Zanten, 2007; Reay et al., 2011).

The close connection between the choices of residence and school is often emphasised (Boterman, 2013; Butler and Hamnett, 2007; Butler and Robson, 2003) as a factor promoting residential and educational segregation (Maloutas, 2007a). Findings on the interrelation between education and residential location choices are mainly based on research in Western European countries, in particular the UK, while no comparison between Western and Southern European cities is available. This paper investigates and compares the connection between educational achievement and social origin in the cities of Athens/Greece and Dortmund/Germany, seeking to understand the differences in educational and housing systems – i.e. the ways resources are provided and socially allocated in the realms of education and housing – that shape the way educational disparities occur and are perpetuated in both cities, while special attention is given to parental strategies reinforcing social inequalities.

We start by outlining the educational and housing systems in Athens and Dortmund and pinpoint social selection processes in each city. We move on to provide evidence substantiating the breadth of social inequality within the two educational systems. This is followed by a discussion of the role played by space and the way residential segregation is related to school segregation. Finally, we discuss middle-class parental strategies for gaining educational advantage in the two cities.

Educational inequalities in context

The democratisation of education has opened up occupational and power positions to people without hereditary privilege, enabling a massive increase in social mobility. However, society remains stratified by the unequal social acquisition of increasingly demanding educational qualifications. Education is thus caught between its educational function, in principle open to everyone and rewarding personal merit, and its social reproduction function (Duru-Bellat, 2009; Felouzis, 2012). The socially unequal outcomes resulting from the systematic social differentiation of educational achievement suggest, therefore, that what appears as the just reward of personal merit in education is, to a large extent, a social construct (Dubet et al., 2010; Duru-Bellat, 2009).

Education constitutes a social selection process that national education systems manage in various ways. A national curriculum applying to all secondary schools, as found in most Scandinavian countries, is in principle less selective than differentiated curricula from an early age, as found in Germany or the Netherlands, or privileged paths to elite professions, like the ‘filières’ to the Grandes Écoles in France (Felouzis, 2009). In mixed (public/private) systems, high-profile private institutions may be free to choose their clientele from among those able to afford their services, leading to blatant forms of school segregation. The UK’s renowned public schools (i.e. private) are such an example, as are the elite private schools in Greece – the only other EU country where private schools are not funded at all by the state (Dronkers et al., 2010). Where state schools dominate, middle-class education strategies usually engender more intricate forms of school segregation (Ball, 2003; Boterman, 2013; Merle, 2012; Power et al., 2003; Van Zanten, 2009).

School choice and the role of space

In many countries the latest wave of educational policies has prioritised parental school choice, reflecting the growing size and internal diversity of the middle classes and their (actual or presumed) political support for more ‘consumer choice’ in education. They also reflect the paradigm shift from policies based on state intervention and legitimated by goals of equity and integration to policies promoting public choice assumingly leading to better-performing schools and better-performing education systems through competitiveness. New Labour’s pro-choice reforms in the UK (‘Excellence in Cities’, ‘Educational Priority Areas’, ‘Five-year Strategy’) as well as G.W. Bush’s NCLB (no child left behind) or Obama’s RTTT (race to the top) in the US are prominent examples.

Hamnett and Butler (2013) provide a comprehensive discussion of the ways different school systems (i.e. with a different mix of private/public service provision and varying degrees of parental choice) reproduce social inequalities through different forms of student allocation to schools. In France, the relaxation of catchment areas in the wake of pro-choice policies has had ambiguous social consequences in respect to its objectives. While parental choice was promoted as a tool for working-class and other underprivileged families to gain access to better schools than those in their neighbourhoods, it ultimately served families from classes that were more informed and more driven by educational objectives (Merle, 2012; Oberti et al., 2012). In the UK, parental choice eventually led to stricter catchment area rules reducing the maximum distance for eligibility to good schools (Hamnett and Butler, 2013). The relation between school and residential segregation was thus reinforced in the process. In countries like Germany and Denmark, catchment areas continue to be the norm and school segregation reflects, to a large extent, residential segregation.

However, middle-class parents manage to ‘work’ the system by moving to the ‘right’ catchment area – or by applying strategies not based on household mobility, such as remodelling or colonising ethnically and socially diverse urban neighbourhoods or even circumventing (in many cases illegally) allocation regulations and accepting greater distances between home and school (Butler and Hamnett, 2007; Butler and Robson, 2003; Noreisch, 2007; Raveaud and Van Zanten, 2007; Vowden, 2012). Hence, the level of school segregation eventually supersedes that of residential segregation.

Whereas parental choice of school is sometimes related to local tradition (e.g. to religious freedom in the Netherlands), new parameters such as the major growth of the immigrant population make parental choice a catalyst for school segregation in terms of ethnicity. School choice is increasingly driven by preferences with regard to school composition, used as a marker of academic quality and reducing the fear of social or educational ‘contamination’ (Butler and Hamnett, 2007). Even those parents upholding the social mix of their neighbourhoods struggle with the issue of diversity when it comes to their children’s education (Boterman, 2013; Karsten et al., 2003).

It becomes clear, therefore, that residential segregation and school segregation are closely related. Looking at school segregation, research studies have thus focused on the question of whether (ethnically or socially) polarised school intakes lead to stronger inequalities of opportunities and affect overall pupil performance, once individual effects have been taken into account. Empirical studies generally confirm these effects (Alegre and Ferrer, 2010; Sykes and Kuyper, 2013; Thrupp et al., 2002), though their significance varies (Musset, 2012: 26f). Residential segregation is assumed to be per se important for social reproduction due to its impact on living conditions and on chances of social mobility. There has thus been a substantial growth in the literature addressing neighbourhood or area effects and the question of whether there are specific spatial effects on peoples’ lives and life prospects ‘over and above non-spatial categories such as gender and class […]’ (Atkinson and Kintrea, 2001: 2277).

Both urban and educational inequalities are not only expressions of social inequality, but also mechanisms contributing to its reproduction. School and residential segregation usually work in tandem: areas with better schools attract more middle-class residents, eventually improving local schools’ performance and in turn further increasing their attractiveness. High levels of residential segregation usually induce high levels of school segregation. The opposite, however, is not necessarily true.

Setting the context: Educational and housing systems in Athens and Dortmund

Looking at Germany, national and international research has repeatedly revealed a strong relationship between the educational success of pupils and their socio-economic background. The often criticised stratified school system with its early enrolment of pupils in specific school forms with different curricula is seen as one factor explaining educational inequalities. In contrast to most other European countries, Germany operates a model of differentiated secondary education (EC, 2013: 3). After four years of primary education (age 6–10) in most federal states (in others after sixth grade), pupils are channelled into specific school forms, of which only one, the Gymnasium,³ leads directly to upper secondary education and, on successful completion, to tertiary education. Which secondary school form is selected is based on the recommendation of the primary school, whereby the ultimate choice lies with parents (e.g. in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW)) or with the school based on the fulfilment of specific performance criteria (e.g. Bavaria) (KMK, 2011: 27). The primary school recommendation is, however, partly influenced by teachers’ expectations regarding different social groups, and therefore not free of discriminatory practices (Maaz et al., 2010; Stanat, 2008). The importance of the transition between primary and secondary school for a pupil’s educational career is evidenced by the low permeability of the German school system: upward transitions from lower to higher school forms are possible, but relatively rare (Bellenberg and Forell, 2012), with the result that students from working-class families remain underrepresented in German universities.

Although the Greek educational system appears much less socially selective with regard to institutional barriers inhibiting educational attainment, national research studies have shown that, eventually, educational performance is clearly related to social origin (Frangoudaki, 1985; Lambiri-Dimaki, 1974; Panayotopoulos, 2000; Thanos, 2011). The upper-secondary option leading directly to higher education (Γɛνικό Λύκɛιο (General Lyceum)) is taken up by the majority of students (70%) having accomplished the compulsory lower-secondary education level (Gymnasio), while those following the vocational option retain the possibility to access higher education. However, the socially very unequal chances of being admitted to the most prestigious university departments (e.g. medicine, law or electrical engineering) bear witness to the fact that the Greek school system does not reduce social inequalities, but actually boosts them. Going private or using extra private education services in the Greek public secondary school system (Sianou-Kyrgiou, 2008) is an important parameter in reproducing educational inequality in class terms.

The transition from secondary to higher education in Greece is, therefore, the only meaningful transition to investigate in terms of institutional selection. Given the massive increase in the number of higher education students since the 1970s and a major diversification of their social backgrounds, this investigation should mainly consider the very unequal prospects of social mobility offered by different university departments (Hadjiyanni and Valassi, 2009; Lambiri-Dimaki, 1974; Panayotopoulos, 2000; Thanos, 2011). By contrast, educational inequalities within the German education system arise much earlier and are even intensified by the system’s low level of permeability. Nevertheless, despite their different timing, both transitions represent important steps within the educational career of students and are socially highly selective in both countries.

Social patterns of residential location may be related in different ways to educational inequalities. The most obvious one is that unequal attainment may be attributed to the impact of residential segregation, relegating low-income groups to areas where the quality of schools is also lower. Even though often the case, schools in deprived areas are not necessarily deficient in infrastructure and teaching staff for them to lag behind in educational performance. The different social composition of their student population can be enough to generate unequal performance among schools in different areas, since there is a significant relationship between school intake characteristics and educational achievement – over and above the effects of students’ individual variables (Alegre and Ferrer, 2010; Sykes and Kuyper, 2013; Thrupp et al., 2002).

Residential segregation in Dortmund is comparatively high, dividing the city into a disadvantaged north and an affluent, middle-class south. This division corresponds to other cities within the Ruhr area shaped by the northward migration of coal mining and the subsequent settlement of working-class families, to a major extent of migrant (mainly Turkish) origin. With the decline of the Ruhr coal and steel industry in the 1950s, the former working-class areas developed into areas with high unemployment, above-average rates of people dependent on social security benefits and high percentages of non-Germans. At the same time, the highest shares of children are found in these neighbourhoods. Thus, there is a high and ever-increasing correlation between social and ethnic (and even age) segregation (Map 1(a) and (b)) (Landtag NRW, 2004).

Map 1.

Social and ethnic segregation in Dortmund, 2011.

Segregation in Dortmund is also related to the quite balanced housing market – rents are moderate and the development of new housing construction is comparatively positive (Stadt Dortmund, 2014). With a high share of rented accommodation, relocation is less complicated than in other German cities – at least for middle-class households. The ever-increasing demand for rent-controlled apartments, due to the growing numbers of people living on benefits, in combination with the decreasing share of social housing has led to a tight market for low-budget rented apartments (Stadt Dortmund, 2014). Moreover, though housing prices and rents in Dortmund are below the NRW and German average, they vary considerably within the city. Lower priced housing is concentrated in the northern parts of Dortmund, thus narrowing the relocation opportunities of low-income families.

Housing construction in Athens – which provided most of the current stock between 1950 and 1980 (Leontidou, 1990; Maloutas, 1990) – has created a weakly segregated urban environment at micro-level and broad social division at macro-level. Class segregation is marked by the concentration of higher occupational categories in the eastern part of the metropolis, especially the inner ring suburbs to the north-east and the south along the coast (Map 2(a)). This pattern denotes the steady relocation of higher categories towards the suburbs since the 1970s, in step with inner-city decline. The working class and other lower occupational groups are over-represented in the western part of the metropolis and in most of the outer periphery. On the other hand, rapid inner-city decline has provided abundant affordable housing to the important wave of migrants since the 1990s. Social housing is non-existent in Greece and privately rented housing in the traditional working-class areas is scarce. As a result, the contours of immigrant segregation (Map 2(b)) are quite different from those of class segregation, with most immigrants to be found in the formerly middle-class central municipality and in certain parts of the outer periphery.

Map 2.

Social and ethnic segregation in the metropolitan area of Athens, 2011.

Segregation in Athens is not only weak and varies along class or ethnic lines; it is also stable, if not decreasing (Maloutas et al., 2012). The dominant housing tenure in Athens is owner occupation and, in tandem with proximity-based family networks and high property transfer taxes, has led to low rates of residential mobility (Allen et al., 2004; Maloutas, 2004) ruling out relocation as a strategy of school choice and has induced middle-class parents to seek alternate ways of creating educational advantage for their children.

Methodology

Since the paper seeks to understand and compare the different mechanisms shaping the way educational disparities occur and are perpetuated in Athens and Dortmund, we focus on the major transitions reproducing social inequalities. Due to the different educational context, we concentrate on different transitions in the educational career of pupils, investigating in Dortmund the transition between primary and secondary school types, and access to higher education in Athens.

Since there is no individual-level data on social origin available in Dortmund, we used area-based socio-economic indicators (district level) as a proxy for the origin of primary school pupils, correlating them with school data to examine the connection between educational achievement and social background. To illustrate socio-economic disadvantage throughout the districts of Dortmund,⁴ a cluster analysis of three indicators of poverty risk in Germany was conducted: unemployment rate, child poverty (the proportion of children under 15 years dependent on social security benefits) and the proportion of single-parent households. The cluster analysis divided the 62 statistical districts of Dortmund into five levels/clusters of (dis)advantage (from cluster 5, containing the least disadvantaged districts to cluster 1, the most disadvantaged ones). The results of the cluster analysis were subsequently correlated with the transition rates from each primary school to each secondary school type. As primary schools exist in almost every district in Dortmund, it is presumed that their social school composition is similar to the primary school’s district. Despite the abolishment of school catchment areas in NRW in 2012, the majority of children in Dortmund still attend primary schools in their immediate vicinity (Ramos Lobato and Weck, 2012: 13). Though the results need to be carefully interpreted, they nevertheless provide important information.

In Athens we tried to investigate the combined effect of social origin, school quality/performance and neighbourhood social profile as variables explaining educational performance (Maloutas et al., 2013) through a database containing detailed information on the school attended by each candidate in the admissions examination to higher education in 2004–2005, their individual performance and certain personal characteristics (age and sex).⁵ Focusing on the candidates from the Athens metropolitan area, we examined how each of the major explanatory parameters was related to candidates’ performance. Since this database lacked direct reference to candidates’ social origin, we created a proxy by socially ranking the university departments to which each candidate was ultimately admitted, using independent data from a different source (ELSTAT-Greek Statistical Authority) for the years 2009 and 2010. We were thus able to correlate the socially unequal outcome to educational performance and, further, consider whether a candidate’s school and neighbourhood affected this performance and therefore the outcome. We reproduced the social hierarchy of university departments by clustering the educational and occupational profiles of their students’ parents, assuming that these profiles remained relatively stable between 2005 and 2010 (Maloutas et al., 2013). Finally, census data were used to construct the social profile of neighbourhoods around each secondary school.

Findings

The cluster analysis for Dortmund shows quite a rigid dichotomy: whereas the indicators for all southern districts (with one exception) are below average, characterising them as not being disadvantaged, eight of the nine (highly) disadvantaged districts are situated in the northern parts of Dortmund, where the share of children (16.3%) is well above average (12.5%).

By analysing the transition rates from primary to different secondary school forms based on the socio-economic typology of the (dis)advantaged clusters, a clear correlation between the socio-spatial background of children and their educational achievement becomes evident. Whereas more than half of pupils in the southern (not disadvantaged) districts gain access to the Gymnasium, only one quarter in the disadvantaged districts do so (Table 1). At the same time, the likelihood of attending the Hauptschule, the school type with the lowest educational level, is three times as high for the latter (Table 1). Hence, the education system itself is reproducing rather than closing pre-existing attainment gaps. Moreover, although the transition rate to the Gymnasium increased from 2002 to 2011 in all Dortmund districts, it is still almost twice as high in advantaged than in disadvantaged ones (Table 1), suggesting that educational disparities persist (Ramos Lobato and Weck, 2012).

Table 1.

Spatial distribution of the transition rate (in %) to secondary school forms in Dortmund (2002 and 2011).

	Hauptschule	Realschule	Gesamtschule	Gymnasium
2011
Cluster 1	12.3	32.3	28.0	26.4
Cluster 5	4.0	20.4	21.6	53.8
2002
Cluster 1	19.3	28.5	30.9	21.4
Cluster 5	9.3	29.0	18.9	42.8

The highly divergent transition rates in Dortmund are potentially not only based on individual performance but are also the result of compositional effects boosting educational disparities. In certain secondary schools in Dortmund, 90% of pupils come from the two most disadvantaged clusters, meaning that it can be presumed that they have a lower social status, live in lower income households and have parents with lower educational qualifications. In addition, whereas almost half of the pupils in primary schools within the disadvantaged cluster are non-German (the share of children with a migration background is even higher), their share in the respective age group in this cluster is less than half as high, pointing to school ethnic segregation exceeding residential segregation (Ramos Lobato and Weck, 2012: 23).

Athens is probably the area in Greece where the relation between educational achievement and social background is strongest – on account of a concentration of both privilege and disadvantage. The city features a very large share of education institutions – especially of higher education – and plays the role of a ‘national escalator’ (Fielding, 1992) for social mobility through education. At the same time, it concentrates socially unequal education services within a limited space, including almost all high-profile private education institutions. There are major differences in the social profiles of schools, dependent on both their type and location and presaging unequal educational careers for their pupils. As regards the university admissions examination, our analysis revealed a strong correlation (r = .79) between the social hierarchy of university departments and candidates’ performance. The chances of candidates with both parents having a higher education degree to be admitted to the most prestigious group of university departments (therefore expected to score highly in the admissions examination) are 4.2 times higher than those of the average candidate, and 34.6 times greater than those of a candidate neither of whose parents has received more than compulsory education. It also shows that the type and average performance of the school attended by the candidate is greatly linked to his/her performance (r = .36). High- and medium-profile private schools are seemingly synonymous with high performance, as are the rather small group of high-performing state schools. The social profile of a candidate’s neighbourhood also emerges as a significant parameter for performance but to a much lesser extent than the other two criteria (r = .20). Finally, we used a multiple linear regression model to confirm the combined – but also unequal – effect of the above-mentioned variables in explaining the variance in educational performance.

The average performance of upper secondary schools (Lykeia) in the higher education admissions examination shows a clear spatial pattern dividing the eastern (middle class) side of the city where many high-performing schools are located from the western (working class) side where there is a comparatively high concentration of low-performing schools. This picture is corroborated by the high correlation index (r = .52) between a school’s performance and the social profile of its surrounding areas.⁶ However, despite this noteworthy correlation, the relatively low level of residential segregation in Athens in both class and ethnic terms (Arapoglou, 2006; Arapoglou and Sayas, 2009; Maloutas, 2007b; Maloutas et al., 2012) does not translate into an equally low level of school segregation. The comparative analysis of candidate performance in the higher education admissions examination within the different social types of residential area and the school form hierarchies reveals that performance is more polarised in the latter (Table 2). We can therefore assume that there is a higher level of school segregation than residential segregation.

Table 2.

Candidates’ average performance by school form and social type of residential area in Athens (2005).⁷

School (performance/form)	Mean^a	N^b	Residential area status	Mean^a	N^b
Low (public and private)	968	7954	Lower	1014	2585
Mid-low (public)	1109	10,565	Lower-middle	1081	11,937
Medium/high (public and private)	1305	7082	Upper-middle	1226	5141
High (private)	1543	1008	Upper	1410	1144
All schools	1142	30,103	All areas	1142	30,103

Maximum possible performance/score = 2000.

Number of candidates.

The higher level of school segregation in Athens is triggered, above all, by the large elite private schools, most of which are located in the city’s bourgeois residential areas and operate extensive private bus networks to collect middle-class pupils often from quite distant areas. The presence of these large private schools in several bourgeois suburbs has a negative effect on local state schools which are left with the less solvent, less informed and less ambitious share of local demand. On the other hand, there is considerable variation in the performance of state schools among and within socially similar areas. The spatial distribution of private institutions coaching students for the admissions examination (Sianou-Kyrgiou, 2008) shows that this important factor correlates less with where a pupil lives and more with the performance of schools in different areas.

Discussion

The analysis for Dortmund points to a relationship between children’s socio-spatial background and their educational achievements. The transition from primary to secondary school is influenced by their achievements based on their cognitive potential and performance, but also affected by parental educational aspirations and strategies. Helbig and Gresch (2013) show that in German federal states where parents are allowed to choose the secondary school, such as NRW, transition is less based on performance, but rather determined by parental socio-economic status, with middle-class parents with high educational aspirations tending to send their children to the Gymnasium, even without a recommendation from the primary school, with the result that social disparities are further enhanced by parental decisions (p. 4).

Whereas parents with a higher social status register their children more frequently in higher school forms than recommended, parents with a lower social status on the contrary regularly remain behind the recommendations of teachers (Ditton, 2010: 64).⁸ Doubts concerning the educational success of their children, education costs due to the longer school career as well as educational returns seem to be crucial explanatory factors for parental school choice strategies (Becker and Lauterbach, 2010: 21; Vester, 2006: 16). Moreover, lacking knowledge of the educational system itself, its different school types, selection regulations and the available alternatives may be of relevance for explaining the educational strategies of parents with a migration background (Kristen, 2008), as confirmed by a local expert in Dortmund: ‘The parents [parents with a migration background; author's note] are – against popular assumptions – interested in the school career of their children, but they often have no idea how to achieve these goals’ (Ramos Lobato and Weck, 2012: 20).

Paving the way for the Gymnasium and a successful educational career, access to the ‘right’ primary school seems to be crucial for middle-class parents (Ball et al., 1995: 68; Noreisch, 2007: 70). The abolition of school catchment areas in NRW in 2008 resulted in free primary school choice, which has, according to a study in Wuppertal, led to increased choice mainly for advantaged families who strategically use this freedom more often than disadvantaged families (Weishaupt et al., 2012). Children in Dortmund, however, still attend primary schools in their direct vicinity. Middle-class families’ school choice is thus more related to residential mobility, with families moving to areas with good schools, as interviews with local school experts confirm: ‘Parents normally do not send their children to schools in other districts. When they can afford it, they just move away’ (Ramos Lobato and Weck, 2012: 29). At the same time, there is no strong ‘tradition’ for middle-class parents to stay in the inner city, with the result that the Gymnasien followed suburbanisation and are now mostly concentrated in the southern parts of the city.

Since lower priced housing is mainly concentrated in the northern parts of Dortmund, primary school choice based on residential mobility is not affordable for all families. The lack of household income in combination with the weighing up of education costs and educational success as well as missing formal and informal information needed to negotiate the system (Ball and Vincent, 1998; Noreisch, 2007) thus prevent disadvantaged families from creating advantage for their children. Primary school choice and parental influence on the transition to the ‘right’ secondary school type are crucial parameters for the educational success of children in Dortmund. Since both are options unequally accessible to lower class parents, these parameters contribute to the reproduction of educational disparities.

The public secondary education system in Athens covers more than 90% of pupils and school choice is limited. At the same time, research on the motives leading to residential (re)location has revealed that, in contrast to Dortmund, settling near a good school has never been a priority (Maloutas, 1990; Maloutas et al., 2006). However, the high level of school segregation and the fact that it appears stronger than residential segregation suggest that there are certainly middle-class strategies for ‘working’ the system and enhancing social inequalities in education (Maloutas, 2007a).

The clearest strategy in this respect is opting for a high-performance private school which, on average, fares better than any state school, whatever its type. Though this withdrawal strategy (Van Zanten, 2009) only concerns about 5% of the school population in the Athens region, it sets the rationale and the rules for the whole system. The importance of this strategy increases due to the relatively low level of residential segregation which does not provide any obvious social advantage to schools in a particular area. This is further enhanced by the rigidities of the local housing tenure structure inhibiting relocation. Large private schools are, therefore, the prime upper middle-class choice, acting as a substitute for what the low level of residential segregation does not immediately provide, even if this means that pupils have to travel a long way every day to eventually acquire a considerable educational advantage.

Although residential segregation does not provide the school environment sought by middle-class groups throughout the city, middle-class suburbs – socially the most homogenous areas – offer, in most cases, better-performing state schools. Moving to the suburbs was not initially related to school choice, but more to avoiding city-centre pollution and congestion. Eventually, as these suburbs became increasingly consolidated, a privileged school environment emerged, appealing mainly to middle-class groups unable to easily take up the private school option.

The lack of public space in Athens has affected the availability of space for schools. As a result, several school units are often grouped in the same buildings and their catchment areas are not clearly demarcated. Unclear catchment areas or leniency in their enforcement have led to localised strategies of selection or avoidance of particular schools by middle and lower middle-class groups. Middle-class education strategies in Athens are therefore stratified, following the different resources possessed by the groups developing them, whereby their common feature is to avoid the school normally provided within the relatively mixed residential environment.

Conclusion

The paper highlights the difference in timing and procedures through which social selection is achieved by the educational systems in Dortmund and Athens, two cities with clearly different residential structures and different ways these can relate to educational advantage/disadvantage. In Dortmund, with its predominance of rental accommodation, its moderate rents and the development of new housing, the housing market is quite flexible, while in Athens outright homeownership dominates in all social groups, thereby reducing residential mobility. As a result, the leeway for using spatial mobility to acquire advantage by locating closer to better schools is unequal and handled differently in the two cities. However, in spite of these differences, a clear correlation emerges between socio-economic origin and educational outcomes, reproducing educational and ultimately social inequality. Middle-class parents seem to find ways to work the system and boost their children’s advantage by devising strategies adapted to local conditions in both cases.

In Dortmund, poverty and educational disadvantage seem to be co-located, expressed by a twice as high transition rate to the premium option (Gymnasium) of children from well-off areas compared to disadvantaged areas. In Athens, due to the low level of residential segregation, performance diverges to a greater extent among school forms than among neighbourhoods pointing to a higher level of school segregation than residential segregation – which is also true for Dortmund, even though residential segregation is more important here.

The educational systems in Greece and Germany and their structures and patterns facilitating educational disparities diverge greatly. In Germany, early selection into different school forms and low permeability between these are seen as one factor explaining the strong relationship between children’s educational success and the socio-economic status of their parents. Whereas the social selectivity of the German education system ends in a higher proportion of German university students whose parents have a tertiary education degree, the national curriculum and the socially diversified secondary education system in Greece – at least apart from the elite private schools – leads to a higher participation of university students from less educated, lower-middle-class and working-class backgrounds. In Germany, the chances of students whose parents hold tertiary education degrees to become a university student are 2.5 times higher than average against 1.9 times in Greece.⁹ However, the more ‘democratic’ access to Greek universities is counteracted by a highly differentiated social selectivity amongst university faculties and departments. Highly prestigious departments thus remain very unequally accessible, resulting, as in Germany, in unequal chances and, eventually, positions in the labour market. According to Müller and Pollak (2004: 312) ‘the more universal education in primary and secondary stages is, the more likely it is that measures producing inequality become relevant to an increased extent in tertiary education’ – which explains the different stages responsible for social selectivity in the Greek and German educational systems. Hence, selection mechanisms in both countries reproduce social inequalities, although occurring at a later stage in Greece.

In conclusion, it would seem that Athens offers greater educational chances to a broader social audience, even if at the end of the day this does not lead to bridging but rather to reproducing – if not increasing – social inequalities. For a further evaluation of the differences between Dortmund and Athens in terms of the social openness of their educational systems we should also take into account the way (in)egalitarian relations are structured within the two different national contexts. Dubet’s distinction between equality of positions and equality of opportunities (2010) helps us realise that social positions have to be relatively close if equal opportunities are to become effective. Therefore, we should consider the fact that social positions in Germany are more equal than in Greece, inter alia due to a much more developed welfare state (Dubet, 2010: 16–19). This means that, though the Greek educational system formally provides opportunities to a larger social spectrum than the German one, these opportunities are provided to more unequal social groups. Moreover, since the formally equal education services are, generally speaking, insufficient for attaining ambitious educational goals and necessitate substantial additional family investment, the outcome is ineffective in terms of bridging social gaps. The openness of the Greek educational system was very effective in inducing social mobility until the 1990s when the less prestigious higher education degrees stopped being a passport to the labour market, a trend exacerbated by the crisis during which many university degrees lost a lot of their social effectiveness. The increasingly unequal social outcomes of education are ultimately the product of a rarefication of degrees guaranteeing social mobility and of the increasing need for other resources (e.g. social capital) to boost the effectiveness of educational credentials. In Germany, by contrast, though unequal destinies are much more predetermined through differentiated educational paths from an early age, the unequal social positions to which they lead are, to a certain extent, less unequal than in Greece.

In both cities, middle-class parental aspirations and strategies seem to play a crucial role in enhancing educational disparities and are highly dependent on local housing systems. In Athens, low levels of segregation and residential mobility make educational insulation with ‘people like us’ (Butler, 1997) barely possible. Middle-class parents pursue stratified education strategies depending on their resources; upper middle-class parents living in mixed neighbourhoods often send their children to large elite private schools located in the bourgeois residential areas of the city, while middle or lower middle-class parents may try to colonise a local public school. The common feature is that they will often try to avoid the school their children are normally assigned to within the public education system. Bridging out of the neighbourhood seems to be a less relevant school choice strategy in Dortmund, where residential and subsequent educational segregation is facilitated by the flexible and moderate housing market. Despite the diverse educational strategies pursued by middle-class parents in Athens and Dortmund, they all utilise the options provided by the education and/or housing system to create further advantage for their children, thereby unintentionally deepening educational and social inequalities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments.

Conflict of interest

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This publication is partly based on results of the ESPON project ‘The Territorial Dimension of Poverty and Social Exclusion in Europe (TiPSE)’. © ESPON 2013, TiPSE, Nordregio.

Notes

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