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Determinants of Civic versus Economic Outcomes of Dutch Secondary Education

9 July 2024

Education fulfils a vital role in preparing generations for the future. This involves an economic and a civic task: to provide youngsters labour market qualification, and to prepare them for participation in society and democracy. Determinants of school effectiveness for fulfilment of the economic task have been extensively studied, and this is also increasingly the case for schools’ civic task. Only scarcely, however, have determinants been examined for both economic and civic performance within one school. At the same time, changing international labour markets and increasingly complex societies suggest that schools’ economic and civic tasks will increasingly overlap. This urges insight in the effect of school characteristics on fulfilment of both instead of one task. The aim of this project is to contribute to the understanding of the relation between economic and civic performance within schools, and examine what factors determine this relation. In particular, the role of school policy (that is, educational task priority and implementation) and school resources (that, means to realise the policy) will be studied for different school types. As is necessary for all school effectiveness research, school composition in terms of parental background will be included to reliably identify the contribution of schools. Data on civic and economic performance on 205 Dutch secondary schools is already available, yet a link with Microdata from Statistics Netherlands is vital for realising reliable estimates of school compositions. Two types of analyses will be conducted: a multinomial logistic regression analysis aggregated to the school level (Study A), and a multilevel linear regression analysis at school and student level (Study B). This allows to examine the impact of school type, policy and resources on the relation between schools’ economic and civic performance (Study A), and on students’ civic performance within schools that differ in economic performance (Study B). By means of these studies, the project aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of economic and civic performance within schools, and to provide new and increasingly relevant insight in what can be done to enhance both.

Photo by Jordan González on Unsplash