Consequences of educational reforms on school segregation and educational equity in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

School segregation in the Nordic countries is a topic high on the political agenda.

However, to design effective policy interventions targeting school segregation and its consequences, we need to know more about the mechanisms that generates and maintains segregation and educational inequalities.

A fruitful approach to address this is applying a comparative perspective where school segregation is examined over time in three countries that have had very similar educational systems but have reformed their respective educational systems in different ways during the last decades.

These reforms have to different degrees altered opportunities for school choice and the organizational forms of schools. In theory are such changes closely tied to school segregation and equity in education. However, the consequences of these reforms have not been assessed in a comparative perspective using register data.

The project utilizes register data spanning over at least two decades from Sweden, Norway and Denmark covering all students graduating from their primary education.We have designed three related themes which jointly will improve our understanding of how segregation and the consequences of segregation are related to the reformation of the educational systems and changes in the student population.

The first theme examines how different dimensions of segregation have developed during the last two decades in the three countries. Such changes in school segregation will be related to (the timing of) educational reforms. The second theme addresses how school segregation affects educational inequalities.

We do this by studying how students of various socioeconomic and migration backgrounds are affected by different school compositions in terms of their school achievements and their educational attainment.

The third theme addresses what the long-term consequences are from school segregation by examining how school composition shapes students adult labor market outcomes.