Purpose: There is a tendency to assess educational systems in terms of their efficiency in gaining high scores on cognitive skills. Schools perform, however, also a socializing function. The whole policy debate tends to ignore the impact of educational systems on attitudes or democratic values. This contribution focuses on the impact of the…

In this paper, we try to unravel some of the unintended and intended academic effects associated with post-Soviet educational reforms by focusing on three cases: Estonia, Latvia and Russia. We have chosen this comparison because a unique "natural experiment" in the three countries allows us to compare the changing academic performance on…

Used data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study to study school violence in 37 nations. Findings show that national patterns of school violence are not strongly related to general patterns of violence or lack of social integration in society , but that there is more violence in systems with more disparity between high- and…