Educational Reform, Ability, and Family Background

摘要

In the period between 1950 and the mid-1970s many European countries carried out major educational reforms that resulted in increases in the number of compulsory years of education, in the introduction of national curricula, and in the abolition, or delay, of the placement of more able students into separate schools at an early age (streaming). Examples of such countries are the United Kingdom, France, and the Scandinavian countries. Generally, it is very difficult to evaluate the impact of such reforms, because they are implemented nationwide simultaneously and thus evaluations have to rely on before-and-after comparisons which may confound the effects of the policy with other macro-aggregate or cohort effects. In Sweden, major educational reform was designed in the late 1940s. The main elements of this reform were to (a) increase compulsory schooling to nine years from seven or eight years; (b) abolish placement based on academic achievement into an academic or nonacademic stream after grade six, i.e., at age 12 or 13; and (c) impose a nationally unified curriculum. An attractive feature of this reform is that it was preceded by a social experiment, albeit not randomized, where school reform was implemented gradually across municipalities. This permits an evaluation approach similar to those that have been used in a number of U.S. studies, which have examined the cross-state and cross-time variation in compulsory schooling laws and child labor laws to estimate their impact on educational attainment or to estimate the returns from education.