Dieser Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über international bestehende Leistungsstudien, die die Frage nach Lerneinbußen und neuer Bildungsungleichheit aufgrund der pandemiebedingten Schulschließungen im Frühjahr 2020 beantworten. Auf Basis von drei kürzlich erschienenen Reviews und eigenen Recherchen konnten 32 Leistungsstudien identifiziert werden. Nimmt man die in diesen Studien berichteten Befunde zusammen, so kann festgehalten werden, dass die bestehende Datenlage die vielfach erwarteten Lerneinbußen und die erwartete Bildungsbenachteiligung von Schüler*innen aus sozioökonomisch schlechter gestellten Familien mehrheitlich bestätigt. Demgegenüber steht allerdings eine substanzielle Zahl von Studien, die keine Lerneinbußen und keine zusätzliche Bildungsbenachteiligung durch Schulschließungen im Frühjahr 2020 beobachten können. Diese Studien stammen insbesondere aus dem DACH-Raum. Auch zeigt sich die Tendenz, dass in höheren Schulstufen und in der Domäne Lesen verstärkte sozioökonomische Benachteiligung aufgrund von Schulschließungen weniger wahrscheinlich ist als im Primarstufenbereich und in der Domäne Mathematik.

Whether voluntary or enforced, increasing patterns of migration have significantly impacted schools by making them linguistically, culturally, religiously and ethnically more diverse than ever before. This increasing diversity requires school leaders to put in place mechanisms to ensure equity of participation for migration background students. Dimmock and Walker (2005) believe that school leaders need to play a vital role in promoting and sustaining an environment that embraces diversity and, by association, contributes to solving the macro problems of society. To accomplish this emerging role, there is a need for ‘new approaches to educational leadership in which leaders exhibit culturally responsive organisational practices, behaviours and competencies’ (Madhlangobe and Gordon, 2012: p. 177). This is all well and good in theory, but the current and historical context in which school leaders operate, together with the training and supports that are provided, influences, to a significant extent, how culturally responsive leadership can operate in practice. This study, which is part of a European Commission Erasmus+ funded project entitled Supporting Culturally Responsive Leadership and Evaluation in Schools (CReLES), examines these assumptions by mapping out the factors and actors that can hinder and facilitate the flourishing of such practices in four European countries, Austria, Ireland, Russia and Spain.

Throughout the last 30 years, many European countries have ‘modernized’ their governance of education. For the Central European school systems of Austria and the German Bundesländer it has been claimed that this ‘modernization’ was characterised by a sequence of reform ‘waves’ which culminated in introducing ‘evidence-based governance’ models characterised by nation-wide comparative performance testing, new school inspections, etc. This paper argues that we recently see the emergence of revisions of the original ‘evidence-based governance’ models which may be understood as a new ‘wave of modernization’ of school governance. These models aim to react to increasing criticism of the evidence-based philosophy, in particular to its ambivalent attitude to teacher professionalism. The paper at hand analyses the specific aspirations and features of ‘revised evidence-based governance instruments’ to discuss their potential as a policy future. In a second step, we take the Austrian quality management system SQA as an example for these new governance models. In an explorative study, we use case data to understand how teachers and school leaders evaluate this reform and its impact on their work. In particular, we are interested whether or not educational professionals feel that this reform conveys appreciation of and trust in their professional capacities.

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In spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global crisis with far-reaching effects, not least on education. Since the beginning of the pandemic, its impact on learning losses and increasing educational inequality has been widely discussed. While empirical evidence of rising educational inequality and learning loss is steadily growing, at the same time little is known about the families who are interested in remedial measures like summer schools to bridge the negative effects of the pandemic and school closures. The present study addresses this lack of research by providing an initial examination of the empirical evidence of mechanisms underlying parental choice of remedial measures. We take a closer look on which parents are particularly attracted by remedial measures by using cross-sectional data from a parent survey (N = 3590 parents) in Austria. The findings, illustrated via a series of latent mediation models, indicate that parents’ intention to use remedial measures is predicted by parents’ attitudes towards the implementation of remedial measures, parents’ assessment of their child’s learning engagement and of the quality of distance learning during school closures. Moreover, the intention to use remedial measures is significantly influenced by the family’s socioeconomic status.