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The social justice teaching theory describes how teachers can transfer equality attitudes to their students. According to this theory, teachers are important role models in the political socialization process. Starting from an unequal disposition of equality attitudes between boys and girls, this article analyses how teachers can bring equality to the classroom by compensating for different attitudes on the topic of gender equality. We first discuss how teachers can influence equality attitudes, comparable to the influence by parents' socialization. Secondly, we assess whether teachers can compensate for differences in equality attitudes. Parallel to evidence from studies on parental socialization, we expect teachers with better student-teacher relationships in particular to be able to transfer equality attitudes better. For the analyses, we use the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2009), an important study of fourteen-year-olds' civic knowledge, attitudes and engagement. We use data from seven European countries and the Greek part of Cyprus, 1,160 schools and 24,087 students. To take the multilevel structure of this data into account the analysis includes a multilevel analysis (MLwiN). As expected we find a positive association between student-teacher relationships and equality attitudes. We also find that a good student-teacher relationship can compensate for attitudinal differences. By assessing adolescents' equality attitudes, we conclude that teachers can close an attitudinal gender gap.

This article examines how different civic learning opportunities relate to students' political knowledge in different school tracks. Existing studies found out that citizenship teaching can not only enhance overall levels of civic outcomes but also mitigate inequalities. However, educational achievement studies emphasise the risk of a tracked school context exacerbating the general knowledge gap. Combining these findings, we do not know whether efforts in the vocational track to enhance civic outcomes can still reduce civic inequalities. This study relies on the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 data.It uses multilevel analysis to examine how the civic learning opportunities schools offer (as perceived by students) are related to civic knowledge across different tracks. It finds that cross-track differences in civic knowledge are not smaller in schools rich in civic learning opportunities. We provisionally propose that this is due to differences across tracks in the levels and the nature of the civic learning opportunities provided.

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