School choice and educational attitudes: Spatially uneven neoliberalization in Sweden

Abstract

The aim of the article is to use survey evidence of school choice and educational attitudes in Sweden to explore how spatial polarization and liberal school reforms have affected the way parents, pupils, and school management think about education. The authors identify a possible polarization of attitudes in Sweden towards the importance of education in general and schools in particular, against the background of a highly liberalized school market, including school choice and rural-urban regional differences in the population's education level. The basis for the analysis is TIMSS 2015 data for pupils in Grade 4 (age group 10-11 years). The results showed that localization of the school was a very important factor in school choice and that localization was more important than parental education and social class. Additionally, the authors tested the association between maths results and the variables attitudes, location, school, and household, and found that a household with a lower proportion of tertiary-educated parents in less central locations could make it difficult for pupils to perform well in mathematics. The authors conclude that in Sweden neoliberalization has been a geographically uneven process with a concentration in the metropolitan areas.

Parental Attitudes and Expectations as a Determinant of Children’s Success in School

“…The family environment, which is the basis for a child's learning, has a key impact on the determinants influencing the pupils' school success (Čáp & Mareš, 2001;Havlík & Koťa, 2002;Hvozdík, 2017;Mareš, 2013;Mayerová, 2014;Szobiová & Ďurčová, 2012). Concerning the family environment, several factors can be identified as influencing the child's success in school, such as the parent's relationship with the school (Mertin, 2004;Sinha, 2018;Staníková, 2021), parents' level of education (Erola et al, 2016;Kaščák & Betáková, 2014), socioeconomic status of the family (Bomba, Zemančíková, 2011;Możdżyńska, 2011;Spera, 2005, In Puhrová, 2018) parents' attitude towards education (Assari, 2018, Zhang et al 2020Žúborová, 2011), parents' attitudes towards child's success in school (Andersson et al, 2021;Bogunović & Polovina, 2007) and parents' expectations of the child's success in school (Almroth et al, 2019;Guo et al, 2018). Among all the identified factors, special attention will be paid to parental attitudes and expectations toward the child's success in school.…”