Has educational sector any impact on school effectiveness in Hungary? A comparison of the public and the newly established religious grammar schools

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to test whether the pupils of religious gymnasiums in Hungary have higher grades and a better opportunity to enter vocational college or university than comparable pupils of public gymnasiums have. For the first time the effectiveness of public and religious schools is compared in one of the former communist societies. Data are from a self-administered survey among 4th grade secondary school students in spring of 1998. Our results show clearly that pupils at religious gymnasiums in Hungary get higher grades and that they have more success in entering tertiary education and university. This is especially true for pupils at Catholic gymnasiums but there are clear indications that the Calvinist and Lutheran gymnasiums might catch up Catholic gymnasiums in the near future, if they get the time to develop themselves. A more selective social composition of these schools, higher earlier school achievements or a higher academic ambition of religious pupils cannot explain these better results of pupils in religious gymnasiums. We conclude from these results that the religious grammar schools in a post-communist country like Hungary are on average more effective than public grammar schools. This does not hold only for Catholic schools but also for Protestant schools, just as in other European societies.

Early tracking and competition – A recipe for major inequalities in Hungary

“…Early tracking on the lower secondary level is also likely to add to this segregation (see Horn 2013), whereas vocational tracking on the upper secondary level further aggravates differences (Hermann 2013). Besides these mechanisms, differences between public and non-public education providers (Dronkers and Róbert 2004) as well as within-school separation of students are also probable generators of inequalities.…”

“…A previous analysis of church-run schools in Hungary has shown that students in these schools perform better and have higher success rates for transition to higher education than students in public schools. This advantage persists after controlling for the dissimilar student composition in church-run schools (Dronkers and Róbert 2004).…”

“…When looking at the academic secondary schools, 40 per cent of these schools were non-public and more than half of them were of a denominational character in 2012. In full-time education, about 26 per cent of students studied in non-public institutions and about four-fifths of these studied in religious schools (Ministry of Human Resources 2013).The public-private divide can also be seen as a kind of tracking in the Hungarian school system, as shown by Dronkers and Róbert (2004).…”

Schools and Communities of Norm-awareness

“…In Europe it received attention after the turn of the millennium when a Program for International Student Assessment proved that denominational schools had better results than public schools in 14 of the 17 countries [27,28]. When Corten and Dronkers [29] tested the theory of social capital, he grounded his hypothesis on Coleman et al's concept [30] of a functional school based on shared values.…”

“…This is of utmost importance in our region according to the fundamental hypothesis that the high achievement of denominational schools might be due to the fact that the community of students generally accept norms related to the importance of studying and sense of duty, and these values are also supported by a transcendent set of arguments [35][36][37]. The same argument is present in the pedagogical documents of the surveyed schools, but it will produce real effects only if it appears in the personal opinions of the widest possible circle of students.…”