Resisting Education: A Cross-National Study on Systems and School Effects

This book focuses on how school-level features affect student resistance to education from a comparative angle, taking into account cross-national differences. All over the world, policy makers, school administrators, teachers, and parents are dealing with students who resist education. Resisting school might ultimately lead to unqualified dropout, and it is therefore crucial to understand what triggers resistance in students.

The book uses the ISCY data set to study multilevel questions in detail. It does so based on the view that system effects and school effects intertwine: system-level policy measures affect student outcomes in part by shaping school-level features, and school effects may differ according to certain system-level features. We start from an overarching theoretical framework that ties the various city-specific insights together, and contains empirical studies from Barcelona, Bergen, Ghent, Montréal Reykjavik, Sacramento, and Turku. It shows that, in all countries, the act of resisting school is more likely to occur among the socio-economically disadvantaged, and those in the most disadvantaged schools. However, educational system features, including tracking, free school choice, and school autonomy, are important driving factors of the differences between schools. As such, systems have the tools to curb between-school differences in resistance.

Previous research turns resistance into a problem of individual students. However, if school or system features engender resistance to school, policy initiatives directed at individual students may solve the problem only partially.

Jannick Demanet, PhD in Sociology, is assistant professor at the Department of Sociology, research team CuDOS (Cultural Diversity: Opportunities and Socialisation), at Ghent University, Belgium. His research deals with contextual effects, originating from school contexts and educational systems, on antischool attitudes and behavior and postsecondary education outcomes. He further researches friendships, bullying/victimization, grade retention, and teacher expectations. His work has been published in, among others, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Sociological Quarterly, American Educational Research Journal, Acta Sociologica, and Teaching and Teacher Education (for full bibliography, see https://biblio.ugent.be/person/802000232230). He has been invited to lecture at the University of Lower Silesia, Wroclaw, Poland, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. Since 2015, he is member of the board of the Research Network 10 (Sociology of Education) of the European SociologicalAssociation (ESA) and since 2012 he is the coordinator of the International Study of City Youth in Ghent, Belgium.

Mieke Van Houtte, PhD in Sociology, is full professor and head of the research team CuDOS (Cultural Diversity: Opportunities and Socialisation) at the Department of Sociology at Ghent University (Belgium). Her research interests cover diverse topics within the sociology of education, particularly the effects of structural and compositional school features on diverse outcomes for students and teachers, with a focus on equal opportunities. In addition, she supervises research on sexual minorities. She (co)authored more than 300 publications, of which more than 100 accepted and/or published articles are listed in Web of Science, among which articles in high standing journals like Sociology of Education, American Educational Research Journal, Acta Sociologica, Sex Roles, Gender and Education – bibliography see https://biblio.ugent.be/person/801000942270. Since 2006 Van Houtte has been or is supervising about 20 PhD-students, of whom 14 successfully defended their PhD in the meantime. She has been invited to lecture at several universities abroad, such as St.-Petersburg, Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam and Lancaster (UK). From 2009 until 2015 she was the president of the Flemish Sociological Association. Since 2009 she is member of the board, and since 2017 coordinator, of the Research Network 10 (Sociology of Education) of the European Sociological Association (ESA). Since 2015 she is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts.