Urban segregation and educational inequality in Athens

The paper explores the spatial distribution of unequal performance in secondary education and attempts to model its relation with social and urban inequalities. Educational achievement is measured by the yearly performance (for a specific grade) as well as by the performance in the admission examinations to tertiary education. The data on educational achievement are school averages covering the entirety of several hundreds of school units in the Athens Metropolitan Area for the mid 2000s. Through a GIS application schools and their performances were related to the social and urban characteristics of their surrounding residential areas (census tracts). The independent variables in the explanatory model of educational performance include the social (occupational composition, housing conditions, education level etc) and urban characteristics (centrality, land use etc) of residential areas around each school, as well as control variables pertaining to school quality (e.g. teacher/pupil ratio, percentage of teachers with a post-graduate degree).