Schools and Inequality

This session aims to gather contributions on the relationship between schools and inequality. Since the 1966 Coleman report, scholars have yet to agree on whether schools reproduce or exacerbate achievement gaps. While discourse in the sociology of education has been traditionally dominated by the view that schools are engines of inequality, recent empirical research challenges this critical view suggesting that schools can compensate for inequality between different social groups at least when it comes to cognitive skills. We invite contributions that analyse how schools and teachers may shape inequalities along different dimensions (e.g., cognitive skills, grades, socioemotional development, wellbeing, track decisions).