Научный семинар ИНИИ "School segregation in the digital space"

Research on inequality in education has traditionally focused on the spatially localized context of schools. The spread of information technologies means that today's schools operate in the global digital context too. We investigate the relationship between educational outcomes of schools and their digital context. We analyze a unique data set that contains information about one cohort of high schools students (N = 24,922) from all schools of the 4th largest European city. Using information about the inter-school friendship ties on a popular social networking site we reconstruct the network of schools in the digital space. We demonstrate that school segregation by academic performance in the digital space is higher than segregation in the physical space. We also show that school position in the digital space is a much better predictor of educational outcomes than its position in the physical space. The single digital metric (eigenvector centrality) explains as much as 30% of the variation in educational outcomes. That is comparable with the total effect of socio-economic characteristics of school students. These results indicate that, despite the apparent democratizing nature of the internet, information technologies may amplify inequality rather than mitigate it. The results may have important implications for educational policy and for understanding of inequality reproduction in the digital age.