Opinion on Educational Inequality

In survey experiments in the ifo Education Survey, we study whether people’s preferences for equity-oriented education policies change when they receive information on the actual extent of educational inequality. The share of the population who view inequality for children from different social backgrounds in the German education system as a serious problem rises from 55 to 68 percent if participants are informed about the size of achievement differences. The information also affects support for equity-oriented education policies (which have high baseline support), although effects are quantitatively small on average. However, instrumental-variable estimates suggest substantial effects of concerns on policy preferences among the compliers whose concerns are shifted by the information treatment. There are substantial effects on support for compulsory preschool, which increases further if respondents are informed about policy effectiveness. 

Here you can find a short non-technical overview on this topic. 

Further findings on the opinion of Germans on measures to reduce inequality in education can be found in the ifo Education Surveys 2019 and 2023. 

Research paper:

Educational Inequality and Public Policy Preferences: Evidence from Representative Survey Experiments (with P. Lergetporer and K. Werner). Journal of Public Economics 188: 104226, 2020

Non-technical contributions: 

Public Opinion on Education Policy in Germany (with P. Lergetporer and K. Werner). In:  M.R. West, L. Woessmann (eds.), Public Opinion and the Political Economy of Education Policy around the World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 205-243, 2021

Section 4 in: Public Opinion and the Political Economy of Educational Reforms: A Survey (with M. Busemeyer and P. Lergetporer). European Journal of Political Economy 53: 161-185, 2018 

Material available only in German

Newspaper article:

Mehrheiten für gerechte Bildung. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 10.12.2018, p. 18