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... evaluation1. It doesn’t matter to summarize here the relevant debate that is taking place in Italy, frequently ideologically oriented. We can recall just two main observations. First of all, every educational system must warrantee three different goals, which haven’t an optimal mix, because they depend on the context. The first is obviously to ensure equal opportunity to all, for combined reasons of social justice and optimization of social functioning: the principle is sometimes defined ‘meritocracy’, but luckily Elise Tenret (2011) and Carlo Barone (2012) learned well the lesson of Michael Young (1958) and showed the ideological bias of this term. Nevertheless, a real debate on this topic can lead us to recognize the necessity of ‘positive actions’ to ensure real equality of opportunity. As a previous Vice Minister of Education recently said, we must enrich the principle of equal opportunity, ‘giving more to people that start with less’ (Rossi Doria, 2014). But of course the problem of ‘how much more’ and ‘how much less’ is a problem of social justice and not only of good functioning of the society (in terms of cost/benefit analysis, you should give ‘more’ only till the increasing performan...

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...tus (also in terms of signalling potential skills in the job placement process – see Shavit, 2014); from the other side, it depends on the way in which other social mechanisms intervene, inside or outside the school, to determine an individual’s social position (Spartaco et al. well debate such topic in their article). This is an increasing problem because, as Poli (2015) pointed out, also in a society in which there are a lot of classless inequalities, job placement strongly depends on the ‘family welfare’, i.e. social origins of young people. Also studies that use a transition approach (see Walther, 2006) show that social capital of young people plays an important role in building the individual biographies and strengthening people’s awareness and identity (Benasso, 2013). On the other side, transitions studies underline that social reproduction is far to be an automatic consequence of social background and school choices and school results depend on individual life courses, which are influenced in turn by teachers, school environment, etc… (Müller, 2014). In our special issue the transition approach and the focus of life trajectories are well explained and dealt with in the articles of Walthe...

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...F EDUCATION, 7 (2), 2015 3 The second goal is to ensure to every young person the success in their educational path; this means to zero the NEET, combining vocational guidance and differentiated educational and vocational training tracks. In this case the risk of ‘cooptative mobility’ (Bowles & Gintis, 1976) is very high, as the segregation one. The success of the ‘dual system’ in Germany is accompanied by questioning the way in which families or teachers orientate students’ choices. This goal is strongly linked to the forms of convergence between structural and rational choice theories (e.g. Bourdieu, 1974; Tenret, 2011) and we briefly shall come back to this argument. Finally, there is a third goal to which also European Educational policies urge us: citizenship competencies must be warranted to everyone, regardless of his/her starting point, personal goals and conditions. The European Parliament and the European Council on the 18th of December 2006 approved a recommendation on key competences for lifelong learning, specifying their necessity for personal fulfillment, active citizenship, social cohesion and employability in a knowledge society. An additional goal is an equalitarian one, which ...

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... Ricucci. The authors analyze, assuming different approaches, the ways in which cultural models, social order and institutions, as well as personal expectations, ambitions, individual features and individual plans influence the course of an individuals' life. Their focus is in particular on the role of education, integrated with an attention on the working environment, the family, the market, and the sphere of political, media, interest associations and informal personal networks. This leads to the crucial question: Can Education Change Society?, to quote the title of a recent book of Michael Apple (2013). His answer is honest: ‘it depends on a lot of hard and continued efforts by many people’ (p. 2). One of the qualities of this book is to underline that school has been considered relevant to change society not only from the left, but also from conservatives, and the attacks that he describes (referring to other countries) ‘on teachers and all public employees, on unions, on schools and on the curricula …’, remind us that some people sometimes give to the school an importance as an institution crucial for the democratization of the society greater than social reformers. Introduction to the Sp...

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...erse way, according to diverse quality, needs and aims of young people. Hence the importance of the equality of opportunities, for functional and not for ethical reasons (i.e. to ensure that ‘the best’ people occupy ‘the most important’ places in the society, (Davis & Moore, 1942; 1945). Of course the concept of equality of opportunities can change for different authors, also because recent studies pointed out that the differences in learning capacity of people begin very early to work, and also for this reason, schools risk to certificate rather than compensate the effects of social origins (Huttenlocher, 1998; Barone, 2012). Introduction to the Special Section M. Palumbo and V. Pandolfini ITALIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION, 7 (2), 2015 6 Recent comparative analysis (Dubet, Duru-Bellat & Vérétout, 2010) showed that the capacity of the school to modify social inheritance depends, from one side, on the importance assigned to educational systems to determine social status (also in terms of signalling potential skills in the job placement process – see Shavit, 2014); from the other side, it depends on the way in which other social mechanisms intervene, inside or outside the school, to determine ...

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... partly for the same reasons, partly for the opposite, both functional and Marxist-Weberian scholars assign an important role to the school in contemporary society. For the first scholars because the ‘right’ placement of people in a differentiated society depends on the ‘right’ functioning of school giving skills and competences in a diverse way, according to diverse quality, needs and aims of young people. Hence the importance of the equality of opportunities, for functional and not for ethical reasons (i.e. to ensure that ‘the best’ people occupy ‘the most important’ places in the society, (Davis & Moore, 1942; 1945). Of course the concept of equality of opportunities can change for different authors, also because recent studies pointed out that the differences in learning capacity of people begin very early to work, and also for this reason, schools risk to certificate rather than compensate the effects of social origins (Huttenlocher, 1998; Barone, 2012). Introduction to the Special Section M. Palumbo and V. Pandolfini ITALIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION, 7 (2), 2015 6 Recent comparative analysis (Dubet, Duru-Bellat & Vérétout, 2010) showed that the capacity of the school to modify social i...

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... that school has been considered relevant to change society not only from the left, but also from conservatives, and the attacks that he describes (referring to other countries) ‘on teachers and all public employees, on unions, on schools and on the curricula …’, remind us that some people sometimes give to the school an importance as an institution crucial for the democratization of the society greater than social reformers. Introduction to the Special Section M. Palumbo and V. Pandolfini ITALIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION, 7 (2), 2015 7 In the Italian case, authoritative voices (see: Bottani, 2013) highlight the difficulties faced by the school in carrying out the tasks that are assigned by a complex society, in which the needs of competitiveness coexist with the need for greater social equity. And for a long time no public debate on the main task of the school in a democratic society took place; on the contrary, a strongly ideological debate arose around the creation of a National Evaluation System and particularly on the role played in this system by INVALSI’s test and data (see the article of Argentin and Triventi in this special issue). The Italian educational system is not very hea...

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... is well debated by Daniela Sideri. An important side effect of the extension of educational paths has been the creation of a great amount of failures and of NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training), or the differentiation of tracks with the development of vocational training. In the Italian case a high youth unemployment rate and a high number of NEET, combined with a high rate of dropouts and flunks, are registered (the Italian student failure and dropouts are analyzed by Anna Siri, who focuses in particular on the Italian University dropouts). Briefly, both the Bourdieu perspective (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964; 1970), which states that the school is an institution that allows social reproduction, and the Boudon approach (1973), according to which schools produce social inequality thanks to differentiated individuals’ rational choices, are always able to explain why schools have difficulties to play a role in reducing social inequalities. This is not a strange phenomenon because, partly for the same reasons, partly for the opposite, both functional and Marxist-Weberian scholars assign an important role to the school in contemporary society. For the first scholars because the ‘right’ placement of peo...

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...ION, 7 (2), 2015 5 the first job is a good predictor of future social status, particularly in the last generations (Barone, Lucchini & Schizzerotto, 2011). So interest in social mobility overflows in analysis of the role of educational systems in reproducing, modifying or reducing social inequalities (Barone, 2012). Scholars of different backgrounds converge, observing that democratisation of access to secondary and higher education – the generous ambition of all social-democratic reforms of the sixties of the past century – produced massification instead of democratisation of school systems (Dubet, 2014); such topic is well debated by Daniela Sideri. An important side effect of the extension of educational paths has been the creation of a great amount of failures and of NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training), or the differentiation of tracks with the development of vocational training. In the Italian case a high youth unemployment rate and a high number of NEET, combined with a high rate of dropouts and flunks, are registered (the Italian student failure and dropouts are analyzed by Anna Siri, who focuses in particular on the Italian University dropouts). Briefly, both the Bourdieu p...

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...lowing the introduction of the national system of evaluation1. It doesn’t matter to summarize here the relevant debate that is taking place in Italy, frequently ideologically oriented. We can recall just two main observations. First of all, every educational system must warrantee three different goals, which haven’t an optimal mix, because they depend on the context. The first is obviously to ensure equal opportunity to all, for combined reasons of social justice and optimization of social functioning: the principle is sometimes defined ‘meritocracy’, but luckily Elise Tenret (2011) and Carlo Barone (2012) learned well the lesson of Michael Young (1958) and showed the ideological bias of this term. Nevertheless, a real debate on this topic can lead us to recognize the necessity of ‘positive actions’ to ensure real equality of opportunity. As a previous Vice Minister of Education recently said, we must enrich the principle of equal opportunity, ‘giving more to people that start with less’ (Rossi Doria, 2014). But of course the problem of ‘how much more’ and ‘how much less’ is a problem of social justice and not only of good functioning of the society (in terms of cost/benefit analysis, you shoul...

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...nisms intervene, inside or outside the school, to determine an individual’s social position (Spartaco et al. well debate such topic in their article). This is an increasing problem because, as Poli (2015) pointed out, also in a society in which there are a lot of classless inequalities, job placement strongly depends on the ‘family welfare’, i.e. social origins of young people. Also studies that use a transition approach (see Walther, 2006) show that social capital of young people plays an important role in building the individual biographies and strengthening people’s awareness and identity (Benasso, 2013). On the other side, transitions studies underline that social reproduction is far to be an automatic consequence of social background and school choices and school results depend on individual life courses, which are influenced in turn by teachers, school environment, etc… (Müller, 2014). In our special issue the transition approach and the focus of life trajectories are well explained and dealt with in the articles of Walther, Pandolfini and Poli, Gomensoro and Bolzman, and Ricucci. The authors analyze, assuming different approaches, the ways in which cultural models, social order and instit...

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...y of opportunity. As a previous Vice Minister of Education recently said, we must enrich the principle of equal opportunity, ‘giving more to people that start with less’ (Rossi Doria, 2014). But of course the problem of ‘how much more’ and ‘how much less’ is a problem of social justice and not only of good functioning of the society (in terms of cost/benefit analysis, you should give ‘more’ only till the increasing performance obtained thanks to additional help encompasses the cost of the given help). 1 See Palumbo & Pandolfini (in press); Faggioli, 2014; Allulli, Farinelli & Petrolino, 2013; Castoldi, 2012. Introduction to the Special Section M. Palumbo and V. Pandolfini ITALIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION, 7 (2), 2015 3 The second goal is to ensure to every young person the success in their educational path; this means to zero the NEET, combining vocational guidance and differentiated educational and vocational training tracks. In this case the risk of ‘cooptative mobility’ (Bowles & Gintis, 1976) is very high, as the segregation one. The success of the ‘dual system’ in Germany is accompanied by questioning the way in which families or teachers orientate students’ choices. This goal is s...

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...ducational qualifications in the labor market. In fact, a lot of empirical evidence shows that in Italy the access to the labor market is related to social origins both directly and by means of school attainment and in a period of economic crisis and lower mobility the over qualification of young people strengthens the combined effects of social and cultural capital. Also for this reason we see that young people (and their families) embed the ‘structural’ constraints (and their consequences in terms of hierarchy of schools, segregation of educational paths and so on in their strategic action, Devleeshouwer, 2015) and live their educational destiny as the result of individual (or familiar) choices, not as the fruit of structural conditioning (see also Carriero, Filandri & Parisi, 2014). Nevertheless, also in the studies based on students’ Introduction to the Special Section M. Palumbo and V. Pandolfini ITALIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION, 7 (2), 2015 4 perceptions, we meet (luckily) the importance of the role of teachers and of the atmosphere of class (frequently declined in terms of mutual aid among students and respect from the teacher – see Devleeshouwer, 2015). This is a non-secondary final r...

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...cultural growth. Inequality and education: some reflections on contemporary society After the launching of our special issue, the Italian and European scientific debates on such topics have been enriched by the publication of important contributions, confirming how the topics related to inequality and education constitute even nowadays a very fertile land for theoretical and empirical studies. Among others, we can recall three important special issues: Scuola Democratica (2014), Quaderni di Sociologia (2014) and the special issue of the Oxford Review of Education to mark its 40th anniversary (Furlong & Lunt, 2014). Also a special issue of MicroMega (6/2014) has been devoted to the possibility to achieve in the same time equity and excellence in schools. We think that this renewed interest towards the relationship between social inequalities and school systems is due to the convergence of at least three distinct but related topics in the political and scientific debate. First of all, we can quote a renewed interest in social mobility. In Italy for a long time this topic has been cultivated in the inner circle of experts but, after the crisis of the last years, people have felt that in a declining econom...

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...b placement strongly depends on the ‘family welfare’, i.e. social origins of young people. Also studies that use a transition approach (see Walther, 2006) show that social capital of young people plays an important role in building the individual biographies and strengthening people’s awareness and identity (Benasso, 2013). On the other side, transitions studies underline that social reproduction is far to be an automatic consequence of social background and school choices and school results depend on individual life courses, which are influenced in turn by teachers, school environment, etc… (Müller, 2014). In our special issue the transition approach and the focus of life trajectories are well explained and dealt with in the articles of Walther, Pandolfini and Poli, Gomensoro and Bolzman, and Ricucci. The authors analyze, assuming different approaches, the ways in which cultural models, social order and institutions, as well as personal expectations, ambitions, individual features and individual plans influence the course of an individuals' life. Their focus is in particular on the role of education, integrated with an attention on the working environment, the family, the market, and the spher...

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...in schools. We think that this renewed interest towards the relationship between social inequalities and school systems is due to the convergence of at least three distinct but related topics in the political and scientific debate. First of all, we can quote a renewed interest in social mobility. In Italy for a long time this topic has been cultivated in the inner circle of experts but, after the crisis of the last years, people have felt that in a declining economy the phenomenon of social immobility and the polarization of social stratification (with the great crisis of middle classes – see Palumbo & Poli, 2013) are increasing, as confirmed by a recent research (see: Barone, Lucchini & Schizzerotto, 2011), according to which downward mobility in Italy is quite null and, on the other side, upward mobility grows only in the periods of economic growth. A greater interest into social mobility leads to a greater attention to educational systems, not only for the relationship that in modern societies exists between the two, but particularly because in Italy the first job is strongly related to educational attainments and, in addition, Introduction to the Special Section M. Palumbo and V. Pandolfini ITALIAN...

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...015 6 Recent comparative analysis (Dubet, Duru-Bellat & Vérétout, 2010) showed that the capacity of the school to modify social inheritance depends, from one side, on the importance assigned to educational systems to determine social status (also in terms of signalling potential skills in the job placement process – see Shavit, 2014); from the other side, it depends on the way in which other social mechanisms intervene, inside or outside the school, to determine an individual’s social position (Spartaco et al. well debate such topic in their article). This is an increasing problem because, as Poli (2015) pointed out, also in a society in which there are a lot of classless inequalities, job placement strongly depends on the ‘family welfare’, i.e. social origins of young people. Also studies that use a transition approach (see Walther, 2006) show that social capital of young people plays an important role in building the individual biographies and strengthening people’s awareness and identity (Benasso, 2013). On the other side, transitions studies underline that social reproduction is far to be an automatic consequence of social background and school choices and school results depend on individ...

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...ery early to work, and also for this reason, schools risk to certificate rather than compensate the effects of social origins (Huttenlocher, 1998; Barone, 2012). Introduction to the Special Section M. Palumbo and V. Pandolfini ITALIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION, 7 (2), 2015 6 Recent comparative analysis (Dubet, Duru-Bellat & Vérétout, 2010) showed that the capacity of the school to modify social inheritance depends, from one side, on the importance assigned to educational systems to determine social status (also in terms of signalling potential skills in the job placement process – see Shavit, 2014); from the other side, it depends on the way in which other social mechanisms intervene, inside or outside the school, to determine an individual’s social position (Spartaco et al. well debate such topic in their article). This is an increasing problem because, as Poli (2015) pointed out, also in a society in which there are a lot of classless inequalities, job placement strongly depends on the ‘family welfare’, i.e. social origins of young people. Also studies that use a transition approach (see Walther, 2006) show that social capital of young people plays an important role in building the in...

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...has instead occurred following the introduction of the national system of evaluation1. It doesn’t matter to summarize here the relevant debate that is taking place in Italy, frequently ideologically oriented. We can recall just two main observations. First of all, every educational system must warrantee three different goals, which haven’t an optimal mix, because they depend on the context. The first is obviously to ensure equal opportunity to all, for combined reasons of social justice and optimization of social functioning: the principle is sometimes defined ‘meritocracy’, but luckily Elise Tenret (2011) and Carlo Barone (2012) learned well the lesson of Michael Young (1958) and showed the ideological bias of this term. Nevertheless, a real debate on this topic can lead us to recognize the necessity of ‘positive actions’ to ensure real equality of opportunity. As a previous Vice Minister of Education recently said, we must enrich the principle of equal opportunity, ‘giving more to people that start with less’ (Rossi Doria, 2014). But of course the problem of ‘how much more’ and ‘how much less’ is a problem of social justice and not only of good functioning of the society (in terms of cost/ben...

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...loyability in a knowledge society. An additional goal is an equalitarian one, which considers not the equality of starting points (the first one), nor the differentiation of the arrival points (the second one), but the equality of the arrival points without considering the points of departure. Faced with these three main goals of the contemporary educational systems, scholars focused their attention on mainly one of these. One of the most interesting approaches tries to combine structural and individualistic perspectives. Analyzing the level of meritocracy perceived by Italian students, Elise Tenret (2014) finds that of the sample thinks that the educational system is meritocratic, also if this perception isn’t related to the perception of the utility of the educational qualifications in the labor market. In fact, a lot of empirical evidence shows that in Italy the access to the labor market is related to social origins both directly and by means of school attainment and in a period of economic crisis and lower mobility the over qualification of young people strengthens the combined effects of social and cultural capital. Also for this reason we see that young people (and their families) embe...