School factors related to quality: Multilevel analysis for three swiss cantons

Abstract

What influence do schools and the educational system have on students' performance? How should schools be organised to ensure equal opportunities for students independently of their origin? What school characteristics impacting students' outcomes are easily amenable to educational policies? Launched by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) offers a framework for analysis and a unique database for offering answer to questions of this kind. Since 2000, OECD member states like Switzerland as well as other associate countries have participated every 3 years in a survey. Their aim is to examine and compare knowledge and skills acquired by students at completion of compulsory education (e.g. OECD 2001, 2004). In the Swiss federal system, education is in major part under the jurisdiction of the cantons (member states of the federal state) and municipalities. Consequently, it is worthwhile not to limit research to an international comparison but to examine the regional and cantonal levels too. Hence, under the aegis of the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (SFSO) and the Swiss Conference of cantonal Directors for Education (SCDE), an important series of common studies analysed and discussed Swiss students' results (e.g. SFSO/SCDE 2001, 2002, 2003a, 2004, 2005). The analysis led by the SFSO and the SCDE covered a broad range of determining factors of students' performance. However, among the explanatory variables, the policy-amenable school factors have often been neglected, especially in the studies of French-speaking cantons. Concretely, we are interested in policy-amenable school characteristics that at the same time impact students' performance in these cantons. Thus, taking as a reference a current international multilevel study (OECD 2005a), we will seek to shed light on the conditions for learning in the schools within the educational systems of the three French-speaking cantons located around Lake Leman (the cantons of Geneva, Vaud and Valais). We hope to subsequently raise a number of issues useful for the practice of educational policies at school level. This chapter is divided into five sections. In the following section, we first give an overview of the main branches of school effectiveness research. This allows us to define our explanatory model and our corresponding hypotheses. The third section specifies the method and the data as well as certain limitations of the analysis. The fourth section presents and interprets the estimated results for the three above-mentioned cantons. Finally, the main findings are summarised in the concluding section. © 2008 Springer.