Stratified Failure

What is it about?

Students variably blame themselves or others for not doing well academically. In this paper I describe how students understand their academic failure based on a survey of 128,110 students in 20 countries. Patterns in students’ explanations of academic failure revealed their responses to be only loosely connected to the particular country in which a student lives, their school’s resources, or that student’s social background. Rather, these students’ attributions of failure show a close correlation to the way a student’s school is organized. Regardless of students’ factual school performance, those students who attended highly stratified, segregated schools were most likely to think only they were to blame for their failure. Conversely, students in less stratified, socioeconomically integrated, schools tended to attribute their academics to a range of factors within their control (effort, ability) and beyond their control (teachers, luck).

Featured Image

Why is it important?

These findings are particularly relevant to the U.S. educational field, which is more stratified and segregated than anywhere in the developed world. Stratifying school policies, such as tracking, and failures to address socioeconomic and racial segregation are consequential for how young people understand their competencies, how they make sense of success and failure in their immediate environment, and how they learn to cope with setbacks. These are often formative lessons that come to shape young citizens’ view of self and society.