Expert Judgements on Education Systems’ Characteristics: A New Dataset

The central goal of this paper is to describe and release the data collected from an expert survey on education systems of 34 OECD member states (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Kingdom). To classify education systems, scholars have identified four concepts: stratification, vocational specificity, standardization and centralization. Although numerical indicators have been provided in the last years, they all suffer from either measurement error or weak connection between theoretical concept and empirical indicant(s). In contrast, this new dataset is based on the identification of the most important dimensions of each concept that have been operationalized and measured consistently for a large number of countries. The indicators have been constructed upon information gathered from a survey of 206 experts carried out in 2016. The experts who completed the questionnaire are academics and researchers from different disciplines but also practitioners such as school principals and staff of the ministry of education. They were selected through academic networks, a reading of scholarly publications and internet searches to identify members of scientific associations or research centres. In addition to summarizing general statistics on the response rate and providing a detailed description of this new dataset, in this paper each indicator is contrasted against the ones most often employed in the literature. A section is also dedicated to the discussion of the assumptions and doubts surrounding the use of expert.