Abstract:

According to the structure of societies and the role of social institutions, the education system should be a guarantee of social stability. However, international research and statistical analysis raise doubts as to whether the Lithuanian education system creates prerequisites for ensuring social stability. Lithuania constantly strives to achieve better positions, but the results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2015 and 2018 show that the achievements of Lithuanian students are lower and do not reach the OECD average, and there is not much progress observed within this period. Studies of student achievement reveal a wide gap in different economic, social and cultural status (ESCS) environments. Achievements of students who study in Polish in many areas are lower than the average of the country. Differences in achievements, as established by the international research, might be affected by the fact that the majority of schools that teach in Polish are located in rural areas, where the average performance of all students is lower due to the poorer ESCS. The international study TALIS (2018) emphasized that the most important persons related to the school and the ones with the greatest impact on the students’ learning are teachers. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to reveal the potential of Polish minority school teachers in reducing student achievement gaps. The topic presented in the article can be treated as a step in creating a purposeful and systematic approach to national minority (NM) schools in Lithuania, assessing their situation, possibilities and competence to overcome student achievement gaps by counterbalancing the challenge of the ESCS environment.

A mixed research strategy was chosen to achieve the research goal:
- the context of education of NM in Lithuania is examined based on the analysis of legal acts;
- the analysis of achievement gaps of NM students is based on statistical data analysis, i.e. provided by PISA 2015 and 2018 and national student achievement assessment data;
- the evaluation of the situation of teachers is based on the analysis of the Lithuanian strategic education documents, data of the Statistics Department, official reports, and TALIS 2018;
- teacher working practices are determined based on the data obtained during three group interviews with 21 teacher who work in NM schools.

This research confirms the findings of previous studies that the ESCS has an effect on student achievements, but our research emphasizes that small schools, having better conditions for individual relationships not only with students, but also with their families, have more possibilities to control the negative impact of ESCS on student achievements. However, a teacher working in a rural area faces financial difficulties, as the number of students in rural areas decreases, so does the possibility to have a full-time position and receive a higher salary. This is also related to fewer possibilities for improving competences and self-education.
Nonetheless, the long-term impact of education equity in Lithuania in NM schools will be influenced by the ability to control the effect of the social, economic and cultural context. There is a need to change the current school network and model in municipalities with a strongly expressed ESCS by organizing full-day schools for children from families with an unfavourable ESCS, which would ensure additional workload for teachers and support specialists.

Keywords:

Student achievement gaps, national minority schools, education policy, teachers, equity in education.