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Introduction
The purpose of this study is to explore the association of everyday school operational discipline and academic performance. “Generally, school discipline is defined as school policies and actions taken by school personnel with students to prevent or intervene with unwanted behaviors” (Cameron, 2006, p. 219). The focus is very intentionally not on school pedagogy or “in the clouds” philosophy, but instead on the actual everyday operation in the classroom. Our study is designed to reveal differences in discipline among various geographic clusters of countries, given that school operations differ markedly among different regions in the world (Baumann et al., 2012). Could it be that the diverging approaches to education in geographic clusters result in different academic performance?
Education and economic performance
Academic research has long aspired to explain differences in academic performance and soon it became clear that education also links, in one way or another, to economic performance. Researchers started to put such research in a global context, e.g. Hanushek (2003), Keep and Mayhew (1999), Porter (1990) and Sahlberg (2006) with comparisons of diverging pedagogic theory and respective academic results. There are a number of theories at play when dealing with performance, academic and economic. Going back in history, as far back as Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations from 1776, issues of abilities and talents contributing to countries’ capital were being discussed, suggesting an association between education and economic performance. In the 1960s, Schultz argued in his Capital Formation by Education Theory (Schultz, 1960) that education should be treated as an investment in nations and his Human Capital Theory (Schultz, 1961) explains why some nations have progressed both in terms of educational performance and subsequent economic progression.
“Competitiveness is not that bad […] at least in the East” concluded King et al. (2012). Indeed academic performance has been explained by competitiveness, economic performance and culture (Baumann and Hamin, 2011) and vice-versa, i.e. education explaining competitiveness (Baumann and Winzar, 2016). The Harvard-based Barro School (e.g. Barro and Lee, 1993; Barro, 1997; Barro and McCleary, 2003) investigated how education is utilised by poor economies in their attempt to catch up with countries more economically developed. Other studies investigated how years of schooling is linked to economic performance (Barro and Lee, 1996),...