Education for All? Measuring inequality of educational outcomes among 15-year-olds across 39 industrialized nations

Zlata Bruckauf, Yekaterina Chzhen and Innocenti Research Centre Unicef

Innocenti Working Papers

Abstract: Measuring inequality of learning outcomes in a way that provides meaningful benchmarks for national policy while retaining a focus on those students who are ‘hard to reach’ and ‘hard to teach’ is a challenging but vital task in the light of the global post-2015 education agenda. Drawing on PISA 2012 data and its earlier rounds, this paper explores alternative approaches to measuring educational inequality at the ‘bottom-end’ of educational distribution within the cross-national context. Its main aim is to understand how far behind children are allowed to fall in their academic achievement compared to what is considered a standard performance in their country. Under the framework of relative (measured as achievement gap between the median and 10th percentile) and absolute (measured by the percentage of students achieving at a given benchmark) educational disadvantage it examines cross-country rankings as well as national trajectories with reference to overall academic progress. We find that on average across OECD countries around 11% of 15- year-olds lacked skills in solving basic reading, mathematical, as well as science, tasks in 2012, but variation across countries was large.

Keywords: educational indicators; educational levels; educational planning; inequality; low income families; social inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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