Education Inequality and Academic Achievement

In this concluding chapter, we return to a persistent question in the study of education inequality that asks about its relationship with student learning. The question could be formulated in a variety of ways but our summarizing choice is this: what impact, if any, do costly efforts to achieve an equal distribution of school completion rates have on student learning as measured by standardized achievement tests? Or course the flip side of this question would inquire about the costs in terms of comparatively low student learning outcomes and ultimately human capital formation of doing nothing to equalize education opportunity. Many countries are precisely in this situation.

The matter of the consequences of education inequality is one that, up to now, has not been satisfactorily answered due primarily to data limitations. Achievement data, of course, are commonplace in this era of preoccupation with human capital formation through schooling. However, similar measures of education equality are just beginning to surface, and in most countries they still do not exist at the sub-national level. A correlation analysis across nations could be done using national education Gini coefficients and national test scores from the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and similar sources. However, rarely do learning achievement tests purport to be representative of the entire school age population. In many country cases, only a small fraction of school children attend school, thus casting considerable doubt on the meaning of a comparison between a measure of the distribution of education attainment based on an entire age group and an achievement test score based on a school sample biased in favor of children from urban wage-earning families.