Comprehensive Schooling and Educational Inequality

Abstract

The major argument of this book is that educational inequality matters in terms of the social effects of education and may, indeed, be one of its major determinants. This chapter focuses on the production of inequality in school systems, reviewing the evidence on the differences in levels of educational equality across countries, and assessing the school system factors which may explain these variations. The chapter concludes by asking whether one can identify different (supra-national) regional patterns in the characteristics of national school systems and their distributional outcomes.