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

Publication date: 2016_08
Publication series:
Innocenti Working Papers
No. of pages: 42
Download the report
(PDF, 18.23 MB)
Related Project(s):
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.
Available in:
English