Abstract
This chapter turns to inequality in learning outcomes, as measured by within-country dispersion in standardized test scores. Torpey-Saboe finds that the relationship between globalization and education inequality is consistent whether inequality is measured in years of education or test score achievement. Labor-abundant countries open to trade have lower education inequality than other types of economies. The relationships between modernization and inequality and political regime and inequality are not consistent with the findings in Chap. 5 on access to education, however. While modernization is associated with lower inequality in years of education, it is associated with higher inequality in terms of learning outcomes. Also, the author finds that in countries with high levels of income inequality, democracy is associated with greater disparities in learning outcomes. Several examples from different countries, including Chile and former Soviet bloc countries are discussed.
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- 1.
This data comes from the National Center for Education Statistics High School and Beyond surveys. These were a series of studies conducted beginning with the high school class of 1972 and continuing through the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. Income is family income as reported by student. For more information, see https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/hsb/.
- 2.
Countries are to include all 15-year-olds attending educational institutions, including full-time students, part-time students, students in vocational training programs, students attending foreign schools within the country, and students from other countries attending any of the programs in the first three categories. The sampling design is a two-stage stratified sample design. First, schools were systematically sampled from a comprehensive national list, with probabilities proportional to a measure of size. Schools were also assigned to mutually exclusive groups called explicit strata based on school characteristics. In the second stage, up to 35 students within each school were randomly selected from a list of all 15-year-olds in the school. Certain students, such as those with intellectual disabilities or those not proficient in any of the assessment languages were allowed to be excluded, but exclusions had to be kept below 5 percent of the desired target population. For more on PISA assessment, see www.oecd.org/pisa.
- 3.
PISA does not publish individual level data, but they do publish summary statistics of some analysis that they do on the individual level data. One of these statistics is the r-squared of the bivariate regression of student test score on socioeconomic status. By taking the square root of this number, I obtain the absolute value of the correlation coefficient.
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Torpey-Saboe, N. (2019). Inequality in Learning Outcomes. In: Measuring Education Inequality in Developing Countries. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90629-4_6
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