The Global Increase in the Socioeconomic Achievement Gap, 1964 to 2015
2019/05/16 by Anna K. Chmielewski · 22 citations
Social Sciences · #Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies #Global Educational Reforms and Inequalities #School Choice and Performance
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/0003122419847165
Abstract
The “socioeconomic achievement gap”—the disparity in academic achievement between students from high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds—is well-known in the sociology of education. The SES achievement gap has been documented across a wide range of countries. Yet in most countries, we do not know whether the SES achievement gap has been changing over time. This study combines 30 international large-scale assessments over 50 years, representing 100 countries and about 5.8 million students. SES achievement gaps are computed between the 90th and 10th percentiles of three available measures of family SES: parents’ education, parents’ occupation, and the number of books in the home. Results indicate that, for each of the three SES variables examined, achievement gaps increased in a majority of sample countries. Yet there is substantial cross-national variation in the size of increases in SES achievement gaps. The largest increases are observed in countries with rapidly increasing school enrollments, implying that expanding access reveals educational inequality that was previously hidden outside the school system. However, gaps also increased in many countries with consistently high enrollments, suggesting that cognitive skills are an increasingly important dimension of educational stratification worldwide.
Citations
Cited by
- Social class, intensive parenting norms and parental values for children
- Trends and Determinants of Intergenerational Educational Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa for Birth Cohorts 1974 to 2003
- A Systematic Overview of Meta-Analyses on Socioeconomic Status, Cognitive Ability, and Achievement: The Need to Focus on Specific Pathways
- Inequality in the shadow: The role of private tutoring in SES achievement gaps
- Intergenerational Educational Mobility During the Twentieth Century
- Education and Multidimensional Inequalities in Contemporary Japan and Beyond: A Call for Longitudinal and Comparative Studies
- Mind the gap: the interplay between genes and neighbourhood context on educational achievement
- How school principals manage teaching to support equity in learning: re-thinking instructional leadership with a social justice lens
- How does school composition mitigate socioeconomic and ethnic gaps in students’ achievement in Sweden: A long-term trend between 1988 and 2020
- Looking for "us": power reimagined in mathematics learning for Black communities in the pandemic. [europepmc]
- Persistent association between family socioeconomic status and primary school performance in Britain over 95 years. [europepmc]
- School achievement in adolescence and the risk of mental disorders in early adulthood: a Finnish nationwide register study. [europepmc]
- Belief in School Meritocracy and the Legitimization of Social and Income Inequality. [europepmc]
- Cultural variation in the SES-gender interaction in student achievement. [europepmc]
- Self-perceptions as mechanisms of achievement inequality: evidence across 70 countries. [europepmc]
- Profiles of Loneliness and Ostracism During Adolescence: Consequences, Antecedents, and Protective Factors. [europepmc]
- Using social and behavioral science to address achievement inequality. [europepmc]
- Need for cognition, academic self-efficacy and parental education predict the intention to go to college-evidence from a multigroup study. [europepmc]
- Associations among socioeconomic disadvantage, longitudinal changes in within-network connectivity, and academic outcomes in the ABCD study. [europepmc]
- The development and validation of the Decent Education Scale and the Retrospective Decent Education Scale. [europepmc]
- Beyond the income-achievement gap: The role of individual, family, and environmental factors in cognitive resilience among low-income youth. [europepmc]
- Socioeconomic status and educational inequality: digital competency pathways to creative problem-solving and academic performance. [europepmc]
Related