Trends in educational inequality

The goal of this paper is to analyze the link between average, deprivation and inequality of reading test scores from 38 countries evaluated by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), for the years 2000 and 2009. The primary contribution of the current study is to apply well-developed indices and techniques used in economic studies of poverty and inequality to some education data. One hypothesis is that the growth elasticity of educational deprivation reduction is greater than that typically found in economic studies. The reason for this is that the distribution of test scores tends to be more homogeneous as compared to income distributions. To measure deprivation in education we use the poverty metrics developed by Foster, Greer and Thorbecke (1983, 2010) including: 1) educational deprivation headcount index; 2) educational deprivation gap index; and 3) educational deprivation severity index. We define as ‘poor in education’ students who have neither acquired fundamental knowledge nor mastered the basic skills corresponding to their level of schooling. Our findings suggest that ambitious strategies to reduce educational deprivation might have to combine both the increase in the average quality of educational system and some kind of distributive policy focusing on the lowest-skilled students.

In this paper, we explore the impacts that education expansion and increased levels in educational homogamy have had on couples’ isolated illiteracy rates, defined as the proportion of illiterates in union that are married to an illiterate partner. First, we develop the methodology to decompose isolated literacy rates into two main components: the educational distribution of the spouses and the level of homogamy. Second, we use harmonized international census microdata from IPUMS and Demographic Health Survey data for 73 countries and 217 samples to investigate which of the two components is more important in shaping the level of isolated illiteracy. Our results indicate that the expansion of education has been more powerful than the increases in the tendency toward homogamy in its impact on isolated illiteracy rates. As the percentage of illiterates decreases over time, an increasingly large proportion of them marry literate individuals, showing that opportunities for intermarriage among illiterates expand d espite the strengthening of homogamy.

Background: This paper examines the inequality of opportunity among Indian children in attending appropriate class as per their age up to elementary level (Std. I-VIII) of education during 1986–2008. The socioeconomic, regional and temporal perspective in underscoring the inequality of opportunity in time-bound completion of elementary education would be imperative to achieve universalization of elementary education in effective manner.
Data & Methods: Data from the three rounds of the National Sample Survey on ‘Participation in Education’ conducted during 1986-87, 1995-96 and 2007-08 were analyzed. In order to assess inequality of opportunity in attending appropriate class at appropriate age among children across selected circumstance groups, the study used the Human Opportunity Index (HOI). The HOI synthesizes measurements of both the absolute level of opportunities in a society and how equitably those opportunities are distributed into a single indicator.
Results: Adjusting potential socio-demographic and economic characteristics, the opportunity among Indian children in attending appropriate class as per their age up to elementary level has shown an increase of 20 percentage point during 1986-2008. The opportunity gap in gender and social group is catching up gradually due to increasing coverage rate in disadvantaged