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