The Global Increase in the Socioeconomic Achievement Gap, 1964 to 2015
By A. Chmielewski. American Sociological Review, 2019
238 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Demography, Education, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24d7c9866325e8ce6cebaa2312386620c4f69394
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Citations in the corpus
- Socioeconomic Status and Academic Outcomes in Developing Countries: A Meta-Analysis (2019, background): “A few others have started to explore international variations in achievement gaps across countries mostly using international large-scale assessment data sets such as TIMSS or PISA, but they are largely limited to already developed or upper-middle–income countries (e.g., Baker et al., 2003; Chmielew”