How Equal are Educational Opportunities? Family Background and Student Achievement in Europe and the United States

By Ludger Woessmann. Social Science Research Network, 2004

282 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper estimates the effects of family-background characteristics on student performance in the US and 17 Western European school systems. Family background has strong effects both in Europe and the United States, remarkably similar in size. France and Flemish Belgium achieve the most equitable performance for students from different family backgrounds, and Britain and Germany the least. Equality of opportunities is unrelated to countries� mean performance. Quantile regressions show little variation in family-background effects across the ability distribution in most countries.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78f575a6104f59443ae819de2ba99027bb840038

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Citations in the corpus

Preparing for Life in a Digital Age: The IEA International Computer and Information Literacy Study International Report (2014, background): “This association has been observed across many learning areas (see, for example, Saha, 1997; Sirin, 2005; Woessmann, 2004).”
Investigating relationships between school context, teacher professional development, teaching practices, and student achievement in response to a nationwide science reform (2018, background): “…reading achievement levels (i.e., PSAT scores) with students' current knowledge (i.e., AP scores) (e.g., Ewing et al., 2006; Zhang et al., 2014), as well as research that relates students' family background with student achievement (Davis-Kean, 2005; Desforges & Abouchaar, 2003; Woessmann, 2004).”
Educational Opportunities and the Role of Institutions (2005, methodology): “The approach followed in most studies is to determine the effect of institutional settings on student performance by estimating educational production functions (e.g. Fuchs and Woessmann, 2004) or applying a matching approach (e.g. Vandenberghe and Robin, 2004).”
Computers and Student Learning: Bivariate and Multivariate Evidence on the Availability and Use of Computers at Home and at School (2004, methodology): “In order to use all available information of the PISA test and estimate the maximum sample of students participating in the test, missing values in the student and school questionnaires were imputed (see Fuchs and Wößmann 2004 for details on the imputation method employed).”
Heterogeneity in the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment: evidence from Switzerland on natives and second-generation immigrants (2007, background): “7 For a similar argument see Woessmann (2004) who investigates the heterogeneity of intergenerational transmission across levels of child ability.”
Education Policy and Equality of Opportunity (2008, unknown): “…Machin, Winfried Pohlmeier, JoachimWinter and the editors, as well as participants at the joint SOLE/EALE World Conference on Labor Economics in San Francisco, the conferences of the International EconomicAssociation inMarrakechand theGermanEconomicAssociation inBonn, andat seminars at the…”
Peer Effects in European Primary Schools: Evidence from Pirls (2006, unknown): “In fact, Woessmann (2004) found the number of books to be the single most important predictor of reading skills among various”
Preparing for life in a digital age (2014, background): “This association has been observed across many learning areas (see, for example, Saha, 1997; Sirin, 2005; Woessmann, 2004).”