• Economics and education

Economics of education

While international data show that socioeconomic status (SES) strongly influences student outcomes, some countries have done better than others at mitigating this effect. This report analyses international data on educational outcomes from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), to disentangle the factors that, across countries, tend to contribute to or mitigate the relationship between literacy performance and students’ family background. It then discusses the implications for macro-level educational policies aimed at reducing inequalities in student outcomes.

The analysis identifies a range of factors that produce variation in the extent to which SES affects outcomes:

• schools make a difference in mitigating or exacerbating the effects of SES. However, this is not reflected in many national monitoring systems such as league tables, which do not take into account student background or ability at entry. Therefore, assessments of schools’ performance should be based on a measure of student growth taken on at least three occasions
• for schools or countries that have a relatively strong relationship between SES and student outcomes, SES-targeted or a combination of SES- and performance-targeted interventions may be most effective in raising achievement levels overall as well as reducing inequalities in outcomes
• in all countries the average level of SES of a community has an effect on outcomes over and above the effects associated with individuals. As a result, children attending schools serving low SES populations tend to be at a significant disadvantage than students with similar family backgrounds that have been integrated into schools serving more heterogeneous populations
• schools with a heterogeneous intake of students, in terms of their family SES, have equally high performance as those with a homogeneous intake
• the effects of family SES are mediated by school-level factors such as teacher experience, the disciplinary climate of the classroom and parental support, but it is a it is a combination of factors, rather than any single effect, that makes a difference to school performance
• the results do not support the popular belief that smaller class sizes, or lower teacher to student ratios, yield better results
• the differences between urban and rural sectors are associated with material and human resources, such as smaller classes, better quality material resources and higher levels of teacher training, and various aspects of school and classroom policy and practice

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