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This study employs sequence analysis to explore the educational pathways of individuals born in China between 1976 and 1988, a cohort that witnessed substantial educational expansion. The study constructs a typology for classifying these educational trajectories and quantifies the prevalence of each category within the cohort. Utilizing decision tree analysis, the study investigates the relationship between different educational pathways and various background characteristics. Unlike the "waning coefficients" commonly observed in Mare model and its variants, this approach unveils the substantial influence of cumulative advantage and disadvantage in shaping educational trajectories, a process heavily impacted by individuals' social backgrounds. Despite some exceptions and complexities, several discernible patterns become apparent. For instance, individuals hailing from rural settings generally exhibit a decreased likelihood of progressing along superior educational trajectories throughout their academic endeavors when juxtaposed with their urban counterparts. Moreover, elevated levels of parental education persistently enhance children's prospects for accessing superior educational pathways, irrespective of their urban or rural origins. This methodology serves as a valuable instrument for scrutinizing the general features and diversity of educational trajectories, providing a complementary perspective to existing research on educational stratification and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unequal access to university and the decision processes that give rise to it are important factors in the accumulation of educational inequalities. In this paper, we investigate a specific aspect of such decision processes by focusing on those students who change their original plans to start a (nontertiary) vocational education and decide to pursue a tertiary degree instead. In doing so, we find that more than one-fifth of the students in our sample who originally planned to pursue a vocational education change their original decision in this way. Moreover, while students from a more advantaged background are more likely to go to university in the first place, those among them that initially opted for a vocational education are also more likely to change their decision and go to university instead. We also find that parental preferences for tertiary education play an important role in the process of changing one's mind, even for adult children. Moreover, we find that differential parental preferences contribute to both the emergence of social background effects and—as a result—the perpetuation of educational inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on uncovering social inequality in non-curricular activities (NCAs) and looking at the impact these have on young people's school performance. Based on research conducted in Barcelona with 2,156 10th-graders, the authors investigate the association of participation in NCAs with academic outcomes in the context of social stratification. Their analysis of the data show how the choice of NCAs differs according to gender, immigrant background and family education level. Their findings also indicate that NCAs have an impact on academic performance, and that this effect is amplified when the family educational level variable is introduced. The largest impact of these activities occurs among students whose parents' highest level of education is compulsory education. If students in this social group do not participate in any of the NCAs, their grade point average is associated with the worst performance among young people in Barcelona. On the other hand, if they take part in sports or artistic activities at school, their grade point average is the highest in their social group. The article concludes with some recommendations for socio-political and educational intervention, at the level of schools and the educational community as well as at the policymaking level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does the analysis of school support practices during lockdown in France tell us about the fabrication of educational inequalities? The question of parental monitoring of schoolwork has long been absent from French sociology of education. Based on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural assimilation, the traditional assumption was that family socialisation operates in an "osmotic" way and that studying parents' concrete, voluntary and explicit practices to support their children's schoolwork would not yield much new information. This research note takes the opposite view and demonstrates, on the basis of a survey using a questionnaire (n = 31,764) supplemented by a series of interviews (n = 18) conducted in France during the spring 2020 lockdown, that there are strong differences depending on social background. The early results of this survey suggest in particular that limiting explanations for social inequalities in homeschooling to a digital divide is too simple. The pedagogical dimensions of social inequalities in children's educational achievements must also be taken into account. The author introduces French theories about the "relationship to knowledge" (les théories du rapport au savoir) as a suitable theoretical approach to investigating this dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are concerns that ability tracking at a young age increases unequal opportunities for children of different socioeconomic background to develop their potential. To disentangle family influence and potential ability, we applied moderation models to twin data on secondary educational track level from the Netherlands Twin Register (N = 8847). Delaying tracking to a later age is associated with a lower shared environmental influence and a larger genetic influence on track level in adolescence. This is in line with the idea that delaying tracking improves equality of opportunity. Our results further suggest that this is mostly because delaying tracking reduces the indirect influence of family background on track level via the test performance of students. Importantly, delaying tracking improves the realization of genetic potential especially among students with low test scores, while it lowers shared environmental influence on track level for students of all test performance levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides comparable lower-bound estimates of inequality of opportunity for tertiary education (EIOp) for 31 countries in Europe, by using the two EU-SILC waves for which information on family background is available (2005 and 2011). The results reveal an important degree of heterogeneity, with Northern European countries showing low levels of inequality of opportunity and Mediterranean and Eastern European countries characterized by significant degrees of unfair educational inequalities. Parental education and occupation are the most relevant circumstances in the great majority of the countries considered. This study also exploits the two point-in-time observations available and analyses the relationship between some country-specific characteristics and inequality of opportunity in tertiary education. The analysis documents a negative association between EIOp and real GDP per capita, possibly indicating that higher equality of opportunity in tertiary education and economic growth are complementary objectives. Two results emerge as especially robust: in all the specifications we find a positive association between EIOp and the students/teacher ratio, and a negative one between EIOp and public spending in tertiary education. While we do not claim that such correlations should be interpreted causally, we think that they might indicate a meaningful underlying relationship between equality of opportunity in tertiary education and the availability of financial and non-financial resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Britain and elsewhere, the influence of family socioeconomic status (SES) on education is already evident in primary school, and it persists and increases throughout the school years, with children from impoverished families earning lower grades and obtaining fewer educational qualifications than children from more privileged backgrounds. Reducing the effect of family background on children's education is a pivotal aim of educators, policymakers, and researchers, but the success of their efforts is poorly evidenced to date. Here, we show for the first time that over 95 years in Britain the association between family SES and children's primary school performance has remained stable. Across 16 British population cohorts born between 1921 and 2011 (N = 91,935), we confirmed previous findings of a correlation between family SES and children's school performance of 0.28 [95% Confidence Interval 0.22–0.34], after adjusting for cohort-specific confounders. Contrary to the popular assumption that family background inequality has increased over time, we observed only minimal differences in the association between family SES and school performance across British cohorts. We argue that education policies must prioritize equity in learning outcomes over equality in learning opportunities, if they seek to disrupt the perpetuation of social and economic inequality across generations. We speculate that the influence of family SES on children's education will only noticeably weaken if primary education settings become better equipped to meet and remediate the children's differential learning needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of international surveys on children's learning like PISA, PIRLS and TIMSS—delivering comparable achievement measures across educational systems—has revealed large cross-country variability in average performance and in the degree of inequality across social groups. A key question is whether and how institutional differences affect the level and distribution of educational outcomes. In this contribution, we discuss the difference-in-differences strategies employed in the existing literature to evaluate the effect of early tracking on learning inequalities exploiting international assessments administered at different age/grades. In their seminal paper, Hanushek and Woessmann (Econ J 116:C63–C76, 2006) analyze with two-step estimation the effect of early tracking on overall inequalities, measured by test scores' variability indexes. Later work of other scholars in the economics and sociology of education focuses instead on inequalities among children of different family background, using individual-level models on pooled data from different countries and assessments. In this contribution, we show that individual pooled difference-in-differences models are quite restrictive and that in essence they estimate the effect of tracking by double differentiating the estimated cross-sectional family background regression coefficients between tracking regimes and learning assessments. Starting from a simple learning growth model, we show that if test scores at different surveys are not measured on the same scale, as occurs for international learning assessments, pooled individual models may deliver severely biased results. Instead, the scaling problem does not affect the two-step approach. For this reason, we suggest using two-step estimation also to analyze family-background achievement inequalities. Against this background, using PIRLS-2006 and PISA-2012 we conduct two-step analyses, finding new evidence that early tracking fosters both overall inequalities and family background differentials in reading literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars generally agree that family socioeconomic status significantly influences student engagement and motivation in school learning. Yet, teachers are key adults who play an equally important role in determining student experiences through daily interactions in the classroom. This study asks how family and teachers together shape student motivation to learn. Using data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS), we examine the roles of teachers vis-a-vis parents in fostering students' motivation to learn Math, Chinese, and English subjects. We find that both family background and student-teacher interactions are related to students' learning motivation. However, student-teacher interactions fully mediate the association of family background and student motivation to learn Math and Chinese, whereas student interest in learning English remains independently related to family background. Importantly, we show that students with strong learning motivation have high academic performance. Our findings reveal a hidden mechanism of the reproduction of class inequality through the school system and suggest that not only parents but teachers also play a nontrivial role in shaping educational inequality. We discuss the implications of our findings on educational stratification in Chinese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worldwide participation in higher education now includes one-third of the age cohort and is growing at an unprecedented rate. The tendency to rapid growth, leading towards high participation systems (HPS), has spread to most middle-income and some low-income countries. Though expansion of higher education requires threshold development of the state and the middle class, it is primarily powered not by economic growth but by the ambitions of families to advance or maintain social position. However, expansion is mostly not accompanied by more equal social access to elite institutions. The quality of mass higher education is often problematic. Societies vary in the extent of upward social mobility from low-socio-economic-status backgrounds. The paper explores the intersection between stratified social backgrounds and the stratifying structures in HPS. These differentiating structures include public/private distinctions in schooling and higher education, different fields of study, binary systems and tiered hierarchies of institutions, the vertical 'stretching' of stratification in competitive HPS, and the unequalising effects of tuition. Larger social inequalities set limits on what education can achieve. Countries with high mobility sustain a consensus about social equality, and value rigorous and autonomous systems of learning, assessment and selection in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I present and defend a highly demanding principle of justice in education that has not been seriously discussed thus far. According to the suggested approach, 'all the way equality', justice in education requires nothing short of equal educational outcome between all individual students. This means not merely between equally able children, or between children from different groups and classes, but rather between all children, regardless of social background, race, sex and ability. This approach may seem implausible at first, due to the far-reaching implications it entails, primarily its requirement to deny better-off children their advantage for the sake of equality. However the paper argues that all-the-way-equality, in fact, does a better job realizing the goals of justice in education than alternative conceptions of justice. It is further argued that at least some of the principle's most radical consequences, those that make it seem counterintuitive, can be mitigated by balancing all-the-way-equality with competing interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we evaluate the impact of social origin on the realisation of educational intentions at the time of becoming eligible for higher education in Germany. In general, we find high persistence of intentions and actual attendance of higher education. However, effects of parental education on the changes of educational intentions increase the existing social inequality with regard to higher education at the time of leaving secondary school. The group which is affected most are those young adults planning to study after vocational training-while the gap between different origin groups does not widen much during other stop-outs from education. This can be explained only partly by previous educational performance. The findings suggest that estimates of educational inequality are attenuated when entry into higher education is approximated by educational intentions of young adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Results from PISA show that strong educational performance, and indeed significant improvement over short periods of time, is possible. Whether in Asia (e.g., Japan and Korea), in Europe (e.g., Finland) or in North America (Canada), many countries display strong overall learning outcomes; equally important, they show that poor performance in school does not automatically follow from a disadvantaged socio-economic background. Furthermore, some countries show that educational success can become consistent and predictable, with very little variation in performance across schools. These countries set the goals to which others can aspire. This article sets out some of the key policy levers that are associated with high levels of quality in students’ learning outcomes as well as an equitable distribution of learning opportunities as measured by PISA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the assessment of equality of learning outcomes in Hungary through examining the effects of tracking in secondary schools. It mentions that the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003 data was used to determine to what extent are differences in socio-economic backgrounds of students attributable to students' family background. It cites that prioritizing the vocational training students can help on the attempt to raise the performance of the students.