Measuring educational inequality of opportunity: Pupil's effort matters
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-1-2021
Abstract
The distinction between effort and other factors, such as family background, matters for correcting policies and normative reasons when we appeal to inequality of opportunity. We take advantage of a purposefully designed survey on secondary schools in rural Bangladesh to offer a comprehensive view of the importance of overall effort when measuring inequalities of opportunity in education. The analysis comprises decomposition exercises of the predicted variance of student performance in mathematics and English by source (effort, circumstances, etc.) and subgroup (within- and between-schools) based on parametric estimates of educational production functions. Pupils' effort, preferences, and talents contribute between 31% and 40% of the total predicted variances in performance scores. The contribution of overall effort falls by 10% when the correlation between effort and circumstances is taken into account. These findings are robust to the choice of estimation strategy (i.e. combined within- and between-schools variation models versus multilevel random-effect models). All in all, these results advocate that social determinism in education can be mitigated by individual effort at school. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Keywords
Inequality of opportunity, Education, Effort, Variance decomposition, School
Divisions
FacultyofEconomicsAdministration
Funders
French National Research Agency (ANR) (ANR-17-EURE-0020),Health Chair-a joint initiative by PSL, Universite Paris-Dauphine,ENSAE,MGEN,ISTYA under the aegis of the Fondation du Risque (FDR)
Publication Title
World Development
Volume
138
Publisher
Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd
Publisher Location
THE BOULEVARD, LANGFORD LANE, KIDLINGTON, OXFORD OX5 1GB, ENGLAND