Do school resources reduce socioeconomic achievement gap? Evidence from PISA 2015

The purpose of this study was to determine whether an ACT prep program taught by three teachers at a Midwestern U.S. high school, each with certification in the ACT subtest topic they taught, generated statistically significant results in the ACT scores of its participants. The secondary purpose of this study was also to determine whether the three-teacher ACT prep course effectively served underrepresented students, helping to close multiple ethnic and socioeconomic achievement gaps (Darling-Hammond, 2000). Ultimately, the three-teacher model did not demonstrate statistically significant differences in scores for its participants, including underrepresented students. Using the economics of schooling as a conceptual framework that "views the schooling process as an input-output model, where the inputs are students, teachers, and school resources and the outputs are student learning achievements" (Qiu and Wu, 2011, p. 65), it was revealed that the inputs of the three-teacher model were not worth the outputs, when outputs can be considered statistically significant differences in scores.

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The Global Increase in the Socioeconomic Achievement Gap, 1964 to 2015

American Sociological Review ◽

10.1177/0003122419847165 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 84 (3) ◽

pp. 517-544 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Anna K. Chmielewski

Keyword(s):

Achievement Gap ◽

Low Socioeconomic Status ◽

Cognitive Skills ◽

Large Scale ◽

Educational Inequality ◽

Achievement Gaps ◽

Low Socioeconomic ◽

Wide Range ◽

Socioeconomic Achievement ◽

Global Increase

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.

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