| By: |
Nicolas Gravel (CSH - Centre de sciences humaines de New Delhi - MEAE - Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - Ecole Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique);
Edward Levavasseur (AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - Ecole Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique);
Patrick Moyes (GREThA - Groupe de Recherche en Economie Théorique et Appliquée - UB - Université de Bordeaux - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: |
This paper proposes two dominance criteria for evaluating education systems
described as joint distributions of the pupils' cognitive skill achievements
and family backgrounds. The first criterion is shown to be the smallest
transitive ranking of education systems compatible with three elementary
principles. The first principle requires any improvement in the cognitive
skill of a child with a given family background to be recorded favorably. The
second principle demands that any child's cognitive skill be all the more
favorably appraised as the child is coming from an unfavorable background. The
third principle states that when two different skills and family backgrounds
are allocated between two children, it is preferable that the high skill be
given to the low background child than the other way around. The criterion
considers system A to be better than system B when, for every pair of
reference background and skill, the fraction of children with both a lower
background and a better skill than the reference is larger in A than in B. Our
second criterion completes the first by adding to the three principles the
elitist requirement that a mean-preserving spread in the skills of two
children with the same background be recorded favorably. We apply our criteria
to the ranking of education systems of 43 countries, taking the PISA score in
mathematics as the measure of cognitive skills and the largest of the two
parents International Socio Economic Index as the indicator of background. We
show that, albeit incomplete, our criteria enables conclusive comparisons of
about 19% of all the possible pairs of countries. Education systems of
fast-growing Asian economies - in particular Vietnam - appear at the top of
our rankings while those of relatively wealthy Arabic countries such as
Lebanon, United Arab Emirates and Jordan are at the bottom. The fraction of
countries that can be ranked successfully happens to be only mildly increased
as a result of adding elitism to the three other principles. |
| Keywords: |
Education,inequality,family background,opportunities,dominance,math scores,international comparisons |
| Date: |
2019 |
| URL: |
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-02291128&r=all |