School-level inequality and learning achievement: evidence from PISA

Abstract

Abstract A large body of literature has documented a strong economic gradient of educational outcomes, with pupils from richer households obtaining on average better outcomes than pupils from poorer households. However, there is surprisingly very little evidence on the role of aggregate economic inequality on individual educational attainment, once individual economic status as well as the aggregate economic milieu are controlled for. Using the 2012, 2015 and 2018 waves of multi-country data from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), we find a negative relationship between school-level wealth inequality and test scores. In addition, we observe that school-level inequality interacts with school-level mean wealth. This suggests that the role of inequality may differ depending on the economic milieu – being stronger for schools attended by pupils from richer families. We go beyond the standard econometric interpretation of this interaction term and provide a reading of it in terms of school-level absolute inequality and aggregate relative deprivation. Results hold for the pooled data as well as for each of the three waves alone and are confirmed by a range of robustness checks.