Abstract
Providing all children equal access to essential services, such as primary education, has been set as a priority in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)’ agenda during the last two decades. Yet the Global Education Monitoring report in 2016 reveals that wide disparities between the rich and the poor persist in access to education of high quality. This study uses the Human Opportunity Index (HOI) to examine the equality of opportunity in access to basic education of high quality. By using enrollment and admission data from a case study in a large school district in the US in 2015/2016, this research evaluates the capacity of the HOI, in order to reveal disparities in access to school opportunities and examines how much of this inequality is explained by families’ pre-determined circumstances. The way of analyzing equality is by disaggregating applications’ data into circumstance groups, according to gender, geography, race/ethnicity, and other criteria. To capture the contribution of each circumstance to inequality of opportunity, the Shapley decomposition method is used. Findings show that the HOI is capable of systematically monitoring and examining existing admission policies and identifying inequality problems. Furthermore, the analysis of the contribution of each circumstance group can reveal admission criteria that have the potential to harm the educational opportunities for children. This assessment should provide valuable insights into the capability of the indicators to reveal where policy intervention is necessary and supply points of view on how policy can be improved.
Highlights
Quality basic education has been recognized as being at the core of sustainable development
Being enrolled in a high-quality school is a privilege for 77.7% of the magnet school population at School District of Hillsborough County (SDHC), a luxury when it is compared with the 53.5% of all public students at middle level in the District, and with the 54.4% of all public students at middle level in the State of Florida, suggesting that magnet schools provide higher opportunities for access to high quality public education at lower secondary level
Prior research on educational opportunities measures how far a given distribution of individual outcomes is from equal opportunity, capturing different aspects of education, such as participation, attainment, and achievement
Summary
Quality basic education has been recognized as being at the core of sustainable development. Providing all children equal access to essential services, such as clean water, improved sanitation, or primary education, has been set as a priority in the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDG) agenda over the past 15 years [1]. The Global Education Monitoring (GEM) report in 2016 [2] raises an alarm since over the past two decades social inequalities have increased, calling for urgent action for education. It reveals that wide disparities between the rich and the poor persist in access to education of good quality, within and between countries. In low-income countries, “only 36% among the poorest youth complete primary education; less than half of children complete lower secondary school, only 14% complete upper secondary education, and girls continue to lag behind boys” [4]
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