Lee Elliot Major and John Jerrim.
The study of education inequality and social mobility increasingly feels like a small world. The British Prime Minister David Cameron hopes for improved educational opportunities for disadvantaged children. President Barack Obama has put the issue of inequality and social mobility at the heart of at least one State of the Union address. In fact most national leaders espouse similar aspirations. And at international gatherings the education challenges facing countries are strikingly similar: improving education in the early years; recruiting and developing good teachers; ensuring equitable access to leading universities.
But international comparisons matter precisely because of the differences they reveal between countries. We can indicate how well one education system or society is performing by comparing it against somewhere else (the assumption being that humans are basically the same across the world). At the same time good comparative data is devilishly hard to come by and offers mainly (more…)