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Inequality of Opportunity in Education: Accounting for the Contributions of Sibs, Schools and Sorting across East Africa
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Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-sonnet-5-5This paper looks at why children in East Africa differ in how well they do on school tests. It considers household resources and school quality together, rather than separately as most earlier work has done. It also looks at how children are matched to schools, which shows whether schools make household-based gaps wider or smaller. The analysis uses data on more than one million children in three low-income East African countries. The authors conclude that education policy should look at how school quality is distributed and how households are matched to schools, not only at average school quality.
Key points
- Household factors account for a significant share of the variation in children's test scores.
- Variation in school quality and positive sorting between households and schools together matter no less than household factors.
- School quality varies substantially across geographic areas.
- Promoting equity in education requires policies beyond raising average school quality.
- Policies should attend to the distribution of school quality and to the matching of households with schools.
Limitations
Only the abstract is available, so the three countries, the data source, the test measures and the exact size of each contribution are not stated. The work is a statistical decomposition of test score variation and does not evaluate an intervention.
Abstract
Inequalities in the opportunity to obtain a good education in low-income countries are widely understood to be related to household resources and schooling quality. Yet, to date, most researchers have investigated the contributions of these two factors separately. This paper considers them jointly, paying special attention to their covariation, which indicates whether schools exacerbate or compensate for existing household-based inequalities. The paper develops a new variance decomposition framework and applies it to data on more than one million children in three low-income East African countries. The empirical results show that although household factors account for a significant share of total test score variation, variation in school quality and positive sorting between households and schools are, together, no less important. The analysis also finds evidence of substantial geographical heterogeneity in schooling quality. The paper concludes that promoting equity in education in East Africa requires policies that go beyond raising average school quality and should attend to the distribution of school quality as well as assortative matching between households and schools. (World)