Inequality in the public provision of education: Why it matters

Comparative Education Review

Volumn 49, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 297-310

  Holsinger, Donald B ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 24944456287     PISSN: 00104086     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/431319     Document Type: Review

References (12)

1. Donald B. Holsinger, "Education and Occupational Attainment Process in Brazil," Comparative Education Review 19, no. 2 (1975): 267-75.
2. World Development Report (WDR) 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty (Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2000).
3. See Lant Pritchett, "Where Has All the Education Gone?" World Bank Policy Research Working Paper no. 1581 (World Bank, Washington, DC, March 1996).
4. Although popularly the terms are used interchangeably, J. P. Farrell ("Changing Conceptions of Equality of Education: Forty Years of Comparative Education," in Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local, ed. R. F. Arnove and C. A. Torres [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999], 158) states that, more precisely, "equally" should be used when referring to quantity whereas "equity" refers to the fairness or justice of the distribution of education.
5. Donald Holsinger, John M. Collins, Joshua Rew, Jiesu Luo, Adam J. Lindsay, and Laura Jimenez, "The Education Gini Coefficient: An Underutilized Tool for Education Policy Analysis - the Case of Viet Nam" (unpublished manuscript). Cuba appears to be similar, both in achieving high levels of access and achievement overall (as compared to Latin American societies) and with respect to a negligible correlation between rural-urban residence or other measures of family background and educational achievement (test performance);
6. see Unesco, Primer estuido internacional comparativo sobre lenguaje, matemática y factores asociados en tecero y cuarto grado (Santiago, Chile: Oficina Regional de Educación Para Américal Latina y El Caribe, 1998).
7. From the Vietnam Living Standards Surveys of a representative sample of all households in the indicated year. Nguyen Nyuyet Nga, "Viet Nam: Trends in the Education Sector during 1993-98" (draft report, World Bank, 2001).
8. Of course the evidence only pertains to the price inelasticity of demand for secondary schooling in the specified range of user fees. There would probably be a price at which demand would slacken.
9. See D. B. Holsinger, "Trends in School Finance: A Summary of Recent Evidence" (unpublished manuscript, Asian Development Bank, Hanoi, 2001).
10. This is intuitively obvious for when enrollment approaches universality the distribution becomes increasingly equal.
11. The contention that education spending of governments is biased toward the rich is hardly a novel idea, There is also a large literature providing ample evidence that such bias is ultimately a political decision. And one conclusion that has been reached by many observers is that politically biased policies and practices that favor dominant groups are frequently masked as being part of a meritocratic system, especially where access to successive levels of schooling is determined through high-stakes examinations.
12. In many countries a parallel private system operates in such a way as to ensure that at each successive level of schooling the children of comparatively wealthy households capture the educational spending of the government. This "parallel system" exists because relatively wealthy households increase the probability that their children will succeed in high stakes entrance examinations by hiring tutors - underpaid school teachers who are happy to sell their services afterschool hours.