"What if disadvantage need not correlate with poor academic achievement? If instead of researching the 'underachieving' groups (minorities, children for whom English is not their home language, and children of families in poor socioeconomic circumstances) you look at what works in schools to raise the attainment of all these groups, the results are compelling. This inspiring book is grounded in Feyisa Demie's meticulous research and analysis of the high expectations and targeted interventions by schools in one poor inner-city local authority (LA). Schools once in special measures are transformed to "Outstanding" by gifted leadership, effective teachers who mirror the school's intake, and a governing body and community of parents all working towards the same goals. This LA's schools raise their children's attainment at Key Stage 2 and GCSE to levels that far surpass the national average and allow students to access top universities." -- Back cover.

Winner, 2016 Best Authored Book presented by the Society for Research on Adolescence Diverse case studies on how youth build political power during an era of racial and educational inequality in America This is what democracy looks like: Youth organizers in Colorado negotiate new school discipline policies to end the school to jail track. Latino and African American students march to district headquarters to protest high school closure. Young immigration rights activists persuade state legislators to pass a bill to make in-state tuition available to undocumented state residents. Students in an ESL class collect survey data revealing the prevalence of racism and xenophobia. These examples, based on ten years of research by youth development scholar Ben Kirshner, show young people building political power during an era of racial inequality, diminished educational opportunity, and an atrophied public square. The book’s case studies analyze what these experiences mean for young people and why they are good for democracy. What is youth activism and how does it contribute to youth development? How might collective movements of young people expand educational opportunity and participatory democracy? The interdependent relationship between youths’ political engagement, their personal development, and democratic renewal is the central focus of this book. Kirshner argues that youth and societal institutions are strengthened when young people, particularly those most disadvantaged by educational inequity, turn their critical gaze to education systems and participate in efforts to improve them.

Inequality is a marked and persistent feature of education systems, both in the developed and the developing worlds. Major gaps in opportunity and in outcomes have become more critical than in the past, thanks to the knowledge economy and globalization. The pursuit of equity as a goal of public policy is examined in this book through a series of national case-studies. The book covers many different global contexts from the wealthiest to some of the poorest nations on earth. It therefore offers a broad range of different theoretical and methodological approaches, and brings together extensive international experience in equity policy.

Pia Nicoletta Blossfeld provides a long-term longitudinal analysis of the stepwise changes in transitions over the educational careers in East and West Germany using data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). She examines how far reforms aimed to increase the permeability in the German educational system have changed the movements of children, adolescents and young adults in Germany since the last four decades. Her book contributes to the literature of educational sociology by studying the associations between various resources of family background and respondent’s educational histories until final educational attainment. A novelty of her book is the analysis of the role of intercohort changes in social background composition on final educational attainment.

In her research R. Nazlı Somel focuses on the topic of educational inequality, both from a theoretical perspective and through an empirical analysis. After a review of prominent approaches to educational inequality and their criticism, she offers a novel strategy to study the issue based on Relational Sociology and using the relational approaches of Charles Tilly and Pierre Bourdieu. Three relational characteristics of educational inequality are identified that are its relativity, cumulativeness, and being an organized practice. The author then applies this relational perspective to an in-depth study on an Istanbul primary school, analyses students, teachers and school organization in relation to each other and to Turkish education system and society.

This open-access book focuses on trends in educational inequality using twenty years of grade 8 student data collected from 13 education systems by the IEAs Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) between 1995 and 2015. While the overall positive association between family socioeconomic status (SES) and student achievement is well documented in the literature, the magnitude of this relationship is contingent on social contexts and is expected to vary by education system. Research on how such associations differ across societies and how the strength of these relationships has changed over time is limited. This study, therefore, addresses an important research and policy question by examining changes in the inequality of educational outcomes due to SES over this 20-year period, and also examines the extent to which the performance of students from disadvantaged backgrounds has improved over time in each education system. Education systems generally aim to narrow the achievement gap between low- and high-SES students and to improve the performance of disadvantaged students. However, the lack of quantifiable and comprehensible measures makes it difficult to assess and monitor the effect of such efforts. In this study, a novel measure of SES that is consistent across all TIMSS cycles allows students to be categorized into different socioeconomic groups. This measure of SES may also contribute to future research using TIMSS trend data. Readers will gain new insight into how educational inequality has changed in the education systems studied and how such change may relate to the more complex picture of macroeconomic changes in those societies.

The issue of educational opportunity has long been of public concern and a major focus for eduational research. As a result, there is now a substantial body of research findings in this field, both quantitative and qualitative.; This work relates to various levels of the educational system and to different categories of student, but particularly social class, gender, ethnicity and race. The central trend has been to find persisting inequalities despite reform at system, institutional and classroom levels. Furthermore, the educational system is frequently portrayed as playing a key role in reproducing wider social and economic inequalities.; This book examines the status of educational inequality as a social problem, explores the conceptual issues surrounding it, assesses a representative sample of recent research, and seeks to clarify the relevant methodological ground rules, thereby laying the basis for future research in the field.