| Yuko Nonoyama
Teachers College, Columbia University
A cross-national, multi-level study of family background and school effects on educational achievement
FINAL REPORT:
In democratic countries, it is commonly argued that a major purpose of education is to level the playing field for later life chances. However, evidence as to what extent schools provide equal educational opportunities for children from different family backgrounds has been inconsistent. This study focuses on the effect of family background on student achievement as a measure of equality of educational opportunities. The study uses Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2000 and 2003, including data from 40-plus participant countries. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner's ecological model, I represent students' learning outcomes as being influenced by multiple environments and frame my questions at multiple levels.
First, the study investigates whether family effects are sensitive to different measures of family background, to highlight the complex roles that families play in transmitting their status. Second, the study revisits the Heyneman and Loxley hypotheses that developing societies are characterized by school resources showing greater influence on achievement than family background and that this effect is a function of the societal level of economic development. The contradictory findings of this study on the relative size of family versus school effects warrant re-examining the question. Third, the study explores whether institutional characteristics of educational systems are associated with the magnitude of family effects, to understand why some countries achieve equality of educational opportunity to a greater extent than others.
The study finds that at the micro-level, a multidimensional socio-economic status (SES) has stronger effects on achievement across countries than the simpler measures of SES used in previous studies. At the meso-level, family effects are not conditioned by the level of economic development, and are consistently larger than school effects across countries. At the macro-level, countries with higher teacher status tend to have weaker within-school family effects, and countries with higher degrees of tracking between schools tend to have stronger between-school family effects. The findings highlight the importance of differentiating the within- and between-school family effects, and also underscore the necessity of different educational policies for the two stratification processes. The dissertation concludes with some policy implications and suggestions for future research.
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