Education for all? : Measuring inequality of educational outcomes among 15-year-olds across 39 industrialized nations

The prime objectives of the Office of Research are to improve international understanding of issues relating to children’s rights and to help facilitate full implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in developing, middle-income and industrialized countries. [...] The latter identifies the severity and scale of ‘bottom-end’ educational disadvantage and helps to interpret the meaning of ‘being left behind’ through the level of skills and competencies acquired. [...] It also discusses various measures of inequality of educational outcomes used in the literature highlighting the rationale for the choice of the measures for this paper. [...] For instance, using the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) of 1999 and 2007, Freeman, Machin and Viarengo (2010) used the ratio of the difference between a country’s 95th percentile and 5th percentile scores to the median as a measure of dispersion. [...] Notably, the standardisation results in both the translation of the mean and the rescaling of the dispersion.