Reaching the marginalized: EFA global monitoring report, 2010; 2010

0120CHAPTER 3Education for All Global Monitoring ReportHouseholdwealth, parentaleducation andhome languageexercisea pervasiveinfluenceon learningachievementnine out of ten Hmong, members of an ethnicminority group living in northern highland regions,are in the bottom 20% of the national distributionfor years in school.The quality deficitMarginalized individuals and groups do not justaccumulate fewer years of education. When they arein school they often receive a poor-quality education,leading in turn to low levels of learning achievement.Many of the world’s poorest countries have beenmore successful in expanding access than raisingquality. As Chapter 2 shows, average learningachievement is often shockingly low even forchildren who complete a full primary educationcycle. The achievement deficit is widely spreadacross the population, but is typically concentratedamong individuals and groups facing widerdisadvantages in access to education.Factors such as household wealth, parentaleducation and home language exercise a pervasiveinfluence on learning achievement. That influencehas been extensively documented in developedcountries but less widely explored in the world’spoorest countries. Research carried out for thisReport examined data on learning achievementcollected for sub-Saharan Africa, through thePASEC and SACMEQ regional assessmentprogrammes, to identify characteristics associatedwith students performing at the top, middle andbottom of the test score range. The results arestriking. As early as grades 5 and 6, there is astrong association in many countries betweenwealth and test scores. In Kenya and Zambia, theaverage household of children scoring in the top10% has twice as many consumer durables as theaverage household for children in the lowest 10%.Parental literacy is also strongly associated withtest scores (Fehrler and Michaelowa, 2009).In Latin America, too, assessments reveal the lowachievement of students belonging to marginalizedpopulations. The PISA assessment programmeuses a composite set of indicators to construct asocio-economic background index for parents of15-year-olds tested. The results point to a strongassociation between parental socio-economicstatus and learning outcomes. In Brazil, Mexicoand Uruguay, children of parents in the top quartileachieved a mathematics score 25% to 30% higherthan those in the poorest quartile (Vegas andPetrow, 2008). In a national assessment in Uruguay,only 36% of sixth-graders from ‘very unfavourable’backgrounds passed the mathematics test and 55%the language test, as opposed to 72% and 87%,respectively, of those from ‘favourable’ backgrounds(Vegas and Petrow, 2008).Education outcomes are often substantially worsefor indigenous people and ethnic minorities. In LatinAmerica, there is extensive evidence of test scoregaps between indigenous and non-indigenouschildren. In Guatemala, indigenous children in bothrural and urban areas scored between 0.8 and 1standard deviation below non-indigenous childrenin grades 3 and 6 Spanish tests – a gap of around17% (McEwan and Trowbridge, 2007). Differences inmathematics tests were smaller but still significant.Recent research from Peru recorded exceptionallylarge gaps in indigenous and non-indigenouslearning achievement (Cueto et al., 2009). At theend of primary school, the gap in mathematics andlanguage scores was above a full standard deviation(1.22 and 1.07, respectively).Home language often has an important influenceon test scores. Research using data from the 2007TIMSS assessment identifies a strong associationbetween students performing below the lowestinternational benchmark and the frequency withwhich the language of the test is spoken at home.In Turkey, grade 8 students who report ‘always oralmost always’ speaking the test language at homeare 30% less likely to score below the internationalmathematics benchmark than those who reportspeaking it ‘sometimes or never’ (Altinok, 2009).Evidence from PASEC and SACMEQ also pointsto a strong link between home language and thelanguage of instruction in influencing test scores(Fehrler and Michaelowa, 2009).Language, ethnicity and regional factors can combineto produce complex patterns of disadvantage. InViet Nam, a large-scale survey of grade 5 studentsin 2001 found strong disparities in achievementamong provinces, with school location and students’socio-economic background and ethnicity also havinga strong influence (World Bank, 2004). Ethnic minoritystudents who spoke no Vietnamese at home weremuch less likely to read ‘independently’ thanstudents whose home language was Vietnamese.Marginalization in rich countriesEducation is an increasingly important engineof social and economic success in rich countries.While education can break the transmission ofcycles of disadvantage across generations, it can154