Using Individual-Level Advantage to Reevaluate Educational Inequality

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Practices of Addressing Inequality in Different Learning Spaces and Settings (Table 12)

Abstract

The measurement of educational inequality relies primarily on achievement. Despite calls to reframe inequality as a function of opportunity, its use is limited by the lack of a shared definition. I defined and evaluated a framework for measuring opportunity based on individual-level advantage, estimated using six educationally-relevant demographic variables. The Advantage framework embraces the non-random patterns in which student characteristics intersect and contribute to group-level inequalities. I evaluated the framework using data from two school districts and compared the results against the achievement-gap frameworks. As a measure of opportunity, advantage outperformed the gap frameworks on all tests. Importantly, Advantage explained over 4.4 times more of the variance, suggesting that group-centered methods may be understating the true magnitude of inequality.

Author

• David Stevens, University of California - Berkeley