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ERIC Number: EJ781084
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2007-Dec
Pages: 15
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0272-7757
EISSN: N/A
What Does It Take to Achieve Equality of Opportunity in Education?: An Empirical Investigation Based on Brazilian Data
Waltenberg, Fabio D.; Vandenberghe, Vincent
Economics of Education Review, v26 n6 p709-723 Dec 2007
Roemer's [Roemer, J. (1998). "Equality of opportunity". Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.] seminal work on equality of opportunity has contributed to the emergence of a theory of justice that is modern, conceptually clear and easy to mobilize in policy design. Inspired by Roemer's theory, this paper is fundamentally a policy-modeling exercise coupled to a micro data analysis. In a pure allocation setting, we first analyze the reallocations of educational expenditure required to equalize opportunities (taken to be test scores close to the end of compulsory education). Using Brazilian data, we find that implementing an equal-opportunity policy across pupils of different socio-economic background, by using per-pupil spending as the instrument requires multiplying by 6.8 on average the current level of spending on the lowest achieving pupils. This result is driven by the extremely low elasticity of scores to per-pupil spending. We then show that the simultaneous redistribution of monetary and non-monetary inputs, like peer group quality and school effectiveness, considerably reduces--by around 23%--the magnitude of financial redistribution needed.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Brazil
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A