In most countries, students' socioeconomic status (SES) is strongly related to their educational achievement: the higher a student's SES, the higher his or her achievement scores, and vice versa. This lack of equity in student outcomes is of great concern to policy makers because educational achievement should not depend on family background. This policy brief examines how school characteristics may be associated with educational equity in terms of the relationship between students' SES and achievement. There was a clear distinction between highly-developed and developing countries; school characteristics differed in their relationship to educational equity in these two groups. Instructional quality, school emphasis on academic success, and a safe and orderly school climate were associated with a looser relationship between SES and achievement; family background was thus less important in many highly-developed countries, and school characteristics were consequently related to greater equity. In contrast, the same school characteristics exhibit no such association in developing countries; in some cases, instructional quality, school emphasis on academic success, or a safe and orderly school climate were related to exacerbated inequality.