Educational Inequality and Its Solutions
Inequality in education is one of the biggest problems that an individual aspiring to grow faces. The school standards and the occupation requirement don’t match each other not only in case of two countries, but also within a same country, e.g. in a developing country, the student of a village school can’t get a the job in a city because his school’s standard is considered to be lower than required by the job. Even in developed countries, inequality in school standards exists.
Why Is Educational Inequality Harmful to Growth?
Theses, essays and other literature on educational inequality and growth are comparatively less than that on income inequality. However clear connections have been found between the two, with some views considering educational inequalities as the main influencing factor for income inequalities while some views consider same factors affecting both contexts.
In the 2002 study by Castello and Domenech, it has been proposed that educational inequality has a negative connection with economic growth. The data used for these papers was collected from across 108 nations from 1960 to 2000. The conclusion drawn in the papers stated that educational inequality might have more importance than income inequality for financial growth. They also emphasize that educational inequality also retards growth through another important channel, i.e. demographics, especially in developing countries. The base of the argument is that societies having low educational levels have higher fertility and poor life-expectancy, and investment in education is discouraged by both these factors.
Many other reviews have the same concern and Perotti has explained the idea in the simplest form: when people are unable to borrow against their potential income, the basic distribution of resources can largely impact the pattern of investment of the economy and thereby growth. This theory is supported by many experiential studies like the 1998 Deninger and Squire Study which concludes that initial inequality of assets remarkably affects education and financial growth and also credit limitations have a major impact on investment decisions of people with lower income. In simpler words, this means that lower income groups often invest less in education because of having no access to sufficient resources. And this is the connection between inequality and low educational and skill level.
This condition can exist even with the availability of free public education. Because parents may want their children to work to contribute to home matters, they may avoid choosing the best schooling for their children. Actually, an entire array of negative associations between income inequality, and social and health problems have been discovered in cross-country studies.
Inequality of Educational Outcomes
The 2002 study by Castello and Domenech has some description of how educational inequality varies in different regions in the world. Countries in the European Union considered as richer countries have much lower inequality of education than any other groups. Compared to these other groups, developed countries show overall higher educational levels and less inequality. The level of inequality is strongly connected to the overall educational level.
Solutions to Educational Inequality
It has so far clear that educational inequality has a highly negative influence on one’s socio-economic growth and therefore it should be eliminated. So, what are the solutions?
Reducing Income Inequality: As discussed earlier, poorer parents cannot invest in good education of children which results in low standard of education and thereby less growth. A solution to this may be efforts should be made to lessen income inequality through redistribution which alleviate credit restrictions and boost growth.
Efforts Made on School Level: Studies show a possibility to diminish the socio-economic gap by executing certain policies at the school level. Some of these policies are:
- Increased resources, particularly to underprivileged students which will cause higher average achievement and more equitable results
- Free fulltime childcare right from babyhood which has proved to be especially impressive in terms of academic outcomes
- Early tracking of children’s progress generally in a more educational route against a more vocational route
GAF and GAR
Among these solutions, the efforts made at school level are important because it’s here that children get education. If this education is of high quality in all the schools of the world, there would not be the cases of a village student or a student in a developing country denied for the job in a city or a developed country. But can an effort be made to standardize all the schools in the world and can it be ensured that all of them are giving high level education to their students, not only in the academic perspective, but other perspectives too like care, protection, secure environment, skill building, maintenance of teachers’ competence at their best, importance given to parents’ opinion and more?
Such an effort has been actually made by GAF, Global Academic Forum, a non-profit organization in London, United Kingdom. GAF has created a system called GAR, Global Academic Ranking which is a system ranking all educational institutes on a global level for various parameters, like teaching, academics, social responsibility, inclusiveness, skill-building, guidance, protection, care, perception, graduate outcome and more.
Global Ranking with a Local Impact
Under GAR, the schools will be ranked at a local level too along with national and global levels. This will make schools know about what improvements they need. This will result into reformation of the schools’ education to make it high quality. Thus, through global ranking, an impact at local level will be brought about.
Due to unequal distribution of resources and imbalanced credit markets, low-income persons cannot make proper investment decisions which leads to wrong allotment of resources leading further to retarded economic growth. To increase economic growth, along with increasing the educational standards, reducing educational inequality is also important, particularly focused on underprivileged groups.
GAF has taken a step towards this goal and educational institutes can participate in their mission which will in turn benefit themselves, in terms of high standards of education and an overall growth passed on to their students, who can achieve great success in their careers because of the high quality education.
If you wish that your school should meet the best standards of all components of education, you should register at GAR Schools 2016. For more information, visit https://www.globalacademicforum.org/.
