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Educational achievement as measured by students’ performance in international tests is receiving scant attention in the educational research. The launch of these tests helped the educational community to better understand the factors underlying students’ achievement and guided the policy makers in their policies. However, Middle East and North African (MENA) countries were underrepresented in these discussions mainly because of data scarcity. Fortunately, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2007 data provides data for 15 MENA countries for students at the eighth grade and for many MENA countries; this is the first time that such data is available. This chapter aims to present estimates of students’ family background over mathematics and science scores. The results show that students with abundant home resources perform better than those with less home resources. Moreover, expatriate students in Gulf countries perform better than natives.

This chapter aims to quantify and compare inequalities of opportunity in health across European countries considering two alternative normative ways of treating the correlation between effort, as measured by lifestyles, and circumstances, as measured by parental and childhood characteristics, championed by Brian Barry and John Roemer. This study relies on regression analysis and proposes several measures of inequality of opportunity. Data from the Retrospective Survey of SHARELIFE, which focuses on life histories of European people aged 50 and over, are used.

In Europe at the whole, inequalities of opportunity stand for almost 50% of the health inequality due to circumstances and efforts in Barry scenario and 57.5% in Roemer scenario. The comparison of the magnitude of inequalities of opportunity in health across European countries shows considerable inequalities in Austria, France, Spain and Germany, whereas Sweden, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland present the lowest inequalities of opportunity. The normative principle on the way to treat the correlation between circumstances and efforts makes little difference in Spain, Austria, Greece, France, Czech Republic, Sweden and Switzerland, whereas it would matter the most in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Poland and Denmark.

In most countries, inequalities of opportunity in health are mainly driven by social background affecting adult health directly, and so would require policies compensating for poorer initial conditions. On the other hand, our results suggest a strong social and family determinism of lifestyles in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Poland and Denmark, which emphasises the importance of inequalities of opportunity in health within those countries and calls for targeted prevention policies.

According to the UN High Commission on Refugees, over 82 million people are currently displaced globally and of those nearly 25 million are refugees. Every community in the United States – urban, suburban, and rural – is shaped by newcomers seeking safety, opportunity, and self-improvement. Libraries are often the place that feels most welcoming to refugees and newcomers, making them well positioned to offer relevant and impactful programs and services to these communities. Using the International Federation of Library Associations’ (IFLA) conceptual rubric of sanctuary, storehouse, gateway, and bridge, my research explores a variety of programs and services deployed by libraries to address the needs of refugee and newcomer populations. Based on fieldwork in the United States, the Netherlands, and Germany, this chapter describes how libraries impact refugees and newcomers in decisive and meaningful ways. From informal gatherings to national government collaborations of digital content, libraries provide an array of compassionate, effective, scalable interventions for newcomers. Such interventions also positively impact the non-displaced communities in which they operate, fostering deeper connections between newcomers and their communities. Library services to refugees and newcomers provide a broad collective impact in the global crisis of displacement and belonging.

Reading African American literature through the lens of American legal history broadly construed and reading American legal history through the lens of African American literature reshapes both texts of American experience and provides new readings of the literature and new perspectives on the law. Consequences for the understanding of each socially constructed “text” of reality proceed from examining their common narratival practices, specifically calling for a new periodization and taxonomy of African American literature and for a new “romantic” history of American law.