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Using the data from PISA (Program for International Student Assessment), we compare the ways in which families and schools influence educational achievement among 15-year-olds between four Asian countries (Hong Kong, Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand) and four Latin American countries (Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru). We find that family socioeconomic status (SES) affects student achievement considerably more in Latin America than in Asia. Compared to the relatively weak impacts of family SES in Asian countries, however, parental communication with children plays an important role in fostering achievement. The most evident difference between the two regions is the extent of school differentiation along family socioeconomic backgrounds. The extent to which students’ individual and family characteristics account for between-school variance in student performance is substantially larger in Latin America than in Asia. Although the overall degree of students’ sense of belonging at their school is significantly associated with increased student achievement in all eight countries, school climate factors are more relevant for student learning in Asian education than in Latin American education.

Increasing income inequality particularly since the economic crisis of 1997 has called attention to the issue of growing educational inequality in South Korea. Although much recent research has been directed at understanding the socioeconomic gap in academic achievement, few studies have empirically examined how this gap has changed over time during the past decade in South Korea. Using nationally representative data for the most recent three cohorts (1999, 2003, and 2007) of eighth-grade South Korean students from Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), this study examines trends in the relationship between socioeconomic background and student achievement. The eighth-grade TIMSS data demonstrate that the influence of socioeconomic background on student achievement has increased over time during the past decade, offering evidence of growing educational inequality in South Korea. Various factors may contribute to higher educational inequality, including the widening income gap and recent educational transformations geared toward school choice and tracking.

Using data from the 2000 Program for International Student Assessment, we examined determinants of children’s participation in highbrow cultural activities and its relationship with academic achievement in Hong Kong. We found that family socioeconomic status (SES) and home possessions related to high-status culture were important determinants of children’s participation in highbrow cultural activities. Yet, we found no significant relationship between children’s participation in highbrow cultural activities and academic achievement when controlling for other variables. We highlighted several characteristics of Hong Kong society and its educational system, including the British colonial experience, extreme focus on test preparation, and extensive shadow education, all of which may combine to explain the role of cultural resources in this East Asian society.

Purpose – This chapter focuses on the family and school influences on the achievement gaps in math and reading by gender, race, and nativity.

Methodology – With the longitudinal data from the National Education Longitudinal Studies, this chapter uses panel data technique to model for the changes of the achievement from the three time points of observation, 8th grade, 10th grade, and 12th grade. This study proposes the concept of “low-level constrained curriculum” to characterize the curriculum structure that leads to the universal low level of course taking among students within the same school.

Findings – The analysis shows that this kind of curriculum structure has the most damaging effect on individual students' math achievement outcomes. For the analysis on parental involvement, the results show that school involvement is more effective than home involvement for math achievement, but not for reading. Domain-specific parental involvement is more important than general parental involvement for both math and reading. These findings have important theoretical and policy implications.

With some important exceptions, immigrants tend to lag behind native students in terms of educational attainment and academic achievement. Prior research has focused on two individual-level explanations for the educationally disadvantaged position of immigrant students.

Improving Turkey's low level of education quality and achieving equity in quality education across its seven regions continue to be a monumental challenge. The purpose of this study was to document the extent of Turkey's regional differences in science achievement at the eighth grade and to investigate factors associated with these differences. Identifying the factors influencing Turkey's regional inequalities in student learning is crucial for establishing policies that will help raise the educational performance at the national level as well as close regional gaps. A series of hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses were performed at two levels (the school/class level and student level) using Turkey's nationally representative data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2007. Findings suggested that attempts to increase Turkish students' achievement and close the achievement gaps between regions should target the students in the undeveloped regions, particularly in Southeastern and Eastern Anatolia. Designing interventions to improve competency in Turkish and to compensate for the shortcomings of insufficient parental education, limited home educational resources, poor school climate for academic achievement, and inadequate instructional equipment and facilities might be expected to close the regional achievement gaps as well as raise the overall achievement level in Turkey. Using TIMSS data, this study provided an example of a methodology that may be employed to describe how student achievement is distributed among various subpopulations of national interest and to investigate the factors that contribute to differences in the achievement distribution.

The current paper examines the relationships between watching television for various times of day and reading achievement for a subsample of third grade language minority (LM) students compared to third grade students in general.

The analysis uses ECLS-K 1998–99 data to first test for significant differences between the two samples, then further explores these relationships using separate OLS multiple regression models, while controlling for past reading achievements and socioeconomic variation.

Building on more nuanced versions of displacement theory, this paper finds a positive relationship between reading achievement and watching television after dinner on weekdays specifically for LM students. For the general sample, watching TV on weekends or weekdays at any time period has no relationship with reading achievement.

This research suggests the potential for TV or perhaps other media to act as a lingual- or cultural-learning facilitator for LM students, being positively tied to reading achievement. The paper’s unique focus on multimedia use and LM students makes it particularly applicable to educators and public policy officials tasked with confronting the reading skills gap for a growing LM student population.

For more than a century, state and federal governments and organizations have used different measures to determine if students and groups of students have achieved in a particular subject or grade level. While the construct of achievement is applied irrespective of student differences, this equal application turns out to be anything but equitable. In this chapter, we work to understand the way achievement plays out for Black students by deconstructing how the word achievement works. In doing so, we track the history of education, testing, and curriculum as it has been applied to Black youth and youth of color.

This chapter focuses on two aspects of the achievement gap – underachievement and low achievement among Black males in urban school contexts. More specifically, the authors explain several problems/issues confronting Black male students in P-12 gifted and talented, advanced placement, and special education programs, along with the school-to-prison pipeline – inequitable discipline in the form of suspensions and expulsions. We parse underrepresentation and overrepresentation for this student group. A central part of this discussion is grounded in the achievement gap literature on Black students in general with implications for Black males in particular. Another fundamental aspect of this discussion is the need for educators to adopt an anti-racist (social justice or civil rights) and cultural competence approach to their work, which means being equity-based and culturally responsive in philosophy and action. Suggestions for closing the achievement gap and otherwise improving the achievement of Black males are provided for educators. We also compel educators to go beyond talking about equity by setting quantifiable equity goals for minimum and maximum percentages (and numbers).

California enacted a standards-based accountability regime in 1999, aiming to boost achievement overall and narrow gaps among subgroups. Yet we know little about the efficacy of specific accountability practices and reform tools observed by teachers and principals. The loose-coupling critique of school organizations, positing that local educators steadily buffer interventions mounted by state actors, is challenged by a selective-coupling representation where school-level actors do experience rules and incentives that encourages compliance with state advanced curricular standards, pedagogical practices, and standardized testing. After surveying educators across a band of similar elementary schools, we can account for sizeable shares of the variance in mean Academic Performance Index (API) scores among schools and in the size of achievement gaps within schools. We found that achievement levels are higher when principals report a stronger district focus on a unified curriculum and their teachers share high expectations for learning. Gaps between white and Latino students are smaller when teachers report steady attention to meeting accountability targets. Latino achievement is more sensitive to these accountability practices, compared with the performance of white students. Even after sampling schools with similar student populations, the social-class background of students continued to heavily influence achievement levels, explaining greater shares of the variance than accountability practices.