Measuring educational inequality of opportunity: pupil’s effort matters
利用孟加拉国农村中学调查数据，分解学生成绩方差，发现努力、偏好和天赋解释了31%-40%的成绩差异，且努力与家庭背景相关时贡献下降10%，表明个人努力可缓解教育中的社会决定论。
The distinction between effort and other factors, such as family background, matters for correcting policies and normative reasons when we appeal to inequality of opportunity. We take advantage of a purposefully designed survey on secondary schools in rural Bangladesh to offer a comprehensive view of the importance of overall effort when measuring inequalities of opportunity in education. The analysis comprises decomposition exercises of the predicted variance of student performance in mathematics and English by source (effort, circumstances, etc.) and subgroup (within- and between-schools) based on parametric estimates of educational production functions. Pupils’ effort, preferences, and talents contribute between 31% and 40% of the total predicted variances in performance scores. The contribution of overall effort falls by 10% when the correlation between effort and circumstances is taken into account. These findings are robust to the choice of estimation strategy (i.e. combined within- and between-schools variation models versus multilevel random-effect models). All in all, these results advocate that social determinism in education can be mitigated by individual effort at school.