Equity in Education: from Hope to Change
Fangzhou Liang Growing inequality is nowadays a global concern, to which education is seen as a key solution. But how well are today’s education systems responding to such a call, and what are the challenges faced? Are today’s education systems equitable? There is increasing research evidence that achieving equity and quality in an education system at the same time is actually possible. For example, according to PISA 2012 results, countries like Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada, Estonia and Australia succeed in combining high performance and high levels of equity. Failure in reaching equity not only limits economic growth and innovation, hampers social cohesion and mobility, but also generates higher public expenditures, for instance in health and public welfare or security. As this has been proved by more and more research (See note 1) , policy makers are more aware of the need to invest in equity in education. However, education systems around the world still face...