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Equity and educational disadvantage glossary
24 terms from C19, Equity and educational disadvantage — each defined in the primer's own words. Every term the primer teaches links to the slide that teaches it.
C19 · Schools and systems
Equity and educational disadvantage
“Access to devices closes gaps.”
Every term below is defined in the words of equity and educational disadvantage, primer C19 of understanding the context of education, and opens the primer at the slide where it is taught. 1 term is also defined by another primer in the series; where the two differ, both wordings are given. The whole context glossary holds all of them together.
| Term | Definition | Referred to in | Read further |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | |||
| Achievement, attainment and opportunity gaps | An achievement gap is a difference in measured performance; an attainment gap a difference in qualifications reached; an opportunity gap a difference in the resources and chances that produced them. The last is the cause of the first two, and the hardest to measure. |
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| C | |||
| Coleman Report | The survey Congress ordered under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which found the impact of resources on achievement modest compared with family background: a finding about school inputs, not teaching (Coleman et al., 1966). |
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| Compensatory education | Additional provision intended to offset disadvantage, from preschool programmes to funded tutoring. Its record is mixed and depends on intensity, staffing and duration rather than on the label. |
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| Cultural capital | Dispositions, goods and credentials that institutions recognise and reward. Bourdieu (1986) distinguishes an embodied state, "long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body", an objectified state as cultural goods, and an institutionalised state as qualifications. |
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| D | |||
| Digital inclusion | Policy and practice aimed at all three divides rather than the first alone: connectivity, but also skills, support, relevant content and the recognition of what people do online. A device count is not a measure of it. |
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| E | |||
| Equity and equality | Equality is the same provision for everyone. Equity is provision matched to what different people need in order to reach a comparable standing. A system can be perfectly equal and deeply inequitable at once, which is why the two words are not interchangeable. |
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| F | |||
| First-, second- and third-level digital divides | The first is access to a device and connection; the second is skills and patterns of use (Hargittai, 2002); the third is the tangible outcomes people obtain from using it (van Deursen & Helsper, 2015). Each has its own social gradient. |
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| G | |||
| Gender gaps | Differences in performance, participation and subject choice between girls and boys. They are usually smaller than socio-economic gaps, and they run in different directions by subject, which is why a single "gender gap" figure is rarely informative. |
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| H | |||
| Heckman curve | The schematic curve associated with the economic argument for investing in disadvantaged children early; the claim that returns fall steadily with age has been tested and did not hold (Heckman, 2006; Rea & Burton, 2020). C16 Heckman’s much-reproduced figure showing returns falling with the age of the people served; it was a stylised pattern, not a plot of estimates, and costed programmes show no such ordering (Rea & Burton, 2020). |
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| Home learning environment | The books, talk, routines, space and adult attention available to a child at home. It is the strongest single predictor in much early-years research, and the thing most often assumed rather than asked about by a programme design. |
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| I | |||
| Intersectionality | The observation that disadvantages combine rather than add, so the experience of a group defined by two or more characteristics is not the sum of the separate effects. It matters for analysis: averages by one characteristic can hide the group carrying most of the cost. |
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| L | |||
| Learning loss | A shortfall in expected progress over a period, measured against a comparable earlier cohort. Engzell et al. (2021) estimated about a fifth of a school year during an eight-week Dutch closure, with losses up to 60% larger among students from less-educated homes. |
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| M | |||
| Matthew effects | Early advantage compounding into later advantage, named after the gospel line about those who have being given more. Stanovich (1986) showed the pattern in reading, where reading more makes reading easier, which produces "rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer patterns of reading achievement". |
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| Meritocracy | Allocating positions by measured ability and effort rather than by birth or connection. Its critics argue that measured ability is itself unequally produced, so the system can convert inherited advantage into apparently earned standing. |
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| R | |||
| Redistribution and recognition | The argument that "justice today requires both redistribution and recognition": remedies aimed only at money can leave misrecognition untouched, while remedies aimed only at recognition leave the money where it was (Fraser, 1995). |
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| S | |||
| Shadow education and private tuition | Paid tutoring in school subjects, outside school hours. Bray and Lykins (2012) call it a shadow because "much private supplementary tutoring mimics the mainstream", changing shape whenever the school curriculum does. |
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| Social capital | In Bourdieu's (1986) sense, "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition": who a family can call on, and what that is worth. |
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| Social gradient | Outcomes rising steadily across the whole range of social position rather than dividing into two groups, which is why a programme aimed only at the bottom leaves most of the gradient in place (Marmot, 2010). |
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| Social mobility | Movement between social positions across a lifetime or between generations. Education is the route most societies rely on for it, which is why the strength of the link between origins and school results matters politically as well as educationally. |
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| Social reproduction | The process by which the social order of one generation is reproduced in the next, with schooling as one of the mechanisms. Bourdieu (1986) is the standard reference; the claim is about how institutions recognise resources, not about the worth of families. |
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| Socio-economic status | A composite of a household's income, occupation and education, usually measured indirectly. PISA uses an index of economic, social and cultural status (ESCS) built from parental occupation and education and home possessions (OECD, 2023). Sirin (2005) shows that results depend heavily on which version is used. |
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| Stereotype threat | Being at risk of confirming a negative stereotype about one's group, which was shown in the laboratory to depress test performance (Steele & Aronson, 1995). A large pre-registered school study found no such effect on girls in mathematics (Flore et al., 2018), so the size and generality of the effect are contested. |
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| Summer learning loss | The idea that skills stall or slip over long holidays and that gaps therefore widen outside term time. The seasonal evidence has been revised: von Hippel et al. (2018) found most inequality already present at school entry, with term time tending to compress it. |
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| T | |||
| Targeted and proportionate universalism | Targeting concentrates support on those below a threshold. Proportionate universalism offers support to everyone "with a scale and intensity that is proportionate to the level of disadvantage" (Marmot, 2010), which avoids both the cliff edge and the thin universal offer. |
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