Multidimensional poverty measures for analysing educational poverty in European countries

This paper studies the degree of educational poverty in European countries by focusing on data from two editions of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA): 2006 and 2015. We focus on students’ proficiency levels in various literacy domains and propose a multidimensional approach that enables the measurement of not only the incidence of educational poverty but also its depth and severity. Subsequently, we perform a microeconometric analysis of school factors that are associated with the probability of educational poverty using a Partial Proportional Odds Model. The main results demonstrate that in recent years, the incidence of educational poverty became more relevant in many countries, while most of them experienced a reduction of poverty depth and severity. Several school factors can be manipulated to avoid the trap of educational poverty, such as improving the disciplinary climate, adopting an adaptive style of teaching, and increasing the amount of instructional time.