To measure the educative systems equality of opportunity : an international comparison based on PISA multi-levels data

Inequalities in education are most of the time unacceptable perceptions as far as schools system is supposed to be an intergenerational mobility vector. A growing litterature in Economics question the differences among educative schemes and particularly the impact of a student's social background on his/her school results (Wössmann 2004). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the ability of several developed countries to promote equal opportunities. To define the different educative systems, we supported our theory on Mons typology (2004) which define four major types of systems : individualised integration, particularised integration, regular integration and separation. Each education model was represented by a country belonging to O.E.C.D. : Japan and Finland for individualised integration, United Kingdom for particularised integration, Italy for regular integration and Germany for separation model. Concerning the notion of equal opportunities, our analysis area is close to the 'capability approach' from the economist Amartya Sen (1985,1992) and turns to liberate students possibilities for choosing the school career they are supposed to prefer. An Educative System can be considered as egalitarian as soon as students performances are relatively independent of their sociocultural background. So, the aim is to analyse if educative system make students free from the weight of their social environment and can get a real freedom to reach the level of education they have reasons to value. After having compared the different existing educative systems in developed countries, a multilevel economical model will show the way students are posted to the different schools of countries and so, allow to estimate people leeways. According to our assumptions, the results confirm that educative models in Finland and in United Kingdom produce a large equality in opportunities. At the opposite, in Japan, for whom educative system is similar to Finland, it seems to appear a poor equality in opportunities, the objective for this egalitarian system may be biased by a hard competition period between pupils before their university entrance examination. Furthermore, unexpectedly, the educative system in Germany seems a little more egalitarian than in Italy for whom the educative model does not seem actually satisfying its unique school ambition. Results are implemented from PISA 2003,which is a relevant database since it helps in measuring : -the impact of the student's social and cultural environments on his performance -the variations of performance within each school -the variations of performance between several schools Therefore, it can identify the way students are appointed to the various schools within a country.