Seminar - Gabriela Sicilia

Gabriela Sicilia (Universidad de La Laguna) will present her paper “Educational equity in the OECD countries: a multidimensional analysis using composite indicators,” co-authored by Giovanna D’Inverno (University of Pisa), Cristina Polo (Universidad de Extremadura), and Rosa Simancas (Universidad de Extremadura). 

The invited speaker is interested in a job tenure track in the department (Area: Operations)

Abstract

Educational equity remains as a crucial challenge for the development of the societies and became a central issue in the education policy agendas internationally. In this research we propose a multidimensional composite indicator to compare the performance of OECD education systems in terms of educational equity. To do this, we resort to a conditional direction distance "Benefit of the Doubt" model which allow us to construct a synthetic measure without losing the educational equity multidimensional nature. The main attraction of our approach is that it does not require establishing weights for the individual indicators a priori, but rather they are determined endogenously. The formulation based on direction distance functions allows us to simultaneously deal with desirable and undesirable indicators. Moreover, by using the conditional version of the BoD model, we account for the heterogeneous priorities and heterogeneities of the different educational systems which makes the comparison fairer. Although its attractiveness, this is the first time that a conditional extension of the BoD model is used to the assess and compare the performance of educational systems. In short, this research aims to provide a new tool that can be used not only to assess the evolution of educational equity across countries, but also to evaluate the impact of public policies.