The relationship between socio-economic status and academic achievement: Exploring specific characteristics of education and inequality in Japan

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the distinguishing characteristics of education and inequality at the secondary-school level in Japan using international comparative analysis from institutional perspective. The main data used in this paper is derived from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003, which has focused on the academic performance of 15-year-old students conducted by OECD. Based on the typology of the educational system, we conducted HLM analysis to see how the educational institution intermediates the effect of family socio-economic status (SES) on academic performance. From the result of the analysis, we found that the effecting pattern of SES on the academic performance has differed widely among the educational typologies, but was similar within the typology. This shows that the typology used in this paper is appropriate to examine the relevance between SES and the academic performance from the institutional perspective. We can conclude that the institutional characteristics of the competitive examination model, which includes Japan, are the following: low ratio of vocational school students, low vocational specificity, low regional school diversity, and almost no student repeat the same grade. However, the degree of stratification between the schools is very high. Moreover, we have shown that Japan is a country having the distinct characteristic wherein almost all the relevance between SES and the academic performance is being converted into inter-school disparity by the high school entrance exam.