Effects on equity in mathematics education: Multilevel analysis via the PISA 2015

The interaction between student and school levels should be considered to understand and examine equity in education. For this reason, we included the socioeconomic composition of schools to scrutinize the equity related to students’ socioeconomic status and mathematical literacy in Korea. We applied the hierarchical linear modeling approach to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 data for binational comparison between Korea (5,548 students from 168 schools) and the U.S. (5,217 students from 161 schools). The findings show that school-level achievement and the socioeconomic composition of schools cannot be ignored to understand Korean students’ achievement gap between high and low socioeconomic status. In addition, U.S. students from low socioeconomic status were likely to have similar mathematics literacy scores. These findings indicated that inequity in Korean mathematics education could be intertwined with the characteristics of Korean students like high demands for supplementary private education and school characteristics like curriculum selection. This research also reminds mathematics educators that people should not simply mimic other education systems to resolve education issues in their own system.