The importance of socio-economic status in determining educational achievement in South Africa
AbstractThe needs to find ways of lifting people out of poverty and to transform the existing patterns of inequality in South Africa are high on the country’s development agenda. Much hope is often vested in education as an opportunity for children from poor households to overcome the disadvantage of their background and escape poverty. The logic of this is often conceived of in terms of the human capital model, according to which education improves an individual’s productivity, which in turn is rewarded on the labour market by higher earnings. However, there is a circularity in the relationship between socio-economic status (SES) and education, in that it is well known that a student’s SES has an important influence their educational achievement. Drawing on data from the recent Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS 2006), this paper investigates the extent to which SES affects educational achievement in the case of South Africa, and moves on to consider the implications of this for the ability of the education system to be an institution that transforms existing patterns of inequality rather than reproducing such patterns.
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Bibliographic InfoPaper provided by Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number 01/2009.
Date of creation: 2009
Date of revision:
South Africa; socio-economic status; education; educational achievement; educational inequality; economic development;
Find related papers by JEL classification:
- I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
- I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
- I30 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General
- O15 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-AFR-2009-01-24 (Africa)
- NEP-ALL-2009-01-24 (All new papers)
- NEP-EDU-2009-01-24 (Education)
- NEP-HRM-2009-01-24 (Human Capital & Human Resource Management)
- NEP-LAB-2009-01-24 (Labour Economics)
- NEP-PKE-2009-01-24 (Post Keynesian Economics)
- NEP-URE-2009-01-24 (Urban & Real Estate Economics)
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- Thomas Laurent & Fabrice Murtin & Geoff Barnard & Dean Janse van Rensburg & Vijay Reddy & George Frempong & Lolita Winnaar, 2013. "Policy Determinants of School Outcomes Under Model Uncertainty: Evidence from South Africa," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 1057, OECD Publishing.
- Debra Shepherd, 2013. "A question of efficiency: decomposing South African reading test scores using PIRLS 2006," Working Papers 20/2013, Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics.
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