The Missing Half of Education Quality: Equality

“Quality of education” is a much-favored concept among officials and education experts. Yet few stop to ask what this idea really consists of, even though it shapes how we interpret every measure of a school system’s performance.

Typically, it tends to refer to academic achievement as measured through grades, national exams and tests, and the results of international assessments, of which the best known is PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment.

While these measurements are certainly related to the quality of education, the concept itself is much broader and includes far more than final scores alone. In this article, I want to reflect on the notion from an academic perspective and will seek to demonstrate the inextricable link between “quality” and “equality” in education.

The scholarly debate over what “quality of education” actually means has been raging for decades. At its core lies a question of focus: should we judge quality by the conditions students start with, or by the results they achieve?

“Input factors” refer to things like the socioeconomic conditions in which a child lives and studies, along with the educational resources available; textbooks, technology, and so on. “Process factors” cover what happens inside schools: the quality of teaching, how teachers and students interact, and how much time is spent on learning. And finally, those familiar exams and tests serve as tools for measuring the combined effect of all those inputs.

All these elements of educational quality are, in the end, shaped by a deeper philosophical question. As David F. Labaree, a Stanford University scholar and historian of education, argued in his 1997 essay “Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals,” goal setting is matter of choice and not scientific investigation. “The answer lies in values (what kind of schools we want) and interests (who supports which educational values) rather than apolitical logic,” Labaree wrote.

It’s here, perhaps, that the link between quality and equality begins for education systems everywhere, since equality of opportunity is treated as a universal value in most political systems.

The debate over family and school influence

In the 1960s, a landmark moment for education researchers and policymakers arrived in the United States: the publication of the Coleman Report, an 800-page study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The study examined what shapes students’ academic performance and quickly became one of the most influential documents in modern education policy.

The report marked a major turning point for two reasons. First, it argued that differences in student achievement were explained mainly by family and community background, in other words, the child’s socioeconomic status (SES), while the direct impact of schools themselves was comparatively small. Second, it helped bring quantitative research methods into the mainstream of education studies.

In policy terms, the Coleman Report influenced how governments thought about school funding and support for low-income families. But its more consequential message, that schools were largely powerless in the face of social inequality, shaped both academic thinking and public debate for decades.

The Coleman Report did not go unchallenged. Over time, researchers criticized it for both methodological and conceptual flaws. Chief among them, they argued, was the narrow focus on data that overlooked more unquantifiable factors, such as cultural and social context. The report paid special attention to racial differences in educational access and achievement among American students but tended to treat equality of opportunity as identical to equality of results, as if matching test scores across groups would automatically mean fairness had been achieved.

Later, comparative studies found that Coleman’s conclusions didn’t fully hold up in developing countries. For instance, a seminal 1983 study by Stephen Heyneman and William Loxley found the opposite trend to Coleman’s. Drawing on cross-national data, they showed that in developing countries, the influence of schools on student achievement is actually stronger than the influence of family background, a pattern later dubbed the Heyneman-Loxley effect. In these contexts, schools play a far greater role in shaping educational outcomes, often because other social institutions are weaker or less equal.

More recent research, however, tends to partially vindicate Coleman, recognizing that schools can both reproduce and reduce inequality, depending on how they’re organized, what they teach, and how effectively they support students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Equality and Quality

The Coleman Report’s significance, I believe, lies not just in how it sparked decades of research into the balance between family and school influences, but in how it reframed the very idea of education quality. If we aim for high academic achievement, the key question becomes: do all children have an equal chance of reaching it?

That question wasn’t new, but the debate it set off, about whether inputs (like resources and conditions) or outcomes (like test results) matter more, took discussions of educational quality to an entirely new level. Coleman himself later admitted that neither side of this equation can fully capture what equality of educational opportunity means, calling it a confusing concept. He suggested instead that schools should play a compensatory role by helping to level the playing field for those starting at a disadvantage.

That view, however, still draws criticism today. The Finnish education scholar Pasi Sahlberg argues that it hides deeper inequalities by pretending meritocracy is fair. Put simply, schools cannot just be told to “fix” inequality on their own; they need the wider system around them to support that effort.

Scholars have already started to offer a way forward, a more grounded idea of “just education,” built on what’s known as the “adequacy approach”, which rests on the golden rule of education policy: raise the bar and close the gap. The idea is to focus on two things at once: making sure everyone has equal access to education and resources, and pushing for equality in educational outcomes, all while guaranteeing a basic minimum standard for all students.

Building on that, the authors behind the “just education” concept take things further. They outline five key elements: access to education (enrolment), completion of basic education (attainment), equal achievement across social groups (equity), an adequate minimum level of learning (adequacy), and the share of academically successful students in every group (excellence). The first two deal with inputs (the conditions students start with), while the last three capture outcomes.

This approach goes beyond the “adequacy” model by linking those two sides (inputs and outcomes) and by clearly distinguishing between equality, adequacy, and achievement, which are so often conflated in public debates about education quality.

What this means for Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan is no stranger to this conversation. Public debates about “quality of education” still fixate on familiar visible results: grades, exams, rankings. That’s understandable: numbers are easy to track and compare. 

What those numbers don’t show is the difference in student context. Some live in Almaty with private tutors and fast internet. Some live in remote villages and have no quiet place to study. 

If both of those students sit the same test, and we only look at the score, the “quality” we measure in the end is not only about education.

In fairness though, researchers analyzing education data routinely factor in students’ socioeconomic status. In studies utilizing PISA results, for instance, it is standard practice to compare test results with the SES index to see how background shapes performance. 

The fragmented understanding of “quality”, which often drops the ideas of equal opportunity and fair access to resources, is easy to understand in public debate. Numbers are visible, comparable, and global. But this narrow, utilitarian view misses the hidden value of schools that serve disadvantaged communities or operate in poorer regions.

From a broader policy perspective, that is where linking education with social, economic, and regional development becomes crucial. The education system still carries the main responsibility for what happens in schools, but much of its energy goes into compensating for social inequalities that don’t show up in test scores.

That is why initiatives that widen access to resources, like providing study spaces, devices, and materials for children who lack them at home, are so essential.