SOCIAL DIVERSITY AND EQUITY IN UKRAINIAN EDUCATION THROUGH THE PRISM OF PISA 2018 PERFORMANCE OF UKRAINIAN STUDENTS

Abstract

Education system policies of any country have among their priorities not only improving students’ academic performance and reducing the proportion of students who have low levels of reading, mathematics and science literacy, but also creating equity in education that will allow children with different backgrounds and from families with different socio-economic status to get a quality education. Today, different countries often implement quite different strategies to ensure that children have fair access to a quality education. The results of PISA, a well-known international survey on the quality of students' education, make it possible to get an incomplete, but fairly objective picture of the functioning of education systems in different countries and economies and to evaluate their impact on students’ performance. In 2018, Ukraine participated for the first time in this study. Ukrainian students have shown average achievement in major areas of PISA. Of course, many factors influence students’ performance but the role of Ukraine’s school system is still to be explored. This paper provides an analysis of some of the indicators obtained by PISA 2018 on the segregation of students across schools, that is, the analysis of how evenly (or unevenly) pupils are distributed across schools regardless of their individual characteristics. Ukraine's results are compared with the OECD average, which makes it possible to draw some conclusions about the implementation of the principle of "fairness" in the Ukrainian education system.