Anna ChmielewskiUniversity of Toronto | U of T · Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
Anna Chmielewski
PhD
About
16
Publications
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Introduction
My research examines educational policy and social inequality, both in North America and internationally. Specifically, I am interested in socio-economic disparities in academic achievement, school segregation, neighbourhood inequality, and policies around school and program choice, streaming and tracking. I use a sociological lens and quantitative methods for analysis of large-scale data. I am also interested in the methods and policy uses of international large-scale assessments (PISA, TIMSS).
Publications
Publications (16)
This chapter reviews international comparative sociological research on the effects of educational policies on socioeconomic inequality in educational achievement and attainment. We first review evidence on the effects of two key areas of school policy: differentiation and standardization. Differentiation is the degree of curricular tracking within...
We examine the link between student expectations and educational attainment. While a close link between expectations and final educational attainment is assumed in thestatus attainment literature, a growing body of US literature has claimed that expectations have become increasingly unrealistic and decoupled from actual outcomes. However, this clai...
Since the release of the results from PISA 2000, Finland has been lauded as a high-performing, high-equity country. This success has been attributed in part to an egalitarian 9-year comprehensive school created by dramatic de-tracking reforms in the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, recent international assessments show this picture may be chang...
The “socioeconomic achievement gap”—the disparity in academic achievement between students from high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds—is well-known in the sociology of education. The SES achievement gap has been documented across a wide range of countries. Yet in most countries, we do not know whether the SES achievement gap has been...
It is well-known that there are large disparities in academic achievement between children of different socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. This study examines the evolution of disparities in literacy skills between adults of different SES backgrounds. It compares countries’ patterns in the evolution of disparities in literacy by SES backgroun...
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an important international study of 15‐olds' knowledge and skills. New results are released every 3 years, and have a substantial impact upon education policy. Yet, despite its influence, the methodology underpinning PISA has received significant criticism. Much of this criticism has focu...
Secondary school curricular differentiation has been organized in a variety of ways across schools, across countries and over time. Two types of differentiation are course-by-course tracking, in which courses are offered at varying levels of difficulty in one or more subjects within a school (often practised in the USA, the UK, Australia and other...
In a recent paper, Reardon found that the relationship between family income and children’s academic achievement grew substantially stronger in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. We provide an international context for these results by examining the income–achievement association in 19 other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develop...
This article considers the extent to which private-state school differences in post-secondary outcomes can be explained by
family background, secondary school achievement, or neither of the above. We find that privately educated children’s more
advantaged family backgrounds and higher levels of school achievement are the main reasons why this group...
This paper considers the relationship between family background, academic achievement in high school and access to high-status postsecondary institutions in three developed countries (Australia, England and the United States). We begin by estimating the unconditional association between family background and access to a high status university, befo...
In this paper, Anna K. Chmielewski and Corey Savage examine school data to compare socioeconomic segregation in the United States and Latin America. They link trends in inequality and segregation in an international context by comparing rates of socioeconomic segregation in U.S. schools with those of several Latin American countries. Their findings...
Secondary school tracking is organized in some countries on a course-by-course basis within schools and in other countries as explicit academic and vocational streaming, often in separate school buildings. This article is the first to compare these two forms of tracking, using student-level tracking data across the United States and 19 other develo...
The aim of the present study was to examine how different types of tracking- between-school streaming, within-school streaming, and course-by-course tracking-shape students' mathematics self-concept. This was done in an internationally comparative framework using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). After controlling...