The ability to improve educational outcomes for students, particularly students from disadvantaged backgrounds, is a key goal for governments, policy makers, and academics around the globe. Specifically, minimizing educational inequality for disadvantaged students continues to be the focus of copious research efforts and funding. However, as Stephen Gorard and Beng Huat See demonstrate in Overcoming Disadvantage in Education there exists a lack of rigor and quality in many of these respective studies, which makes any policy decisions not only inadequate, but perhaps even harmful. Therefore, the authors urge the scholarly community to put an end to biased examinations of the roots of academic disadvantage and instead, point to areas where more research is needed to design effective interventions.The aim of Overcoming Disadvantage in Education is three-fold. First, the authors describe where the solutions to disadvantage are located, suggesting researchers and policy makers are currently asking the wrong questions and using inappropriate, easily-biased data sources. Second, the authors adopt a social science causation model and, through the analysis of primary, secondary, and published evidence for the causes of disadvantage, conclude that very few complete, plausible and compelling models of disadvantage exist. Finally, the authors distinguish between fixed and modifiable causes of disadvantage to identify appropriate variables for targeted interventions. Fixed causes are characterized as immutable to policy (such as health or family background) and modifiable causes are those that can be influenced by interventions. The authors ability to distinguish between the two causes of disadvantage further clarifies intervention effectiveness and applicability. As such, Overcoming Disadvantage in Education comprehensively demonstrates the limitations of current scholarship and advances equitable interventions for disadvantaged populations.The causation model that is utilized throughout the book provides rigorous and arguably unbiased relations between a cause for disadvantage and the manifestation of that cause. Respectively, the authors develop a causation model that holds findings to demonstrate repeatable, sequenced, and coherent mechanisms for explaining the casual link. Stephen Gorard and Beng Huat See identify modifiable determinants of disadvantage, such as teacher and peer effects, segregation by poverty between schools, and student motivation and behavior to locate potential sites of intervention. After introducing the their causation model along with modifiable variables, Gorard and Huat See then square in on the roots of ineffective interventions. In chapters two and three, the authors scrutinize the poor quality of existing datasets and the lack of rigor in their application and analysis, specifically when seeking to determine factors
