Evaluating schooling system. The role of international assessments of children’s learning.

Large scale international assessments of student learning achievement, providing comparable measures of competencies, school variables, and indicators of family background across countries and schooling systems, have given a great impulse to the empirical educational research. Purpose of this paper is to review the contribution of these surveys to the evaluation of educational policies with respect to quality of the instruction and equality of opportunity between children with different family backgrounds, and review this line of research. The focus is on the main problems involved in the identification of the causal impact of policies and on the solutions employed in the empirical literature to overcome them.