Educational qualityin many contexts is so poor that the UNESCO global monitoringreports on the ‘Education for All’ goals have repeatedly spoken ofa global ‘learning crisis.

Equity can be considered as aqualitative property and equality can be named as a quantitative property (Secada, 1989).

hapter 2 discusses the theoretical and analytical premises of our research and aims to increase its validity through methodological transparency. It

e it is sufficient to mention that they present a clear set of common features which justify their selection for a comparative study

has been of growing interest to international organisations and national poli-cies since at least the 1990s (Leeuw 2002; Power 1994; Smith 1990). W