Comparing Equity and Quality Education in the Asia-Pacific

Multilateral interventions, based on evidence from large-scale surveys, tend to promote the idea that quality and equity can be combined and that globalization enables a more universalized, standardized approach to achieving this. However, in countries where educational supply fails to meet demand, there continues to be a polarization between policies for educational equity and those promoting individualized rights to a quality education. The justification of this book chapter reflects paradigmatic approaches to equity and quality in comparative literature to ascertain positional frames of reference in order to improve the way in which equity and quality might be viewed and acted upon. The first literature review consists of comparative education articles that incorporate both equity and quality as descriptors in English-medium texts. The second review consists of chapters in this section not only to help summarize each, respectively, but to analyze them using a modified version of McTaggart and Kemmis' practice architectures in order to highlight the psychological and sociological dimensions from outsider/insider perspectives. The aim is to provide direction in terms of the complexity between equity and quality education on the one hand and the identification of new trends from various approaches and lenses on the other. This book chapter reviews the assumption that perspectives of equity and quality education can be informed by the visualization of evidence and the comparability of contexts through textual, documentary analysis.