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Abstract This paper introduces a new method to measure school-level inequality based on Item Response Theory (IRT) models. Categorical data collected by large-scale assessments poses diverse methodological challenges hinder measuring inequality due to data truncation and asymmetric intervals between categories. I use family possessions data from PISA 2015 to exemplify the process of computing the measurement and develop a set of country-level mixed-effects linear regression models comparing the predictive performance of the novel inequality measure with school-level Gini coefficients. I find school-level inequality is negatively associated with learning outcomes across many non-European countries.

This article uses empirical data provided by public and private school students, analyzed in the light of the theorists Labov, Bourdieu and Bernstein. From the analysis of the subjects preferred by the students and their oral and written discourses, it was shown that the linguistic stratification is correlated with the social and scholastic inequalities, being that the students of the favored classes take advantage of the students of the disadvantaged classes in the access to the school, which has a linguistic code distant from these students and close to those. It concludes that, the school operates a process of naturalization of social inequalities, in this school model, a process of sociocultural transformation is not envisaged.