ABSTRACT
Policy makers who aim to promote equity and/or excellence in education need to make a clear diagnosis comparing the current level of equity/excellence with the target level. However, both “excellence” and “equity” are complex concepts that fi rst must be made operational and translated into empirical measures. This chapter will focus on the typical problems that the measurement of both equity and excellence raises, and on the choices that need to be made when trying to solve these problems. Among others, these problems relate to the defi nition of the concepts themselves, the empirical parameters needed to describe them, the measurement techniques that are utilized, and the social signifi cance of both equity and excellence. The debate around these choices, which are indistinctively of a conceptual, methodological, and moral nature, is not purely academic, and, far from being neutral, has many political consequences.
