Investigating Educational Equity between Different Types of Second- Cycle High Schools in Urmia

Educational planning is the process of setting out in advance strategies, policies, programmes and standards through which an educational objective (or set of objectives) can be achieved and it is one of the ways to improve equity in education. Equity in education can be achieved if all students have equal access to opportunities, support, and the tools they need to succeed. Therefore, present study aimed to investigate inequalities between three main types of second- cycle high schools. The statistical population included all students who were studying in second-cycle high schools in Urmia in 1394-1395 and all teachers and principals who were working in these schools in the same academic year. One thousand and three students and 301 teachers were selected by using proportionate stratified random sampling but the entire population of principals was used. Data was collected through questionnaires that have been used in international studies to investigate inequalities between countries as well as within the counties and the validity had been approved through expert's views and reliability was confirmed by Cronbach-Alpha coefficient. The findings showed that there were significant differences between these types of schools in terms of studied indicators, especially selective schools had better school climate and educational resources than public and private high schools. Moreover, on average, students in selective high schools had higher socioeconomic status than their peers in public high schools that can demonstrate the impact of socio-economic status on access to educational opportunities.