Educational participation, cultural resources, and social inequality: Have social inequalities in reading literacy increased or decreased between 2000 and 2022?

Despite improved access to upper secondary education, social inequalities in skills acquisition have remained pronounced in Germany. However, it is empirically unclear whether the disparities have increased or decreased in the context of educational expansion. Therefore, this study addresses whether social differences in reading skills have increased or decreased in the past two decades, focusing on learning conditions at school and cultural conditions at home. Based on theoretical considerations of the Maximally Maintained-Inequality and the Effectively Maintained-Inequality hypotheses, we distinguish between distributional and correlation effects of learning conditions at home and at school and use the series of Programme for International Student Assessment data to analyse the development of reading skills inequality. Using OLS-regression and KHB-decomposition methods our findings reveal that while inequalities in reading skills persist, the underlying mechanism of these disparities has changed between 2000 and 2022. Inequalities declined markedly in the 2000s but increased again after 2015. The initial decline is largely attributed to more equitable access to upper secondary education. In contrast, the recent increase in disparities appears to be driven less by educational participation and more by the growing influence of cultural resources offered at home.