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Educational disadvantage has been high on the societal and political agenda for many years now. Various interventions have been designed and implemented. Despite the investment of huge budgets, the effects of all of these efforts are disappointing. The disadvantage gap has failed to improve; on the contrary, the gap has even widened. Educational disadvantage has been associated with determinators such as social class, ethnic background, and sex. However, more disadvantaged categories can be discerned and often such groupings coincide; for instance, immigrant children regularly come from low socioeconomic backgrounds, speak a foreign language, and adhere to a non-Christian religion. Disadvantage may therefore be cumulative. This book brings together a collection of articles and chapters around the theme of educational disadvantage, which have been published in scientific journals and books, some fairly recently, others less recently. All of these studies are based on a thorough and critical review of the literature and (advanced) quantitative analyses of large-scale data-sets. The focus is on the Netherlands, a country were the first national educational disadvantage policy was launched in 1972, now half a century ago. For many scientific disciplines, knowledge development and accumulation through empirical research is self-evident. However, in the case of educational disadvantage, progress is not so obvious. That is the reason why articles which have been published a while ago may still be (highly) relevant now. Read less