Towards Sustainable Educational Equity: Dynamic Evolution and Convergence of Inter-School Disparities in Resource Allocation in Chinese Senior High Schools

Optimizing educational resource allocation is essential to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) and advancing a high-quality education system. Using school-level panel data for public ordinary high schools in China from 2018 to 2024, this study constructs an evaluation index system for educational resource allocation and applies the entropy method, Dagum Gini coefficient decomposition, kernel density estimation, and convergence models to examine inter-school disparities and their dynamic evolution. The results show that the overall level of educational resource allocation remained broadly stable, with only marginal improvement over time. However, gains were concentrated in advantaged groups, including the core metropolitan area, urban schools, municipally administered schools, and provincial model high schools, while disadvantaged groups experienced stagnation or decline. Regional disparities were the dominant source of overall inequality, and between-group differences increased descriptively over time. The overall distribution remained unimodal and right-skewed, indicating persistent inter-school stratification. No evidence of province-wide σ-convergence was found, and the paired-school increase in the overall Gini coefficient from 2018 to 2024 was not statistically significant. By contrast, absolute and conditional β-convergence estimates were significantly negative, indicating relative catch-up by schools with lower initial resource levels rather than a demonstrated narrowing of province-wide inequality. These findings suggest that improving educational equity requires stronger provincial coordination, differentiated compensation mechanisms, and more targeted support for disadvantaged schools and regions.