Description: The widely accepted educational objectives combine high quality and level of performance with equitable distribution of outcomes. High level of performance can be defined as high average performance in the student population. Equitable distribution means that systematic variation attributable to factors that the individual students cannot escape or control, like disadvantaged background, gender, location of residence and membership of a minority group is minimal or does not even exist. Large between-school variation during the basic education may also endanger the equitable distribution of educational outcomes. The purpose of this study (Malin, 2005) was to investigate the level and distribution of reading literacy performance in Finland from the perspective of equity both at the student and school level, as they were observed in the international PISA 2000 reading literacy data. The Finnish PISA 2000 data were a representative sample of 15-years old students and schools they attended, and it consisted of 4864 students in 155 schools. The data were analyzed using two-level linear models. The aim was to find out the amount of the school differences in reading literacy performance in Finland, the force of the effects of selected background factors, and the extent to which the between-school as well as the total student variation were attributable to these factors. The background factors used were the following: language of the school, grade the student attended, student's immigrant background, location of the school as a regional unit and municipality type, gender of the student, socio-economic status of the family, parents' educational level, and wealth of the family. Students' own engagement in reading was used to test, if the effects of these factors could be reduced. The results showed that the quality of performance in reading literacy was high in Finland. The unadjusted between-school variation was less than 6 % of the total student variance. About one third of the between-school variance and little less than one fifth of the total student variance were explained by all the factors together. Most of this systematic variation between schools was associated with the socio-economic status. On average, higher socio-economic status and parents' higher education meant better results. Regional differences existed, but they were associated with regional variation in the social background. Gender difference was notable for the benefit of girls, but it was not due to the low performance of boys rather than the extremely good performance of girls. The average results were lower in Swedish-speaking than in Finnish-speaking schools, and students with immigrant background did not do as well as native students. After controlling for the effects of the background factors, only few schools were clearly below or above the national mean in reading literacy performance. The effect of one single school was found to be very strong on the estimate of the between-school variation. When the effect of engagement in reading was controlled for, the effects of the background factors on reading literacy performance decreased in size.