Education is a human right, and equal access to education is important for achieving sustainable development. Measuring socioeconomic development, especially the changes to education inequality, can help educators, practitioners, and policymakers with decision- and policy-making. This article presents an approach that combines population distribution, human settlements, and nighttime light (NTL) data to assess and explore development and education inequality trajectories at national levels across multiple time periods using latent growth models (LGMs). Results show that countries and regions with initially low human development levels tend to have higher levels of associated education inequality and uneven distribution of urban population. Additionally, the initial status of human development can be used to explain the linear growth rate of education inequality, but the association between trajectories becomes less significant as time increases.

中文翻译：

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夜间卫星影像能否使我们对教育不平等现象有所了解？

教育是一项人权，平等获得教育对于实现可持续发展至关重要。衡量社会经济发展，尤其是教育不平等状况的变化，可以帮助教育者，从业者和决策者做出决策和决策。本文提供了一种方法，该方法结合了人口分布，人类住区和夜间照明（NTL）数据，使用潜在增长模型（LGM）来评估和探索国家在多个时间段内的发展和教育不平等轨迹。结果表明，人类发展水平最初较低的国家和地区往往伴随着更高水平的相关教育不平等和城市人口分布不均。此外，