Innocenti Report Card November 2002 [antikvár]

EDITORIALThe big pictureThis fourth Innocenti Report Card seeks to measure and compare educational under-achievement across die industrialized world.Using data from two different surveys of students in 24 OECD countries, it presents the 'big picture' of how well each country's educational system is performing when measured by a) what proportion of students fall below given benchmarks of educational achievement and b) how far behind the national average the lowest-achieving pupils are being allowed to fall.Overall, these data show that some countries do a very much better job than others in containing educational disadvantage. A child starting school in Canada, Finland, or Korea, for example, has both a higher probability of reaching a given level of educational achievement and a lower probability of falhng well below the average than a child starting school in Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, or the United States.efforts to contain that disadvantage - in order to foster social cohesion and maximise investments in education -must also take into account what is now known about early childhood development.The essence of that knowledge is not complicated: learning begins at birth, and a loving, secure, stimulating environment, with time devoted to play, reading, talking and Hstening to infants and young children, lays down the foundations for cognitive and social skills. No government can therefore ignore the issue of what happens in the preschool years.All OECD countries remain conuiiitted to the principle of equahty of opportunity, and to the goal of allowing each child to reach his or her fiill educational potential. But as this Report Card shows, that ideal is far froni being realised. Significant levels of educational disadvantage exist in all developed nations, and the gap between children of the same age can be the equivalent of many years schooling.But the similarities between educational outcomes across the OECD nations are also revealing. In all countries under review, for example, a strong predictor of a child's success or failure at school is the economic and occupational status of the child's parents. And in all, the seeds of disadvantage are sown early.Looking back, such disadvantage at school can be seen to be strongly linked to disadvantage at home. Looking forward, it may be predicted that the disadvantage is likely to perpetuate itself through educational under-achievement and a greater likelihood of economic marginalisation and social exclusion.It would be a mistake to conclude from this that disadvantage in education simply reflects inequality in society at large and that there is Htde that schools or governments can do about it. Some school systems do more to mitigate inequality than others. Similarly, the relationship between school performance and home background does not follow any inmiutable law but varies considerably from country to country.Opportunities do exist - both in schools and in pre-school care and education to minimise educational disadvantage. Failure to explore those opportunities would imply that the ideal of equality of opportunity has run out ofpoHtical steam, and that the industrialized nations of the 21st century are prepared to accept a social order in which the opportunities of life remain heavily circumscribed by the circumstances of birth. Nonetheless it is clear that educational disadvantage is born not at school but in the home. And government