Schools, Poverty, and the Achievement Gap

LAST June, representatives from more than 20 countries and several international agencies came together under the midnight sun in Trondheim, Norway, to discuss the challenge of creating greater in the outcomes of This meeting, sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Norwegian Ministry of Education, was the culmination of several years of work on the theme of equity in education. The OECD will shortly issue a report titled No More Failres, replete with analysis and recommendations on how to improve in educational outcomes. The concern for raising the bar and closing the in educational outcomes is now widespread around the world. Kappan readers will be familiar with the debate on the achievement gap, especially in the context of No Child Left Behind. In Europe, the results of (Programme for International Student Assessment--www.pisa.oecd.org) brought the issue into stark relief as well. PISA, a large, carefully designed study now involving more than 40 countries, tests 15-year-olds in reading, science, and mathematics. There have been two rounds of results so far, in 2000 and 2003, with a third due to be released this December. The findings of have been striking and consistent. Some countries that thought they were doing well educationally found that they had not only poor overall results but also very large gaps between their highest- and lowest-achieving students. In Germany, the phrase PISA Schock has come into the language as a sign of how serious the problem is. In contrast, some other countries, such as Finland, Korea, and--yes--Canada, showed very high overall results and much smaller gaps in their achievement distribution. The reality, in and in every other assessment of student outcomes, is that socioeconomic status remains the most powerful single influence on students' educational and other life outcomes. This is true in Finland and Canada as well as in the U.S. and everywhere else. Where you are born and grow up matters enormously to what you are able to be and do. A recent study in my home town of Winnipeg, using a database of all children born in the city in 1984, showed that, whereas 89% of all students writing the grade-12 language exam passed, only 12% of students whose families had received social assistance in the previous two years passed the exam.1 Indeed, a large proportion of this group was either a year or more behind or out of school entirely. Although the achievement gap in Canada is smaller than in the United States, it is far from trivial. UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre recently released a report with the fascinating title of Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries (www.unicef-irc.org/publications). Using a rich array of data, it compares the situation of children in Canada, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and 18 other European countries on six dimensions, including material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviors and risks, and young people's subjective sense of well-being. No country ranks high on all six dimensions. The Netherlands gets the best overall score. Canada's average ranking across the six areas is 12th, while the U.S. and the U.K. are at the bottom. And the kicker is that the report concludes: Variation in government policy appears to account for most of the variation in child poverty levels between OECD countries. No OECD country devoting 10% or more of GDP to social transfers has a child poverty rate higher than 10%. No country devoting less than 5% of GDP to social transfers has a child poverty rate of less than 15%. (2) About 15% of Canadian children live in poverty, defined as living in a household with income less than 50% of the national median. What makes the Canadian situation galling is that in 1989 the Parliament of Canada passed a unanimous motion to end child poverty in the country by the year 2000. …

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