Educational success among children of similar cognitive ability depends on their background
背景决定儿童的教育成就
牛津大学
Britain's got talent—but we're still wasting it. That's the main finding of a new report by researchers from Oxford University published today.
Children of similar cognitive ability have very different chances of educational success; it still depends on their parents' economic, socio-cultural and educational resources.
这与人们普遍持有的观点相矛盾,这种观点认为,如今我们的教育体系已经发展到足以给每个人一个奋斗的机会。
The researchers, led by Dr. Erzsébet Bukodi from Oxford's Department of Social Policy and Intervention, looked at data from cohorts of children born in three decades: 1950s, 1970s and 1990s.
They found significant evidence of a wastage of talent. Individuals with high levels of cognitive ability but who are disadvantaged in their social origins are persistently unable to translate their ability into educational attainment to the same extent as their more advantaged counterparts.
The research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, found that only about half of the difference in educational attainment between children from advantaged and disadvantaged parental backgrounds is due to differences in their cognitive ability. The other half is due to other factors associated with their backgrounds.
"If we compare the educational attainment of children born in the 1990s to those in the late 1950s and early 1970s, we see that parent's economic resources have become a less important factor, but their socio-cultural and educational resources have grown in significance," says Dr. Bukodi. "
这意味着,你父母在社会中的地位和他们自己的教育水平,仍然在很大程度上决定着你的成就。
These experts are now calling for policy-makers to acknowledge that formal qualifications are only one channel for upward mobility for high-ability individuals of disadvantaged backgrounds.
Bukodi co-authored a recent book on this issue with Dr. John Goldthorpe who commented that, "The real mobility problem is that upward mobility is falling while downward mobility is rising.
翻译:樱桃星少女