Innocenti Research Centre, UNICEF
November 2002
UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre is the source of this new international comparison of "educational disadvantage" in the world's most prosperous countries - up to two dozen of them, depending on the specific indicators and benchmarks. These are not new data. The report is drawn from familiar sources such as TIMSS and PISA. But the data are analyzed differently here, not according to national averages but, rather, the severity of the discrepancy within each country between middle-scoring and bottom-scoring students (and other "gap" measures). On the main table, a composite of five separate measures "of absolute educational disadvantage" (mostly at age 15), the United States is 7th "worst," followed by Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal. Seventeen countries did better, led by Korea and Japan. The main policy point: wealthy countries have educationally disadvantaged kids, too, but a lot of them have done better than we have at gap-closing. You can download your own copy of this 36-page report at http://www.unicef-icdc.org/publications/pdf/repcard4e.pdf.
