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Going up? “All human beings are born equal. But on the following day, they no longer are,” said French author Jules Renard in 1907. This is because sticky floors and ceilings–or rags to rags and riches to riches–define the bottom and top income distributions. Today, it takes four to five generations, on average, for children from the poorest 10% of the population to reach median income levels. Meanwhile, about 50% of children of wealthy parents will themselves remain rich in countries like Germany and the US. Worse, every four years, a fifth of the middle class’ poorest fall down to the bottom of the income distribution while its upper half enjoys much greater
security, as shown in A Broken Social Elevator? How to Promote Social Mobility. What’s more, in countries like Brazil and South Africa where income inequality is high, there is a state of “permanent inequality”, with an underlying feeling that social mobility is but a broken promise. Indeed, low upward mobility increases people’s sense that their voices do not matter and that the system is neither fair nor meritocratic. Still, mobility is not all about money. It can range from jobs to education and health, and it changes when viewed through each of these lenses. These distortions create unique situations within each country: in places like Japan and Korea, educational mobility is higher than income mobility, but it’s the other way around in Norway and Spain. In the US, job mobility is higher than earnings mobility, while in Finland it’s the reverse, with lower educational mobility on top.
Yet there is nothing inevitable about socio-economic status being passed down between generations. Equal access to quality education is one way to enhance social mobility: countries that spend more on public education tend to achieve higher educational mobility. The same goes for health. Moreover, progressive taxation on wealth, inheritance and combatting tax avoidance leads to less sticky ceilings, while money transfers or benefits to low-income families and improving the school-towork transition unsticks the floors. And as the report shows, policies that address the likes of residential segregation and sudden unemployment, or aim to improve the work-home balance can enhance social mobility across the board. OECD (2018), A Broken Social Elevator? How to Promote Social Mobility, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264301085-en.
Better teachers for all “One teacher can change the world,” said Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, and policymakers should take note–for indeed, high-quality teachers are the main asset of any education system, the OECD finds. What policies can be used to improve teacher quality and the related student outcomes? Effective Teacher Policies: Insights from PISA analyses successful school systems around the world to pinpoint the most effective policies regarding the recruitment, retention, development and placement of teachers. Data from 72 countries show that the highestperforming schools have three key policies in common. First, they mandate extensive pre-career classroom experience. Second,
they provide in-career professional development opportunities that keep teachers updated on the most recent trends and practices. Finally, they evaluate teachers using classroom observation and individual progress, rather than teacher tests. These three policies form a dynamic, lifelong learning process. Not only do they establish more rigorous training for prospective teachers, they also push current teachers to constantly review and improve their practices through professional workshops. Many low-performing schools make the mistake of focusing on decreasing class size to the exclusion of recruiting higher-quality teachers. But even if class sizes are small, the teachers must still be well trained. High-quality teachers should be distributed more equitably between high and low-performing schools, the report argues, but to encourage top
teachers to work in disadvantaged, low-performing schools, they must be paid more, provided with extensive pre-career and in-career training opportunities, and given clear job mobility options. Together, these policies have worked extremely well in countries like Japan and Korea, where teachers are highly respected, well paid and rotated through different schools every few years. As a result, low-income students in Japan and Korea today are equally likely to be taught by high-quality teachers as high-income students. It is a lesson that should be taught elsewhere. OECD (2018), Effective Teacher Policies: Insights from PISA, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264301603-en.
OECD Observer No 314 Q2 2018
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