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posted by martyb on Thursday May 30 2019, @04:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the being-smart-and-hard-working-is-only-part-of-being-successful dept.

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. This contradicts a commonly held view that these days that our education system has developed enough to give everyone a fighting chance.

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.

[...] "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. "That means that your parents' place in society and their own level of education still play a big part in how well you may do."


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  • (Score: 1) by Coward, Anonymous on Thursday May 30 2019, @08:49PM

    by Coward, Anonymous (7017) on Thursday May 30 2019, @08:49PM (#849424) Journal

    So if you're a successful parent who puts a lot into raising kids, you get them dinged for "advantage" and "privilege". I foresee academics shifting politically to the right, once their kids get college rejections due to a secret SAT "adversity score".