Italian education improves, but not enough. Also to blame for the heavy cuts decided in recent years. The OECD report card towards our country is not the best. According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on the skills of XNUMX-year-old students, Italians are inferior to their colleagues from industrialized countries in various subjects: mathematics, science and reading.
Our country is positioned in the middle of the table, in 32nd place out of 65 countries. Leading the rankings are confirmed by Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong, which occupy the top positions in all three performances. Among the most striking data of the report is the clear gap in performance between the Italian regions: students from Trento, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Veneto are among the best in the world in mathematics, while Sicilian 15-year-olds occupy a low place in the ranking and rank level with Turkey and Romania. Excellent performances in the north-east and poorer performances in the south are also recorded in the fields of science and reading.
In economic terms, Italy is among the rare industrialized countries that cut school funds between 2001 and 2010. The cut - underlines the OECD - was 8% per student and occurred above all in the final part of the decade. In the OECD area only Mexico and Iceland have done the same.
The report specifies that beyond a certain level of spending, identified as 50 dollars, there is no clear relationship between spending per student and his/her performance. For example, Italy and Singapore both spend about $85 on each student between the ages of 6 and 15, but while Italian high schoolers score 485 points in mathematics, their Singaporean peers score 573 points, one of the highest levels.
Italy, on the other hand, has a performance similar to that of Norway (489 points), but Oslo spends a good 124 dollars per student. In general, spending per student in Italy is in line with the OECD average (84.416 dollars against 83.382), in the presence of a per capita GDP of 32.110 dollars against an OECD figure of 33.732 dollars.
Among the data highlighted by the report also the cost of failures which is equal to 6,7% of the total annual expenditure in primary and secondary education, or 47.174 dollars for each repeating student, between school costs and social costs. In Italy repeaters are 17% of students against 12% of the OECD average and they also increased by 2% between 2003 and 2012, while on average in the OECD area they decreased.
