Closing the Gap

The place where you are born increasingly determines the opportunities you get in life. Right now, there exists an almost ironclad link between a child’s postal code and her chances of success. And education holds an important key to addressing this. But the engine of emancipation is grinding to a halt. Our education system, traditionally thought of as the chief mechanism to close the opportunity gap, instead too often reflects existing societal inequities. Inequality of opportunity is, next to the shortage of teachers, the most important problem in Dutch education and tends to perpetuate or even reinforce itself: it stops intergenerational mobility. So what to do? Together with renowned American sociologist Bowen Paulle (University of Amsterdam), award-winning documentary filmmaker Ester Gould (documentary series Klassen), and students and teachers from comprehensive school Hugo de Groot we will analyse and unpack the complex puzzle of educational inequality. And we will look into best practices, scalable solutions and concrete policies to tackle the current divide.