The link between parents’ occupations and their children’s PISA scores was more than twice as strong as the link with parental education, according to a new study by the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research.
What this means is that knowing what parents did for a living allowed researchers to account for over double the difference in students’ scores as knowing how much education the parents had.
The study was conducted by Shoresh researcher Ariela Savin, the institution’s vice president, Prof. Ayal Kimhi, and its president, Prof. Dan Ben-David. It examined data from 10,336 children aged 15 who took Hebrew-language PISA tests in 2012, 2015, 2018, and 2022 and whose parents were both employed. The findings were published on Thursday.
Students who took the tests in Arabic were not included. The researchers said they excluded them because an earlier study found large differences between students’ reports of their parents’ education and official data held by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS).
PISA, the OECD’s international student assessment, tests 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science. The researchers examined students’ average results across the three subjects and compared them with their parents’ occupations.
They also took into account parental education, birthplace, gender, the number of books in the home, and the availability of computers and internet access, as well as other items in the household.
The study found a link between parents’ jobs and their children’s scores, but it did not establish that the jobs caused the differences in achievement. The analysis did not directly account for household income.
Fathers' occupations linked to reading, mathematics, science, mothers' linked to reading
Fathers’ occupations were linked to children’s results in reading, mathematics, and science, while mothers’ occupations were linked most strongly to reading. The pattern was reversed for parental education: Mothers’ education was more closely linked to achievement than fathers’ education.
To calculate the differences between occupations, the researchers first grouped together parental occupations whose children received similar results, then compared every other occupational group with them.
Because mothers and fathers tended to work in different fields, the researchers created a separate comparison group for each. These groups were created for the study and do not represent the average Israeli parent or student.
For fathers, the comparison group included jobs in sales, transportation, security, law enforcement, construction, and manufacturing.
Compared with the fathers’ comparison group, average scores were around 7.3% higher among children whose fathers worked in university teaching, science, or research, and about 6.8% higher among those whose fathers worked in technology, information, or software.
The percentages do not represent increases in raw PISA points – they are the researchers’ estimate of the difference between the groups after taking the other background factors into account.
Compared with the fathers’ comparison group, children whose fathers worked in advanced engineering scored about 5% higher. Children whose fathers worked in finance, accounting, and economics scored about 4.2% higher, while those whose fathers worked in health and medicine scored about 3.7% higher.
The positive link was not limited to science and technology.
Children whose fathers held jobs classified as “general” or “elementary,” such as office-management and mail-sorting work, scored about 5.4% higher than the fathers’ comparison group.
For mothers, the comparison group included jobs in teaching, personal services, sales, clerical work, and cleaning.
Children whose mothers worked in technology, information, or software scored about 6.8% higher than children in that group. Technology was one of the few fields in which the researchers found a similar result for mothers and fathers.
Only two occupational categories were associated with significantly lower scores. Children whose mothers worked as early-childhood educators scored about 4.6% lower than the mothers’ comparison group, while children whose mothers worked as teaching assistants scored about 2.2% lower.
Researchers emphasize caution with interpreting results
The researchers emphasized that the results did not show that working in those professions caused children to score lower. Other differences between the families or occupations that the study did not measure may have contributed to the findings.
“The findings show that to understand a student’s starting point, it is not enough to know their parents’ level of education,” Kimhi said. “Where their parents stand in the labor market is also significantly associated with their achievement.”
Children enter the education system from different starting points, and its role is to reduce the link between family background and achievement, he said. Without that, “it is difficult to speak of equal opportunity and intergenerational mobility.”
“The future generation’s prospects for success remain anchored in their parents’ occupational starting point,” Savin, Kimhi, and Ben-David wrote, saying the findings highlighted the need for education systems that promote equal opportunity.