AKIPRESS.COM - Israel isn’t investing enough in education and its students are performing poorly, even though Israeli pupils in the formative elementary school years spend much more time in class than children in other developed countries.

This is what the data from the OECD’s (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s) 2014 “Education at a Glance” report show.

Using mostly data from 2012, the report, released on Tuesday, found that Israel was at the bottom of most rankings for investment in education, classroom crowding and teacher salaries, while student achievement in the OECD’s international PISA exam was poor.

Yet at the same time that Israeli student achievement tends toward the low end of the OECD scale, elementary school pupils here spend far more time in class than children in other developed countries. In Israel, pupils spend an average of 5,741 hours in elementary school classes – compared to an OECD average of 4,553 hours. In Finland, considered one the leaders in educational performance, elementary school pupils are in class just 3,793 hours.

The report warned that educational mobility has started to slow down throughout the industrialized world. The proportion of people with lesser education than their parents is 9% among people ages 55-64, 12% among those 35-44, and 16% among those 25-34.

“Education can lift people out of poverty and social exclusion, but to do so we need to break the link between social background and educational opportunity,” said OECD Secretary General Angel Gurría.