Cutting education expenditure

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress division, Directorate for Education and Skills

Education systems, for the greatest part funded by the public purse, have a symbiotic relationship with economic tides: they blossom in booming years, they suffer in recessions. Educational needs however behave exactly in the opposite way: they expand when the economy shrinks. The recent recession, probably the biggest many of us have seen in our lifetimes, again provides ample evidence for this. And the relationship is now even more pronounced than ever before. Education and skills have moved into the centre of economic life, as economies become increasingly knowledge- and skills-based. Unemployment clearly separates the educational haves and have-nots, with the unskilled paying the price for the recession. As a result, people want to invest more in education, stay longer in schools, and postpone their entry into the labour market, because work doesn’t offer much of an alternative. Also governments promote education and training as a strategy to drive people out of unemployment.

Thus demand increases, but do schools receive the public resources to meet this demand? The latest issue of Education Indicators in Focus builds on the available evidence on public expenditure in education for the first three years of the crisis (2008, 2009 and 2010) to shed light on spending trends and the first clear signs of widespread cuts.

In the first year after the collapse of Lehmann Brothers, which instigated the financial crisis in 2008, not much happened. Probably, this is partly due to the intrinsic slowness of public budgets and of the education system in itself. But in the first year, the financial crisis was not yet a fiscal crisis in most countries. And some governments initiated huge stimulus programmes to avert the social impact of the crisis, and also education often took profit from such initiatives. In other countries the rise in educational expenditure, noticeable during the pre-crisis boom, just continued.

Things changed from 2009 onwards, when in around one third of OECD countries public expenditure on education dropped. The downturn in the real economy triggered a fiscal crisis, aggravated in countries with already huge levels of public debt. From 2010 onwards the fiscal situation further deteriorated in quite a number of countries. Governments were forced to launch austerity and fiscal consolidation policies. Between 2008 and 2010 education budgets continued to increase in constant prices in most countries, but their relative share of total public expenditure started to fall in exactly half of the countries. Education no longer was as high on the priority ranking in public spending as it was in the years 2000-2008.

Of course, education takes a large share of public expenditure: 13.1% of all public expenditure on average across OECD countries in 2005. So, to exempt education from public expenditure cuts takes a lot of political courage. And because of its size relatively even minor measures immediately result in huge nominal savings. So, it is a tempting scenario for any finance minister. Many also share the belief that there is a lot of internal elasticity or even inefficiency in the system, which can be reduced by increasing budgetary pressure.

In any case, the salaries of teachers – by far taking the largest share of public expenditure – were immediately affected: on average across OECD countries, teachers’ salaries decreased by 2% in real terms between 2009 and 2011. After years of salary gains in most countries, this might seem a rather marginal drop. But the value of it is real and, no doubt, the downward trend will continue in the following years. Seen against the higher demand, but also taking into account the political ambitions to improve the quality of education by investing in teachers, this is a significant sign.

For more information
On this topic, visit:
Education Indicators in Focus: www.oecd.org/education/indicators
On the OECD’s education indicators, visit:
Education at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators: www.oecd.org/edu/eag.htm
Chart source: OECD Education at a Glance 2013: Indicator B4 (www.oecd.org/edu/eag.htm)

Leadership for 21st Century Learning

by Marco Kools
Analyst, Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

Against a backdrop of increasing globalisation, rapid technological innovation and a growing knowledge workforce, few would dispute that the primary task for management today is the leadership of change. The education sector is no exception to this.

Contemporary learning environments (schools) must be able to keep pace with the changing times, while delivering on their core task - equipping students with the knowledge and skills for life in the 21st century. This requires leadership to set the direction, taking responsibility for putting learning at the centre and keeping it there. Sounds simple, but what does it really mean in practice? Where does one start? Who does what?

These are some of the challenging questions that the recently released OECD publication Leadership for 21st Century Learning responds to. The publication builds on the prominence given to the concept of learning leadership in the recently released Innovative Learning Environments. It addresses the "Why? What? How? Who? Where and When? of learning leadership and presents a selection of leadership strategies from Austria, Australia, Canada, Israel, Norway, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The analysis of the leadership strategies, international literature and the contributions to this volume by leading international experts shows that by its very nature, learning leadership is social and connected. It shows the importance of participating in professional learning communities and networks as a vehicle for learning leadership to flourish and to make it more effective. This is not argued principally in order for community members to feel more positive about themselves through a sense of belonging. Rather, it allows professional learning communities and networks to serve as a means for shared strategies and visions to emerge within learning environments, and for developing appropriate expertise through sharing. A key role for government therefore lies in creating the conditions that facilitate networked professional learning opportunities.

For 21st century learning to flourish on the ground, learning leadership must be exercised at different levels of the education system. Although the initial impetus for change might come from any level - from within the system or outside - it needs the corresponding decision making and action at other levels of the system in order for it to be sustained at scale. This is increasingly relevant as learning environments become more innovative and involve a range of different non-traditional partners like businesses, foundations or cultural bodies from outside the formal system. 

A key question for governments to consider therefore is what these changing leadership dynamics mean in terms of issues like quality assurance, governance and accountability when the education system's boundaries deliberately become more blurry. These are some of the key issues being investigated in the last strand of work of the OECD Innovative Learning Environments (ILE) project on "Implementation and Change" and its sister project Governing Complex Education Systems (GCES), which are activities of the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI).

Links:

Leadership for 21st Century Learning
Centre for Educational Research and Innovation CERI
Innovative Learning Environment project
Governing Complex Education Systems
Related blog post by Marco Kools: Designing 21st century learning environments

Photo credits: Cover © Inmagine LTD.

A new direction for education reform in China

by Yan Wang, Ph.D
National Institute for Education Sciences, Beijing

China has worked hard to expand access and improve the quality of education by trying many alternative approaches to educate more people, both by drawing on the experiences of other countries or retrieving historical practices. The progress to date has been tremendous, with nine-year basic education universalised, mass higher education attained, and youth and adult illiteracy eradicated. The recent 3rd plenary session of the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee announced a number of strategies to address social and economic challenges faced by China. These strategies will, among other things, frame the future direction of Chinese education. The purpose of the new reforms is not only to pursue further development, but also address the problems arising from the rapid changes made over the last two decades.

Historically, 3rd plenary sessions have been milestones of major political, economic and social reforms since China embarked on the reforms that opened up the economy in 1978. The aim then was to inject vigor into a system that had almost come to a halt after the devastating Cultural Revolution.  But the reform strategies adopted by the 2013 plenary are quite different from the 1978 reforms, as they mark two developmental stages with different challenges. The new policies have called for rebuilding the education system and encouraging bold experimentation in education to boost economic growth in three main areas:

Equity: As in other sectors, the rapid development of education over the past three decades has led in many cases to severe inequities both within provinces and across provinces. The equity reform involves several strategies for dealing with this problem, among which are the following: 1) support hard-to-reach or disadvantaged students with more financial support, 2)  standardise public schools (including abolishing so-called key schools or key classes by removing their resource privileges) and 3) facilitate mobility of teachers and principals among different types of schools as well as sharing of resources among different areas and schools by means of information technology.

Gaokao (college entrance examination): which has long been regarded as a bottleneck of education reforms aimed at quality in China. When Gaokao was resumed 30 years ago, it was designed as a unified examination to screen and select the most talented students for admission into higher education.  Because it was the same examination for all, and was objectively scored, it was seen as fair and equitable by everyone. But the exams, though rigorous and fair, do not measure the kinds of skills required by a modern economy. The reforms essentially comprise three elements: 1) replace once-and-for-all the college entrance examination system with a more comprehensive learning assessment that incorporates: a) a colleague entrance examination with fewer subjects and more choice of examinations at different times of the year, b) competency-based student learning performance assessment and c) tests organised by the universities and colleges.  (one hopes that this could be done in the near future); 2) separate university admissions from college entrance examinations, to give more autonomy to universities and colleges to identify students of different capabilities and 3) create more learning pathways among regular tertiary institutions, vocational institutions and adult tertiary schools.

Reduce the bureaucratic control of education by government: The reform will disentangle the responsibilities of administration, sponsorship (school management) and evaluation. It is intended to delegate more power to provincial government, give more autonomy to educational institutions and give more control over education evaluation and monitoring to professional organisations. Another strategy that merits a mention is to promote public-private partnerships such as those that would encourage involvement of the private sector in education sponsorship.

While earlier education reforms have put the focus on the development of schools and teachers, these reforms focus on traditional cultural values, like ethics and personal health and fitness, on the one hand, and the need to produce students who are more creative and innovative on the other.  This does not appear to be in any way a rejection of the past priorities, but rather a recognition that they are well on the say to being achieved and it is time to move on to new frontiers.

Links:
Shanghai (China) – PISA
Strong performers and Succesful Reformer: Shanghai
Related blog posts by Andreas Schleicher:
Are the Chinese cheating in PISA or are we cheating ourselves?
Learning in rural China: The challenges for teachers
Learning in rural China: The challenges for students

Photo credit: Chinese students @ Shutterstock

Let’s talk about skills

by Joanne Caddy
Senior Analyst, Skills Beyond School Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

In a quiet room in downtown Oslo, a group of people are in deep discussion.

Gathered around a table strewn with markers, glue and crumpled paper, their assignment is to help Kari. The card they have been given describes her as a 17-year-old drop-out who wants to find a job. They have 15 minutes to fill in a poster with concrete advice on how Kari could navigate her way through the tangled undergrowth of unemployment services, career guidance and training programmes to achieve her goal.

Aptly named, the “Skills Obstacle Course” is just one of the many interactive exercises which the OECD has designed to generate in-depth and structured discussions among highly diverse stakeholders – drawn from businesses, trade unions, education institutions and student associations – together with broad inter-ministerial teams responsible for various facets of national skills policy. Nourished by comparative data and guided by multidisciplinary OECD teams, these workshops offer fertile ground on which to challenge assumptions and foster frank policy dialogue. Recent data from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) also offers new insights as workshop participants gather together to identify the main skills challenges facing their country today and their vision of the future.

The conversation is spreading. Over the past few months, equally animated discussions about skills have been taking place in Vienna and Seoul.

Austria, Korea and Norway are the first countries to have launched collaborative projects with the OECD on building effective skills strategies and others will follow. Drawing on the three-pillar framework of the OECD Skills Strategy – developing relevant skills, activating skills supply and effective use of skills – each project is tailored to the country’s specific circumstances and priorities. Norway faces the challenge of reducing drop-outs and ensuring strong foundation skills for all, Austria is grappling with how to activate the skills of migrants and women, while Korea is looking for better ways to use the skills of women in the workforce and foster entrepreneurship.

Each country project is unique, yet they share three common features: first, a broad, strategic perspective on the national “skills system” encompassing policies on education, employment, migration, taxation and local economic development. Second, a strong focus on the enabling conditions which foster better skills outcomes, including the need for a ‘whole of government’ approach to skills. Third, a strong commitment to engaging all relevant stakeholders in crafting a shared understanding of the skills challenges ahead and how to tackle them. Why? Because experience shows that policy dialogue, fuelled by data, is the only solid foundation on which to generate effective action.

So let’s keep talking about skills.


Links:
OECD Skills Strategy
Survey of Adult Skills
For more on skills and skills policies around the world, visit: http://skills.oecd.org/
See also the country pages on skills for Norway, Austria and Korea
Related blog posts on skills:
Skill up or lose out, by Andreas Schleicher
Time for the U.S. to Reskill? by Viktoria Kis

Photo credit: paper lightbulb @ Shutterstock

Students at the centre: promoting effective evaluation and assessment in Northern Ireland

by Claire Shewbridge
Analyst, Early Childhood and Schools Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

“Students do not want to be ‘passive objects’ of evaluation and assessment, they want to be actively involved”. When we heard the representative of the European School Student Unions say this at a conference in April, we smiled. We had just returned from eight days in Northern Ireland where we’d been really impressed with how much students knew about their assessment. Of course, we only got the chance to visit a few schools, but although each school had a distinct approach to assessment, they all shared a commitment to getting the students involved.

As explored in a new OECD report on evaluation and assessment policies in Northern Ireland, current policy, together with the curriculum, promotes the engagement of students in their own evaluation by encouraging them to talk about, review and make improvements to their work, as well as to ask questions and to respond to others’ points of view. This allows students to develop ‘higher order skills’ such as meta-cognitive awareness: the ability to reflect and analyse the learning experience itself. Engagement is also important for school inspectors, who check to what extent schools are using a broad range of assessment policies and engaging students in self- and peer-assessment.

But in addition to evaluating themselves, students want to be involved in the evaluation of their teachers and schools. In Northern Ireland, official policy underlines the importance of school self-evaluation for improving the learning experience for students, and evidence from school inspections indicates that self-evaluation activities are highly developed in many schools. This is backed up by new PISA 2012 results, which indicate that 65% of 15-year-olds in Northern Ireland are in schools that give students an opportunity to provide written feedback on teachers, lessons and resources, compared with an OECD average of 61%. 

The evaluation of schools in Northern Ireland can play a crucial role in addressing the existing equity challenges by monitoring whether effective equitable and quality education is being provided. This is a key factor in increasing the social mobility of children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and addressing economic and social challenges. In this way, evaluation promotes improvement for ALL students.

Going forward, Northern Ireland will need to build public awareness and further develop professionalism in schools, ensuring that policies are reviewed and refined where necessary. But throughout all of this, the focus of evaluation should always be kept on the improvement of student learning outcomes, and on involving students. With this, evaluation and assessment become more effective for schools and governments, and more relevant for students.

Access OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment in Education for Northern Ireland, United Kingdom and the other participating countries, along with the final project report, ‘Synergies for Better Learning: an International Perspective on Evaluation and Assessment’ on the OECD website Reviews on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes. 

Links:
Synergies for better learning 
PISA 2012 Results: What Makes Schools Successful? Resources, Policies and Practices, Volume IV
Related blog post Evaluation and assessment is for everyone


Photo credit: student assessment @ Shutterstock

Are the Chinese cheating in PISA or are we cheating ourselves?

by Andreas Schleicher
Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary General

Whenever an American or European wins an Olympic gold medal, we cheer them as heroes. When a Chinese does, the first reflex seems to be that they must have been doping; or if that’s taking it too far, that it must have been the result of inhumane training.

There seem to be parallels to this in education. Only hours after results from the latest PISA assessment showed Shanghai’s school system leading the field, Time magazine concluded the Chinese must have been cheating. They didn't bother to read the PISA 2012 Technical Background Annex, which shows there was no cheating, whatsoever, involved. Nor did they speak with the experts who had drawn the samples or with the international auditors who had carefully reviewed and validated the sample for Shanghai and those of other countries.

Others were quick to suggest that resident internal migrants might not be covered by Shanghai’s PISA sample, because years ago those migrants wouldn't have had access to Shanghai’s schools. But, like many things in China, that has long changed and, as described by PISA, resident migrants were covered by the PISA samples in exactly the way they are covered in other countries and education systems. Still, it seems to be easier to cling to old stereotypes than keep up with changes on the ground (or to read the PISA report).

True, like other emerging economies, Shanghai is still building its education system and not every 15-year-old makes it yet to high school. As a result of this and other factors, the PISA 2012 sample covers only 79% of the 15-year-olds in Shanghai. But that is far from unique. Even the United States, the country with the longest track record of universal high-school education, covered less than 90% of its 15-year-olds in PISA - and it didn't include Puerto Rico in its PISA sample, a territory that is unlikely to have pulled up U.S. average performance.

International comparisons are never easy and they are never perfect. But anyone who takes a serious look at the facts and figures will concede that the samples used for PISA result in robust and internationally comparable data. They have been carefully designed and validated to be fit for purpose in collaboration with the world’s leading experts, and the tests are administered under strict and internationally comparable conditions. Anyone who really wants to find out can review the underlying data.

Short of arguments about methodology, some people turn to dismissing Shanghai’s strong performance by saying that Shanghai’s students are only good on the kind of tasks that are easy to teach and easy to test, and that those things are losing in relevance because they are also the kind of things that are easy to digitise, automate and outsource. But while the latter is true, the former is not. Consider this: Only 2% of American 15-year-olds and 3% of European ones reach the highest level of math performance in PISA, demonstrating that they can conceptualise, generalise and use math based on their investigations and apply their knowledge in novel contexts. In Shanghai it is over 30%. Educators in Shanghai have simply understood that the world economy will pay an ever-rising premium on excellence and no longer value people for what they know, but for what they can do with what they know.

PISA didn't just test what 15-year-olds know in mathematics, it also asked them what they believe makes them succeed. In many countries, students were quick to blame everyone but themselves: More than three-quarters of the students in France, an average performer on the PISA test, said the course material was simply too hard, two-thirds said the teacher did not get students interested in the material, and half said their teacher did not explain the concepts well or they were just unlucky. The results are very different for Shanghai. Students there believe they will succeed if they try hard and they trust their teachers to help them succeed. That tells us a lot about school education. And guess which of these two countries keeps improving and which is not? The fact that students in some countries consistently believe that achievement is mainly a product of hard work, rather than inherited intelligence, suggests that education and its social context can make a difference in instilling the values that foster success in education.

And even those who claim that the relative standing of countries in PISA mainly reflects social and cultural factors must concede that educational improvement is possible: In mathematics, countries like Brazil, Turkey, Mexico or Tunisia rose from the bottom; Italy, Portugal and the Russian Federation have advanced to the average of the industrialised world or close to it; Germany and Poland rose from average to good, and Shanghai and Singapore have moved from good to great. Indeed, of the 65 participating countries, 45 saw improvement in at least one subject area. These countries didn't change their culture, or the composition of their population, nor did they fire their teachers. They changed their education policies and practices. Learning from these countries should be our focus. We will be cheating ourselves and the children in our schools if we miss that chance.

International comparisons are never easy and they aren’t perfect. But PISA shows what is possible in education, it takes away excuses from those who are complacent, and it helps countries see themselves in the mirror of the educational results and educational opportunities delivered by the world’s leaders in education. The world has become indifferent to tradition and past reputations, unforgiving of frailty and ignorant of custom or practice. Success will go to those individuals, institutions and countries which are swift to adapt, slow to complain and open to change. And the task for governments is to help citizens rise to this challenge. PISA can help to make that happen.

Links:
PISA 2012 Results
OECD Programme for International Student Assessment
Related blog post by Andreas Schleicher: What we learn from the PISA 2012 results
Slideshare PowerPoint presentation: PISA 2012 Evaluating school systems to improve education
Press release: Asian countries top OECD's latest PISA survey on state of global education

Photo credit: Chinese olympic athlete @ Shutterstock

What we learn from the PISA 2012 results

by Andreas Schleicher
Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary General

 

International comparisons are never easy and they aren’t perfect. But PISA shows what is possible in education, and it helps countries see themselves in the mirror of the education opportunities and results delivered by the world’s leaders in education. Even those who claim that the relative standing of countries in PISA mainly reflects social and cultural factors must now concede that improvement in education is possible. In mathematics, countries like Brazil, Mexico, Tunisia and Turkey rose from the bottom; Italy, Portugal and the Russian Federation advanced to the OECD average or close to it; Germany and Poland rose from average to good; and Shanghai-China and Singapore have moved from good to great. Indeed, of the 65 participating countries, 40 saw improvement in at least one of PISA’s three subject areas. These countries did not change their culture, or the composition of their populations, nor did they fire their teachers; they changed their education policies and practices.

We focused this year’s PISA assessment on mathematics. Each year, OECD countries invest over 200 billion euro in math education in schools; but poor math skills still severely limit people’s access to better-paying and more-rewarding jobs and, at the aggregate level, inequality in the distribution of math skills closely relates to how wealth is shared within nations.

This PISA 2012 assessment came at a time when countries were still grappling with the aftermath of the economic crisis - a period that has brought home the urgency of equipping more people with better skills to collaborate, compete and connect in ways that drive our economies forward, foster employment and reduce social inequality.

A large part of the challenge in education lies in addressing underperformance. Across countries, almost one in four 15-year-olds did not even reach Level 2, the PISA baseline level of proficiency in mathematics, where students have to do little more than employ basic algorithms or procedures involving whole numbers. But in Canada, Korea, Shanghai-China and Singapore, it is one in ten or fewer. According to one estimate, if all 15-year-olds in the OECD area attained at least PISA Level 2 in math, they would contribute USD 200 trillion in additional economic output over their working lives. While such estimates are never wholly certain, they do suggest that the benefits of improvement dwarf any conceivable cost. Part of the issue lies with students living in social disadvantage, and many school systems amplify that disadvantage. According to PISA, advantaged and disadvantaged schools show particularly wide differences in levels of teacher shortages. Attracting the most talented teachers and school leaders to the most challenging classrooms will therefore be key to making headway. Indeed, PISA finds that higher-performing countries allocate educational resources more equitably among advantaged and disadvantaged schools.

A belief that all students can achieve at a high level and a willingness to engage all stakeholders in education – including students, through such channels as seeking student feedback on teaching practices – are other hallmarks of successful school systems. New results from PISA also show that students whose parents have high expectations for them tend to have more perseverance, greater intrinsic motivation to learn math, and more confidence in their own ability to solve math problems.

But the challenges of school systems are not just about poor kids in poor neighbourhoods, but about many kids in many neighbourhoods. Only 2% of American students reach the highest level of math performance, demonstrating that they can conceptualise, generalise and use math based on their investigations and apply their knowledge in novel contexts. That compares with an OECD average of 3%, and proportions of up to 31% in Shanghai-China. The world economy will pay an ever-rising premium on excellence, and a number of countries have shown how the share of top performers in school can be raised significantly, including in high performers, such as Hong Kong-China and Korea, and low performers, such as Italy, Portugal and the Russian Federation. It is important that raising excellence and improving equity are not seen as conflicting policy objectives. Indeed, of the 13 countries that significantly improved their math performance since 2003, three also show improvements in equity in education, and another nine improved their performance while maintaining an already high level of equity.

Of course, raising outcomes is easier said than done. The status quo has many protectors, and countries need to be bold in thinking and in execution to effect real changes. Obviously, we can’t copy and paste school systems wholesale. But PISA has revealed an encouraging number of features shared by the world’s most successful school systems.

Everybody agrees education is important. But the test comes when education is weighed against other priorities. How do countries pay their teachers, compared to other highly skilled workers? Would you want your child to be a teacher rather than a lawyer? How do the media talk about teachers? What we’ve learned from PISA is that the leaders in high performing systems have convinced their citizens to make choices that value education, their future, more than consumption today.

But placing a high value on education is just part of the equation. Another part is the belief that all children can achieve. The fact that students in some countries consistently believe that achievement is mainly a product of hard work, rather than inherited intelligence, suggests that education and its social context can make a difference in instilling the values that foster success in education.
In the past, different students were taught in similar ways. Today’s top school systems embrace diversity with differentiated instructional practices; they realise that ordinary students have extraordinary talents and they personalise educational experiences. High-performing school systems also share clear and ambitious standards across the board. Everyone knows what is required to get a given qualification. This remains one of the most powerful system-level predictors in PISA.

And nowhere does the quality of a school system exceed the quality of its teachers. Top school systems pay attention to how they select and train their staff. They watch how they improve the performance of teachers who are struggling and how to structure teachers’ pay. They provide an environment in which teachers work together to frame good practice. And when deciding where to invest, they prioritise the quality of teachers over the size of classes. Not least, they provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers.

High performers have also moved on from administrative control and accountability to professional forms of accountability and work organisation. They support their teachers in developing innovations in pedagogy, in improving their own performance and that of their colleagues, and in pursuing professional development that leads to stronger education practice. The goal of the past was standardisation and compliance; now, top performers enable teachers to be inventive. In the past, the policy focus was on providing education; in today’s top school systems, it’s on outcomes, shifting from looking upwards in the bureaucracy towards looking outwards to the next teacher, the next school, about creating networks of innovation.

Perhaps the most important outcome of world-class school systems is that they deliver high-quality education across the entire school system so that every student benefits. Overall, Finland did not come out quite as impressively as in previous assessments; but what makes Finland still special is that only 6% of the performance variation among students lies between schools. In other words: every school succeeds.

Last but not least, high-performing systems tend to align policies and practices across all aspects of the system, they make them coherent over sustained periods of time, and they see that they are consistently implemented.

Of course, there is no single combination of policies and practices that will work for everyone, everywhere. Every country has room for improvement, even the top performers. That’s why the OECD produces this triennial report on the state of education across the globe: to share evidence of the best policies and practices and to offer our timely and targeted support to help countries provide the best education possible for all of their students. With high levels of youth unemployment, rising inequality, a significant gender gap, and an urgent need to boost growth in many countries, we have no time to lose.

Links:
PISA 2012 Results
OECD Programme for International Student Assessment
Press release: Asian countries top OECD's latest PISA survey on state of global education
Follow:
PISA on twitter: @OECD_Edu @SchleicherEdu @OECDLive #OECDPISA
Facebook PISA  for Parents

Learning for jobs: Quality pays off

by Dirk Van Damme and Rodrigo Castaneda Valle
Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

In 2010 the OECD published Learning for Jobs, a major review of vocational education and training (VET). The economic crisis has since continued to worsen the job prospects for young people in many OECD countries.  To counterbalance governments have increasingly been looking to strengthen vocational tracks in secondary education as a way to better prepare youth for the job market. The evidence base on VET remains weak, however Education at a Glance is providing improved data on VET systems and the latest issue of Education Indicators in Focus draws attention to some interesting findings.

The very basic policy question that governments ask is: Do more and better VET programmes help to improve employment prospects for young people? International evidence shows us that VET programmes are a costly investment. VET programmes are expected to be up-to-date with the latest technologies in the different industry sectors, and once you factor in the costs of instructors and facilities, it becomes a costly endeavour. On average, the annual expenditure per student in an upper secondary VET programme is 12% higher than in a general programme. In some countries such as Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the Czech and Slovak Republics – countries which have extensive VET provision, enrolling more than 60% of students – the difference in annual expenditure per student can exceed 20%.

It is tempting to relate the size and cost of VET programmes to employment prospects for young people. Indeed, countries like Germany and Switzerland have relatively healthy youth employment rates. Young people with a secondary VET qualification are doing much better in the labour market than their counterparts with only a general secondary qualification as their highest level of educational attainment.

But, as the graph demonstrates, a high proportion of secondary school students in VET programmes is no guarantee for high employment outcomes. It is interesting that it is the relative cost of VET programmes which differentiates countries on employment. Countries which invest more than the average succeed in offering better job prospects. Assuming that more monetary investment in VET programmes also means higher quality programmes, it becomes clear that it is not the size of VET provision that counts, but the quality. Of course, many other factors also impact youth employment, but the graph suggests that it doesn’t really help to have a large proportion of students in VET tracks – as is the case in the Czech and Slovak Republics. Rather, it is much better to have about 35% of students in vocational tracks and to fund them well, as can be seen in the case of Switzerland.

For more information
On this topic, visit:
Education Indicators in Focus: www.oecd.org/education/indicators
On the OECD’s education indicators, visit:
Education at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators: www.oecd.org/edu/eag.htm
For more information on OECD work on Vocational Education and Training: www.oecd.org/education/vet
Chart source: OECD Education at a Glance 2013: Indicators A1, A5 and B1 (http://oecd.org/edu/eag.htm)

Timekeeping order in the classroom

by Gabriela Moriconi
Thomas J. Alexander fellow to TALIS in the Directorate for Education and Skills

I have mostly good memories of my high school years in São Paulo, but among them I have one that might sound bizarre.  There was never any toilet paper in the school restrooms. Back then, someone explained to me that the reason behind this was vandalism. Students would perform various acts of vandalism, such as making little balls of wet paper to throw at the ceiling or to clog up the toilets. My school was not considered particularly “difficult”. In fact, I had to compete with other students to study in that school, because it was considered one of the best public schools in my hometown, São Paulo. Recently, I learned that this remains a very common concern in Brazilian public schools.

Although this may seem like a rather insignificant issue, I think it reflects two major problems in Brazilian education: widespread poor disciplinary climate and the incapacity to deal with it. Teachers in Brazil report spending the largest proportions of their class time on maintaining order among the 24 countries that participated in the 2008 OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). And as the example above illustrates, dealing with the root of the problem is often avoided – rather the solution is usually to sidestep confrontations and place the blame on someone – especially students, parents or teachers – which then leads to an even more negative environment for students. 

As a fellow participating in the OECD Thomas J. Alexander Fellowship Programme, I am developing research that focuses on analysing the proportion of class time that teachers spend keeping order in the classroom. The study includes in-depth analyses of new TALIS 2013 data and will also include a case-study approach.

Using TALIS 2013 data, I am examining what factors lead to time spent by teachers to maintain discipline in the classroom. We would expect that teachers spend more time maintaining discipline in classes with higher percentages of students with behavioural problems, however there are other factors at stake. This research will identify teacher and school profiles, and policies under which teachers spend less class time disciplining students. For example, teachers who are more experienced, who participate in professional development activities concerning classroom management, and who count on high levels of co-operation among school staff may be found to spend less time keeping order in the classroom.

The data analysis work is taking place at the OECD headquarters where I am working closely with the TALIS team and other colleagues in the Directorate for Education and Skills. On a personal level, this fellowship has given me the opportunity to learn about how the OECD conducts research and to share knowledge and experiences with colleagues from many parts of the world. Through the case-study, I will also be able to learn about particular policies aimed at improving disciplinary climate and the use of class time in education systems, which will enhance my qualifications to work as a researcher and a policymaker in Brazil.

In a wider context I hope that the results of this research will provide evidence-based direction to policymakers, school leaders and educators internationally, and for Brazil in particular, in dealing with disciplinary issues and improving the use of class time.

The OECD is now accepting applications for the Thomas J. Alexander Fellowship Programme. If you have a good idea on how to improve education in your country, send your application by 20 December 2013.

Links:
Thomas J. Alexander Fellowship Programme
To learn more about TALIS visit www.oecd.org/talis

Photo credit: Map © Shutterstock

What teachers know and how that compares with college graduates around the world

by Andreas Schleicher
Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary General

Numeracy test scores of tertiary graduates and teachers 

The purple bar shows the middle-half of the numeracy skills of 16-64-year-old tertiary graduates (the end points are the 25th and 75th percentiles of the test scores) and the red segment shows the average numeracy scores of 16-64-year-old teachers (with a 95% confidence interval)

One of the most frequent claims I have heard from people trying to explain poor learning outcomes in their country is that their teachers come from the bottom third of their college graduates, while high-performing countries recruit their teachers from the top third. It sounds plausible, since the quality of a school system will never exceed the quality of teaching. And, surely, top school systems pay much attention to how they select their staff. They work hard to improve the performance of teachers who are struggling, they provide an environment in which teachers work together to frame good practice, and they establish intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers.

But, again, does all that mean that in those countries the top third graduates chose to become teachers rather than lawyers, doctors or engineers? In the past, nobody really knew because it is very difficult to get comparative evidence on this. That has now changed. A few weeks ago, we published results from our first Survey of Adult Skills, which tested the skills of countries’ workforces – including teachers – in key areas such as numeracy, literacy and problem-solving. With a back-of-the-envelope calculation (teachers are only a small group of the 5000+ workers in each country who were tested) it is possible to compare the numeracy and literacy skills of teachers with those of other college and university graduates (see the chart above).

So what do the results show? In short, among the countries with comparable data, there is no single country where, based on their average numeracy skills, teachers are in the top third of workers with a college degree; and there is no country where they are among the bottom third of college graduates. In fact, teachers tend to come out remarkably similarly to the average worker with a college or university degree. There are just a few exceptions: In Japan and Finland, for example, the average teacher has better numeracy skills than the average college graduate while in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, the Slovak Republic and Sweden it is the other way round.

But you can look at this another way. While, in each country, teachers tend to score similarly to college graduates on our numeracy test, the numeracy skills of the workforce themselves differ substantially across countries, and so the numeracy skills of teachers vary too: Teachers in Japan and Finland come out on top, followed by their Flemish (Belgium), German, Norwegian and Dutch colleagues, while teachers in Italy, the Russian Federation, Spain, Poland, Estonia and the United States come out at the bottom.
So, how then do the numeracy skills of teachers square with student learning outcomes in mathematics? We will all find out on 3 December when results from the next PISA round, the global metric of student performance, will be published.

In the meantime, we can turn our attention to the things we already know. Unless countries have the luxury of hiring teachers from Finland or Japan, they need to think hard about making teaching a well-respected profession and a more attractive career choice  - both intellectually and financially - and invest more in teacher development and competitive employment conditions. They can also learn from high-performing education systems how to transform the work organisation in their schools by replacing administrative forms of management with professional norms that provide the status and the high-quality training, responsibility and collaborative work that go with professional work. They can develop effective systems of social dialogue, and appealing forms of employment that balance flexibility with job security, and that grant sufficient authority for schools to manage their talent. And, perhaps most crucially, many countries need to do better in attracting the most talented teachers to the most challenging classrooms to ensure that every student benefits from high-quality teaching. The alternative is clear: a downward spiral - from lowered standards for entry, leading to lowered confidence in the profession, resulting, in turn, in more prescriptive teaching and thus less personalisation in learning experiences –that will risk driving the most talented teachers out of the profession, that will then lower the skills of the teacher population.

Links:
PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
First result of the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)
TALIS (OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey)
Chart source: © OECD

What do we really know about teaching?

by Kristen Weatherby

Senior Analyst, Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)

I have often heard it said that everyone thinks they are an expert on education simply because they went to school. This is an overstatement, of course, but it does seem today that more and more people have – and express – an opinion about teachers and the quality of their teaching.

But what do we really know about how the majority of teachers are teaching today? Data from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) show that on average across TALIS countries, 13% of teachers did not receive any appraisal or feedback on their teaching. In several countries, this number approaches a quarter or even half of teachers in the country. One can imagine these teachers as completely alone, teaching with the door closed and never receiving feedback on how to improve their practice.

The eighth Education Fast Forward online debate will take place today to discuss in more detail the development of new teaching practices, with the objective of driving deeper learning for every learner. Michael Fullan, the esteemed former Dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto will open the debate. Recognised as a worldwide authority on education reform, Michael will first explore the concept of new pedagogies and what they might lead to. He will then look at how teachers might use technology to develop and change the way students learn, and how changes in teaching over the coming decades could be greater than those that occurred over the past 2 000 years.

I will then take a closer look at what the TALIS data tell us about teachers’ practices today and what factors might contribute to how teachers are currently behaving in their teaching. Research shows that high-quality teaching is linked to the use of a variety of classroom teaching practices that include both student-led and teacher-directed approaches. I will look at what the international data say on whether today’s teachers are equipped to teach in this manner and what kind of support they are receiving to develop their practice.

Michael and I will be joined by education experts from all over the world who will contribute their insights and experiences to this global conversation. The debate will be streamed live to Promethean Planet from 12.00 until 14.30 GMT. Join us to get an inside look at what is really happening in classrooms around the world, and how this might change in the future.

Links:
For more information about Education Fast Forward, visit  www.PrometheanPlanet.com/EFF
To learn more about TALIS visit www.oecd.org/talis or follow @Kristen_TALIS on Twitter.

Photo credit: Classroom © Shutterstock

Reforming education systems: Where to start?

by the Education Policy Outlook Team
Policy Advice and Implementation Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

Today the OECD Education Policy Outlook series is publishing five new country profiles: Chile, Finland, Mexico, Norway and Turkey. Policy makers and educational professionals will gain key insights into other countries’ recent experiences in education. These summaries outline how countries have responded to common challenges and provide lessons learnt about the different policy options adopted, as well as reflections on how to make reform happen in education.

Even when countries address similar reform areas, policy options vary widely.  For example, Chile, Finland, Mexico and Norway have all made early childhood education and care (ECEC) a priority, but in different ways. Chile and Mexico have increased funding and focused on quality aiming for universal coverage; Norway has invested in increasing accessibility, funding and staff; while Finland has defined a core curriculum and moved ECEC from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health to the Ministry of Education and Culture.

Many countries are similarly concerned with responding adequately to the educational needs of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Finland has been successfully implementing a preventive approach to target low-performing students earlier on, with the support of both schools and welfare staff. Australia and Ireland targeted disadvantaged students through education strategies that identify and support schools and school communities with additional resources. On the other hand, Chile has chosen to address the needs of disadvantaged students through financial incentives, which are either targeted at schools via grants or directly at students in tertiary education with a comprehensive scholarship programme.

Ensuring that all students complete upper secondary education is another major priority for many countries: Finland, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway and Turkey have aimed at improving their secondary completion rates, as well as the transition into higher education or to joining the labour market. Mexico and Turkey both have introduced reforms to lengthen compulsory education and also reform secondary education. Finland and New Zealand have implemented an initiative to increase the engagement of youth and ensure qualification completion and employment. Norway has aimed to increase the completion of upper secondary education with a specific measure that motivates low-performing students.

Research confirms what we know from experience high-quality teachers are essential for school improvement, and this is a key policy area for all countries. Looking ahead Chile, Czech Republic, Finland and Norway aim to attract a high-quality teaching workforce. Finland has developed teacher education into a selective and highly qualified profession, which is provided at university level and is research-based, having both a strong theoretical and practical content, as well as instilling pedagogical knowledge. According to selected evidence, only about 10% of candidates who apply to primary teaching studies are accepted and teachers must have a master’s degree. Chile introduced an incentives-based full scholarship to attract high-performing students into teaching. Norway introduced a new campaign that uses short films and a website to promote the teaching profession and this has helped increase applications by almost 60%.

The OECD Education Policy Outlook: Country Profiles inspire reflection and inform action: countries may use them as an opportunity to map out specific country reform processes and to explore co-operation with similar types of education systems.

More information at www.oecd.org/edu/policyoutlook.htm
More information about the Voices of Education Policy at http://www.oecd.org/edu/voices.htm

Photo credit: OECD/Sylvain Fraccola

It’s PISA time again. So?

by Marilyn Achiron 
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Results from the most recent round of PISA surveys are scheduled for release in less than one month (3 December). Why should you care?

For lots of reasons, really. This month’s PISA in Focus highlights a few. For  example, the recently published Survey of Adult Skills finds a close link between countries’ performance in the different rounds of PISA and the literacy and numeracy proficiency of adults of the corresponding age group later on. This is an important connection because the Survey of Adult Skills reveals that highly skilled adults are twice as likely to be employed and almost three times more likely to earn an above-median salary than poorly skilled adults. In other words, poor skills severely limit people’s access to better-paying and more rewarding jobs. Highly skilled people are also more likely to volunteer, see themselves as actors rather than as objects of political processes, and are more likely to trust others. And many – if not most – of these skills are acquired at school.

“Strong performers” in education, as identified by PISA 2009, are those countries and economies that are more successful at imparting those skills to their students than others. They -- Canada, Finland, Hong Kong-China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Shanghai-China -- are found in diverse regions, with different cultures and traditions, and are at different stages of development. But PISA finds that they all share a few common traits: a belief in the potential of all their students, strong political will, and the capacity of policy makers, educators, students and their families to make sustained and concerted efforts towards improvement.

Success in PISA is only partly about test scores. In fact, the most successful school systems are those that not only perform well, but ensure that every student has the chance to fulfil his or her potential. For example, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong-China, Iceland, Korea and Liechtenstein all showed above-average performance in reading in 2009 and are places where socio-economic status has less impact on performance than it does in other countries.

As a regularly recurring survey, PISA can also track progress over time. Of the 26 countries with comparable information between 2000 and 2009, half – namely Albania, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Korea, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Peru, Poland and Portugal – improved their reading performance during the period. The fact that such a diverse group of countries succeeded in raising the level of their students’ performance in reading is another indication that any country can improve, irrespective of its culture, traditions, level of development or initial level of skills.

Since its first round in 2000, PISA has become the international standard for measuring the quality, equity and efficiency of school systems. And because PISA shows that improvement is possible for all, governments and educators, students and parents around the world can learn from each other to build more effective and efficient school systems. In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, and where public budgets are tight, there is little that is more important.

If you’re still unsure about why you should care about PISA results, think of your child’s future, your own abilities at school or at work, and your country’s capacity to compete in a rapidly changing global economy. You’ll find the answers there.

Links:
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
PISA in Focus No.34: Who are the strong performers and successful reformers in education?
Photo credit: Pencil ladder © Shutterstock

Time for the U.S. to Reskill?

by Viktoria Kis
Analyst, Skills Beyond School Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

A few decades ago young people in the United States were among the most educated in the world, but other countries have caught up. Today, despite still being relatively highly educated, the skills of adults lag behind those of adults in many other countries. This has been revealed by the new international Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), which measured the skills of adults in 24 countries.

A newly published report, Time for the U.S. to Reskill?, looks at the U.S. and draws some challenging policy conclusions. One in six adults in the U.S., about 36 million people, has weak literacy skills – they can, at best, read short texts and understand basic vocabulary. In Japan the comparable figure is one in 20. In the U.S. nearly one in three have weak numeracy skills against a cross country average of one in five.

These results are not impressive, but what is really worrying is that there are few signs of improvement. In fact the average basic skills of young adults are not very different from older persons, but if you look around the world you see a very different picture – while the overall results of the U.S. are similar to that of Poland, young Poles have better skills than their U.S. counterparts. That means that if nothing else changes, the basic skills of the Polish workforce will progressively leave the U.S. workforce behind.

Unsurprisingly, the school system appears to be one of the roots of the problem. PISA assessments show U.S. teenagers have mediocre basic skills and these are now reflected in the skills of young adults. Dramatic improvements in initial schooling are needed to turn this around. But the millions of adults have already slipped through the net also need help through effective learning opportunities for young adults, policy measures linked to employability and adult learning programs adapted to diverse needs. Not least, it is crucial to build awareness of the implications of weak basic skills, the costs of inaction and the need to tackle the challenge in the interests of all.

More encouragingly, some of the results point to pathways of opportunity. Participation in adult education is relatively high in the U.S. and many of the low-skilled who for one reason or another did not participate in learning activities express an interest in learning. The results of the survey provide much food for thought and show that this moment is also an opportunity for the U.S. – an opportunity to raise awareness of the importance of adult skills, take action and change course for the better.

Links:
Time for the U.S. to Reskill? What the Survey of Adult Skills Says
OECD Press release: Concerted Action Necessary to Address U.S. Adult Skills Challenge, says OECD
Presentation: Time for the U.S. to Reskill? What the Survey of Adult Skills Says
OECD Skills Outlook 2013: First Results from the Survey of Adult Skills (2013)
Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)
For more on skills and skills policies around the world, visit:
http://skills.oecd.org
Photo credit: American construction © Shuttersctock

Learning in rural China: The challenges for teachers

by Andreas Schleicher
Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary General

Mr. Huang became principal of Qiao Tou Lian He school at the age of 25, not because he was specifically trained for the post, but because he had been the only educated person in his village. He’s a dynamic leader who is squarely focused on supporting, developing and evaluating his teachers, of whom only a handful have a high school degree and more than basic teacher training.

The teaching conditions in the rural Qiao Tou Lian He school, 3,000 kilometres southwest of Shanghai, are tough and teachers are struggling. In Shanghai, teachers not only have smaller classes, but they can also rely on much better initial preparation and more extensive training opportunities at the school, district and municipal levels. They spend 70% of their time teaching and 30% of their time learning, often in collaboration with teachers from other schools. In many countries, we see learning outcomes severely impeded if a quarter or more of the students come from disadvantaged educational backgrounds. Here every child does. The Qiao Tou Lian He school is mainly on its own; but the teachers I met there showed an amazing commitment, and I was struck by the positive learning atmosphere – rigorous, highly disciplined, yet joyful – in every classroom I visited.

Over lunch in his office, Mr. Huang explained how he works with individual teachers to become aware of any weaknesses in their practices – and that often means not just creating awareness of what they do but also changing their underlying mindset. He helps them understand best practices by seeing how they are applied by other teachers in other classrooms. And he motivates his teachers with his high expectations, a shared sense of purpose, and with the belief that they can all make a difference to every child. He keeps close track of teacher performance, looking at both student achievement and classroom management in order to help teachers strengthen their practice. Over time, he also hopes to bring parents along, offering workshops for them not just on how to support their children’s education, but also simply on how to be good parents.

This is a country where everyone is willing to learn: students are learning for a better life; teachers are learning to improve their teaching; schools compare themselves eagerly with other schools; and, perhaps most important, the system as a whole is willing and able to learn. Whether China is interested in designing a better sewer system, retirement system or school system, it sends key people from the relevant sector to visit the world’s best performers in those areas with instructions to find out how it’s done and to put together a design for China that is superior to anything seen anywhere else.

Seven years ago, Andrea Pasinetti came to the area as a college student to brush up his Chinese. He saw both the enormous challenges facing the country’s schools, and also the opportunities afforded by China’s openness to learning. He dropped his studies and founded Teach for China. His organisation is now supporting over 80 schools; it doesn’t provide a high volume of resources, but it offers what is most critically missing in this area: teaching capacity to build teaching capacity. He is enlisting promising future leaders from across academic disciplines and careers to teach at least two years in those rural schools and become lifelong promoters of educational quality and equity.

I met two of these teachers, Xianming Xu and Madeline Christensen and was inspired by their enthusiasm, commitment and professionalism. Critics of organisations like Teach for China maintain that there is no alternative to the traditional route of undergraduate studies, teacher training and then a career in the classroom. But they underestimate the potential that this combination of talent, passion and entrepreneurship represents. In fact, the administration in China understands this better than many other countries and is embracing their work. Zhenhua Mi, another enthusiastic leader of this organisation explains to me that Teach for China is now so attractive that it can recruit the most promising candidates, even where the general status of the teaching profession is in decline. The programme also provides intensive initial training, ongoing support, and a work environment in which teachers work together to create good practice. What impressed me most is the vision of social transformation behind all this work – extending from teacher leadership through school leadership, policy and political leadership, up to community organisation.

By strengthening teaching capacity, these people are making a difference towards helping rural China build an education system that shifts from reproducing educational content for school towards strengthening competencies for life; from education to serve the state towards education for citizenship in the local and global community; from education for competition in exam hell towards strengthening relevant skills; and from education for situational values (I will do anything the situation allows me to do) to sustainable values. That will help the next generation to better reconcile resilience – managing in an imbalanced world – with greater sustainability – putting the world back into balance – that China needs so badly too.

Links:
Video series: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education - Shanghai, China
Related blog posts by Andreas Schleicher
Learning in rural China: The challenges for students
China – what will remain when the dust around economic expansion has settled?
Implementing educational reform in China
Chinese lessons

Photo credit: @ Schleicher OECD