How much do teachers cost?

by Eric Charbonnier and Etienne Albiser
Analysts, Directorate for Education and Skills

Can increasing the salaries of teachers lead to better learning outcomes? Does reducing class size have a positive effect on learning outcomes? Given the current background of tight public budgets, governments seeking to ensure value for money must ask themselves these questions before increasing the salary cost of teacher per student, as teachers account for a major part of education expenditure.

The latest edition of Education Indicators in Focus highlights that the salary cost of teacher per student is a combination of four factors: teachers’ salary, class size, the number of teaching hours in front of a classroom and the number of hours of instruction received by students.

Countries that have similar levels of expenditure on education do not necessarily have similar educational policies and practices. A given level of expenditure may result from a different combination of these factors. One country may pay higher salaries to teachers while another may have smaller class sizes and thus more teachers to pay.

Between 2000 and 2010, increases in the salary cost of teacher per student were mainly influenced by changes in teachers’ salaries and class size
 With the exception of France and Italy, the salary cost of teacher per student at the primary and lower secondary levels increased between 2000 and 2010, and on average it increased by one-third and one-quarter, respectively (for countries for which data is available). In the majority of cases, this increase was due to an increase in the level of teacher compensation (16% at the primary level and 14% at the lower secondary level). The largest salary increases (more than 50%, in constant prices) were seen in the Czech Republic, Estonia and Turkey.

During the same period, class size decreased, by 14% (primary) and 7% (lower secondary), but this was often the result of changing demographics and not of a change in education policies.

Little change in instruction time and teaching time
With the exception of a few countries, there was little or no change with respect to the two other variables (instruction time and teaching time) during the same period. This may be due to the political sensitivity of reforms in these areas. At the primary level, teaching time increased most significantly in the Czech Republic (200 hours) and instruction time increased the most in Iceland (by nearly 200 hours).

The higher the level of education, the higher the salary cost of teacher per student, with great disparities between countries
Spending on education rises sharply with the level of education. The OECD average salary cost of teachers is USD 2 307 per primary student, USD 2 856 per lower secondary student and USD 3 301 per upper secondary student. In some countries, the differences between the different levels of education is quite small (in Chile and Hungary it is less than USD 50) while in others it is quite important (exceeding USD 2 000 in the Flemish Community in Belgium).

In general, teachers of higher levels of education earn more money than teachers at lower levels. In addition, teaching time generally decrease as the level of education increases (meaning that more teachers are necessary to teach the same number of students).

Wrapping up
Reforms relating to these four factors have an impact on education expenditure and may also affect learning outcomes. However, the link between expenditure and outcomes is not straightforward. PISA results show that between 2000-2009, the performance of 15-years olds did not vary significantly in the majority of countries, regardless of the changes we have seen in instruction time, teaching time, class size and teacher compensation. What is more, changes relating to pedagogy may have an impact on outcomes without necessarily having an impact on expenditure.

The bottom line is that in the past ten years, increasing teachers’ salaries and reducing class size have not led to better learning outcomes in the majority of countries. This raises the question: has all of the additional money been well spent?

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 2012: OECD Indicators: www.oecd.org/edu/eag2012
Chart source: OECD Education at a Glance 2012:  Indicator B7 (www.oecd.org/edu/eag2012)

Grade expectations

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills 

They’re a source of both anxiety and pride, but school marks can also have long-term consequences for students. Most teachers reward student achievement, but also the skills, attitudes, habits and behaviours that are necessary for lifelong learning. However, as this month’s PISA in Focus  points out, the tendency of teachers to award higher marks to girls and socio-economically advantaged students than to boys and disadvantaged students – even if they perform equally well in school and have similar positive attitudes towards learning – is cause for some concern.

Marks help to promote student learning by informing students about their progress, alerting teachers about their students’ needs, and certifying the degree to which students have mastered the tasks and competencies valued by teachers and schools. Schools and teachers recognise this: more than 95% of students in the countries and economies that participated in PISA 2009 – except Korea – attend a school that measures student achievement through teacher-prepared tests, student portfolios or student projects. In most cases, students receive feedback on these assessments in the form of school marks.

As PISA results show, few countries and economies share the same marking schemes; in fact, even schools within a country may have different ways of marking. In addition, different education systems establish their own ways of informing students that they have failed a class or an assessment. In some countries, the marking scheme allows for only one possible value for failing. This means that students who fail do not know how far they are from meeting the passing criteria. This is the case in Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia and the Slovak Republic. Other countries establish the passing mark somewhere in the middle of the marking scale, which gives students some idea of how far they are from passing. In Ireland, for example, the grading scale ranges from 0 to 100, but only scores below 40 are considered unsatisfactory or failing. In some countries, such as Austria, Hungary, Poland and the Slovak Republic, the remaining values on the marking scale reflect the quality of the passing mark in clear and distinct labels, such as “sufficient”, “good”, “very good” and “excellent”; meanwhile Belgium (Flemish Community), Italy and Ireland use a wider array of numeric values (e.g. 50 to 100, 10 to 20 or 6 to 10).  Analyses suggest that countries and economies that have a grading system with a limited number of values and use labels that refer to clear categories of achievement (e.g. “sufficient”, “good”, “very good”, “excellent”) can better differentiate students’ performance.

Students often base their expectations of further education and careers on the marks they receive in school; and school systems use marks to guide their selection of students for academically oriented programmes and, later, for entry into university. So whenever teachers reward – or punish – certain student characteristics that are unrelated to learning they may inadvertently shape a student’s future according to factors that have nothing to do with the student’s abilities, talents and personal goals.

That’s why it’s a good idea for school systems to promote marking practices that reward the behaviours and attitudes that help students to learn – so that more students can make the grade.

Links:
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
PISA in Focus No. 26: Grade Expectations
Grade Expectations: How Marks and Education Policies Shape Students' Ambitions 
Photo credit: Test score sheet / Shutterstock

Who says she’s a great teacher?

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

Most of us have been lucky enough to have had at least one great teacher in our lifetime: a teacher who inspired us to work hard and take risks, who opened up new worlds for us; a teacher whom we remember years, even decades, after the brief intersection of our two lives as someone who changed the course of our life or deepened the meaning of it.

What makes a teacher great? And who gets to decide? Students? Parents? Fellow teachers? Principals?

There are some countries where mentioning the phrase “teacher evaluation” around educators, teachers’ union leaders and policy makers provokes a rise in the ambient temperature. Teachers in the United States and France have gone on strike over the issue and Britain’s teachers’ unions and those that represent head teachers found themselves on opposite sides of a recent debate about whether to base teachers’ pay on their performance.

Nearly everyone agrees that school systems need to find a way to encourage promising teachers, reward those who have demonstrated their effectiveness, and remove underperforming teachers from the profession. And in the 23 countries that participated in OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), 83% of teachers who had received appraisal and feedback considered them to be fair assessments of their work; of those, 78.6% found that the appraisals were helpful in developing their work as teachers. But agreement on how to measure teachers’ skills is harder to come by.

Teacher-appraisal systems in most countries are still a work-in-progress – where they exist at all. Some 13% of teachers in countries that participated in TALIS had never received any feedback or appraisal of their work from any source. This is partly because such systems may be costly – in money and time – to design and maintain. More often, though, it’s because there is no consensus on what criteria should be used to measure teacher performance (student test scores? a teacher’s ability to engage a classroom full of students? students’ and/or parents’ opinions? some or all of the above?); who should do the measuring (an inspector from a central education authority? the school principal? fellow teachers?); and how the results of an evaluation or appraisal should be used (to determine salary? to shape the trajectory of a career? to signal professional-development needs? to weed out ineffective practitioners?).

Stakeholders are already beginning to find common ground on a few issues. They note, for example, that while student test scores offer important information, they cannot provide a complete picture of teaching quality; multiple sources of evidence are needed for that. And they agree that teacher-appraisal systems must be part of a holistic approach to the teaching profession that includes high-quality teacher training and professional development, attractive working conditions, nurturing school leaders, and engaging teachers in innovation and reform.

The subject of teacher evaluation came up briefly during the first two International Summits on the Teaching Profession, both held in New York. This week, participants at the third Summit, which is being held in Amsterdam and hosted by the OECD, Education International and the Ministry of Education of the Netherlands, will be examining the issue in depth from their various perspectives as teachers, union leaders, education ministers and experts in education – and perhaps, too, as former students who may have once had a great teacher. Consensus might be too ambitious a goal for this meeting; but a lively – not to say provocative and passionate – discussion is all but assured.

Links:
Third annual International Summit on the Teaching Profession, 13-14 March 2013, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Teachers for the 21st Century: Using Evaluation to Improve Teaching
Related blog: A class act: giving teachers feedback
Follow the summit on twitter: #ISTP2013
Photo credit: Jose Luis Pelaez, Inc./Blend Images/Corbis

A Women’s Day Challenge

by Barbara Ischinger
Director for Education and Skills

On a recent visit to New Zealand, I attended a memorial service for the 185 people who lost their lives when the earthquake of 22 February 2011 struck Christchurch. What I took away from that gathering was less the still-fresh grief but rather the sense of purpose that followed the tragedy. Kay Giles, chief executive of Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT), for example, who was already devoted to assisting young people – most of them boys – who had dropped out of the education system, put her passion and expertise to work by calling on people involved in apprenticeship programmes to help those who had lost their livelihoods to the earthquake. Stakeholders from local businesses, industry and education worked together quickly to develop long- and short-term training modules to put people back to work – sometimes in entirely different careers – as soon as possible.

I met, too, with New Zealand’s Education Minister, Hekia Parata, who is part Maori, and a vocal champion of indigenous culture and rights. She told me she is particularly concerned about Maori boys who are increasingly falling out of the education system and, in doing so, are dooming themselves to a very uncertain future.

On this International Women’s Day I’d like to be just a bit provocative and suggest that we start paying a little more attention to boys. Boys are getting lost in today’s life and we don’t really understand why. A recent study finds that boys’ behaviour costs them dearly in school marks (our next PISA in Focus, due out on 14 March, has a few other interesting things to say about how teachers award marks to girls and boys); and a school in Shanghai, China – which was the best-performing school system in the 2009 PISA survey  – has just introduced boys-only classes  in an effort to turn around the decline in boys’ performance in university entrance exams. (I was interested to read that some of the boys interviewed said that they felt shy answering teachers’ questions in front of girls. Didn’t many girls used to say that the presence of boys made them reluctant to participate in class?)

How do we make sure that our education systems – and labour markets – are equitable, and create good opportunities for both boys and girls?

We have done a lot for girls, and we see the positive results of this in everyday life. Girls are, on average, doing better in school than boys, and more women now graduate from university-level education than men. Of course, there is still a lot of room for improvement: just look at the salaries of women versus those of men. And I am irritated when I attend board meetings in the private sector and note that women are still a minority.

So we must not look at the great strides girls and women have made in recent decades and think that the battle is won. But I would also add: We don’t gain much if we gain on one side and lose on the other.

Am I focusing too much on boys on what is supposed to be the day we celebrate the girls and women of the world? I don’t think so. It’s all about empowerment: having equal opportunities to realise our individual potential. And that is something that should not be gender-specific.

Links:
OECD work on Gender: www.oecd.org/gender and www.oecd.org/gender/data for data on International Women's Day
OECD Feature: Growing more equal
OECD Insights: Born a girl: bad karma?
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
Photo credit: Boy with apple on head in classroom / Shutterstock

A class act: giving teachers feedback

by Kristen Weatherby
Senior Analyst, Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)

When I think back on my first experiences as a student teacher of English language and literature to 13- and 14-year-olds, I don’t really remember the successes; I am not sure there were many during my teaching practice. Rather, I am reminded of the more colourful episodes of classroom management and student behaviour that seemed to occur all too frequently. For example, there was the time I looked up from reading to the class to see one student staring back with a green mustache and eyebrows. Another time one student jumped up from his desk and threw another student’s books out the window before I could blink. And then there were the countless times that I had to take away combs, brushes and makeup from both girls and boys in an effort to turn my classroom from a beauty salon into a place of learning. Needless to say, in these moments I didn’t feel like a very effective teacher.

Little did I know it at the time, but I was not alone in feeling a bit like a failure due to a less-than-ideal classroom climate. The newest Teaching in Focus brief, “How can teacher feedback be used to improve the classroom disciplinary climate?” discusses how providing teachers more feedback to improve their classroom’s disciplinary climate can have a positive effect on their sense of mastery of the situation, what is known as self-efficacy. The OECD’s  Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) measures classroom disciplinary climate by the amount of time it takes to ready students for a lesson, the number of student interruptions, and the amount of noise in the classroom, among other factors. TALIS data shows that, on average, 13% of a typical class’s teaching and learning time is lost to keeping order.

TALIS data also shows that most teachers are not receiving the kind of feedback that helps them to improve their classroom disciplinary practice. As a result,  teachers are left feeling much as I did as a new teacher – not very effective. In fact, this is supported by the TALIS data, which indicates a relationship between teacher self-efficacy and classroom disciplinary climate. Teachers’ self-efficacy can have a significant impact on what goes on in the classroom, as it indicates not only aspects of productivity but also how teachers act in class. And teachers who report poor classroom discipline also report lower levels of self-efficacy.

Policymakers, union leaders, and teachers will be meeting next week in Amsterdam for the third International Summit on the Teaching Profession. This year’s topic is teacher evaluation and professional standards. Constructive feedback – as part of formal or informal teacher appraisal – could help teachers to improve their classroom disciplinary climate. TALIS 2008 results suggest that individualised feedback that considers the teachers’ characteristics, competencies, and individual classrooms, would be most helpful in improving classroom disciplinary climate and teacher self-efficacy. It undoubtedly would have helped me to chalk up a few successes during those early days in front of the class.

Watch this space for more blogs related to the Teachers’ Summit. We’ll also be tweeting live from the Summit. Follow the summit on twitter: #ISTP2013

Links:

For more on the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey:www.oecd.org/edu/talis
Teaching in Focus: How can teacher feedback be used to improve the classroom disciplinary climate?
Third annual International Summit on the Teaching Profession, 13-14 March 2013, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Teachers for the 21st Century: Using Evaluation to Improve Teaching
Follow TALIS and Kristen Weatherby @Kristen_Talis
Photo credit: Positive feedback/Shutterstock