Spoiled for choice?

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Would you rather choose where to send your child to school or have the decision made for you based on where you live? Many parents would rather choose, in the belief that with choice comes the chance of getting a better education for their child. But results from PISA find that education systems do not necessarily benefit as a result.

As this month’s PISA in Focus explains, where parents can choose the school that their children attend, socio-economically disadvantaged parents can end up choosing the best school among a more limited set of choices than more affluent parents; as a result, the benefits of school choice may not accrue to the same extent to disadvantaged students as to their more advantaged peers. And if affluent families are more likely to opt out of the neighbourhood school than poorer residents of the same area, competition may increase socio-economic segregation in schools.

To understand how school choice works in practice, PISA asked parents to rate the importance of different criteria for choosing a school for their children, from “not important at all” to “very important”. Among the list of 11 possible criteria given to parents, one is directly related to the quality of teaching and learning (“The academic achievements of students in the school are high”), but only a minority of parents rated this as “very important” (except in Korea, where 50% of parents did).

Three of the criteria for school choice listed in the parent questionnaire are related to direct or indirect monetary costs (“the school is a short distance from home”; “expenses are low”; “the school has financial aid available”). For more affluent parents, these cost-related factors weigh less than the quality of instruction in their choice of schools, as shown by the proportion of parents who rate the different criteria as “very important”. But in 10 out of the 11 countries and economies that distributed the parent questionnaire, disadvantaged parents tend to choose their children’s school as much on the basis of cost-related factors as on the quality of instruction. These data therefore suggest that parents of different socio-economic status do not seek the same information about schools before choosing one; and even if they have information about the quality of instruction, it may not be the deciding factor.

PISA results also show that, on average across countries, school competition is not related to better mathematics performance among students. In systems where almost all 15-year-olds attend schools that compete for enrolment, average performance is similar to that in systems where school competition is the exception.

What this means is that school choice may actually spoil some of the intended benefits of competition, such as greater innovation in education and a better match between students’ needs and interests and what schools offer, by reinforcing social inequities at the same time.

Links:
PISA 2012 Findings
PISA in Focus No. 42 : When is competition between schools beneficial?
OECD PISA for Parents Facebook page
Photo credit: Set of colorful lockers  / @Shutterstock 

Are teachers really resistant to change?

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

Teachers are often accused of conservatism and resistance to change. Many education policy makers can list numerous examples of well-intentioned reforms that were opposed by the teaching profession and their union representatives in the past. But teachers will argue that reforms are often imposed from the top down, without much consultation with or respect for the professional wisdom and experience of the teachers themselves. At the same time, the teaching profession has not yet completely succeeded in developing a dynamic and change-oriented perspective for its future. The result is that teaching methods and techniques that have worked in the past have become the yardstick by which to assess – and often condemn – ideas about what could work in the future. At least, this seems to be the dominant view.

The finding that, in fact, teachers become more satisfied in their work when education systems go through a process of innovation may thus come as a complete surprise. Innovation and teacher job satisfaction are not mutually exclusive. A new publication from the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), Measuring Innovation in Education: A New Perspective, brings together a wealth of data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that capture various forms of innovation in education. It also presents a composite innovation index for 28 countries or school systems with sufficient amounts of data for the period 2000-11 that covers several areas of innovation-oriented change, such as innovation in instructional practices, in class organisation, in methods of assessment, in the use of technology, in teacher evaluation and feedback mechanisms, and in the ways schools interact with their environments. The composite index measures the size of the changes that have occurred over time as a result of the combined effects of these innovations. (Of course, these school systems might have very different relative positions on the respective indicators.)

According to this index of overall innovation, Denmark, Hungary, Indonesia, Korea, the Netherlands and the Russian Federation have seen the greatest innovation-orientated change between 2000 and 2011. The state of Massachusetts in the United States, Austria and the Czech Republic show the smallest innovation-oriented change. The greater change seen in countries like Indonesia and the Russian Federation can be explained by a catch-up effect, whereas the relatively small change seen in Massachusetts may reflect the state’s already-high level of innovation in education at the beginning of the period. Both the Russian Federation and Indonesia show large changes in more interactive and realistic instructional practices, in encouraging students to reason, rather than learn by rote, in independent work by students, in giving more individual attention to students, and in changes in class organisation and assessment. Both countries also reported large improvements in the use of information and communications technology and in Internet connectivity in the classroom. In Massachusetts, these practices were already in place in 2000 or a negative change was observed in some of the data.

In 23 school systems, this overall innovation index can be correlated with a measure of satisfaction among 8th-grade mathematics teachers between 2003 and 2011, based on TIMSS data (see chart above). The outcomes of this exercise are amazing: the correlation between the two sets of data is strong. In general, school systems that have gone through an intense process of innovation in education tend to be those where teacher satisfaction has increased the most. The relationship is very clear in the upper right quadrant, which includes countries that have innovated more than the average among the OECD countries with available data. However, less change related to innovation does not necessarily correlate with less teacher satisfaction. Some countries in the lower left quadrant have seen a smaller increase in teacher satisfaction than the OECD average, or, in the case of Chile and Sweden, even a decrease, but in the other countries shown on the left of the chart, there is no real relationship between the two data sets.

The composite system-level innovation index includes measures of innovation-oriented change on two levels, the school level and the classroom level. The analysis shows that classroom-level innovation is more strongly correlated with the trend in teacher satisfaction. Clearly, innovation that affects teachers’ daily work – and which probably tends to increase their professional autonomy – matters most for teacher satisfaction.

Interestingly, the composite system-level innovation index also correlates positively with trends in the TIMSS 8th-grade mathematics learning outcomes between 2003 and 2011, as well as various PISA measures of equity in learning. At the risk of over-generalising, it seems that the kinds of innovation in education captured by this OECD innovation index increased the capacity of teachers and schools to cope with challenges, boosted teacher autonomy, and improved teacher satisfaction, ultimately improving students’ learning outcomes and the capacity of systems to create favourable learning conditions for all students in a more equitable manner.

The bottom line is that change, in itself, does not run counter to teacher satisfaction – quite the contrary. In countries or systems where there was a process of rapid innovation-related change, teachers reported greater job satisfaction. If teachers react so positively to change, they can hardly be seen as “conservative”.

Links
The Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)
OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

Chart source: © OECD