Are schools ready to join the technological revolution?

When it comes to technology, education seems stuck in the age of chalkboards. But at an international conference on technology in education, held in Qingdao, China, last week, I got the feeling that educators and education ministers might finally be ready to join the technological revolution.

Right now, at a moment when information and communication technologies are changing the way we live in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways, only around 37% of schools in Europe have high-end equipment and high-speed Internet connectivity, a figure which ranges from 5% in Poland to virtually 100% in Norway. But when asked, between 80% and 90% of school principals say that their schools are adequately equipped when it comes to computers and Internet connectivity – even principals in the many countries where the equipment is clearly substandard. So is technology not that important? Or are school leaders not aware of the potential of ICT to transform learning?

The situation is even more puzzling than that. PISA measured students’ digital literacy and the frequency and intensity with which students use computers at school (look out for the PISA report on digital technology in education to be published in September). One might think that the more students use computers at school, the better their digital skills. But in fact, the relationship is not so simple. Students who use computers moderately at school have somewhat better learning outcomes than students who rarely use computers; but students who use computers frequently at school do a lot worse, even after accounting for their socio-economic status and other background factors.

Put these data together and one can draw two conclusions:

One is that building deep, conceptual understanding and higher-order thinking requires intensive teacher-student interactions, and technology just distracts from this valuable human engagement.

Another is that we haven’t yet become good enough at the kind of pedagogies that make the most of technology; that adding 21st-century technologies to 20th-century teaching practices will just dilute the effectiveness of teaching. If students use smartphones to copy and paste prefabricated answers to questions, that’s surely not going to help them to become smarter. If we want students to become smarter than a smartphone, we need to think harder about the pedagogies we’re using to teach them.

Technology can amplify great teaching, but great technology cannot replace poor teaching. We also know from our TALIS survey that even in the best-performing school systems, teachers cite improving their ICT skills as the second most important priority for their professional development.

What can we take away from all this?

First, education is a personalised service, so technology can only go so far in improving learning outcomes.

Second, the impact of technology on education delivery remains suboptimal because we tend to overestimate the digital skills of both teachers and students, because of often naïve policy design and implementation strategies, because of a poor understanding of pedagogy, and because of the generally poor quality of educational software and courseware. Few children would choose to play a computer game of the same quality as the software that finds its way into many classrooms around the world.

What could we gain if we fixed these problems?

The most obvious gain would be to dramatically expand access to content. Why should students be limited to a textbook that was printed two years ago, and maybe designed ten years ago, when they could have access to the world’s best and most up-to-date textbook? Equally important, technology allows teachers and students to access specialised materials well beyond textbooks, in multiple formats, with little time and space constraints, as we saw at the Qingdao conference.

Second, technology provides great platforms for collaboration in knowledge creation, where teachers can share and enrich teaching materials. It can also make feedback to students, teachers and parents faster and more granular.

Third, technologies can support new, inquiry-based pedagogies that focus on learners as active participants. For example, we can enhance experiential learning, with remote and virtual labs, we can pursue project-based, hands-on and collaborative learning, and we could deliver more formative, real-time assessments. The conference in Qingdao displayed some interesting developments to that end, including highly interactive, non-linear courseware, based on state-of-the-art instructional design, sophisticated software for experimentation and simulation, social media to support learning and teaching communities, and using games for instruction.

But if we continue to dump technology on schools in a fragmented way, we won’t be able to deliver on any of these promises technology holds. Countries need to have a clear plan and build teachers’ capacity to make that happen; and policy makers need to become better at building support for this agenda.

Given the uncertainties that accompany all change, educators will always opt to maintain the status quo. If we want to mobilise support for more technology-rich schools, we need to become better at communicating the need and building support for change. We need to invest in capacity development and change-management skills, develop sound evidence and feed this evidence back to institutions, and back all that up with sustainable financing. Last but not least, it is vital that teachers become active agents for change, not just in implementing technological innovations, but in designing them too.

by Afif Shato

Links:

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Post-2015 Education

PISA in Focus brief: Are boys and girls ready for the digital age?

Photo Credit: Digital classroom / @Shutterstock

Education in the 21st Century: Five lessons from China

by Dr. Catherine Yan Wang
National Institute of Education Sciences

China has redesigned its education system since embarking on opening up the country and implementing reforms in the latter half of the 70s. The journey of change started from an ethos of “Orientation Towards Modernisation, Orientation Towards the Future, and Orientation Towards the World”, created during the late 70s, which went through a three-decade long reflection and debate on quality-oriented education (versus examination-oriented education). It  gained momentum in 2001 with an Action Plan for Invigorating Education for the 21st Century, and resulted in the ground-breaking Basic Education Curriculum Reform that profoundly changed education philosophy, content and pedagogy for education from Grade 1-12. After three decades, not only has China achieved universal access to basic education, Shanghai also became a top-performer in the PISA 2009 round of tests. And the changes continue. Although there are still many challenges and barriers facing the education system in China, several strategies and approaches proved to be workable and effective, including the following five lessons:

1) Evidence-based, participatory policy-making. Like many policies in China, the formulation of the Basic Education Curriculum Outline involved five steps: conducting surveys, drafting, consulting, experimenting and implementation and expansion. It began with a stakeholder survey including teachers, parents, researchers, local authorities and communities, followed by the drafting of the document by a team consisting of researchers, practitioners and administrators. It then went through consultations with schools, teachers and local governments, to solicit their opinions on the relevance and feasibility of the policy. The policy for trial was piloted in four provinces and amended on the basis of piloting. The finalised Outline was then implemented nationwide.

2) Provision of professional support to teaching. China created a Teaching Research System, to provide ongoing support to teachers’ classroom methods, which consisted of teaching research institutes at provincial, prefecture (municipality) and county levels. The researchers, mostly selected from the best in the profession, support other teachers’ work by coordinating school-based research projects, regular visits to schools, interpreting curriculum standards, analysing classroom teaching, preparing teaching lessons, developing teaching materials and distilling best practices for extension (e.g. through demonstrations). Some of the institutes have been integrated with teaching training college and this has made teaching research a booster of teachers’ professional development.   

3) Learning from the world. China, its government agencies, research institutions and even schools all look to other countries’ experiences for inspiration in the process of making changes for improvement.  Since the 1980s, government officials have made many overseas study tours to learn different practices.  These brief glimpses of the outside world have impacted their way of thinking and how they do their work. Major studies almost always contain a component of international comparative study to benchmark against developed countries, and draw upon best practices in order to generate policy recommendations. The schools, in their pursuit of internationalisation, developed exchange partnership with overseas counterparts, and also kept on learning from the outside world to update their teaching content and methods.

4) Experimentation. Partly originating from a principle borrowed from the economic reform, “cross the river by touching stones,” various new thoughts and ideas have continually been tried as experiments in the education system, with successful experiments often being translated into policies. A typical example is the “Shiyi Experimental School”: it abandoned the  traditional way of organising students’ learning in fixed classes on dozens of subjects, and instead, developed over
1 000 courses from which 4 600 students could choose, many of them relating to emerging issues of the 21st century. This has recently sparked a nationwide debate on how to deliver education in China.

5) Balancing between unity and diversity. In 2001, China adopted a three-level curriculum structure aligned with the principle of “common basics, diversified options” that encompasses national, local, and school-based curricula, of which the national curriculum accounts for 80%, and local and school-based curriculum 20%. Such a structure ensures that all the students master fundamental knowledge and skills, while leaving schools ample room for experimentation and innovation.

It is hard to generalise about education development, given its inherent complexity which is only compounded by the size and diversity of such a large country as China. The Chinese idiom “Bearing a global perspective (the big picture) in mind, and start from a (small) concrete action” might best summarise and illustrate lessons for China in setting educational policy for the 21st century . Education can, and will, make a difference on students' learning and social well-being, especially when taking into consideration the tremendous changes happening in the 21st century and the actions that will be taken in the future to meet these challenges and opportunities step by step.

Links:
Global Education Innovation Initiative (GEII)
PISA 2012 results
Video series: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education - Shanghai, China 
Related blog posts:
A new direction for education reform in China, by Dr. Catherine Yan Wang 
Implementing educational reform in China, by Andreas Schleicher
Image Credit: Students and teacher looking at globe / @Shutterstock

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

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

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

Learning in rural China: The challenges for students

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

The first thing I notice is that, in this neighbourhood of simple houses and farmlands, it is the school, not a shopping centre, that is the cleanest and most impressive building in the area. The Qiao Tou Lian He primary school can afford only 29 staff to look after the 714 children who attend. Most of the children stay for the full school-week as they have to walk for several hours to reach their homes. So the school has become their family, albeit one where the children have to assume an incredible amount of individual and social responsibility, with very limited support from adults.

Roughly 3,000 kilometres southwest of Shanghai, a city that harbours the world’s leading education system, the Qiao Tou Lian He primary school is one of the fruits of China’s efforts to educate its citizens who live in sparsely populated rural areas like this. While the economic and social development of these areas has been remarkable by any standard, China’s coastal areas are racing ahead at an even faster pace, thus widening disparities. That, in turn, fuels an endless stream of people moving to the cities: students looking for a better education, parents looking for work, and teachers who excel in their jobs and are looking for more fulfilling careers. Shanghai, alone, registers 1,000 additional cars each day by those who have made it upwards in the social ladder.

Short of options to bring high quality education to the children up in the mountains, China has begun to consolidate rural schools to form viable hubs which bring together the infrastructure and critical mass of teachers that are needed to build strong instructional systems. That’s never easy. Over generations, schools have become the heart of communities; when the children leave, communities see their future endangered. But there have also been serious implementation problems in China, most notably involving transportation, that have bogged down progress and, in some areas, brought the consolidation process to a halt. But Qiao Tou Lian He school is an example that is well on its way to turn the challenges into opportunities. It offers the children from four former remote schools educational opportunities - and a future - that neither they themselves nor their parents could have ever imagined in their villages.

The children at Qiao Tou Lian He school live in a dormitory composed of tiny rooms that each holds 12 beds and 18 children (you can do the math). But room after room is in impeccable order, with the belongings of each child tidily arranged. A cheerful squad of 5th and 6th graders walks from room to room, with notebooks in their hands in which they record notes about hygiene and discipline; and they help the smaller children as best as they can. Only one already over-burdened teacher is appointed to respond to the needs of these hundreds of small children on any given day.

Every education system seeks to make children resilient so that their can find their way in a world in constant disequilibrium — trying, failing, adapting, learning and evolving. Resilience assumes that we don’t know exactly how things will unfold; that we’ll be surprised; that we are open to learning from the extraordinary; that we’ll make mistakes along the way, but that we persist and invest ourselves. Few children will be better prepared for this than the students of Qiao Tou Lian He school, even if the price for this is so high. Those who return to their communities after their education will be able to help those communities adapt to China’s rapid economic and social changes. In the meantime, though, when the students go home, they often have no one to talk to: their parents may be working far away; but even if they are at home, they may not understand the world that is opening up to these children.

Min, a 5th grader, explains that his greatest joy is to read books in a bookstore—even though the bookstore is not around the corner, but a good two-hour walk from his home. In many countries, we see learning outcomes severely impeded if a quarter or more of the students come from disadvantaged backgrounds. At this rural school, every child does. So how do the teachers at Qiao Tou Lian He school cope, let alone teach? I’ll discuss the challenges – and successes – for teachers in rural China in my next blog.

Links:
Video series: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education - Shanghai, China
Related blog posts by Andreas Schleicher
China – what will remain when the dust around economic expansion has settled?
Implementing educational reform in China
Chinese lessons
Photo credit: @ Schleicher OECD

Implementing educational reform in China

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

On the invitation of China's National Institute for Educational Sciences (NIES), I spent some days in Beijing to learn more about education policy and practice in China. As always, this was a very rewarding experience. I met with various teams of educational policy-analysts, researchers and educators in Beijing to provide advice on their work and discuss global trends in education policy and practice. They do not seem to get tired of learning from other countries and cultures as systematically as possible, with strong and consistent efforts not only to do discipline-based international benchmarking but also to incorporate the results of that benchmarking into policy and practice. The Institute is just finalising an impressive study on reform trends in the G20 members, and that work is no longer about emulating what other G20 nations are doing but about learning from them and putting together a design for China that can be superior to anything their researchers have seen anywhere.

While they look carefully at the World’s leading economies and education systems, they are all too aware of the widening income gaps and the uphill struggle they face in providing children in rural areas with a foundation for success, not to speak about the massive skill gaps in the adult population. A significant part of their policy and research agenda is geared towards education in rural transformation, quality, social inclusion and the social welfare of children. Efforts since 2001 to consolidate schools in sparsely populated areas, with the aim to create learning environments that are sustainable and of higher quality have run into real difficulties in the implementation process and the handling of the political economy, to the extent that the Ministry just announced suspending further mergers. This, however, is an area where time is working against them; the rapid demographic changes will make it harder and harder to provide an adequate schooling experience for the most disadvantaged children, not to speak of depriving students of opportunities to see a bigger part of the world - and their teachers of much-needed opportunities to improve pedagogical practice through learning from a more diverse range of colleagues and facilities that come with larger school units.

Quite in contrast to this stands the rather successful curriculum reform. This reform has not just been about updating and repackaging educational content, but aims at helping students find out who they are, where they want to go in life, and how they will get there, in a rapidly changing and increasingly uncertain world. Clearly, the new curriculum will not unfold its full impact on student learning and teacher behavior before China tackles its exam culture that remains narrowly focused on rote learning. But still, there seem signs that the reform is beginning to positively influence teacher development, institutional innovation, classroom culture, research culture and the management culture of Chinese education. It was interesting to learn about the trajectory from designing the reform at the end of the 1990s, through carefully piloting it and then progressively rolling it out (with much emphasis on training teachers and school principals), up to extending it to full implementation at the upper secondary level just this year. That’s a full 16 years to align policies and practices across the different aspects of the school system, ensure their coherence and build capacity for progressive implementation and refinement. Contrast that with most curriculum reforms in the West, where leaders feel they need to get this through in one electoral period, and where we often end up with wave after wave of curriculum reform passing above the heads of those who need to deliver them in classrooms at the frontline.

Read the second blog by Andreas Schleicher: China – what will remain when the dust around economic expansion has settled

Links:
OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
Video Series: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education 
OECD Department for Education
Follow Andreas Schleicher on twitter: @SchleicherEDU
Photo credit: China blackboard /Shutterstock

China – what will remain when the dust around economic expansion has settled?

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

I recently met Vice Mayor Fu Yonglin of Chengdu, one of the key drivers behind the rapid educational transformation that his municipality has seen over the last years. I was struck by his take on how China’s power and role in the World would - when all the dust about economic expansion will have settled - not be primarily determined by what and how many goods China produces, but by what China will be able to contribute to the global knowledge pool and to global culture.

In a country where the average graduate takes home a salary of RMB 2900, roughly what a maid in the main metropolitan areas gets after three meals, money is clearly not the only motivator for the immense value which society places on education, and it seems China’s political and social leaders continue to be able to persuade their citizens to value education, their future, more than consumption today. Interesting were also the ways in which he consolidated the need to preserve and build on the past (‘nothing comes from nothing, everything has a history and evolves from there’) with the need to embrace change and prepare students for jobs that have not yet been created, to use technologies that have not yet been invented, and to solve problems that we don’t yet know will arise. He was well aware of the learning curve the Chinese have in front of themselves here, the essential need for China to play an active role in globalization processes, and the importance of capitalizing on the potential of education as the key enabler to engage with different cultures, fields of knowledge and languages. He had seen the impact which PISA has had on educational reform and internationalization in Shanghai and was keen to get his province involved. His province is making big investments in other aspects of internationalization too (if you get yourself accepted as a foreign student in Chengdu and stay for more than 5 months, the municipality will take care of your expenses).

Read the related blog by Andreas Schleicher on Implementing educational reform in China

Links:
OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
Video Series: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education 
OECD Department for Education
Follow Andreas Schleicher on twitter: @SchleicherEDU
Photo credit: Chinese schoolboy /Shutterstock