Are efficient schools more inclusive?

by Tommaso Agasisti
Thomas J. Alexander Fellow, Directorate for Education and Skills

Distribution of efficiency scores by country
Click here for full size

Analysing the efficiency of education systems and organisations is at the forefront of today’s policy and academic debate. Various factors make efficiency more important than ever: declining public budgets, rising competition across public services for limited public expenditures, increasing demand for transparency in information about the costs and results of schools’ activities. From this perspective, fiscal consolidation in many countries depends on the ability of governments to proactively use information concerning the efficiency of public spending. When focussing on education, providing clear quantitative information about the efficiency of educational institutions has become more important than ever.

In the working paper, we propose an innovative use of PISA data for measuring the efficiency of schools in an international comparison; more specifically, we compare the efficiency scores of more than 8 600 schools in 30 countries using PISA 2012 data. The study deals with the following key research questions:

a)    How relevant are the differences in the efficiency of schools across the selected 30 countries? Are these differences driven more by between-schools or between-countries variance?
b)    Which factors are associated with schools’ efficiency scores? And, are these factors common across all countries?
c)    Is there a trade-off between efficiency and equity at school level?

All three questions can have policy and managerial implications, and each of them also opens the door to potential benchmarking exercises that can prompt school principals to look at the most efficient schools in the world, investigating the drivers of their performances.

Using a non-parametric technique, called Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), that measures efficiency scores from 0 to 1 (where 1 is maximum efficiency level observed in the sample), we find that efficiency scores vary widely both between and within countries. When considering all schools together – so allowing for the existence of an international common benchmark – we find that on average schools can raise their scores by 27%, ranging across countries from 15% for schools in Singapore to more than 33% for those in Slovenia. The Figure 1 highlights how dispersed efficiency scores are within countries; these efficiency scores of schools within countries encompass the entire range of the international distribution of efficiency, underlying the fact that country average efficiency scores mask substantial internal variation.

When we compare each school with those operating in the same country, the average improvement in output is estimated at 15%, ranging from 6%, on average, among schools in Ireland to 22% among those in Slovenia. This result suggests that it could be necessary to consider an international benchmark for efficiency analysis; indeed, the room for improvement is much larger when considering in the sample institutions from various contexts. International benchmarking exercises are really options for opening the mind to more ambitious performance goals – and at lower cost.  

We also investigate if are there factors at the school and country levels that are associated with efficiency. These second-stage variables have been classified in three main groups: students’ characteristics, other than socio-economic status, general characteristics of the schools, and schools’ practices and processes. This last group of variables can help policy makers and school managers to act for improving institutions’ efficiency. The results reveal that the characteristics of the student intake in each school (i.e. the proportion of girls and immigrants, the diversity of socio-economic background, etc.) explain most of the variation in efficiency across schools; however, school-related factors (i.e. practices such as extracurricular activities, principals’ leadership style, etc.) also play a role in describing differences in efficiency across schools.

In the last part of the study, we discuss how we find no evidence of a trade-off between efficiency and equity; in other words, more efficient schools tend to be more inclusive. Efficiency scores are related to greater inclusion, as measured by the percentage of students in the school who score above proficiency Level 2, the baseline level of performance in PISA.

Limitations on methods and data sources imply that the estimated efficiency scores are only proxies for true efficiency. Most importantly, they do not provide precise measures of efficiency at the school level and any attempt to use these measures to rank schools would be ill conceived. Yet, these estimates provide a clear picture of the distribution of schools’ efficiency scores across and within countries. 

We hope that this contribution can help to direct researchers’ attention towards this topic, to explore further the factors that affect efficiency in education.

Links:
The Efficiency of Secondary Schools in an International Perspective
PISA 2012 Key Findings
Thomas J. Alexander Fellowship
Photo source: Authors’ elaborations on PISA 2012 data, www.oecd.org/edu/Figure2.pdf

Education post-2015

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Knowledge capital and economic growth rates across countries*

Next week, UNESCO will convene the world’s educational leaders in Incheon to set the agenda for educational development over the next 15 years. Those who think that’s mainly an agenda for the developing world should read our new report Universal basic skills - what countries stand to gain. The report shows the scale of the effort that is ahead even for many of the wealthiest nations to develop the essential skills that can transform lives, generate prosperity and promote social inclusion. And with a new global metric of the quality of learning outcomes, the report demonstrates that the world is no longer divided between rich and well-educated countries and poor and badly educated ones.

Importantly, the post-2015 agenda is no longer just about providing more people with more years of schooling, but about making sure that individuals acquire a solid foundation of knowledge in key disciplines, that they develop creative, critical thinking and collaborative skills, and that they build character attributes, such as mindfulness, curiosity, courage and resilience.

The first thing the report shows is that the quality of schooling in a country is a powerful predictor of the wealth that countries will produce in the long run. Or, put the other way around, the economic output that is lost because of poor education policies and practices leaves many countries in what amounts to a permanent state of economic recession – and one that can be larger and deeper than the one that resulted from the financial crisis at the beginning of the millennium, out of which many countries are still struggling to climb.

Among the countries compared, Ghana has the lowest enrolment rate in secondary schools (46%) and also the lowest achievement levels for those 15-year-olds who are in school (291 PISA points). While it is difficult for Ghana to meet the goal of universal basic skills any time soon, if it did, it would see a gain over the lifetime of its children born today that, in present value terms, is 38 times its current GDP. This is equivalent to tripling Ghana’s discounted future GDP every four years during the working life of those students with improved skills. For lower-middle income countries, the discounted present value of future gains would still be 13 times current GDP and would average out to a 28% higher GDP over the next 80 years. And for upper-middle income countries, which generally show higher levels of learning outcomes, it would average out to a 16% higher GDP.

The goal of universal basic skills also has meaning for high-income countries, most notably the oil-producing countries. Many of them have succeeded in converting their natural capital into physical capital and consumption today; but they have failed to convert their natural capital into the human capital that can generate the economic and social outcomes to sustain their future. The report shows that the high-income non-OECD countries, as a group, would see an added economic value equivalent to almost five times the value of their current GDP  if they equipped all students with at least basic skills. So there is an important message for countries rich in natural resources: the wealth that lies hidden in the undeveloped skills of their populations is far greater than what they now reap by extracting wealth from national resources. And there is more: PISA shows a significantly negative relationship between the money countries earn from their natural resources and the knowledge and skills of their school population. So PISA and oil don’t mix easily.

One interpretation is that in countries with little in the way of natural resources education is highly valued, and produces strong outcomes, at least partly because the public at large has understood that the country must live by its knowledge and skills, and that these depend on the quality of education. In other words, the value that a country places on education may depend, at least in part, on a country’s view of how knowledge and skills fit into the way it makes its living.

One might be tempted to think that high-income countries have had all the means to eliminate extreme underperformance in education and should already have achieved the education post-2015 goal and targets. But the report shows otherwise. For example, 24% of 15-year-olds in the United States do not successfully complete even the basic Level 1 PISA tasks. If the United States were to ensure that all students meet the goal of universal basic skills, the economic gains could reach over USD 27 trillion in additional income for the American economy over the working life of these students. So even high-income OECD countries would gain significantly from bringing all students up to basic skills by 2030. For this group of countries, average future GDP would be 3.5% higher than it would be otherwise. That is close to what these countries currently spend on their schools. In other words, the economic gains that would accrue solely from eliminating extreme underperformance in high-income OECD countries by 2030 would be sufficient to pay for the primary and secondary education of all students.

The message of these rather complex analyses is simple: there is no shortcut to improved learning outcomes in a post-2015 world economy where knowledge and skills have become the global currency, the key to better jobs and better lives. And there is no central bank that prints this currency. We cannot inherit this currency, and we cannot produce it through speculation; we can only develop it through sustained effort and investment in people.

That raises the question of whether the improvements in learning outcomes suggested in this report are realistic – and how they can be achieved by 2030. The answer to the first question is unambiguously positive. PISA shows that top performers in education, such as Shanghai in China, Korea and Singapore, were able to further extend their lead over the past years, and countries like Brazil, Mexico, Tunisia and Turkey achieved major improvements from previously low levels of performance – all at a speed that exceeds, by a large margin, the improvements described in this report. So the world is full of examples of improvements in education, and there is no time to lose. Without the right skills, people end up on the margins of the society, technological progress doesn’t translate into economic growth, and countries face an uphill struggle to remain ahead in this hyper-connected world. Ultimately in this scenario, the social glue that holds our societies together will disintegrate. The world has become indifferent to past reputations and unforgiving of frailty. Success will go to those individuals, institutions and countries that are swift to adapt, slow to complain and open to change. The task for governments is to help their citizens rise to this challenge by ensuring that by 2030 all of their people are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need for further education, work and life.

Links:
Universal Basic Skills: What Countries Stand to Gain
UNESCO World education Forum, 19-22 May 2015, Incheon, Korea
The World Bank Education for Global Development: A blog about the power of investing in people
PISA 2012 Key Findings
Follow on twitter: #UniversalBasicSkills
Chart Source: Hanushek and Woessmann (2015)
*Added-variable plot of a regression of the average annual rate of growth (in%) of real per capita GDP from 1960 to 2000 on average test scores on international student achievement tests, average years of schooling in 1960, and initial level of real per capita GDP in 1960 (mean of unconditional variables added to each axis).
Note by Turkey: The information in this document with reference to "Cyprus" relates to the southern part of the Island. There is no single authority representing both Turkish and Greek Cypriot people on the Island. Turkey recognises the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Until a lasting and equitable solution is found within the context of the United Nations, Turkey shall preserve its position concerning the "Cyprus issue". 
Note by all the European Union member States of the OECD and the European Union: The Republic of Cyprus is recognised by all members of the United Nations with the exception of Turkey. The information in this document relates to the area under the effective control of the Government of the Republic of Cyprus.

Tough choices in school choice

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

For those parents who have the opportunity to do so, choosing a school for their child is one of the most important decisions they will make as parents – a decision that could have a lasting impact on their child’s life. What do parents look for when choosing a school for their child?

This month’s PISA in Focus reports on the criteria that parents consider before making this decision. Eleven countries and economies distributed a questionnaire to parents of 15-year-olds who sat the 2012 PISA test that asked them to report on the importance they ascribed to several criteria, including school quality, the distance from home to school, the school’s philosophy and financial considerations. Not surprisingly, the quality of the school – including such factors as academic achievement, reputation, environment and safety – comes first among parents. Yet, PISA finds that many parents value certain indicators of school quality – such as the school’s reputation or safety at the school – more highly than they do academic achievement.

While disadvantaged parents are more concerned than advantaged parents about low expenses and the availability of financial aid when choosing a school, PISA results show that disadvantaged parents often ascribe greater importance to these considerations than to criteria that focus on school quality. That is an important finding, because PISA results also show that the children of parents who consider academic achievement very important score 46 points higher in mathematics, on average, than the children of parents who consider it not important. Although the score-point difference shrinks to 32 points after students’ socio-economic status is taken into account, that difference is still equivalent to nearly an entire year of school.

A previous edition of PISA in Focus noted that competition for students among schools – or school choice, from the schools’ perspective – is related to greater socio-economic segregation among students. As this month’s edition makes clear: learning for some students, particularly disadvantaged students, could suffer tremendously in school systems where parents have to choose between affordability and quality.

Links:
PISA in Focus No. 51: What do parents look for in their child's school?
PISA in Focus No. 51 (French version)
PISA Home
PISA 2012 Results: What makes schools successful?
PISA in Focus No. 42: When is competition between schools beneficial?
Photo Credit: Empty Checklist with copy space/ @Shutterstock

How Sweden’s school system can regain its old strength

by Andreas Schleicher

Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

During my days as a university student, I used to look to Sweden as the gold standard for education. A country which was providing high quality and innovative education to children across social ranks, and close to making lifelong learning a reality for all. My professor and mentor, Torsten Husén, was the architect of empirical educational science.

But not long after the turn of the 21st  century, the Swedish school system seems to have lost its soul. Schools began to compete no longer just with superior learning outcomes, but by offering their students shiny buildings in shopping centres, or a driving license instead of better teaching. And while teachers were giving their students better marks each year, international comparisons portrayed a steady decline in student performance. Indeed, no other country taking part in PISA has seen a steeper fall. School discipline has worsened too, with students more likely to arrive late for school than elsewhere.

And yet, Sweden has every chance to become one of the world’s educational leaders again. Among others, it has one asset that few other countries in the Western world offer: The firm belief of Swedes in the power of education to transform lives, generate prosperity and promote social inclusion. And with that comes the unwavering commitment of Swedish citizens and policy-makers from across the political spectrum to do whatever it takes to provide all children with the knowledge, skills and values which they need to succeed in tomorrow’s world.

But some things are in urgent need of change. At the top of the list is the need to raise standards and aspirations for students. The fact that Swedish students think they are doing fine, while their learning outcomes are average at best, underlines the need to significantly strengthen rigor, focus and coherence in school standards. There is a similar need to seriously review teaching methods: According to PISA the majority of math problems which students get exposed to are tasks with relatively low cognitive demand which teacher then try hard to make appear as real-world problems. In contrast, tasks requiring deep conceptual understanding and complex ways of thinking are relatively rare.

Equally important is the belief in the success of every child. Top school systems realise that ordinary students have extraordinary talents and they embrace diversity with differentiated instructional practices. The fact that a majority of Swedish students in PISA believe that success in mathematics is owed to talent rather than hard work, suggests that Sweden must try harder to lower tolerance for failure and raise students’ sense of responsibility for learning. When students in Singapore or Shanghai were asked the same question, virtually all of them said that if they work hard, they trust their teachers to support them and that they will succeed. And they do.

Sweden also needs to revert to one of the traditional strengths of its school system: support for disadvantage. This should include greater focus on enhancing language skills for migrant students and their parents; high quality reception classes; assistants in the classroom; and improved access for disadvantaged families to information about schools. And yet, the performance challenge is not just an issue of poor kids in poor neighborhoods, but for many kids in many neighborhoods. PISA shows that the 10% most disadvantaged students in Shanghai easily outperform the 10% of kids from the wealthiest Swedish families.

Nowhere does the quality of a school system exceed the quality of its teachers. Despite high job satisfaction, only five in one hundred Swedish teachers considered teaching a valued profession in OECD’s 2013 Survey on Teaching and Learning. Top school systems pay attention to how they select and train their staff. They attract the right talent and they watch how they improve the performance of teachers who are struggling. They also provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers. With a new career structure, Sweden has made first steps in that direction, but a lot more needs to be done to advance from industrial to professional forms of work organisation in Swedish schools that encourage teachers to use innovative pedagogies, to improve their own performance and that of their colleagues, and to work together to frame good practice.

Sweden also needs to do more to grow and distribute leadership throughout the school system. School leaders and their employers need to prioritise pedagogical leadership and encourage greater co-operation among teachers and invest more in professional development. A publicly-funded National Institute of Teacher and School Leader Quality would help improve recruitment and the quality of teaching and leadership in the education system.

Sweden has significantly increased spending in education over recent decades, but money alone will only raise education systems up to a point. Among OECD countries there is no longer any relationship between spending per student and the quality of learning outcomes. In other words, two countries with similarly high spending levels can produce very different results. So for countries like Sweden it is not primarily about how much they spend on education, but about how they spend their resources. Whenever Sweden needs to make a choice between a smaller class and a better teacher, it should go for the latter. Sweden should also review how school education is funded. The current funding mechanisms are not meeting the objectives of improving quality while maintaining equity. There are different options Sweden can use, including earmarked funding, defining criteria for municipalities and schools, and student funding formulae, to ensure equity and especially consistency in school funding across Sweden.

Perhaps the toughest challenge is to put in place a coherent national school improvement strategy. A school system must be more than a few thousand autonomous schools. School evaluation and accountability needs to be strengthened so that schools, parents and teachers obtain clear and consistent guidance as to where they stand and how they can improve. That also means that the Swedish Schools Inspectorate should provide much more assistance to schools to follow up on their weaknesses and to bring about a shift in culture from administrative compliance towards responsibility for better results.

Of course, effective policies are far easier designed than implemented. But the world provides plenty of examples of improvements in education, and there is no time to lose. The task for the Swedish government is to help citizens rise to this challenge. The OECD is there to help and our report Improving Schools in Sweden – An OECD Perspective highlights some important lessons from the world for Sweden.

Links:

OECD Press release: Sweden should urgently reform its school system to improve quality and equity

Improving Schools in Sweden – An OECD Perspective

Photo credit: Getty Images International, © Duncan1890

Literacy for life

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Literacy proficiency among 16-65 year-olds:
Percentage of adults at each proficiency level in literacy

As jobs increasingly involve analysing and communicating information, individuals with poor literacy skills are more likely to find themselves at risk. Poor proficiency in these skills limits adults’ access to many basic services, to better-paying and more-rewarding jobs, and to the possibility of participating in further education and training, which is crucial for developing and maintaining skills over the working life and beyond.

On this Leaders for Literacy Day, I want to share some findings from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills. The survey finds, for example, that the median hourly wage of workers scoring at the highest levels in literacy (Level 4 or 5 in the survey) – those who can make complex inferences and evaluate subtle truth claims or arguments in written texts – is more than 60% higher than for workers scoring at Level 1 or below – those who can, at best, read relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information that is identical to the information given in the question or directive or to understand basic vocabulary. In addition, people with poor literacy skills are more than twice as likely to be unemployed.

But the impact of literacy proficiency goes far beyond earnings and employment. In all countries that participated in the 2012 survey, individuals with lower proficiency in literacy are more likely than those with better literacy skills to report poor health, to believe that they have little impact on political processes, and not to participate in associative or volunteer activities. In most countries, they are also less likely to trust others. For example, on average across countries, individuals who perform at Level 1 in literacy are twice as likely to report low levels of trust as individuals who score at Level 4 or 5, even after accounting for their education and social background. Without trust in governments, public institutions and well-regulated markets, public support for ambitious and innovative policies is difficult to mobilise, particularly where short-term sacrifices are involved and where long-term benefits are not immediately evident.

While the evidence on the benefits of high proficiency in literacy is clear, the path towards ensuring that every individual attains at least a basic level of literacy is less so. The latest OECD PISA results show that, across OECD countries, a worrying large proportion of 15-year-old students – 18% -- have not yet attained the baseline level of proficiency as measured by PISA, meaning that they have not yet acquired the reading skills that will enable them to participate fully and productively in society.

What can we do to promote better literacy skills for all

•    Provide high-quality initial education and lifelong learning opportunities.

The impressive progress that some countries, such as Korea, have made in improving the skills of their population over successive generations shows what can be achieved. These countries have established systems that combine high-quality initial education with opportunities and incentives for the entire population to continue to develop proficiency in reading and numeracy skills, whether outside work or at the workplace, after initial education and training are completed

•    Make sure all children have a strong start in education.

PISA results show that investing in high-quality early childhood education and initial schooling, particularly for children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, can help to ensure that all children start strong and become effective learners.

•    Allow workers to adapt their learning to their lives

Programmes to enhance adult literacy need to be relevant to users and flexible enough, both in content and in how they are delivered (part-time, flexible hours, convenient location), to adapt to adults’ needs. Distance learning and open educational resources also allow users to adapt their learning to their lives

•    Identify those most at risk of poor literacy proficiency.

The most disadvantaged adults need to be not only offered, but also encouraged, to improve their proficiency. This means identifying low-skilled adults who require support, particularly foreign-language immigrants, older adults and those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and providing them with learning opportunities tailored to their needs. This is likely to require innovative approaches and significant community engagement.

•    Show how adults can benefit from better skills.

More adults will be tempted to invest in education and training if the benefits of improving their skills are made apparent to them. For example, governments can provide better information about the economic benefits, including wages net of taxes, employment and productivity, and non-economic benefits, including self-esteem and increased social interaction, of adult learning.

•    Provide easy-to-find information about adult education activities.

Less-educated individuals tend to be less aware of education and training opportunities, and may find the available information confusing. A combination of easily searchable, up-to-date online information and personal guidance and counselling services to help individuals define their own training needs and identify the appropriate programmes has often made a real difference.

Results from the Survey of Adult Skills underscore the need to move from a reliance on initial education towards fostering lifelong learning. Seeing literacy as a tool to be honed over an individual’s lifetime will also help countries to better balance the allocation of resources to maximise both economic and social outcomes.

Follow the digital dialogue: How can WE better advance literacy for all and make this the #AgeOfLiteracy?

Links:
Leaders for Literacy Day
Survey of Adult Skills
PISA 2012 Key Findings
PISA in Focus No. 1: Does participation in pre-primary education translate into better learning outcomes at school?
PISA in Focus No. 40: Does pre-primary education reach those who need it most?
Chart Source: © OECD Skilled for Life: Key Findings from the Survey of Adult Skills

Canada Welcomes the Teaching Profession

by J. Alan McIsaac

Vice-Chair, Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC)

Minister, Education and Early Childhood Development, Prince Edward Island

On March 29 and 30, Canada will play host to Implementing Highly Effective Teacher Policy and Practice – The 2015 International Summit on the Teaching Profession (ISTP 2015). The setting will be Banff, Alberta, the jewel of the Canadian Rockies and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

The driving ethos of the summit is the centrality of teaching to education and, by extension, to social and economic development. Its aim is to promote the teaching profession worldwide: to improve its techniques, enhance its appeal, and raise its status as a rewarding career and a respected calling.

Canada is proud to further that aim. With hundreds of delegates from top education systems around the world, ISTP 2015 will provide a wealth of opportunities for generating new ideas and promoting new initiatives. That is one of the surest ways of leading the profession to an even brighter future.

Best practices from the best systems 

The delegates to ISTP 2015 come from across the globe. They represent a remarkable variety of languages and cultures. They come from societies of differing degrees of economic development. Yet, they all share one thing in common: they speak for excellence. 

The systems represented are among the highest-performing in the world or are among those that have demonstrated the most rapid improvement — as measured by results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) an OECD flagship assessment programme.

ISTP has always focused on sharing best practices from around the world, and this year’s summit is no different. Education ministers and leaders of teachers’ unions and associations, along with individual teachers, students, and a variety of education stakeholders will have the opportunity to learn from each other’s challenges and successes by engaging in open and frank discussions on the many issues we all have in common. From national standards, to team teaching, to lesson study, the nuts and bolts of teaching will be on the table. 

Three themes: leadership, recognition and self-efficacy, innovation

The answers to those questions will be formulated within the context of three themes. 

The first is developing and promoting effective leadership. Participants will look at those elements that contribute significantly to a strong sense of leadership in school systems, including distributed leadership, opportunities for professional development, and instructional leadership for principals.

The second theme is supporting teacher recognition and strengthening teachers’ sense of effectiveness, or “self-efficacy.” Evidence from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) suggests that the most successful education systems are those in which the value of the teaching profession is widely recognised by society. Teachers need to believe in themselves to be the best they can be. Yet, how do we get teachers to believe in themselves? This challenge touches on many aspects of the teaching profession, from managing a diverse classroom (a universal theme in teaching) to the need for mutual support, interpersonal relationships, and professional collaboration. It is an ongoing challenge, but one that participating jurisdictions are addressing in their own unique ways.      

   

The final theme is encouraging innovation in the 21st-century classroom, which touches on another universal theme in the profession: the challenge of disruptive technology. We are all — no matter what our culture or society — grappling with the changes brought about by information technology. Those changes are driving a need for innovation. 

This does not mean that innovation itself must always take a technological form. Teachers need to develop new ways to collaborate and communicate. Administrators need to implement new structures for feedback and evaluation. Ministries need to articulate new strategies that ensure coherence across systems in the face of considerable change. These all involve the human element of innovation and do not depend on keeping up with the latest advances in smart phones or tablets.

My colleagues from Canada’s 13 provinces and territories and our co-host, The Learning Partnership, are looking forward to welcoming delegates to ISTP 2015. We encourage you to you to bring your best ideas and your most challenging questions.

(And don’t forget a warm jacket! See you in March.)

Links:

The 2015 International Summit on the Teaching Profession (ISTP 2015)
ISTP Summit Background report: Schools for 21st-Century Learners: Strong leaders, confident teachers, innovative approaches by Andreas Schleicher, Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills

Join a public webinar on 27 March, 17:00 CET with Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD Education and Skills Directorate. Password to register OECDEDU.

Follow on Twitter #ISTP2015
Photo credit: Council of Ministers of Education, Canada

Why boys and girls still don’t have an equal chance at school

by Marilyn Achiron

Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

So: girls are now widely recognised as better students than boys and as more likely to earn a university-level degree than boys. Gender equality in education is achieved!

Hang on. What happened to the boys? And what about all those high-achieving girls who still shy away from further studies in mathematics and science, and who arch an eyebrow in disbelief when someone suggests a career in engineering or scientific research?

If you want to know why real gender equality in education still eludes us, take a look at The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behaviour, Confidence.An analysis of PISA data reveals how student performance is affected by such “intangibles” as behaviour in and outside of school, and self-confidence, and how, in turn, students’ behaviour and confidence can be influenced by parents’ and teachers’ attitudes and expectations.

So, no, we’re not there yet; but this book offers practical ways for teachers, parents and students, themselves, to shrink the gender gap in education outcomes even further – so that girls and boys have an equal chance of fulfilling their potential, both in school and beyond.

Links: 

OECD Press release: Early gender gaps drive career choices and employment opportunities, says OECD

Download the book: The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behaviour, Confidence

OECD Gender Portal
Download the summary: PISA in Focus No. 49 What lies behind gender inequality in education?

Join a public webinar  on 5 March, 17:00 CET with Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD Education and Skills Directorate, and Francesca Borgonovi, Education Analyst.  Password to register OECDEDU.
Follow on twitter #OECDPISA.

Further reading:

A closer look at gender gaps in education and beyond by Stefan Kapferer, Deputy Secretary-General, OECD 
Girls do better than boys despite inequality, The Telegraph 

Girls Get Good Grades But Still Need Help. As For Boys ... SOS!, NPR news
Academic Science Isn’t Sexist, New York Times
Infographic: ©OECD

Got a math problem?

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Some 37% of students in the Netherlands reported that they often worry that mathematics classes will be difficult for them. In Argentina, 80% of students reported the same worry. What is the percentage-point difference between the two countries in the proportion of students who worry that mathematics classes will be difficult for them?*


While reading the above mathematics problem, did you:

1. start hyperventilating and repeat to yourself “I  can’t do this;
   I can’t do this; I can’t do this”
2. grab your mouse with the intent of clicking off this page
3. feel as though you have never encountered such a confusing
   jumble of words and numbers before
4. all of the above?

If you answered a, b, c or d, you’re in good company: on average, about one in three students feels anxious when confronted with a mathematics problem, and more than one in two students reported that they often worry that it will be difficult for them in mathematics classes. Those are alarming statistics – especially because PISA finds that greater anxiety towards mathematics is strongly related to lower scores in mathematics. As this month’s PISA in Focus reports, on average across OECD countries, mathematics anxiety is associated with a 34 score-point decline in mathematics performance – the equivalent of almost one year of school. In New Zealand, Norway and Poland, the decline associated with anxiety towards mathematics is even larger: at least 45 score points.

More worrying still, in almost all countries and economies that participated in PISA 2012, girls reported greater anxiety towards mathematics than boys. Only in Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates did boys report greater anxiety than girls.

PISA finds that students’ anxiety towards mathematics is not just about the subject, itself. Students are more anxious towards mathematics when their schoolmates get better marks than they do, on average. In Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands and Slovenia, students who attend schools where the average student performs better than they do in mathematics tend to be considerably more anxious towards the subject than students who earn similar marks in mathematics, but attend schools where the average student performs as well as they do or worse.

So how can students learn to adopt a more Zen attitude towards mathematics? The answer may lie in their teachers. In 39 countries and economies, among students who performed equally well in mathematics, those students whose teachers consistently tell students how well they are doing in mathematics, give students feedback on their strengths and weaknesses in mathematics, and/or tell students what they need to do to improve in mathematics reported less anxiety towards math. Knowledge is power; and when staring down a mathematics problem, it can relieve stress too.

* There is a 43 percentage-point difference between the Netherlands (which has one of the smallest proportions of students who worry that mathematics classes will be difficult for them) and Argentina (which has one of the largest proportions of these students).

Links
PISA 2012 Findings
PISA in Focus No. 48: Does math make you anxious?
PISA in Focus No.48 (French version)
Full set of PISA in Focus
PISA 2012 Results: Ready to Learn (Volume III) : Students' Engagement, Drive and Self-Beliefs
Photo credit: The Scream / @Wikimédia

What PISA can – and can’t – tell us about adults’ skills

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Can PISA results predict the quality of a country’s labour force one decade later? To find out, we compared some of the results from the PISA 2000  and PISA 2003 tests with results from the 2012 Survey of Adult Skills (a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, or PIAAC). As we explain in this month’s PISA in Focus, we found that those countries where 15-year-old students achieved high scores in PISA were also the countries whose populations of young adults scored at high levels of proficiency in literacy and numeracy a decade after they had participated in PISA.

While, in general, countries tend to maintain the same level of performance in literacy and numeracy as they had achieved in reading and mathematics a decade earlier, PISA results don’t tell the whole story. For example, in Ireland, 15-year-olds performed well above the average score in reading in PISA 2000, but the same cohort scored below average in the Survey of Adult Skills 12 years later. In Italy and Spain, 15-year-olds scored close to the average in reading in PISA 2000, but the same cohort scored well below average in literacy in the 2012 adult survey.

These results tell us that, not only is it important to give all students an opportunity to achieve at high levels during compulsory education, but that the skills acquired in school have to be used later on, or else they’ll be lost (Learning beyond Fifteen: Ten Years after PISA; OECD Skills Strategy). That means that adult education and training systems, employers and labour market policies all have a role to play in making sure that the skills available in a country are used effectively, and in improving the proficiency of those young people who leave school before they have acquired basic skills in literacy and numeracy – which are now a pre-requisite for enjoying full participation in 21st-century societies.

Links:
PISA 2012 Findings
PISA in Focus No. 45: Do Countries with High Mean Performance in PISA Maintain their Lead as Students Age?
PISA in Focus No. 45: (French version)
For more on OECD work on skills go to: http://skills.oecd.org/  
Photo credit: Head and Brain Gears in Progress / @Shutterstock

Spread the wealth, reap the benefits

by Marilyn Achiron, 
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Quick: Who has more up-to-date textbooks: students in wealthier schools or students in poorer schools? Actually, it depends where you live. As this month’s PISA in Focus explains, not only are some countries better than others in allocating their educational resources more equitably across schools, but students in these countries generally perform better in mathematics.

PISA 2012 asked school principals to report whether teacher shortages, or shortages or inadequacy of physical infrastructure or instructional materials, like textbooks, hindered their school’s ability to provide instruction. PISA found that while disadvantaged schools benefit from investments in smaller classes, they are also more likely to suffer from teacher shortages and inadequate instructional materials than advantaged schools. In general, schools with more socio-economically disadvantaged students tend to have less adequate resources than schools with more advantaged students.

It may come as a surprise, but according to PISA data, the United States is the second least-equitable OECD country, after Mexico, in the allocation of educational resources. One in four disadvantaged students in the United States attends a school whose principal reported that a shortage or inadequacy of science laboratory equipment hindered – to some extent or a lot – the school’s capacity to provide instruction. Meanwhile, only around one in seven advantaged students in the United States attends such a school. The differences between advantaged and disadvantaged schools are even starker among Latin American countries, including the OECD countries Chile and Mexico. For example, fewer than one in two disadvantaged students, but more than three in four advantaged students, in Mexico attend schools that have adequate instructional materials.

Apart from making a huge difference to individual students, inequity in resource allocation has an impact on a country’s overall performance in PISA. After taking into account countries’ relative wealth, 19% of the variation in mathematics performance across all the countries and economies that participated in PISA 2012 can be explained by differences in principals’ responses to questions about the adequacy of science laboratory equipment, instructional materials, computers for instruction, Internet connectivity, computer software for instruction, and library materials. At least 30% of the variation in mathematics performance across OECD countries can be explained by how equitably resources are allocated across all schools.

PISA has consistently found that, when it comes to education, money isn’t everything, and that beyond a certain minimum level of expenditure per student, how the money is spent is more important than how much money is spent. When money is translated into such tangibles as up-to-date textbooks, reliable Internet access, and a school library full of books, spreading the wealth evenly across all schools, regardless of their socio-economic profile, gives all students, not just those in the wealthiest schools, the nourishment they need to succeed.

Links:
PISA 2012 Findings
PISA in Focus No. 44: How is equity in resource allocation related to student performance?
PISA in Focus No. 44 (French version)
Photo credit: Teenager students outside protecting their heads from a rain of books / @Shutterstock

Who is most likely to be left back at school?

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

It was the kind of thing you whispered about with your classmates, while for the kid himself – and it usually was a “he” – it was an embarrassment that some tried, unsuccessfully, to dress up as a badge of honour. Being left back at school was no joke; and the practice continues to take a toll on millions of students every year – even though it does little to benefit the individual student who is required to repeat a grade.

The latest PISA in Focus highlights how successive rounds of PISA have found that grade repetition shows no clear benefit, either for individual students or for school systems as a whole. It is also an expensive way of handling underachievement, since the students who are left back are more likely to drop out of school entirely, or stay longer in the school system and so spend less time in the labour force.

Some countries have begun to realise that grade repetition is neither cheap nor particularly effective in assisting struggling students. They are rejecting the practice in favour of identifying and providing support earlier to these students. Among the 13 countries and economies that had grade repetition rates of more than 20% in 2003, for example, these rates dropped by an average of 3.5 percentage points by 2012. Rates fell particularly sharply in France, Luxembourg, Macao-China, Mexico and Tunisia.

Results from PISA 2012 suggest another good reason to end the practice of grade repetition: because disadvantaged students are more likely than advantaged students to repeat a grade, grade repetition tends to reinforce inequities in the school system. Across OECD countries, one in five socio-economically disadvantaged students reported that they had repeated a grade at least once since they entered primary school, while fewer than one in ten advantaged students reported so. In Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia and Uruguay, more than one in two disadvantaged students reported that they had repeated a grade at least once since they entered primary school.

More troubling is that even among students with similar performance in mathematics, reading and science, the likelihood of having repeated a grade is often linked to socio-economic background. In 33 of the 61 countries and economies analysed, the odds of repeating grades are significantly higher among disadvantaged students than among advantaged students, after accounting for differences in mathematics, reading and science performance across students. On average across OECD countries, disadvantaged students are 1.5 times more likely to repeat grades than advantaged students who perform at the same level.

What this shows is that poor academic performance is not the only reason students are left back; other factors related to socio-economic disadvantage come into play as well. For example, grade repetition may be used not to help students who are lagging behind, but as a form of punishment to sanction misbehaviour. PISA data show that disadvantaged students are significantly more likely than their advantaged peers to arrive late for school or to skip classes. But it is unclear – at best – how repeating a grade improves behaviour in class and engagement at school. What is clear is that students who arrive late for school or skip classes miss out on learning opportunities, which, in turn, reinforces inequities related to socio-economic background.

Being required to repeat a grade adds shame and embarrassment to students who may already be discouraged and disaffected at school – and to no apparent benefit. Instead of making struggling students the focus of class gossip, isn’t it better to make them the focus of the support, extra help and encouragement they need – as soon as they need it?

Links:

PISA 2012 Findings

PISA in Focus No. 43: Are disadvantaged students more likely to repeat grades?

Photo credit:  Broken pencil  / @Shutterstock

More data for better policies

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

As recently as 30 years ago, politicians, leaders and practitioners believed that all economic and social systems could and should be measured, and that managing these systems better would require more data. Except for education systems. Education systems were considered to be so different across countries that international data would never do justice to each system’s specificity. And what happened in the classroom was something believed to be unmeasurable. Yes, maybe you could count the number of students or calculate the years people spend in school; but that was basically it.

Some pioneers had the courage to think differently. Against the tide, and confronting a lot of resistance, they organised international network meetings to discuss the essence of what was happening in education, agree on definitions, develop measurement tools, and exchange and compare data. After all, how could it be that what seemed to be so evident in many other complex systems was impossible in education?

Back to the present. The pioneers have gone; highly professional teams are now bringing their ideas into fruition. We have come to understand that, just as in all other spheres of life, many dimensions of what happens in education can be measured and assessed in an internationally comparative way, without doing injustice to the complexity and sensitivity of education. We now know not only how to count students and the amount of money invested in education, we also know how to translate complex realities into accessible language, thanks to tools such as ISCED. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has taught us how to master the challenge of assessing the knowledge and skills that students acquire in schools. We have been able to relate education to external data on employment, earnings, health outcomes and more intangible outcomes, such as interpersonal trust, to better understand the many social purposes that education serves.

On 9 September the OECD will publish its 2014 edition of Education at a Glance, the world’s most extensive and authoritative data source of international educational statistics and indicators. This year’s edition includes no less than 30 different indicators and over 100 000 pieces of data. Policy makers, education leaders, practitioners and a wide variety of stakeholders will try to find out how their system is doing compared to that of other countries. How educated have our societies become? Have the investments in our schools decreased as a consequence of the economic crisis? How large is the earnings premium from which tertiary graduates benefit over their lifetime? Do pupils in private schools perform better than in public schools? Is social mobility a reality or just an aspiration? How well do we pay our teachers? How many students now travel over the globe to study elsewhere? These questions emerge not just out of curiosity. The data and the evidence increasingly serve to underpin and improve policies. A system as complex as education cannot be managed and steered without reliable and comparable data. Better and more data result in better policies.

This year’s edition is particularly rich because the OECD has been able to benefit from three main sources of survey data: the PISA 2012 database on learning outcomes of 15-year-olds, the data from the Survey of Adult Skills (a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, or PIAAC), and data on teachers from the 2013 OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). Combined with the data collected from administrative sources, we now have the largest database in education ever brought together in human history.

Does this mean that the mystery of the educational encounter between teacher and learner has been sacrificed on the altar of numbers? No, just as the sophisticated data-monitoring systems in the health sector have not destroyed the genius of the medical act. In both cases the data have helped to create better conditions for the magic to happen.

Launch events:
Live streaming of launch event in Brussels with Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director of Education and Skills, and Xavier Prats Monné, European Commission Deputy Director-General for Education and Culture
OECD Education and Skills webinar presenting Education at a Glance: 2014 OECD Indicators (registration required. Password: OECDEDU)
Follow #OECDEAG on Twitter:  @OECD_Edu @OECDLive @EAG_Indicators
See full listing of media events
Links:
OECD Education at a Glance
Education GPS - the OECD source for internationally comparable data on education policies and practices
Photo credit: © OECD