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