PISA for Development

by Erik Solheim
Chair of the Development Assistance Committee, Development Co-operation Directorate

PISA for Development, launched on the 27th of March 2015 in Guatemala, provides an opportunity to improve the quality of education in Guatemala and throughout the developing world. Participation in PISA will help Guatemala benchmark its educational system and support the government efforts to improve education at all levels, particularly for the most disadvantaged and the large indigenous population of the country. PISA for Development also aims to identify ways to better measure, benchmark and improve education in developing countries.

Extreme poverty has been halved in two decades, and the world is now richer, better educated and more peaceful than at any other point in human history. More than 9 out of 10 children, and almost as many girls as boys, now go to school. Guatemala has made great strides in the last few years. Participation in primary education increased from 86% in 2001 to 93% in 2011, above the world average. But we must get to 10 and make sure that children learn more.

Enrolling all children, keeping them in school and providing a good education is essential for development. The education a country has today is the economy it will have tomorrow. All the great success stories in recent times have put education at the core of development. South Korea went from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest, by focusing on education and industrialisation. Young Koreans are now 390 times richer than their grandparents were. Korean 15-year olds perform better in school than any other OECD nations.

Leadership is important. The founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, emphasised the importance of education during his entire life, and the results are now visible. In Guatemala, Minister of Education del Aguila has been a champion for PISA and education reform. A former teacher, Minister del Aguila combines real experience in education with political leadership.

Huge strides have been made in securing basic education for all. Nevertheless, children are not learning enough at school. Too many students still drop out before high school or university. Shortage of skilled labour is a big problem in many developing countries. The quality of education will be a central aspect of the new United Nations sustainable development goals, which will be agreed upon later this year. The OECD has launched PISA for Development as a contribution to improve the quality of education all over the globe. Since 1997, PISA has been the leading reference on the quality of education systems worldwide. The “PISA-shock”, or the understanding that you have a lot to learn from others, has inspired many countries to reconsider policies and improve their education systems. Now the time has come to take this success to a global level and work towards better quality education for all.

The OECD has partnered with Zambia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Cambodia, Senegal and Guatemala to identify how PISA can better measure the quality of education in developing countries. The PISA test instruments will need to be adjusted to account for bigger differences between the highest and lowest performing students. New methods must be tested to evaluate students that are not attending formal schooling. We hope that these efforts will enable more countries to use PISA to set national learning policies and monitor progress.

Monitoring and evaluation is crucial for improving education. PISA is a powerful tool because it gives countries an honest assessment of whether their students are on the right track. Brazil has done more than any other PISA participant to improve its education system. Brazil was on the bottom of the ranking when it first participated in 2000. Then Brazil used PISA to prioritise policies and do focus more on what policies work better. Brazil improved the quality of its education system faster than any other nation over the next 10 years. The Bolsa Familia program, which provided cash remuneration to low-income families in exchange for enrolling children in school also contributed to improved education for the poorest children most likely to be out of school.

PISA opens up opportunities to allow us to learn from the best. Chinese and other East Asian students are the best performers in mathematics and science, and reading. The seven top spots on the PISA ranking are occupied by Asian countries and cities. There must be many things we can learn from Asian success stories, whether the secret is aspiring students, good teachers or better public policies. Guatemala and Peru is paired as part of a mentoring mechanism to provide peer-to-peer technical advice and learn from each other. Identifying policies that work and implementing these on a global scale is key for improving the quality of education.

Good policies are much more important than money.  Fifteen year old students in poor Vietnam are doing better than the average student in much richer countries. Only about 6% of performance differences in PISA test are explained by national income. Money is best used to underpin good policies.

Quality education is the way to development and poverty reduction. Monitoring progress, learning from success stories and implementing the best policies is the way to improve quality of education. Let the children learn!

Links:
PISA in Development
PISA 2012 Key Findings
Photo credit: © Roberto Franco Arias/Pedro Molina

Getting our youth back to work

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

If there’s one lesson we’ve learned over the past few years, it’s that we cannot simply bail ourselves out of a crisis, we cannot solely stimulate ourselves out of a crisis and we cannot just print money our way out of a crisis. But we can become much better in equipping more people with better skills to collaborate, compete and connect in ways that drive our economies forward.

There is no group for whom this is more important than today’s young people. Between 2008 and 2011, the gap in unemployment rates between higher- and less-educated youth widened dramatically. While young people with advanced skills have weathered the crisis reasonably well, those without foundation skills have suffered. Unemployment among young people without a high school education soared 20% in Estonia and Ireland and 15% in Greece and Spain. The short-term impact on individuals, families and communities beg for urgent policy responses; the longer-term impact, in terms of skills loss, scarring effects and de-motivation, will affect countries’ potential for recovery. Without the right skills, people will languish on the margins of society, technological progress will not translate into economic growth, and countries can’t compete in the global economy.

What’s often overlooked amid the grim statistics is that a few countries, like Austria, Chile, Germany and Korea saw a sizeable drop in unemployment rates among their low-skilled youth. What this tells us is that, with the right policies and economic environment, we can do something about this and it seems to boil down to three actions: build the skills that foster employability; give young people the opportunity to make their skills available to the labour market; and ensure that those skills are used effectively at work.

To begin, we need to be able to anticipate the evolution of the labour market: we need to know what skills will be needed to reignite our economies. The coexistence of unemployed graduates on the street, while employers say they cannot find the people with the skills they need, shows clearly that more education alone does not automatically translate into better jobs and better lives.

We need to put a premium on skills-oriented learning throughout life instead of on qualifications-focused education that ends when the working life begins. We need to tackle unacceptable rates of school dropout by offering more relevant education and second-chance opportunities, and by offering work experience to young people before they leave education.

OECD’s Learning for Jobs analysis shows that skills development is far more effective if the world of learning and the world of work are integrated. It’s not difficult to understand why. Skills that aren’t used can atrophy. And, compared to purely government-designed curricula taught exclusively in schools, learning in the workplace allows young people to develop “hard” skills on modern equipment and “soft” skills, such as teamwork, communication and negotiation, through real-world experience. Hands-on workplace training can also help to motivate disengaged youth to stay in or re-engage with the education system.

But building skills is the relatively easy part of the plan; far tougher is providing opportunities for young people to use their skills. Employers might need to offer greater flexibility in the workplace. Labour unions may need to reconsider their stance on rebalancing employment protection for permanent and temporary workers. Enterprises need reasonably long trial periods to enable employers giving those youth who lack work experience a chance to prove themselves and facilitate a transition to regular employment. And some countries may need to review the minimum wage for younger workers to make it easier for low-skilled young people to get their first job and discourage early school leaving by lowering the opportunity cost of staying on at school.

Last but not least, if all of this is about more than getting young people temporarily off the street, we need to ensure that talent is used effectively. Skills mismatch is a very real phenomenon that is mirrored in people’s earnings prospects and in their productivity. Knowing which skills are needed in the labour market and which educational pathways will get young people to where they want to be is essential. High-quality career guidance services, complemented with up-to-date information about labour-market prospects, can help young people make sound career choices.

We also need to maintain and expand the most effective active labour-market measures, such as counselling, job-search assistance and temporary hiring subsidies for low-skilled youth; and we need to link income support for young people to their active search for work and their engagement in measures to improve their employability.

But none of this is going to work unless everyone is involved: governments, which can design financial incentives and favourable tax policies; education systems, which can foster entrepreneurship as well as offer vocational training; employers, who can invest in learning; labour unions, which can ensure that investments in training are reflected in better-quality jobs and higher salaries; and individuals, who can take better advantage of learning opportunities and shoulder more of the financial burden. This week OECD will launch an Action Plan for Youth to be presented at the Organisation’s annual Ministerial Meeting in Paris in order to step up government’s efforts to tackle high youth unemployment and strengthen their education systems to better prepare young people for the world of work. It’s time for all of us to take the lessons we learned through the crisis and turn them into a sustainable plan to get our young people back on the path to prosperity.

Links:
OECD Forum 2013: Give youth a chance
skills.oecd: Working with youth
OECD Skills Strategy Spotlight: Apprenticeships and Workplace Learning
OECD Skills Strategy
OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)
Photo credit: Young adult looking for work / Shutterstock

Business in-a-box: a global skills solution

by John Hope Bryant 
Founder, Chairman and CEO of Operation HOPE and Bryant Group Companies, Chairman, Subcommittee on the Underserved and Community Empowerment for the U.S. President's Advisory Council on Financial Capability, bestselling Inc. Magazine/CEO READ business author for Love Leadership: The New Way to Lead in a Fear-Based World (Jossey-Bass)

OECD has just launched their OECD Skills Strategy, which I fully support. I call it the global-common-sense-plan-for-educational-relevancy.The OECD Skills Strategy seeks to powerfully re-connect the power of education with youth aspirations globally, maybe for the first time in a generation.  Quoting my friend Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, in his breakthrough book The Coming Jobs War, "this is the playoff game for the rest of our lives."

The roots of the crisis now gripping Greece, and Europe in general, is not social it's economics and jobs. The main complaint of the Occupy Movement is is economic in nature. The youth led riots in the suburbs of both Paris and London were rooted in economics and jobs, or the powerful lack thereof. The crisis that sparked what many call the Arab Spring, with Mohammad setting himself ablaze in Tunisia, was rooted in local economics and his job. His financial dignity. Specifically, Mohammad had his cart business taken from him, which represented for him his human and financial dignity, the way he fed his children and kept a roof over his family's head.  His job, and thus his aspirations in life, was a large part of his identity.

A young HOPE Fellow at Operation HOPE told me recently that "you cannot have social justice unless you first have economic justice." I agree, and thus the movement today has to be more about silver rights empowerment than simply civil rights justice. Or quoting my friend Richard Cordray, head of the new U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, "as John Hope Bryant told me, and I believe, if we had more consumer empowerment we would need less consumer protection."

What every young person in school around the world wants is essentially the same thing; they want a shot at "a good job," or an authentic opportunity to exercise their economic energy in a way to connects their aspiration with real and sustainable opportunity.

What if we could reconnect the power of aspiration with the power of education in our children's lives? What if a child in elementary school could start a business for $50-100 (U.S.?)? A middle school student could do the same with up to $200, or up to $500 for a high school student?  What if they could get a financial literacy course and a course in dignity, connected with a primer course in entrepreneurship?

They could select from 25 businesses that can be started for $500 or less, pitch their idea for this business in front of a live audience of business role models from their community, get a Business-In-a-Box Youth Entrepreneurship Grant, a business role model, and even a bank account--how would that change their lives? How would that bring the power of aspiration and imagination, and hope back to their educational experience? We think it changes everything. HOPE Business in-a-box, formally launched this Fall in schools across America, will channel and transform a youth’s natural aspiration and state of hope into practical and life changing action steps.  Action steps that they can move on themselves, with a little help from HOPE and our influential friends.

Now imagine this as a global solution, to the sustained youth jobs desert in developed countries today, as well as the jobs crisis from Africa, to Asia, to Latin America, to the 100 million jobs estimated to be needed soon in the Middle East, just for the youth population there. Imagine what could happen if you could double the level of financial literacy in a specific school house, and then double the level of economic energy in that same school house, and then triple or quadruple the level of business role models in that same school house, over a 5-year period of time (it will happen much sooner than that by the way).  You simply change everything in that school, with those youth.  You crush the high school dropout rate crisis in developed countries, because all youth want is a "good job" or economic opportunity.  You also set your nation up for sustained future success, because you are defining your future based on the only real asset you have – the future aspirations of your youth, and their very real connection with local GDP growth in your town, township, city, state and country.

For America, that means the 30 million young people, grades 4-12th, aged 8-18, are the farm club and bench strength for the playoff game of the rest of our lives.  How we field and play that game will decide everything pin 2025.  We are starting now.

Links:
For more information on:
John Hope Bryant
Operation HOPE Business-in-a-box 
The OECD Skills Strategy: http://skills.oecd.org