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

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

Excellence through Equity

by Max Rashbrooke
Journalist, SGI News

In social terms, it’s essential to invest in education.  A recent OECD report How was Life?, looking at global well-being since 1830 finds that, in terms education, there has been a massive improvement.  A lack of educational opportunities creates a vicious circle, in which those unable to get a decent education are denied opportunities for social betterment, the socially disadvantaged then struggle to access education, and so on. Breaking this vicious circle not only improves the lives of individuals; it helps maintain the social fabric. At the same time, it makes good economic sense to nourish every child’s talent, so that they grow up to be productive members of the workforce.

In its assessment of equitable education, the Bertelsmann Stiftung new study “Social Justice in the EU – A Cross-national Comparison" has ranked all 28 European Union countries’ educational policies in several dimensions. The extent to which children’s socio-economic status determines their school results is a key measure. But the report also looks at spending on early childhood education, and countries’ success in lowering the rates of students leaving school early. Finally, it includes an expert assessment of countries’ overall educational policies.

In general, those doing best in the rankings are three Nordic European Union member states (Denmark, Finland and Sweden), two Baltic countries (Estonia and Lithuania), and a European Union new entrant (Croatia). Britain’s ranking is slightly below average. The very worst performers are Malta, Portugal, Slovakia and Greece. The biggest improver has been Luxembourg, while the worst slide down the rankings has come in Slovakia.

Countries should not focus on excellence per se but on equity

Several of the top-ranked countries in terms of equitable access to education such as Estonia and Finland are also the best performers when it comes to reducing the influence of students’ social background on their educational performance. What lies behind this success?

If Finland is anything to go by, the answer is that if a country wants high achieving students, its best bet is – counter-intuitively – to focus not on excellence per se but on equity. Finland’s school system, which is dominated by public schools and has no national testing, has some of the best-performing students in the European Union, as shown in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings. Despite these excellent results, the Finns don’t relax their focus: their latest four-year education plan places a special emphasis on preventing poverty, inequality and exclusion.

Estonia can boast a similar record: top school results, with little influence of social background on students’ performance. This shows that a high degree of social justice and a well-performing school system are not incompatible goals; in fact, emphasising one often delivers the other.

Investing heavily in the early years also pays dividends. Students who have been in pre-primary education do better than those who have not, especially when they have been in it for several years and its facilities have small pupil-to-teacher ratios.

Some countries have picked up on the importance of the early years. Poland, for instance, is making big strides by insisting on compulsory preschool education. Overall, Bulgaria, Denmark and Hungary invest the most in early childhood education. This is especially important in the latter two countries, where the link between social background and academic achievement has historically been very strong. In contrast, Germany, despite having recently increased public spending on early-childhood education, is still only spending at about the average level for the EU, and does not place sufficient emphasis on high-quality early education.

Early school leavers rates are declining across the European Union – yet not evenly

Reducing the number of students leaving school early is another important objective. Early school leaver rates are declining across the EU, but some countries are doing much better than others. Spain has the worst early leaver rates, at nearly one in four of all students, a situation being made worse by austerity policies that are cutting spending on education.

Countries such as Croatia and Slovenia, by contrast, have exceptionally low rates of early leavers. However, there are fears that many of their students are parked in low-quality vocational courses that do not provide the skills employers need and therefore do not lead to good job opportunities.

There are, in contrast, few question marks over Germany’s justly famous vocational system. It is hugely important to the country’s functioning, with over half of all young workers having gone through the system. Helping reduce youth unemployment, it is well-calibrated to employers’ needs, and leads to strong job and income prospects.

It is, however, situated within a wider education system that is highly selective and segregated. Children are pushed down a particular path, whether it is academic or vocational, at a relatively early age. This tends to create a ‘twin-track’ approach, in which a child’s ability in early life – which tends to be heavily influence by their background – pushes them into a path that, to some extent,determines their fate for the rest of their life.

Avoiding early selection in schools is essential

In countries with early selection, educational success depends strongly on a child’s origin and socioeconomic background, and children from disadvantaged and immigrant backgrounds have much less chance of doing well at school than they would in other European Union countries.

In short, to advance social justice and equal access to educational opportunities, avoiding early selection is essential. Over and over, countries with early selection are marked out as having poor opportunities for the most disadvantaged. Luxembourg, for instance, has this issue, despite spending more per student than any other European Union country.

In Austria, experts have criticised the early division of children into multiple educational tracks. This policy means that parents’ social status very often influences whether children go onto higher education.

PISA results highlight another aspect of this issue. The earlier children are tracked and separated according to performance, the more influence their background has on their educational success. But the countries that do this early separation do not see their overall results rise. In other words, it is not possible to say that even if some children’s prospects are damaged by this approach, most children are better off.

The lesson to be drawn here is not too different from that provided by the Estonian and Finnish systems, which, as above, focus on equity and – as a by-product – also deliver excellence. School systems that don’t separate children out early seem to do better both on educational justice and in terms of learning success. And this exemplifies that social justice and economic progress, far from being competing ideas, are actually entirely compatible. In other words, you really can have your cake and eat it.

A forthcoming OECD Education Policy Outlook will provide policy makers with the policy options to deliver equity and quality in education,  such as investing in early childhood education and care (ECEC), tackling system-level policies that may hinder equity (such as grade repetition, unsupported school choice or early tracking) and supporting students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Links:
Education Policy Outlook
How was Life?
PISA 2012 Results
OECD work on Early Childhood Education and Care
Equity, Excellence and Inclusiveness in Education : Policy Lessons from Around the World
Related blog posts:
OECD educationtoday: Building the knowledge economy
Photo credit: Toys seesaw wooden blocks / @Shutterstock

Charting the way towards excellence and equity in education

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

Something remarkable is taking place in New Zealand right now: ministers and teacher union leaders from the best-performing and most rapidly improving education systems are making a unique global effort to raise the status of the teaching profession. The agenda of this year’s International Summit on the Teaching Profession focuses on three policy goals: excellence, equity and inclusion. Vital questions are being addressed, such as how can equity be achieved in increasingly devolved education systems, and how can high-quality teachers and leaders be attracted to schools with the greatest needs?

Why are these questions so important? To teachers, parents and young people, these questions may appear remote from the realities of school life; but the Summit’s unique mix of delegates enables both policy and practice to come under the spotlight. Largely as a result of PISA’s policy messages, many school systems have moved away from top-down administrative control towards giving schools greater autonomy. However, if autonomy is to benefit schools, teacher self-efficacy and the quality of learning, education systems should enable schools to enhance their capacity and encourage a culture of collaboration.

Knowledge about effective education practices tends to stay in the places where it is created, and rarely spreads without effective strategies and powerful incentives to share it. We need to think harder about how to spread good practice and innovation.

This year’s Summit host, the New Zealand Government, has one of the most devolved school systems in the world. Its schools are used to autonomy, but they also benefit from national interventions that focus on enhancing teaching and learning and sharing good practice, and that fully involve their teachers and their unions.

There is a message here. If the benefits of devolving responsibility to schools are to be realised, then the education system itself has to be coherent and effective enough to support schools. The evidence from PISA is that collaborative school management and co-operation among schools are factors in improving student achievement, as is a systemic approach to accountability. That requires a coherent, system-wide approach to the selection and education of teachers and to their pay structure. It also requires close attention to helping teachers who face difficulties in improving the quality of their teaching. And it requires an environment in which there are intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers and in which they can work together to develop new knowledge and practice.

Indeed, everything that previous Summits tell us is that teachers’ engagement in reform is crucial, and that strong, proactive teacher unions have a vital role in developing education policy as well as in supporting teachers professionally.

Essential as the development of teachers is, equity and inclusion are also promoted by other measures being in place. Evidence shows that early tracking, or grouping students by ability, amplifies the impact of students’ socio economic status and limits the achievement of disadvantaged pupils. As a result, countries and regions, such as Poland and a number of Lander in Germany, have recently adopted more comprehensive school systems.

Evidence also shows that school choice has to be managed if the children of parents from disadvantaged backgrounds are not to be disadvantaged, themselves, when it comes to school admissions. In a system with greater school autonomy, it is crucial that equitable admissions criteria apply to all schools.

Nowhere is a coherent, system-wide approach more necessary than for schools with the greatest needs. Again we need to think harder about how to attract dedicated and committed teachers to work in the most challenging classrooms and the most effective principals into the toughest schools.

How education systems respond to disadvantage is a test of their overall effectiveness. Such schools need a range of strategies. They include: providing adequate learning resources; creating a teacher workforce that is responsive to students’ backgrounds; preparing teachers for working in disadvantaged schools; offering mentoring and coaching for such teachers on an ongoing basis; improving working conditions; introducing financial incentives as part of teachers’ career structures; providing regular professional development that addresses diversity issues; and guaranteeing effective employment conditions.

Above all, we need to do better in thinking about how to promote a common vision of schooling and a united school system. These are big issues for teacher unions and governments alike and we have only skimmed the surface. Watch the Summit's Youtube channel for video footage of the event.

Links:
International Summit on the Teaching Profession 2014
OECD Summit Background Paper: Equity, Excellence and Inclusiveness in Education, by Andreas Schleicher
OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey
PISA 2012 Results: Excellence Through Equity: Giving Every Student the Chance to Succeed (Volume II)
Follow the summit on twitter @OECD_Edu  #ISTP2014
Photography courtesy of: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

Don't give up on ‘Education for All’

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

The well-being of individuals and nations depend on nothing more than on what people know and what they can do with what they know. And if there’s one lesson the global economy has taught us over the last few years, it’s that we cannot simply bail ourselves out of a crisis, that we cannot solely stimulate ourselves out of a crisis and that we cannot just print money our way out of a crisis. Investing in high-quality education is the gateway to better skills, better jobs and better lives.

And yet, the 2014 Global Monitoring Report, the world’s most authoritative source to track progress towards the ‘Education for All’ goals, paints a bleak picture. With the deadline for these goals less than two years away, progress has been insufficient to get close to even a single goal by 2015. To date, just half of young children have access to some form of pre primary education, and in sub-Saharan Africa it is less than one in five. Universal primary education is likely to be missed by a wide margin, with 57 million children still having no access to any schooling. Access is not the only crisis: one third of primary school age children are not learning the basics, whether they have been to school or not, and even those who eventually graduate may not find jobs because their education hasn't been in sync with the skills that societies need.

It would be a grave mistake to consider this exclusively or even largely an issue for conflict zones or the developing world, even if that's where those issues are most visible. When it comes to education, the world is no longer divided between rich and well-educated nations and poor and badly educated ones. Similarly, the challenge of poor schooling is not just about poor kids in poor neighbourhoods, but about many kids in many neighbourhoods. Last year, OECD countries invested over USD 230 billion into teaching children math in the industrialised world, but 23% of their 15-year-old students performed below the baseline Level 2 on the PISA 2012 mathematics assessment, showing that these students can barely use basic mathematical procedures and conventions to solve problems involving whole numbers. Worryingly, that proportion is exactly where it stood a decade earlier.

Those numbers matter, for the life chances of individuals, and for the growth prospects of nations. If all students attained at least Level 2 in the PISA mathematics assessment, the combined economic output of OECD countries could be boosted by USD 200 trillion. So the cost of low educational performance is far higher than any conceivable investment in improvement.

The Global Monitoring Report also shows how many adolescents lack essential foundation skills and adult literacy has hardly improved since 2000. Here too, the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills finds that poor skills severely limit people’s access to better-paying and more-rewarding jobs and, at the aggregate level, inequality in the distribution of skills closely relates to how wealth is shared within nations. People with better skills are also more likely to volunteer, see themselves as actors rather than as objects of political processes, and are more likely to trust others. As the Global Monitoring Report notes, educated people are more likely to start a business, and their businesses are likely to be more profitable. In Uganda, owners of household enterprises with a primary education earned 36% more than those with no education; those with a lower secondary education earned 56% more. In short, fairness, integrity and inclusiveness in public policy thus all hinge on the skills of citizens.

That's the sad side of the story. The encouraging side is that, while there is so much to do in so many parts of the world, some countries show that it can be done. On PISA, countries like Brazil, Tunisia, and Turkey rose from the bottom, countries like Germany or Poland have moved from adequate to good, and countries like Singapore or Shanghai in China have moved from good to great. In some of PISA’s top performers, even the quarter of the socio-economically most disadvantaged children break through the cycle of disadvantage and reach high levels of student performance. Leaders in these countries have convinced their citizens to make choices that value education, their future, more than consumption today. And they believe in the possibilities for all children to achieve.

The Global Monitoring Report puts the focus on what matters most. Good teaching. The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. That is why top performing education systems pay attention to how they select and train their staff. They watch how they improve the performance of teachers who are struggling and how to structure teachers’ pay. They provide an environment in which teachers work together to frame good practice. And they provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers. They invest resources where they make most of a difference, and they attract the most talented teachers to the most challenging classrooms. The lessons for policy and practice from these countries are clear, and it is time for the world to take notice.

The Global Monitoring Report rightly calls on governments to fix this. But the magnitude of the challenge suggests that countries will only succeed if they can make education everybody’s business. Where public resources remain insufficient, governments need to think harder about who should pay for what, when and how, and better align their resources with the challenges. Employers can do a lot to better integrate the world of learning with the world of work, offering high quality work-based learning that allows people to develop hard skills on modern equipment and soft skills, such as teamwork or negotiation in a real-world environment. Schools can do better in offering more relevant learning, recognising that the world no longer pays people for what they know, but for what they can do with what they know. Guiding people to make sound educational and career choices, with the latest labour-market intelligence at our fingertips, will help reduce the toxic mix of unemployed graduates and employers saying they cannot find the people with the skills they need. Labour unions can help make investments in learning translate into better-quality jobs and higher salaries. And at the end of the day, we all can take more responsibility for our learning and make better use of available learning opportunities.

None of that’s easy, but the Global Monitoring Report highlights what is possible. It takes away excuses from those who are complacent. And it helps set meaningful targets in terms of measurable goals achieved by the world’s educational leaders.

Links:
Education For All Global Monitoring Report
PISA for development
PISA 2012 results
OECD Skills Surveys
Photo credit: education sign  / @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

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

Getting education to make biculturalism work

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

I was able to add half a day to visit schools in New Zealand, something I always try to do where my schedule permits. At Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Hoani Waititi, New Zealand’s first community school offering Māori medium instruction, I was greeted by a group of ferocious warriors slowly approaching us and offering the choice between picking a fight and settling for peace. With that choice made, we were warmly welcomed with a traditional pōwhiri at the school’s marae. In Māori culture greeting others is an important opportunity for people to show respect and to set the tone for whatever comes after. That hour-long ceremony included skilled speakers crafting poetic verbal images, but most impressive was how the school’s entire student population sang with one voice, confident and incredibly dynamic and self-orchestrated, without a conductor. Principal Rawiri Wright, former leader of the tough Māori language schooling organisation and who had challenged Minister Kaye and myself at my public presentation earlier in the morning, asked me later how the range of artistic and social skills so evident among his students were featuring in New Zealand’s national standards and our comparative work at the OECD. One could argue with some of his political rhetoric, but our conversation left me thinking. And he referred me proudly to the latest results on academic performance too, which showed his students outperforming schools at the 8th decile of socio-economic advantage - despite the fact that his own school was catering for low to middle-income families located at the 4th decile. He sees these results vindicating his stance that the kind of academic performance that we value comes as a by-product of the holistic Maori medium instruction that his school offers, while he claims that attempts to add the latter as a ‘nice-to-have’ to the former were failing in New Zealand.

Rawiri readily conceded that the school is not without its fair share of social and managerial issues, but it demonstrates how Māori running their own schools can offer their children - who tend to show dismal performance as minorities in many schools and whose parent generation makes up a disproportionate number of those on welfare or in correction facilities - a viable education that prepares them both to be citizens in the modern world in which they live, and to become active protagonists of their traditional culture. Rawiri sees helping children build an understanding of their cultural heritage as the foundation for the self-confidence and self-esteem that are so badly needed among the Māori student population. It may seem a thing of a long-gone past to ask children to know and remember seven-hundred ancestors, but it also means giving them assurance that they are not alone in facing the challenges of an ever-more rapidly changing world. Pita Sharples, Associate Minister for Education with responsibility for some key Maori education priorities, gave a moving account of how he had established this school against all odds but with the deep commitment of the community. This had been after more than a century in which Māori language and education had been outlawed. He did not seem that old and that brought home to me how recent biculturalism in New Zealand still is.

In very different ways, community engagement and partnership were also the guiding principles of Sylvia Park School. We’ve all experienced how it is when schools invite for a parental evening, on their own terms and timelines, and we know the kind of parents that show up at those events. The Mutukaroa Home School Learning Partnership at Sylvia Park has turned all this on its head, building educationally powerful partnerships that change what happens in classrooms, and that recognise the importance of engaging with families in honest, rigorous and robust ways to accelerate student learning. Arina, a truly inspiring teacher and counsellor, explained how she does whatever it takes to meet each parent at their home or at work, reviews their children’s performance with them individually, and then provides parents with the tools and assistance they need to assume their responsibilities for the development of their children. The Ministry’s evaluation found that the Sylvia Park project has lifted the achievement of new entrants from well below the national average to above it in just two years. It is now looking to bring that initiative to scale, replicating the core elements of Mukukaroa in a way that preserves their integrity, while adapting them to the individual context of schools.

At Newton Central School, I met Hoana Pearson, another amazing school principal. She defines the world through relationships, for her there is no bridge too far, no stakeholder too distant, no dispute that cannot be resolved through consultation, dialogue and collaboration.  And no one escapes her warm hug. As we walk from one richly decorated classroom to the next, she greets every child by name, and picks up pieces of trash to maintain the meticulous order of the premises. Newton Central provides education that reflects a deep commitment to biculturalism and the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, with four learning pathways to choose from. The school is creative and truly visionary, celebrating the diversity of its community. Here, social background and culture are not obstacles to learning, but the school capitalizes on the diversity of its learners, taking learning to the learner in ways that allow students to learn in the ways that are most conducive to their progress. All this is built on the kind of instructional and distributed leadership that Hoana provides, with a focus on supporting, evaluating and developing teacher quality as its core, where teachers collaborate to design, lead and manage innovative learning environments. Hoana also 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 changing the underlying mindset. She helps them gain an understanding of specific best practices, through experiencing such practices in the authentic setting of other classrooms. And she motivates her teachers to make the necessary changes through high expectations, a shared sense of purpose, and a collective belief in their common ability to make a difference for every child. The school is succeeding even when she is absent, putting the final touches on her Master’s thesis towards the end of her career. What better indication could there be of effective leadership?

Hoana makes this happen, and New Zealand’s liberal and entrepreneurial school system gives her the space to make it happen. It would be hard to imagine her in one of Southern Europe’s bureaucratic school systems. Newton Central is an example for how school autonomy works at its best, and it explains why many of New Zealand’s schools perform top of the class in PISA. These schools set ambitious goals, are clear about what students should be able to do and then provide their teachers with the tools to establish what content and instruction they need to provide to their individual students. They have moved on from delivered wisdom, to user-generated wisdom, from a culture of standardization, conformity and compliance towards being innovative and ingenious.

The challenge for New Zealand is to get everybody to that level, to spread good practice and to make excellence universal. The evening before I had dinner with New Zealand’s cross-sector forum where some school principals’ spoke of the difficulties they face with attracting, developing and retaining effective teachers, of prioritising and delegating their work, of managing their resources strategically and of collaborating with other schools. In New Zealand’s socio-economically privileged schools, the school’s trustees provide magnificent stakeholder support. They elect talented principals and add the expertise of lawyers, accountants and administrators which autonomous schools need to function effectively. In many disadvantaged neighbourhoods, however, schools have a hard time finding any trustees, and where they do, these are unlikely to provide the governance, oversight and resources that are needed - and even more unlikely to challenge an underperforming principal.

The idea of New Zealand’s school systems is not to respond to this with administrative prescription, but for improvement to come from the best knowledge and understanding from within the school system. That means that professional autonomy needs to go hand in hand with a collaborative culture, with autonomous schools working in partnership to improve teaching and learning throughout the system. New Zealand needs its best teachers and its best schools to provide the expertise and resources for all teachers to update their knowledge, skills and approaches in light of new teaching techniques, new circumstances, and new research; it needs its best teachers to help other teachers to get on top of changes made to curricula or teaching practice and it needs its best school principals to enable other schools to develop and apply effective strategies. But knowledge is very sticky, particularly in a highly competitive school system. Knowledge about strong educational practices tends to stick where it is and rarely spreads without effective strategies and powerful incentives for knowledge mobilisation and knowledge management. That means New Zealand will have to think much harder about how it will actually shift knowledge around pockets of innovation and better align resources with the challenges.

The government is trying. Having successfully introduced a coherent system of educational standards – first of their kind in New Zealand - it is now providing schools and teachers with the tools they need to implement these standards in their classrooms and to monitor how individual students progress. But it is still a long way to go until strategic thinking and planning takes place at every level of the system, until every school discusses what the national vision along with desired standards means for them, and until every decision is made at the level of those most able to implement them in practice. Not least, the unions contest the implementation of standards and any notion of public transparency vigorously, fearing this will introduce a culture of external accountability and industrial work organisation of the kind that has driven out creative and professional practice in other countries. Given the nature of the tools and their heavy reliance on professional judgement within schools, these concerns seem somewhat farfetched, but they were an undercurrent in many of my conversations. There seem too few principals like Hoana, who cherish autonomy but see their schools as part of a national education system, who embrace national standards as a tool for peer-learning and for the continuous improvement of their daily practice.

For as long as I have been working with New Zealand there has been talk about equity. But the results from PISA show that the school system is still far from delivering equity, in terms of moderating the impact which social background has on learning outcomes. Disparities are, if anything, on the rise. The challenge for New Zealand lies in moving towards a culture of improvement, framed around not where schools and students are today but how they are advancing. This is about attracting the most talented teachers to the most challenging classrooms and getting the best principals into the toughest schools, it is about developing diverse and differentiated careers for teachers and principals that recognise and reward improved pedagogical practice and the kind of professional autonomy in a collaborative culture that makes school systems cohesive. It is about making sure that every child benefits from excellent teaching.

Links:
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
Education Policy Outlook:New Zealand
Education at a Glance 2013: Country Note

A Women’s Day Challenge

by Barbara Ischinger
Director for Education and Skills

On a recent visit to New Zealand, I attended a memorial service for the 185 people who lost their lives when the earthquake of 22 February 2011 struck Christchurch. What I took away from that gathering was less the still-fresh grief but rather the sense of purpose that followed the tragedy. Kay Giles, chief executive of Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT), for example, who was already devoted to assisting young people – most of them boys – who had dropped out of the education system, put her passion and expertise to work by calling on people involved in apprenticeship programmes to help those who had lost their livelihoods to the earthquake. Stakeholders from local businesses, industry and education worked together quickly to develop long- and short-term training modules to put people back to work – sometimes in entirely different careers – as soon as possible.

I met, too, with New Zealand’s Education Minister, Hekia Parata, who is part Maori, and a vocal champion of indigenous culture and rights. She told me she is particularly concerned about Maori boys who are increasingly falling out of the education system and, in doing so, are dooming themselves to a very uncertain future.

On this International Women’s Day I’d like to be just a bit provocative and suggest that we start paying a little more attention to boys. Boys are getting lost in today’s life and we don’t really understand why. A recent study finds that boys’ behaviour costs them dearly in school marks (our next PISA in Focus, due out on 14 March, has a few other interesting things to say about how teachers award marks to girls and boys); and a school in Shanghai, China – which was the best-performing school system in the 2009 PISA survey  – has just introduced boys-only classes  in an effort to turn around the decline in boys’ performance in university entrance exams. (I was interested to read that some of the boys interviewed said that they felt shy answering teachers’ questions in front of girls. Didn’t many girls used to say that the presence of boys made them reluctant to participate in class?)

How do we make sure that our education systems – and labour markets – are equitable, and create good opportunities for both boys and girls?

We have done a lot for girls, and we see the positive results of this in everyday life. Girls are, on average, doing better in school than boys, and more women now graduate from university-level education than men. Of course, there is still a lot of room for improvement: just look at the salaries of women versus those of men. And I am irritated when I attend board meetings in the private sector and note that women are still a minority.

So we must not look at the great strides girls and women have made in recent decades and think that the battle is won. But I would also add: We don’t gain much if we gain on one side and lose on the other.

Am I focusing too much on boys on what is supposed to be the day we celebrate the girls and women of the world? I don’t think so. It’s all about empowerment: having equal opportunities to realise our individual potential. And that is something that should not be gender-specific.

Links:
OECD work on Gender: www.oecd.org/gender and www.oecd.org/gender/data for data on International Women's Day
OECD Feature: Growing more equal
OECD Insights: Born a girl: bad karma?
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
Photo credit: Boy with apple on head in classroom / Shutterstock

Getting the best start

Miho Taguma
Senior Analyst, Early Childhood and Schools Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

Given the current background of fiscal constraint, is public funding of early childhood education and care programmes a sound investment?

As more and more women have been entering the labour force since the 1970s, access to pre-school services has improved across OECD countries. Although in the 1970s and 1980s, early childhood education and care policy was put into place to facilitate women’s entry into the labour force, in recent years it has become more child-centred, focusing instead on the child’s development and improving educational outcomes. As inequalities, which are often present well before children begin primary school, are likely to increase over time, early childhood policies can be a component of anti-poverty and educational equity measures as well.

As the latest issue of the OECD’s brief series Education Indicators in Focus shows, countries vary widely on all aspects of early childhood education and care, from their policies and systems to their quality. In most countries, the proportion of children enrolled in pres-school programmes has significantly grown in recent decades. Although on average across the OECD, 79% of 4-year-olds are enrolled in such programmes, it ranges from more than 95% in Belgium, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, to between 30% and 60% in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Greece, Poland and Switzerland, and to less than 30% in Indonesia and Turkey.

But what are the benefits of early childhood programmes? PISA scores have shown how important access to these programmes can be for improving children’s outcomes in later stages of life. Data also shows that pre-school can improve children’s cognitive abilities and have a positive impact on reading performance at age 15. It also helps children, especially those from disadvantaged or immigrant backgrounds, to build a strong foundation for life skills. But what is more important, quantity or quality?

There are also vast differences among countries on all of the quality indicators: from the number of children per staff – which ranges from more than 20 pupils per teacher in China, France, Israel, Mexico and Turkey, to fewer than 10 in Chile, Iceland, New Zealand, Slovenia and Sweden – to the length of the programmes – with the majority of countries offering at least one year of  for free, including the Netherlands (for 4  and 5 year olds); England and Scotland (for 3  and 4 year olds); and France, Israel, Mexico, Portugal and Sweden (for all 3 6-year-olds).

Countries’ expenditure on ECE as a percentage of GDP also varies significantly – ranging from 0.1% or less in Australia, India, Indonesia, Ireland and South Africa to 0.8% or more in Denmark, Iceland, Israel, the Russian Federation and Spain.

The bottom line is that even in these times of fiscal consolidation and crisis, sufficient public funding should continue to be dedicated to early childhood programmes. This would help not only to improve children’s outcomes, social mobility from generation to generation and long-term efficiency gains for society, but also reduce poverty and protect the most vulnerable.

For more information
On this topic, visit:
Education Indicators in Focus: www.oecd.org/education/indicators 
On the OECD’s education indicators, visit:
Education at a Glance 2012: OECD Indicators: www.oecd.org/edu/eag2012 
On the OECD’s Indicators of Education Systems (INES) programme, visit:
INES Programme overview brochure
Chart source: OECD.  Argentian and Indonesia: UNESCO Institute for Statistics (World Indicators Programme).  Table C2.1.  See Annex 3 for notes (www.oecd.org/edu/eag2012)