What we learn from the PISA 2012 results

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

 

International comparisons are never easy and they aren’t perfect. But PISA shows what is possible in education, and it helps countries see themselves in the mirror of the education opportunities and results delivered by the world’s leaders in education. Even those who claim that the relative standing of countries in PISA mainly reflects social and cultural factors must now concede that improvement in education is possible. In mathematics, countries like Brazil, Mexico, Tunisia and Turkey rose from the bottom; Italy, Portugal and the Russian Federation advanced to the OECD average or close to it; Germany and Poland rose from average to good; and Shanghai-China and Singapore have moved from good to great. Indeed, of the 65 participating countries, 40 saw improvement in at least one of PISA’s three subject areas. These countries did not change their culture, or the composition of their populations, nor did they fire their teachers; they changed their education policies and practices.

We focused this year’s PISA assessment on mathematics. Each year, OECD countries invest over 200 billion euro in math education in schools; but poor math skills still severely limit people’s access to better-paying and more-rewarding jobs and, at the aggregate level, inequality in the distribution of math skills closely relates to how wealth is shared within nations.

This PISA 2012 assessment came at a time when countries were still grappling with the aftermath of the economic crisis - a period that has brought home the urgency of equipping more people with better skills to collaborate, compete and connect in ways that drive our economies forward, foster employment and reduce social inequality.

A large part of the challenge in education lies in addressing underperformance. Across countries, almost one in four 15-year-olds did not even reach Level 2, the PISA baseline level of proficiency in mathematics, where students have to do little more than employ basic algorithms or procedures involving whole numbers. But in Canada, Korea, Shanghai-China and Singapore, it is one in ten or fewer. According to one estimate, if all 15-year-olds in the OECD area attained at least PISA Level 2 in math, they would contribute USD 200 trillion in additional economic output over their working lives. While such estimates are never wholly certain, they do suggest that the benefits of improvement dwarf any conceivable cost. Part of the issue lies with students living in social disadvantage, and many school systems amplify that disadvantage. According to PISA, advantaged and disadvantaged schools show particularly wide differences in levels of teacher shortages. Attracting the most talented teachers and school leaders to the most challenging classrooms will therefore be key to making headway. Indeed, PISA finds that higher-performing countries allocate educational resources more equitably among advantaged and disadvantaged schools.

A belief that all students can achieve at a high level and a willingness to engage all stakeholders in education – including students, through such channels as seeking student feedback on teaching practices – are other hallmarks of successful school systems. New results from PISA also show that students whose parents have high expectations for them tend to have more perseverance, greater intrinsic motivation to learn math, and more confidence in their own ability to solve math problems.

But the challenges of school systems are not just about poor kids in poor neighbourhoods, but about many kids in many neighbourhoods. Only 2% of American students reach the highest level of math performance, demonstrating that they can conceptualise, generalise and use math based on their investigations and apply their knowledge in novel contexts. That compares with an OECD average of 3%, and proportions of up to 31% in Shanghai-China. The world economy will pay an ever-rising premium on excellence, and a number of countries have shown how the share of top performers in school can be raised significantly, including in high performers, such as Hong Kong-China and Korea, and low performers, such as Italy, Portugal and the Russian Federation. It is important that raising excellence and improving equity are not seen as conflicting policy objectives. Indeed, of the 13 countries that significantly improved their math performance since 2003, three also show improvements in equity in education, and another nine improved their performance while maintaining an already high level of equity.

Of course, raising outcomes is easier said than done. The status quo has many protectors, and countries need to be bold in thinking and in execution to effect real changes. Obviously, we can’t copy and paste school systems wholesale. But PISA has revealed an encouraging number of features shared by the world’s most successful school systems.

Everybody agrees education is important. But the test comes when education is weighed against other priorities. How do countries pay their teachers, compared to other highly skilled workers? Would you want your child to be a teacher rather than a lawyer? How do the media talk about teachers? What we’ve learned from PISA is that the leaders in high performing systems have convinced their citizens to make choices that value education, their future, more than consumption today.

But placing a high value on education is just part of the equation. Another part is the belief that all children can achieve. 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.
In the past, different students were taught in similar ways. Today’s top school systems embrace diversity with differentiated instructional practices; they realise that ordinary students have extraordinary talents and they personalise educational experiences. High-performing school systems also share clear and ambitious standards across the board. Everyone knows what is required to get a given qualification. This remains one of the most powerful system-level predictors in PISA.

And nowhere does the quality of a school system exceed the quality of its teachers. Top school 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 when deciding where to invest, they prioritise the quality of teachers over the size of classes. Not least, they provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers.

High performers have also moved on from administrative control and accountability to professional forms of accountability and work organisation. They support their teachers in developing innovations in pedagogy, in improving their own performance and that of their colleagues, and in pursuing professional development that leads to stronger education practice. The goal of the past was standardisation and compliance; now, top performers enable teachers to be inventive. In the past, the policy focus was on providing education; in today’s top school systems, it’s on outcomes, shifting from looking upwards in the bureaucracy towards looking outwards to the next teacher, the next school, about creating networks of innovation.

Perhaps the most important outcome of world-class school systems is that they deliver high-quality education across the entire school system so that every student benefits. Overall, Finland did not come out quite as impressively as in previous assessments; but what makes Finland still special is that only 6% of the performance variation among students lies between schools. In other words: every school succeeds.

Last but not least, high-performing systems tend to align policies and practices across all aspects of the system, they make them coherent over sustained periods of time, and they see that they are consistently implemented.

Of course, there is no single combination of policies and practices that will work for everyone, everywhere. Every country has room for improvement, even the top performers. That’s why the OECD produces this triennial report on the state of education across the globe: to share evidence of the best policies and practices and to offer our timely and targeted support to help countries provide the best education possible for all of their students. With high levels of youth unemployment, rising inequality, a significant gender gap, and an urgent need to boost growth in many countries, we have no time to lose.

Links:
PISA 2012 Results
OECD Programme for International Student Assessment
Press release: Asian countries top OECD's latest PISA survey on state of global education
Follow:
PISA on twitter: @OECD_Edu @SchleicherEdu @OECDLive #OECDPISA
Facebook PISA  for Parents

Where diversity doesn’t mean disadvantage

by Marilyn Achiron 
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

OECD publications and international media regularly discuss the impact of immigrants on host-country societies. This month’s PISA in Focus looks at the issue from a different perspective: how effectively do the education systems of host countries integrate their immigrant students?

Between 2000 and 2009, across OECD countries the proportion of 15-year-olds with an immigrant background increased from 8% to 10%. In Ireland, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, the Russian Federation, Spain and the United States, the proportion of immigrant students increased by five percentage points or more during that time, and these students now represent from 8% to 30% of these countries’ student population. Education systems play a critical role in the process of integration: they give immigrants and their children opportunities to acquire the skills needed for them to join the labour market.

Results from PISA 2009 show that immigrant students of similar socio-economic status who come from the same country perform very differently, depending on their destination country. For example, immigrant students from the Russian Federation living in Finland, Germany and Israel perform around the OECD average in reading while those in the Czech Republic score about 30 points below the OECD average – the equivalent of a full year of school. Similarly, immigrant students from the Former Yugoslavia living in Denmark score about 40 points below the OECD average while those in Luxembourg score more than 80 points below average. 

The same pattern is observed among students from OECD countries who have immigrated to other countries. For example, on average, German students in Austria and Luxembourg perform at least 10 score points below the OECD average in reading, while those in the Netherlands and Switzerland score more than 30 points above average. On average, French students going to school in Belgium, Israel and Luxembourg perform around the OECD average, while those in Switzerland score 35 points above average.

While immigration policies, similarities between the immigrants’ and the host cultures, and other social policies also explain some of these differences in performance, some education systems appear to be able to facilitate the integration of immigrant students better than others. Immigrant students tend to perform better in school systems that have relatively large populations of immigrant students and where immigrant students are as diverse in their socio-economic status as other students. For example, between one in four and one in five students in Australia, Canada, Israel and the United States have an immigrant background. In these four countries, all students with similar socio-economic status perform equally well, regardless of whether or not they are immigrants. By contrast, in countries where immigrant students represent only a small proportion of the overall student population, and this group is more socio-economically diverse than the overall student population, performance differences between immigrant and non-immigrant students are relatively large, even after taking socio-economic status into account.

PISA results show that immigrant students tend to do better in countries and economies that rise to the challenge of diversity and whose school system is flexible enough to adapt to students with different strengths and needs. Countries that are just beginning to receive increasing numbers of immigrant students from diverse backgrounds can learn from the experience of those systems that have been confronted with this challenge for longer and have succeeded in integrating these students into their school systems.

Links:
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
PISA in Focus No.33: What do immigrant students tell us about the quality of education systems?
Related PISA in Focus issues:
How are school systems adapting to increasing numbers of immigrants students?
How do immigrant students fare in disadvantaged schools?
Do immigrant students' reading skills depend on how long they've been in their new country?
Photo credit: road made with flags from around the world/@ Shutterstock

How did the smartest kids in the world get that way?

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Last week, students, teachers and parents in New York State were stunned to learn that not even one in three third-through-eighth graders passed the new, state-wide English and math exams – tests aligned with the effort now underway in the United States to foster deep analytical and problem-solving skills and introduce more rigorous standards, known as the Common Core, into the country’s education system. While most US states have adopted the Common Core, disappointing first results are dampening enthusiasm for the reform: some states have already stopped rolling out the new exams, citing cost concerns.

I can think of one person who probably isn’t surprised by either the test scores or the resultant sulky foot-dragging to implement reforms: journalist and author Amanda Ripley.  In her new book, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, published today in the United States by Simon and Schuster, Ripley sets the scene for what is turning out to be a battle for the soul of US education. Using PISA 2009 results as the backbone of her story, Ripley sets out to find out why it is that American students are falling behind their contemporaries in countries that aren’t as wealthy or innovative as the United States. “PISA could not tell me how those countries got so smart, or what life was like for kids in those countries, day in and day out, compared to life in America,” she acknowledges. So with three American teenagers as her guides, she explores the human dimension of PISA results: what school is really like for students in Finland, Korea (two PISA top performers) and Poland (a rapidly improving PISA participant).

She follows 15-year-old Kim from rural Oklahoma to Pietarsaari, Finland, where the American exchange student learns first-hand what the Finnish word sisu (roughly translated: strength in the face of great odds, and then some) really means; she follows 18-year-old Eric, a high school graduate who also completed the demanding International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, from suburban Minnesota to Korea, where he planned to spend a year experiencing the “pressure-cooker” of that country’s education system; and she follows Tom, 17, a voracious reader from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to Poland (“[he wanted] to live somewhere where people knew the names Dostoyevsky and Nabokov”) to discover how one country could come so far so fast.

In lively, accessible prose, Ripley paints a warts-and-all picture of both the “education superpowers” and the failing American education system, and discovers the solution to the “mystery” of effective education. It involves rigor (“The problem with rigorous education was that it was hard”), learning how to learn – and recover – from failure (“’Success,’ as Winston Churchill once said, ‘is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm’”), and parents who are involved in their children’s education, not so much by being active in parent-teacher associations or coaching a sports team, but by reading to their young children every day and talking with their older children about their day or about what’s going on in the world. “They let their children make mistakes and then get right back to work. They teach them good habits and give them autonomy,” Ripley observes.

Regular readers of the educationtoday blog, PISA in Focus, or the PISA initial reports will be familiar with most of the data and some of the conclusions in The Smartest Kids in the World. But Ripley’s book looks at the data from a new perspective: that of the students who are the beneficiaries -- or victims -- of their countries’ education systems. Those stunned parents and teachers in New York State and elsewhere would do well to read this book first if they are inclined to blame their children’s/students’ poor results on a new test.

Links:   
OECD PISA for Parents
Videos on Finland and Korea as part of the Strong Performers, Successful Reformers video series
 Photo credit: Evaluation symbol  / @Shutterstock

What a tangled web we weave: strategies for school improvement

by Harald Wilkoszewski
Analyst, Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

The best education possible for our children – this is what all education systems strive for. But what can policy makers do when schools become weak, sometimes too weak, to fulfil their purpose? Especially in highly decentralised systems, where schools enjoy high levels of autonomy, policy interventions to help improve the learning situations for students can be particularly difficult to implement.

A new case study on The Netherlands for the OECD project “Governing Complex Education Systems (GCES)” shows that a timely, risk-based assessment of schools can help to significantly lower the number of weak schools. The case study also illustrates that governing is in the details, as the reform had some undesired effects. But let’s look at the good news first.

In 2009, 120 Dutch schools were underperforming. In 2011 this number decreased to less than 100, a significant drop of over 16%. The Dutch school inspectorate, traditionally responsible for school quality, achieved this by flagging schools that showed low indicators on a number of outputs as “weak” or “very weak”. These labels mean that unless these schools change radically, they run the risk of failing – being closed down.

Schools are not, however, left alone with this message: The inspectorate puts in place a range of supporting measures such as tailor-made recommendations or an intensive exchange with schools boards.

While the numbers speak for the success of this reform, the new GCES case study “Coping with very weak primary schools” also shows that schools react quite differently to being labelled “weak” or “very weak”. Most school communities take it as a wake-up call and are encouraged to improve, but some become discouraged and do not manage to turn the wheel around.

Whereas schools that react positively then end up in a virtuous cycle of improvement, schools that react negatively are stuck in a vicious circle: alerted parents take their children out of the labelled school, other parents follow the example, and the number of students decreases dramatically. This forces the school to merge several school grades into one classroom, putting even more stress on the teachers. In this difficult situation, performance improvements are hard to achieve and school closure becomes a likely scenario.

In order to avoid such undesired effects, the case study recommends that decision makers adapt their mindsets, from a linear perspective of cause and consequence, to a more dynamic view. This will help them take a second look at their existing repertoire and analyse how their current set of policy interventions works in a complex system.

Ultimately, this adaptive view may prove beneficial in other education policy contexts as well because it can:

• Lead to new insights into how and why some interventions seem to work surprisingly well;
• Show why some methods work less well and identify previously unnoticed, positive effects;
• Show that some interventions do not work at all and that the capital that goes into them may be better invested in other areas of the system;
• Put some interventions on the radar that come from other areas, other policy domains that may be beneficial to very weak schools;
• Be an important element in developing smarter interventions in multi-level systems.

Links:
OECD'S Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)
Governing Complex Education Systems (GCES)
Photo credit: Young girl excited that she has reached the top of the giant/ Shutterstock

Bridging the socio-economic divide between public and private schools

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education

Several months ago, we described how PISA results show that, when it comes to the question of private versus public schooling, it’s the students who make the school. Both private schools and public schools with student populations from socio-economically advantaged backgrounds benefit the individual students who attend them. But PISA results also showed that there is no evidence to suggest that the proportion of private schools in a country, in and of itself, is associated with higher performance of the school system as a whole.

In most PISA-participating countries and economies, the average socio-economic background of students who attend privately managed schools is more advantaged than that of those who attend public schools. The PISA team wanted to find out why some school systems seem to be better than others at minimising the socio-economic differences that are often apparent between publicly and privately managed schools.

The team’s findings have just been published in Public and Private Schools: How Management and Funding Relate to their Socio-economic Profile. What the team found out is that the prevalence of privately managed schools in a country is not related to greater or lesser degrees of difference between the socio-economic profiles of public and private schools; but the level of public funding to privately managed schools is.

There are many ways of providing public funding to privately managed schools. One of these is through vouchers and tuition tax credits, which assist parents directly. If school vouchers are available for all students, they could help to expand the choice of schools available to parents and promote competition among schools. School vouchers that target only disadvantaged students can make admission to schools more equitable, which ultimately has an impact on the prospects in life for all children and contributes to social cohesion; but they have a limited effect on expanding school choice and promoting competition among schools overall. When researchers analysed data from PISA 2009, they found that school systems that offer vouchers to all students tend to have twice the degree of socio-economic differences between publicly and privately managed schools as systems that offer vouchers only to disadvantaged students.

Crucially, the results also show that those countries that have smaller socio-economic differences between publicly and privately managed schools also tend to show better overall student performance. That means that policy makers—and ultimately parents and students—do not have to choose between equity/social cohesion and strong performance in their school systems. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Links:

For more information:
on PISA: www.pisa.oecd.org
PISA in Focus N°7: Private schools: Who benefits?


Photo credit: © Stuart Miles / Shutterstock