Trouble with homework

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

It’s sometimes hard to tell who has more trouble with homework: students or their parents. PISA results show that homework, itself, may inadvertently perpetuate a problem that goes far beyond spoiling a student’s evening or a parent’s self-esteem. As this month’s PISA in Focus explains, homework may widen the performance gap between students from different socio-economic backgrounds.

Students everywhere are assigned homework by their teachers, and across OECD countries in 2012, 15-year-old students reported that they spend almost five hours per week doing homework. (If you think that’s a lot, it’s actually one hour less per week than the average reported in 2003 – and 9 hours less per week than students in Shanghai-China reported in 2012.)

The problem lies not so much in the amount of time spent doing homework, but in differences in the amount of time spent doing homework that are related to students’ socio-economic status. In every country and economy that participated in PISA 2012, advantaged students spend more time doing homework than disadvantaged students. In OECD countries, for example, advantaged students spend 5.7 hours per week doing homework, on average, while disadvantaged students spend an average of 4.1 hours per week. PISA also finds that students who attend schools whose student body is predominantly composed of advantaged students, and students who attend schools located in urban areas, reported spending more time doing homework than students who attend schools with a more disadvantaged student body and schools located in rural areas.

What accounts for these differences? PISA cannot establish cause-and-effect links, but results from previous PISA studies suggest that advantaged students are more likely than their disadvantaged peers to have a quiet place to study at home and parents who convey positive messages about schooling. The connection between the socio-economic profile of a school’s student population and the amount of time students spend on homework might reflect differences in teachers’ expectations for their students and teachers’ perceptions of their students’ capacity to study independently.

All of this has an impact on student performance. Students who spend more time doing homework tend to score higher in the PISA mathematics test. And if you compare students from similar socio-economic backgrounds who attend similarly resourced schools, those who attend schools where students, in general, spend more time doing homework perform better in mathematics than those who attend schools whose students devote less time to homework. In fact, PISA results show that the net payoff in mathematics performance from attending a school where more homework is assigned, in general, is particularly large – 17 score points (the equivalent of nearly 6 months of schooling) or more per extra hour of homework – in Hong Kong-China, Japan, Macao-China and Singapore.

One good way to make sure that homework does not perpetuate differences in performance that are related to students’ socio-economic status is for schools and teachers to encourage struggling and disadvantaged students to complete their homework. This could involve providing facilities at school so that disadvantaged students have a quiet, comfortable place to work, and/or offering to help parents motivate their children to finish their homework before going out with friends or surfing the web. The homework still has to get done; but maybe students and their parents will find it a little less troublesome.

Links: 
PISA 2012 Findings
Does homework perpetuate inequities in education?
PISA in Focus No.46 (French version)
Photo credit: Student connection / @Shutterstock

Spoiled for choice?

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Would you rather choose where to send your child to school or have the decision made for you based on where you live? Many parents would rather choose, in the belief that with choice comes the chance of getting a better education for their child. But results from PISA find that education systems do not necessarily benefit as a result.

As this month’s PISA in Focus explains, where parents can choose the school that their children attend, socio-economically disadvantaged parents can end up choosing the best school among a more limited set of choices than more affluent parents; as a result, the benefits of school choice may not accrue to the same extent to disadvantaged students as to their more advantaged peers. And if affluent families are more likely to opt out of the neighbourhood school than poorer residents of the same area, competition may increase socio-economic segregation in schools.

To understand how school choice works in practice, PISA asked parents to rate the importance of different criteria for choosing a school for their children, from “not important at all” to “very important”. Among the list of 11 possible criteria given to parents, one is directly related to the quality of teaching and learning (“The academic achievements of students in the school are high”), but only a minority of parents rated this as “very important” (except in Korea, where 50% of parents did).

Three of the criteria for school choice listed in the parent questionnaire are related to direct or indirect monetary costs (“the school is a short distance from home”; “expenses are low”; “the school has financial aid available”). For more affluent parents, these cost-related factors weigh less than the quality of instruction in their choice of schools, as shown by the proportion of parents who rate the different criteria as “very important”. But in 10 out of the 11 countries and economies that distributed the parent questionnaire, disadvantaged parents tend to choose their children’s school as much on the basis of cost-related factors as on the quality of instruction. These data therefore suggest that parents of different socio-economic status do not seek the same information about schools before choosing one; and even if they have information about the quality of instruction, it may not be the deciding factor.

PISA results also show that, on average across countries, school competition is not related to better mathematics performance among students. In systems where almost all 15-year-olds attend schools that compete for enrolment, average performance is similar to that in systems where school competition is the exception.

What this means is that school choice may actually spoil some of the intended benefits of competition, such as greater innovation in education and a better match between students’ needs and interests and what schools offer, by reinforcing social inequities at the same time.

Links:
PISA 2012 Findings
PISA in Focus No. 42 : When is competition between schools beneficial?
OECD PISA for Parents Facebook page
Photo credit: Set of colorful lockers  / @Shutterstock 

Poverty and the perception of poverty – how both matter for schooling outcomes

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Note: The size of the bubbles is representing the strength of the relationship between mathematics performance and ESCS (Percentage of explained variance in mathematics performance)

Compensating for students’ socio-economic disadvantage is one of the greatest challenges facing teachers,school leaders and education systems as a whole. However, data from PISA show that some countries are much better at this than others.

Consider the chart above. The horizontal axis shows the percentage of lower secondary teachers who work in schools where their principal reported that more than 30% of students in their school were from disadvantaged homes.¹  The vertical axis shows the actual percentage of 15-year-old students from disadvantaged homes, measured by PISA’s internationally standardised index that summarises various indicators of socio-economic disadvantage, including parents’ income and education level, educational resources at home, and other family possessions.² In other words, the horizontal axis reflects school principals’ perception of disadvantage by national standards while the vertical axis reflects the prevalence of disadvantage as compared internationally.

Brazil, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico and Portugal are found in the upper right corner of the chart because their schools have a large share of disadvantaged children and that aligns with the reports of principals. The lower left corner includes the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Japan, Korea and Norway where disadvantage in schools is limited, and fewer than one in ten principals reports significant disadvantage.³ These are the results one would expect.

But actual disadvantage and principals’ perceptions of disadvantage don't always align: 65% of principals in the United States say that more than 30% of their students are from disadvantaged homes, far more than in any other country. However, the actual percentage of disadvantaged students reported by PISA is just 13%, marginally higher than in Japan and Korea; but in those two countries, only 6% and 9% of principals, respectively, report a comparable share of disadvantaged students in their schools. In other words, the actual incidence of child poverty is roughly the same among these three countries, but more than six times as many US principals reported that more than 30% of their students are disadvantaged. Conversely, in Croatia, Serbia and Singapore, more than 20% of students are disadvantaged, while 7% or fewer principals report significant populations of disadvantaged students.

Obviously, a child considered poor in the United States may be regarded as relatively wealthy in another country, but the fact that the perceived problem of socio-economic disadvantage among students is so much greater in the United States - and in France too - than the actual backgrounds of students also suggests that what school principals in some countries consider to be social disadvantage would not be considered such in others.

And there is a third important dimension, namely the actual impact of disadvantage on learning outcomes, which is shown by the size of the circles in the chart.⁴   That impact reflects whether an education system provides equitable learning opportunities. In countries like Finland, Iceland and Norway, one would expect this impact to be small because these countries have very little socio-economic disadvantage in their student populations. Achieving equity in school is easy when society distributes wealth and family education equitably. But the more impressive examples are countries like PISA top-performer Singapore, where disadvantage is significant, but its impact on learning outcomes is only moderate. These countries seem very good at nurturing the extraordinary talents of ordinary students and at ensuring that every student benefits from excellent teaching. In contrast, France has a comparatively small share of disadvantaged students, but school principals perceive this share to be large, and student learning outcomes are closely related to social background – more closely, in fact, than in any other country except Chile and the Slovak Republic. More generally, the results show that principals’ perception of disadvantage correlates with inequalities in education opportunities more strongly than real disadvantage does.

There is another way of looking at this: In Korea and Singapore, more than one in two students from the bottom quarter of the socio-economic spectrum score among the most proficient quarter of the world’s students on PISA; in Japan, 45% of disadvantaged students are similarly “resilient” and perform better on the PISA test than their backgrounds would predict. By contrast, in France and the United States, only around 20% of students are resilient, and in Israel, just one in 10 is.

So what does all this mean? Socio-economic disadvantage is a challenge to educators everywhere, but in countries like France and the United States, perceived disadvantage is far greater than real disadvantage and it makes a significant difference for student performance. In countries like Singapore, real disadvantage is far greater than school principals’ perception of it, but Singapore’s schools seem to be able to help their students overcome that disadvantage.

<sup>1. Or more precisely, the percentage of lower-secondary teachers in schools whose principals reported that more than 30% of students are from disadvantaged homes. Data are based on the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), which is representative of the teaching force in the participating countries.
2. Referred to as the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) index of economic, social and cultural status (ESCS).
3. Significant here means more than 30% of students from disadvantaged homes in the school.
4. Measured here by the percentage of variation in mathematics performance that is explained by the PISA index of economic, social and cultural status (ESCS).</sup>

Links
PISA 2012 Results: Excellence Through Equity: Giving Every Student the Chance to Succeed (Volume II)
The OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) - 2013 Results
Chart source: © OECD TALIS 2013 and PISA 2012 database

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

Learning in rural China: The challenges for students

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

The first thing I notice is that, in this neighbourhood of simple houses and farmlands, it is the school, not a shopping centre, that is the cleanest and most impressive building in the area. The Qiao Tou Lian He primary school can afford only 29 staff to look after the 714 children who attend. Most of the children stay for the full school-week as they have to walk for several hours to reach their homes. So the school has become their family, albeit one where the children have to assume an incredible amount of individual and social responsibility, with very limited support from adults.

Roughly 3,000 kilometres southwest of Shanghai, a city that harbours the world’s leading education system, the Qiao Tou Lian He primary school is one of the fruits of China’s efforts to educate its citizens who live in sparsely populated rural areas like this. While the economic and social development of these areas has been remarkable by any standard, China’s coastal areas are racing ahead at an even faster pace, thus widening disparities. That, in turn, fuels an endless stream of people moving to the cities: students looking for a better education, parents looking for work, and teachers who excel in their jobs and are looking for more fulfilling careers. Shanghai, alone, registers 1,000 additional cars each day by those who have made it upwards in the social ladder.

Short of options to bring high quality education to the children up in the mountains, China has begun to consolidate rural schools to form viable hubs which bring together the infrastructure and critical mass of teachers that are needed to build strong instructional systems. That’s never easy. Over generations, schools have become the heart of communities; when the children leave, communities see their future endangered. But there have also been serious implementation problems in China, most notably involving transportation, that have bogged down progress and, in some areas, brought the consolidation process to a halt. But Qiao Tou Lian He school is an example that is well on its way to turn the challenges into opportunities. It offers the children from four former remote schools educational opportunities - and a future - that neither they themselves nor their parents could have ever imagined in their villages.

The children at Qiao Tou Lian He school live in a dormitory composed of tiny rooms that each holds 12 beds and 18 children (you can do the math). But room after room is in impeccable order, with the belongings of each child tidily arranged. A cheerful squad of 5th and 6th graders walks from room to room, with notebooks in their hands in which they record notes about hygiene and discipline; and they help the smaller children as best as they can. Only one already over-burdened teacher is appointed to respond to the needs of these hundreds of small children on any given day.

Every education system seeks to make children resilient so that their can find their way in a world in constant disequilibrium — trying, failing, adapting, learning and evolving. Resilience assumes that we don’t know exactly how things will unfold; that we’ll be surprised; that we are open to learning from the extraordinary; that we’ll make mistakes along the way, but that we persist and invest ourselves. Few children will be better prepared for this than the students of Qiao Tou Lian He school, even if the price for this is so high. Those who return to their communities after their education will be able to help those communities adapt to China’s rapid economic and social changes. In the meantime, though, when the students go home, they often have no one to talk to: their parents may be working far away; but even if they are at home, they may not understand the world that is opening up to these children.

Min, a 5th grader, explains that his greatest joy is to read books in a bookstore—even though the bookstore is not around the corner, but a good two-hour walk from his home. In many countries, we see learning outcomes severely impeded if a quarter or more of the students come from disadvantaged backgrounds. At this rural school, every child does. So how do the teachers at Qiao Tou Lian He school cope, let alone teach? I’ll discuss the challenges – and successes – for teachers in rural China in my next blog.

Links:
Video series: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education - Shanghai, China
Related blog posts by Andreas Schleicher
China – what will remain when the dust around economic expansion has settled?
Implementing educational reform in China
Chinese lessons
Photo credit: @ Schleicher OECD

Breaking down the barriers to immigrant students’ success at school

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education 

Education is one of the best ways of integrating immigrant children and their families into their new home countries. But most immigrant students have to overcome multiple barriers in order to succeed at school. The latest edition of PISA in Focus shows that of all the obstacles to success these students must surmount, the concentration of socio-economic disadvantage at school is among the most strongly related to poor performance.

Disadvantage and immigrant status are closely linked. Most immigrants leave their home countries in search of better economic prospects. Once immigrants arrive in a host country, they often settle in communities where there are other immigrants who share their culture, their language and often their socio-economic status. Their children often attend the same schools – and those schools frequently have large proportions of immigrant students. As a result, immigrant students tend to be concentrated in certain schools. In most cases, these schools are generally more socio-economically deprived than other schools.

PISA finds that countries vary markedly in how immigrant students are accommodated in schools. In New Zealand, for example, 50% of immigrant students – well below the OECD average of 68% – attend a school that has a large proportion of immigrant students. In addition, the concentration of immigrant students in socio-economically disadvantaged schools is also relatively low in New Zealand: only one in four immigrant students – compared with the OECD average of 36% – attends a school that has a large proportion of students whose mothers have low levels of education. (Having a low-educated mother, that is, a mother who has not attained an upper secondary education, is a measure of socio-economic disadvantage among immigrant populations.) In Germany, the concentration of immigrant students in schools is around the OECD average, while the concentration of immigrant students in disadvantaged schools is higher than the OECD average. In the United Kingdom, high concentrations of immigrant students in schools are coupled with high concentrations of immigrant students in the most disadvantaged schools.

When analysing student performance through this prism, poor student performance, particularly among immigrant students, is most strongly related to the proportion of students in a school whose mothers have low levels of education. This finding indicates that immigrant students – indeed all students – face a major obstacle to success at school when they are concentrated in schools attended by students who face similar socio-economic disadvantage.

In contrast, the results suggest that it is not the proportion of immigrant students or the proportion of those who speak a different language that is most strongly associated with poor performance. In other words, being in a school with students from different countries or who speak multiple languages does not hinder learning as much as being in a school that has a high concentration of disadvantaged students does. In fact, there are many high-achieving schools that have large proportions of immigrant students. Many schools in the Canadian province of Alberta, for example, have just this kind of profile. Often, that high performance is the result of specific national or regional education policies designed to accommodate – and make the most of – heterogeneous student populations.

What these results tell us is that reducing the concentration of disadvantage in individual schools is a good first step towards helping immigrant students integrate successfully into school and, ultimately, society.

Links:

For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/

PISA in Focus No. 22:How do immigrant students fare in disadvantaged schools? 

Photo credit:  Colour figures / Shutterstock