Learning from other countries’ experiences in education

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

The data that the OECD collects can help countries map their strengths and weaknesses in education. But what’s the best way to address those weaknesses? Rather than prescribe actions, the OECD often prefers to show policy makers what everyone else is doing and how successful those initiatives have been. A new OECD series of individual Education Policy Outlook Country Profiles does just that: each profile describes how an individual country is responding to key challenges to improve the effectiveness of its education system. The idea behind the series is to offer policy makers easily accessible profiles of countries’ education systems, and the policies adopted to improve those systems, that could inspire reforms at home.

For example, the profile on Australia reports that, while the country is a top PISA performer and has high completion rates in upper secondary and tertiary education, its PISA scores have not improved since 2000. In addition to targeting teacher and school leadership quality and evaluation and assessment, the country has been focusing on defining a more transparent and fairer funding model for schools presented recently in a national plan for school improvement.

New Zealand, also a top PISA performer, has some of the most autonomous schools and universities of all OECD countries. A key challenge for the country has been better integrating the growing indigenous population in its schools. In response, the government has adopted targeted education strategies for Maori and Pasifika Islanders, and defined national standards and a national curriculum for English and Maori schools.

In a different hemisphere, Ireland, which is an average PISA performer and has a growing immigrant population, adopted a policy in 2005 to support low-performing schools, Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools, which has helped to increase the number of students who complete secondary education in participating schools. A wider national literacy and numeracy strategy was introduced more recently to increase instruction time in reading and mathematics and offer professional-development activities for teachers and school leaders. Perhaps the country’s greatest challenge now is ensuring that these programmes do not suffer as public spending shrinks as a result of the financial crisis.

In the Czech Republic, where PISA performance in reading, mathematics and science has been deteriorating, the government has introduced evaluation and assessment initiatives that include national standardised tests. To improve the quality of teachers and school leaders, it has raised the salaries of young teachers, introduced a new teacher-career system, and changed the process for appointing and dismissing school leaders.

These four examples alone show how governments around the world are trying to improve their education systems to better prepare their young citizens for full participation in the global, knowledge-based economy. Every six months, the OECD will publish a new set of education policy country profiles as part of its Education Policy Outlook series. The series can be a valuable source of information – and inspiration – for policy makers everywhere.

Links:
Education Policy Outlook
Country profiles
Image credit: © Copyright Sasha Chebotarev

Evaluation and assessment is for everyone

by Deborah Nusche and Claire Shewbridge
Analysts, Directorate for Education and Skills

Some may ask if all the time, money and effort invested in evaluation and assessment is worth it. The terms evaluation and assessment may strike fear into the hearts of some students, teachers and parents. Are they not just a way to control and constrain what goes in the classroom? Is this just not more unnecessary work for us? What on earth do they have to do with student learning?

A three-year comprehensive review of evaluation and assessment approaches around the world was brought to its grand finale in Oslo last week. The idea of the international meeting was for the OECD to put its own advice into practice: after conducting a major review of policies, do not put the results on a shelf but put them to good use. Bring stakeholders together, discuss the results of the evaluation exercise, and identify strategies to go forward. Already, over the past three years, countries that were reviewed by the OECD have done this on a national level and the results have been pretty impressive.

The main purpose of the OECD’s review was to investigate how these could be embedded in teaching and learning processes themselves, to improve student learning and give helpful information for all those involved:

Students need to be clear about what they are aiming to learn and how they can evaluate their own progress. Engaging students as active participants in assessment will help them develop capabilities in analysing their own learning and becoming self-directed learners. The representative of the European School Student Unions said it very clearly at the conference: Students do not want to be ‘passive objects’ of evaluation and assessment, they want to be actively involved, not just in their own assessment, but also in the evaluation of their teachers and schools.

Teachers also need assessment information that is reliable and consistent across schools in order to understand student strengths and weaknesses in relation to expected standards, to target future teaching and improve classroom instruction. They need feedback on their own performance to guide their professional and career development, and they should contribute to the self-evaluation of their schools.

School leaders can use school self-evaluation processes to steer whole-school improvement and provide accountability information to their communities, employers and the educational administration.

Parents typically want to know how their children are doing and how schools are helping them achieve. Providing evaluation and assessment information to parents is key to building strong school-home partnerships and can facilitate school choice.

Policy makers need aggregated information to monitor the performance of schools and education systems and ensure that national education goals are met and society at large also needs credentials about the quality of education and the achievement of standards in the education system.

Bringing the pieces together 
But if so many actors within the education system are involved in designing and using assessment and evaluation, is there not a risk that too many cooks spoil the broth? Most countries have a whole range of provisions for student assessment, teacher appraisal and school evaluation that have developed quite independently of each other. A key concern is to bring all these pieces together in a coherent framework to create synergies for learning. The OECD Review gives some ideas on how to do so:

• Take a comprehensive approach: All the components of assessment and evaluation – student assessment, teacher appraisal, school evaluation, school leader appraisal and education system evaluation - should form a coherent whole. This will generate synergies, avoid duplication and prevent inconsistency of objectives.
• Align evaluation and assessment with educational goals: Evaluation and assessment should align with the principles embedded in educational goals. 
• Focus on improving classroom practices: To optimise the potential of evaluation and assessment to improve what is at the heart of education – student learning – policy makers should promote the regular use of evaluation and assessment results for improvements in the classroom.
• Build consensus: Ensure that all the stakeholders are involved early and understand the benefits. 
• Place students at the centre: Students should be fully engaged with their learning and empowered to assess their own progress. The development of critical thinking and social competencies should also be monitored.

Links:
OECD Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes
Synergies for Better Learning: An International Perspective on Evaluation and Assessment
Photo credit: © AKS - Fotolia.com

Does it matter which school a student attends?

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills 

Successful education systems guarantee that all students succeed at high levels. As this month’s PISA in Focus notes, some school systems not only do well on international assessments, like PISA, they also manage to minimise the difference between the best- and poorest-performing students.

In some education systems, most students have similar levels of proficiency; in others, student performance varies far more widely. Analyses of PISA results show that countries and economies can achieve high average performance without having wide disparities in student performance. In 10 out of the 17 countries and economies that have above-average performance in reading, variations in student performance are smaller than the average variation observed across OECD countries.

PISA finds that 40% of the variation in student performance is found between schools within an education system. What accounts for that variation?  A variety of factors. In Germany, large differences in the expected performance of students who attend different schools are related to the education systems’ policies of selecting students for different pathways through education, usually vocational or academic, based on students’ marks. In Italy, these variations are often related to differences in the profiles of the communities the schools serve, such as the socio-economic differences between students who attend urban schools and those who attend rural schools, and/or differences between the policies of federal and regional education systems. Variations can also be linked to characteristics of school systems that are more difficult to quantify, such as differences in the quality or the effectiveness of the instruction provided. Among high-performing countries, considerable between-school variation is found in only three countries: Belgium, Japan and the Netherlands. Between-school differences account for as little as 8% of the variation in student performance in Finland, 10% in Norway, and less than 20% in Estonia, Iceland and Poland.

PISA also tracks how variations in student performance have evolved over time. Across OECD countries, the average variation in student reading performance narrowed by 3% between 2000 and 2009, because most of the countries that improved their performance during that period did so by improving the performance of low-achieving students. Of the countries that saw improvements in performance during that period, only Poland recorded a marked decrease in between-school variation, while Sweden recorded a large increase.

We all know that students have different abilities, talents, interests and potentials (and vive la difference!). But the most successful and highest-performing school systems know how to elicit the best from every one of their students.

Links:
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
PISA in Focus No. 27: Does it matter which school a student attends?
Photo credit: School coat rack / Shutterstock

Skills for the digital economy

by Simone Stelten
Consultant, Skills Beyond Schools Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

Digital economies are powered by skills. People with the high-end skills needed to invent and apply new technologies are in high demand the world over. At the same time, the portfolio of basic skills needed to navigate technology-rich environments and function effectively in our connected societies has expanded.

How severe is the shortage of ICT skills? And what needs to be done to fill the gaps?

Today, 6% of total employment in OECD countries consists of ICT-specialists and ICT-intensive occupations account for more than 20% of all employment. OECD data on Key ICT Indicators shows that countries differ considerably in the share of ICT-intensive employment, ranging from high levels such as 35% in Luxembourg or 28% in the UK to 15% in Portugal and Greece or 11% in Turkey (data for 2010). Growing skills shortages have become a global concern. The Manpower Talent Shortage Survey 2012 puts IT positions at number 5 on the global list of top 10 jobs that employers are having difficulty filling. Only three years ago, IT professionals did not even feature on this list.

Across the OECD the supply of higher education graduates from ICT-related study fields has stagnated or even declined. The share of all STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates declined from 22.7% in 2000 to 20.4% in 2010, indicating a long-term stagnation of the supply from highly demanded science and technology oriented fields. The share of computer science graduates among all graduates has stagnated at around 3% since 2000 (OECD data). Even in the United States, the homeland of computers, the share of computing graduates declined from 4.3% in 2005 to 3.1% in 2010. Similar declines in recent years can be observed in many other countries, including the UK and Germany, pointing towards a risk of ICT skills shortages in many OECD countries.

So what can employers do to fill the skills gap? The study “Building Competitiveness and Business Performance with ICT” from the business school INSEAD shows that firms, which operate in the ICT sector, need to combine the right ICT investments with strong technical talent to be competitively agile. Through the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs employers have developed EU-wide initiatives, such as an online learning platform for ICT practitioners or open online ICT courses for secondary school teachers. Companies such as SAP set up study-programs, Microsoft will increase the number of apprenticeships and internships by 50% over 3 years, and Hewlett-Packard plans to train 500,000 IT-professionals globally by 2015. Clearly, government policy makers could do more to engage employers in meeting the skills challenges facing high value-added sectors.

What about ‘everyday ICT skills’? Survival in a digital economy now demands higher-level cognitive skills for understanding, interpreting, analysing and communicating complex information. The results of the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), to be published on 8 October 2013, will provide unique comparative data on the basic skills of adults in literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments. How to foster those skills effectively is the subject of another recent OECD report on Connected Minds: Technology and Today's Learners.

Tackling the ICT skills challenge will require new thinking and efforts to reach beyond ministerial silos and build partnerships with businesses, entrepreneurs and teachers. With its ‘whole-of-government’ approach to developing more effective national skills strategies, the OECD Skills Strategy offers a concrete roadmap for the future.

Links:
OECD Skills Strategy
OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)
OECD data on Key ICT Indicators
Connected Minds: Technology and Today's Learner
Photo credit: Future technology / Shutterstock

How much do teachers cost?

by Eric Charbonnier and Etienne Albiser
Analysts, Directorate for Education and Skills

Can increasing the salaries of teachers lead to better learning outcomes? Does reducing class size have a positive effect on learning outcomes? Given the current background of tight public budgets, governments seeking to ensure value for money must ask themselves these questions before increasing the salary cost of teacher per student, as teachers account for a major part of education expenditure.

The latest edition of Education Indicators in Focus highlights that the salary cost of teacher per student is a combination of four factors: teachers’ salary, class size, the number of teaching hours in front of a classroom and the number of hours of instruction received by students.

Countries that have similar levels of expenditure on education do not necessarily have similar educational policies and practices. A given level of expenditure may result from a different combination of these factors. One country may pay higher salaries to teachers while another may have smaller class sizes and thus more teachers to pay.

Between 2000 and 2010, increases in the salary cost of teacher per student were mainly influenced by changes in teachers’ salaries and class size
 With the exception of France and Italy, the salary cost of teacher per student at the primary and lower secondary levels increased between 2000 and 2010, and on average it increased by one-third and one-quarter, respectively (for countries for which data is available). In the majority of cases, this increase was due to an increase in the level of teacher compensation (16% at the primary level and 14% at the lower secondary level). The largest salary increases (more than 50%, in constant prices) were seen in the Czech Republic, Estonia and Turkey.

During the same period, class size decreased, by 14% (primary) and 7% (lower secondary), but this was often the result of changing demographics and not of a change in education policies.

Little change in instruction time and teaching time
With the exception of a few countries, there was little or no change with respect to the two other variables (instruction time and teaching time) during the same period. This may be due to the political sensitivity of reforms in these areas. At the primary level, teaching time increased most significantly in the Czech Republic (200 hours) and instruction time increased the most in Iceland (by nearly 200 hours).

The higher the level of education, the higher the salary cost of teacher per student, with great disparities between countries
Spending on education rises sharply with the level of education. The OECD average salary cost of teachers is USD 2 307 per primary student, USD 2 856 per lower secondary student and USD 3 301 per upper secondary student. In some countries, the differences between the different levels of education is quite small (in Chile and Hungary it is less than USD 50) while in others it is quite important (exceeding USD 2 000 in the Flemish Community in Belgium).

In general, teachers of higher levels of education earn more money than teachers at lower levels. In addition, teaching time generally decrease as the level of education increases (meaning that more teachers are necessary to teach the same number of students).

Wrapping up
Reforms relating to these four factors have an impact on education expenditure and may also affect learning outcomes. However, the link between expenditure and outcomes is not straightforward. PISA results show that between 2000-2009, the performance of 15-years olds did not vary significantly in the majority of countries, regardless of the changes we have seen in instruction time, teaching time, class size and teacher compensation. What is more, changes relating to pedagogy may have an impact on outcomes without necessarily having an impact on expenditure.

The bottom line is that in the past ten years, increasing teachers’ salaries and reducing class size have not led to better learning outcomes in the majority of countries. This raises the question: has all of the additional money been well spent?

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
Chart source: OECD Education at a Glance 2012:  Indicator B7 (www.oecd.org/edu/eag2012)

Grade expectations

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills 

They’re a source of both anxiety and pride, but school marks can also have long-term consequences for students. Most teachers reward student achievement, but also the skills, attitudes, habits and behaviours that are necessary for lifelong learning. However, as this month’s PISA in Focus  points out, the tendency of teachers to award higher marks to girls and socio-economically advantaged students than to boys and disadvantaged students – even if they perform equally well in school and have similar positive attitudes towards learning – is cause for some concern.

Marks help to promote student learning by informing students about their progress, alerting teachers about their students’ needs, and certifying the degree to which students have mastered the tasks and competencies valued by teachers and schools. Schools and teachers recognise this: more than 95% of students in the countries and economies that participated in PISA 2009 – except Korea – attend a school that measures student achievement through teacher-prepared tests, student portfolios or student projects. In most cases, students receive feedback on these assessments in the form of school marks.

As PISA results show, few countries and economies share the same marking schemes; in fact, even schools within a country may have different ways of marking. In addition, different education systems establish their own ways of informing students that they have failed a class or an assessment. In some countries, the marking scheme allows for only one possible value for failing. This means that students who fail do not know how far they are from meeting the passing criteria. This is the case in Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia and the Slovak Republic. Other countries establish the passing mark somewhere in the middle of the marking scale, which gives students some idea of how far they are from passing. In Ireland, for example, the grading scale ranges from 0 to 100, but only scores below 40 are considered unsatisfactory or failing. In some countries, such as Austria, Hungary, Poland and the Slovak Republic, the remaining values on the marking scale reflect the quality of the passing mark in clear and distinct labels, such as “sufficient”, “good”, “very good” and “excellent”; meanwhile Belgium (Flemish Community), Italy and Ireland use a wider array of numeric values (e.g. 50 to 100, 10 to 20 or 6 to 10).  Analyses suggest that countries and economies that have a grading system with a limited number of values and use labels that refer to clear categories of achievement (e.g. “sufficient”, “good”, “very good”, “excellent”) can better differentiate students’ performance.

Students often base their expectations of further education and careers on the marks they receive in school; and school systems use marks to guide their selection of students for academically oriented programmes and, later, for entry into university. So whenever teachers reward – or punish – certain student characteristics that are unrelated to learning they may inadvertently shape a student’s future according to factors that have nothing to do with the student’s abilities, talents and personal goals.

That’s why it’s a good idea for school systems to promote marking practices that reward the behaviours and attitudes that help students to learn – so that more students can make the grade.

Links:
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
PISA in Focus No. 26: Grade Expectations
Grade Expectations: How Marks and Education Policies Shape Students' Ambitions 
Photo credit: Test score sheet / Shutterstock

Who says she’s a great teacher?

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

Most of us have been lucky enough to have had at least one great teacher in our lifetime: a teacher who inspired us to work hard and take risks, who opened up new worlds for us; a teacher whom we remember years, even decades, after the brief intersection of our two lives as someone who changed the course of our life or deepened the meaning of it.

What makes a teacher great? And who gets to decide? Students? Parents? Fellow teachers? Principals?

There are some countries where mentioning the phrase “teacher evaluation” around educators, teachers’ union leaders and policy makers provokes a rise in the ambient temperature. Teachers in the United States and France have gone on strike over the issue and Britain’s teachers’ unions and those that represent head teachers found themselves on opposite sides of a recent debate about whether to base teachers’ pay on their performance.

Nearly everyone agrees that school systems need to find a way to encourage promising teachers, reward those who have demonstrated their effectiveness, and remove underperforming teachers from the profession. And in the 23 countries that participated in OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), 83% of teachers who had received appraisal and feedback considered them to be fair assessments of their work; of those, 78.6% found that the appraisals were helpful in developing their work as teachers. But agreement on how to measure teachers’ skills is harder to come by.

Teacher-appraisal systems in most countries are still a work-in-progress – where they exist at all. Some 13% of teachers in countries that participated in TALIS had never received any feedback or appraisal of their work from any source. This is partly because such systems may be costly – in money and time – to design and maintain. More often, though, it’s because there is no consensus on what criteria should be used to measure teacher performance (student test scores? a teacher’s ability to engage a classroom full of students? students’ and/or parents’ opinions? some or all of the above?); who should do the measuring (an inspector from a central education authority? the school principal? fellow teachers?); and how the results of an evaluation or appraisal should be used (to determine salary? to shape the trajectory of a career? to signal professional-development needs? to weed out ineffective practitioners?).

Stakeholders are already beginning to find common ground on a few issues. They note, for example, that while student test scores offer important information, they cannot provide a complete picture of teaching quality; multiple sources of evidence are needed for that. And they agree that teacher-appraisal systems must be part of a holistic approach to the teaching profession that includes high-quality teacher training and professional development, attractive working conditions, nurturing school leaders, and engaging teachers in innovation and reform.

The subject of teacher evaluation came up briefly during the first two International Summits on the Teaching Profession, both held in New York. This week, participants at the third Summit, which is being held in Amsterdam and hosted by the OECD, Education International and the Ministry of Education of the Netherlands, will be examining the issue in depth from their various perspectives as teachers, union leaders, education ministers and experts in education – and perhaps, too, as former students who may have once had a great teacher. Consensus might be too ambitious a goal for this meeting; but a lively – not to say provocative and passionate – discussion is all but assured.

Links:
Third annual International Summit on the Teaching Profession, 13-14 March 2013, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Teachers for the 21st Century: Using Evaluation to Improve Teaching
Related blog: A class act: giving teachers feedback
Follow the summit on twitter: #ISTP2013
Photo credit: Jose Luis Pelaez, Inc./Blend Images/Corbis