Welcome to Top of the Class, our new monthly e-newsletter, and also to our new website. Both are intended to provide you with a gateway into a world that appears to be of great interest to a growing number of educators and policy makers everywhere, a world defined by the accomplishments of the nations whose schools are at the top of the league tables and by the strategies they are using to get on top and stay on top.

Some countries have been working hard to stay abreast of what the best performers have been doing for a hundred years or more. But, until recently, most, if they are part of former colonial systems, have been content to follow developments in their home country or, if not, in nearby countries.

That made sense when most workers were competing with other workers in their own community, metropolitan area, or region. But that is no longer the case. Thirty years ago, the steady reduction in the costs of shipping since World War II and the advances in communications in the same period made it possible for the first time for manufacturers based in any part of the world to design their products in one country, build them in another on the other side of the world, and then sell them anywhere. All of a sudden, or so it seemed, manufacturers were seeking the lowest cost labor in the world for products that could be made by low-skilled workers. Major manufacturing corporations in high cost countries were “hollowed out,” leaving only a small design, marketing, finance, and sales staff in the home country, and shipping out the much more numerous manufacturing jobs to the countries with the cheapest low skill labor forces.

Then, those low-skill countries decided that they wanted to be richer and began to invest part of their new wealth in the education and training that would enable their people to move up the value ladder, take over the other functions that the high wage countries had reserved for themselves, and join the ranks of developed nations.

At the same time, information technology and the Internet began to transform workplaces. More and more work was done by people using computers. As they did that work, they increasingly relied on resources that came to them through local networks and the Internet. And, increasingly, their work product could be sent digitally to another worker and then on to the final customer. In recent years, this process has applied to more and more varied kinds of jobs. Now, employers can put together global work teams composed of members from all parts of the world who do not have to move to participate.

The same technology is progressively eliminating more jobs by automating work once done by humans. This applies not just to low-skill work, but to almost any kind of work that can be routinized.

It is, of course, true that some jobs have to be done by people who are close to the customer, but, it is increasingly true that, for a growing variety of jobs, employers can choose to hire workers anywhere in the world who have the skills they are looking for and can pay the lowest going wage for those skills wherever they can find them. So high-skill workers are now competing with high-skill workers everywhere else on the basis of the relative cost of their labor. And the same holds for medium-skill workers and low-skill workers, too.

As more low-skill work goes to low-wage countries and as those countries use some of their newfound wealth to upgrade their skills to earn higher wages, the supply of higher-skilled people grows. That puts downward pressure on the wages of everyone in the developed countries, but it makes things especially painful for relatively low-skill people in the developed countries, because their wages are often high compared to the highly skilled in the less developed countries. They simply cannot sell their labor in the world market at the prices that are needed to survive in the developed countries.

It is also the case that not all jobs can be automated. But more and more routine work is being done by automated machinery, more of the remaining jobs are demanding highly-skilled, creative people to do the work that cannot be done by computers. And the growing global demand from the burgeoning middle class is producing ever-greater demand for the kinds of products and services that only creative, highly-skilled people can design and produce. So, worldwide, in the developed countries, we are seeing growing demand for creative, highly educated and skilled people and declining demand for low-skilled people capable of doing only routine work. That is raising the wages of the former and lowering the wages of the latter. Countries that care about the standard of living of their population and worry about the growing inequality of income produced by the factors I just described have no choice but to concern themselves with the level and distribution of the skills of their workforces, because they hold the key to their country’s future.

So it is no surprise that these factors are now combining to produce intense interest in the policies that are needed to develop very highly educated and skilled workforces with very high levels of creativity. Such workforces are increasingly seen as the key to national prosperity, both for countries that are already high-wage countries and want to at least maintain their standard of living and for those that would like to join those who already have that status.

This is not just a matter of fine-tuning national education systems. Systems that were once designed to produce a mass of people with basic literacy and a small elite now need to be wholly redesigned to produce what amounts to a mass education system capable of educating everyone to a standard formerly thought appropriate only for the elite.

The question, of course, is how that can be done. The premise of our enterprise is that the most sensible answer to that question is to study the countries that have already done it. Not to copy them, but to learn from them and adapt what we learn to our own situation. And so we come to the purpose of our newsletter and website.

Consider the policy maker who turns to her aide and asks for the best information on the strategies the state should pursue to top the global charts for the quality of its education system and its workforce.

The aide will quickly find that there are many agencies all over the world that have information that bears on the request, however she will also find that the information is scattered across various websites, reports, and online libraries. An intense research process would be necessary to answer questions such as: What countries are leading the world in student achievement and how did they make their way to the top? What were these countries’ policymakers setting out to achieve, what strategies did they put in place, and to what level of success? What do the leading experts in the field have to say about these policies and how they have been implemented? How are these countries approaching issues such as teacher quality or school finance? There is an enormous amount of information available to our fictional aide that bears on all of these possible inquiries, but it is not easy to access or to integrate. We aim to fix that, not just for our fictional aide, but for policymakers, journalists, researchers, and practicing educators all over the world.

We will begin by focusing on eleven countries: the ten countries identified by the PISA data as the best performers in the world and, in addition, the United States. You will have access to brief descriptions of their education systems and reform programs. From time to time, we will post new white papers issued by their ministries, articles from their newspapers describing new developments and controversies, and analyses of their reforms by supporters and critics and others inside and outside the country. There will be tables comparing each of them to the others we are following, links to sources for those countries, including their ministry website, key research centers and others from which you should be able to obtain more in-depth material. All of this is arranged so that the searcher can get everything from a quick overview to answers to detailed questions about the country and its education system as quickly and easily as possible.

You can think of what I just described as the “Access by Country” system but we also provide “Access by Issue”. We’ve selected a small set of issues that appear to be at or near the top of the list for education policy makers all over the world, from “Teacher and Principal Quality” to “Education Finance”. Information about each of the top-performing countries is organized by these issue categories.

In addition to the new section of our website I just described, our organization will provide information, opinion and analysis in this newsletter. In this space, I will write a monthly opinion piece, focused on the issues of the day. From time to time, I will invite others to do a guest piece in my place. The prime candidates for that role are the members of our International Advisory Board.  But we do not want our newsletter to be the voice of any particular orthodoxy. From time to time, we will run debates on important issues, involving prominent advocates for opposing views.

There are still other features of our new newsletter that we hope you will find useful. Not least is a featured statistical commentary. Every month we will also highlight a newspaper article or country white paper that is particularly noteworthy, sometimes along with a commentary that we commission from a prominent person on the international education scene.

Our aim, as I said at the outset, is to provide you with information, analysis and opinion that you find useful. You can—and I hope you will—play an active role in this enterprise. Let us know what is useful to you and what is not. If you know of a white paper, research report, or opinion piece or anything else that you think would be of interest to our audience, send it along. We’d be happy to acknowledge it as your suggestion when we list it. If you have an idea that you think would improve our site or our newsletter, please let us know.

Though Steve Jobs always reminded us how important individual contributions are, we are also constantly reminded of the “wisdom of the crowd,” the idea that many good heads are better than one. Perhaps the most encouraging thing about the recent surge of interest in international benchmarking in education is the prospect that all students, everywhere will benefit as never before from a worldwide exchange of information, ideas and analysis about the goals of education, and which strategies are most likely to make for effective education systems under which conditions.

New Book: Nancy Hoffman, Schooling in the Workplace: How Six of the World’s Best Vocational Education Systems Prepare Young People for Jobs and Life. Harvard Education Press, Nov. 2011

On the shelf with literature on education there is a wealth of books and articles on higher education issues but little on the possibilities for the large group of young people who do not opt for an academic education.  This seems out of balance considering the growing rate of the challenges faced by the latter group as they transition from school into meaningful employment and careers.  The present knowledge based economy places new and much larger demands on our workforce regarding skills, competences, and attitudes. This deepens the gap between the world of school and the world of work, and if we include the impact of the present economic crisis the result is a chilling increase in unemployed youth and school dropouts.

Fortunately, in recent years a growing number of articles and books on this “forgotten” group have been published. Multilateral organizations like the OECD and the European Commission have conducted a lot of recent research and policy initiatives such as setting ambitious multilateral targets. This has been followed up by national targets to reduce school drop-out rates and increase completion rates, but a lot still remains to be done.

Nancy Hoffman’s new book is extremely refreshing in this context. Hoffman combines her life experience working to increase the number of low-income and at-risk young people that finish education with her very recent participation in OECD-reviews of VET (Vocational Education and Training) systems among member states. She states that the book is “written out of a desire to provoke discussion in the United States about features of strong vocational education systems.” Another important quality of the book is that it contains an abundance of facts, issues and lessons for educators, policy makers, business leaders and politicians all over the world.

Hoffman profiles six very different countries in the book: Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands. However, experience from other countries is included in the analysis too. Instead of tedious presentations of the different countries’ systems the book is organized around anticipated questions “that thoughtful and knowledgeable U.S. readers have about vocational education in Europe and Australia” such as: How can countries ensure that VET is broad based and not preparation for a narrow trade? How can countries incentivize firms to engage them in educating young people? What kinds of intermediary organizations do the strongest VET systems employ to liaise between young people, employers, schools, and the state? What kind of pedagogy is relevant in the workplace? How do countries serve struggling young people and those at risk of dropping out of school and being excluded from the labor market? And is there a risk that early tracking results in the replication of social class structures?

By carefully defining fundamental concepts, Hoffman avoids misunderstandings due to different usages of the terms, i.e., What is the difference between certificates, certifications, and licenses? And what is the difference between work-based learning and workplace learning? In my opinion this is crucial in order to communicate features of fundamentally different systems across borders. In addition, Hoffman includes two “Journal Essays” as chapters in the book. One is her own reflections on visits to Swiss companies and their training programs for apprentices; a chapter giving the reader a sense of the young people’s views, aspirations, and experiences. The other essay presents observations and reflections on the German dual system by Harvard professor Robert B. Schwartz.

Hoffmann is by no means arguing for specific solutions in the U.S. case. She has a very clear view of the dissimilarities, flaws and shortcomings of the different systems in play. She offers critiques for the well functioning systems and a clear outline of the different solutions addressing the same national and global challenges. Her attitude is not “they’re good, we’re failing, or vice versa”. Rather, she has one very consistent argument – here cited with one of her many striking statements and in concordance with OECD conclusions – namely that “workplace learning “has compelling attractions” both for young people and for employers; indeed, done well, it appears to be the best way for the majority of young people to prepare for the world of work.”

One of the important contributions of the book is the focus on the upper secondary completion agenda and the national targets for graduation. One of Hoffmann’s conclusions is that in the VET countries, the goal is not to get young people to complete upper secondary school, but rather the higher ambition of engaging them in learning for jobs. Apprenticeships and workplace learning can offer possibilities that schools cannot provide. This important message deserves to be considered by policy makers worldwide.

The final chapter looks at the possibilities for the United States. Hoffman presents a number of promising initiatives and policy developments and offers some reflections on what it would take to improve the designs of the high school and community college programs.

In closing, I enthusiastically endorse Hoffman’s final suggestion to the reader: “Buy a plane ticket to one of the strong VET countries, talk to employers, see young people at work, and decide for yourself whether the system performs as described here.”  Before you travel, I whole-heartedly recommend that you read this book.

NCEE: Can you give us an overview of the history of Australia’s National Assessment and curriculum efforts and what spurred on their development and the decision to create ACARA?

Barry McGaw:Australia has been involved in international studies of student performance since they began in the 1950s; however, the first national surveys of literacy and numeracy occurred in 1976.  The evaluations were sample-based only, a bit like NAEP in the United States.  And then various Australian states introduced sample-based surveys in other curriculum areas.

Barry McGaw

The first assessment of all students across the country in literacy and numeracy occurred in 1990 in New South Wales, which is the largest state in Australia. It was very controversial at the time; particularly with the teachers unions. So, New South Wales began testing all of their students in literacy and numeracy, and then Victoria, the second-largest Australian state, followed, and then other states gradually joined in. Western Australia participated with a really creative set of sample-based surveys that covered their entire curriculum, but only moved to test the entire student cohort when the then-federal Minister of Education made it a condition of federal funding.

By the mid-2000s, the state Ministers of Education decided it would be good to get results expressed in a way that made them comparable across the country. They instituted a process of creating a common scale allowing each state to continue administering its own assessments, but calibrated onto a common scale. After a couple of years, there was some concern about how good the calibration was, and they said, if we’re all testing in order to get the results on a common scale, why don’t we all use the same tests? And so from 2008, the six states and two territories in Australia have all used the same literacy and numeracy tests nationwide, also known as the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).

The next major event occurred in 2007.  During the federal election campaign, the opposition announced that it supported the establishment of a national curriculum in English, Mathematics, Science and History. They won the election at the end of 2007. At the beginning of 2008, they set up an interim national curriculum board. I was appointed chair, with the goal of developing national curriculum in English, Science, Mathematics and History. The government added geography and languages other than English to the curriculum development plans in mid-2008, and then the arts were added later.

At this point, the intention of the federal government was to discuss with the state governments what kind of governance arrangement would be instituted in the longer term for this body. There was some debate about whether it would be set up as a not-for-profit that the ministers collectively owned or a more formal statutory authority of the Australian parliament. The federal minister won out, suggesting that the Council of Ministers (the federal minister and the six state and two territory ministers) would be the policy board for this new body. In late 2008, Australia established the new Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) with responsibility not only for national curriculum development, the national literacy and numeracy assessments, but also the sample-based assessments already underway on a three-yearly cycle for science, civics and citizenship and ICT literacy. Finally the task of public reporting on schools was added to the portfolio.  That work has resulted in the creation of the My School website.

NCEE: You mentioned that these national assessments were controversial with teachers unions. Can you talk a little bit about what their concerns were, and how ACARA was able to address them?

Barry McGaw: The teachers unions were unhappy about the public nature of the reporting and this kind of external assessment. They typically argued that these types of assessments don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about our students. The response was, “you know how your students are doing in relation to one another, but you don’t know how your students stand compared to students across the country.” What typically wins the day in this debate is parents. Parents value information that shows them the bigger picture.  When the My School website came along, suddenly parents are not just getting reports on their own children, but they’re able to see, collectively, for all the students in their school how they’re doing in comparison with other schools. This information can be controversial, but to help on this front, we include information about the circumstances of the school.

Some other countries do what they call value-added analysis. Here is our approach. We obtain measures of students’ background, in particular on their parents’ education and their parents’ occupation. We’re not trying to measure socioeconomic status, we’re trying to measure socio-educational status – what are the benefits that kids get from the occupation and education of their parents as they come to school. We use this information to create an Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage. And then for every school, we look at just 60 schools – 30 schools immediately above it and the 30 immediately below it on that index. These are schools that have got essentially the same kinds of kids. These are the schools that you can learn from, that can challenge you. Now we can show a school another school with kids exactly like theirs that is doing much better. That school can then ask themselves, what policies they might consider that are different from the ones currently being used? What practices could the school adopt that might reproduce the kind of superior performance that you see in the higher performing schools? So that’s essentially the strategy of the My School website. Not only can it assist parents in their choice of schools, but it underpins attempts at school improvement.

NCEE: How are schools and teachers using the data to improve performance?

Barry McGaw: Well, it’s only been produced twice, so we know that within some of the state systems, they’re using it to help schools make these comparisons, but we don’t have much data ourselves on it yet. We know that huge numbers of people look at the site.  States do bring together small groups of schools to look at the data and analyze it. Every school in the country, or ten thousand schools, is in the My School database.

My School website

In terms of test results, we make sure that we only report results for students who were in any given school for each administration of a test for each year it was given. We drop any grade three kids that have gone somewhere else, and we won’t count any grade five kids that have joined you since then, and we’ll compare you with the students in your comparison group of schools with a similar social background, but only in those cases where all of those other schools also have students who were in each school on both occasions. This year, we’re going to provide growth comparisons, which are very interesting and useful, because it begins to give you even further information on what value the schools are adding.

NCEE: Do you plan eventually to use the NAPLAN results to evaluate individual teacher performance in addition to school performance?

Barry McGaw: No. NAPLAN assessments are given only in Grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. It would be very difficult to allocate responsibility for students’ performances or improvements to individual teachers quite apart from the question of how those teaching in grades not tested would be evaluated.

NCEE: Do you see teacher performance as ever becoming a component of the data on the My School website?

Barry McGaw: There are serious discussions going on about how to recognize and reward high-performing teachers but no consideration is being given to reporting on teachers on the My School site.

NCEE: The OECD has recently published a report on evaluation and assessment in Australia (available as a free download from OECD) as part of their international study on these issues. A team of experts visited Australia and observed your system; they made a number of policy observations and suggestions. What did you think about the recommendations that they made for Australia’s system, and are there any that you think the government definitely should implement as you move forward with developing the program?

Barry McGaw: I think it’s a good report. The big thing that we are doing now, as the report pointed out, is developing a strategy for formative assessment. But let me explain where we are first.

The final version of the national curriculum in English, Math, Science and History for kindergarten to grade 10 was adopted last Friday (October 14, 2011), and is now up on the website. It’s quite a historic moment, actually. Already the curriculum is being implemented in the Australian Capital Territory, which is like Washington, DC, because they agreed to the content a year ago. Queensland and South Australia and the Northern Territory will implement next year beginning in January – our school year is the calendar year – and Victoria will have a major pilot in a couple of hundred schools; New South Wales and Western Australia will start in 2013.

What we now have to clarify is the achievement standards. For example, the curriculum states, that, in grade five, in mathematics, these are the things students should have an opportunity to learn. We see our curriculum as a kind of statement of student entitlement. What they should have an opportunity to learn is knowledge, understanding and skills, not just factual stuff.  Then we declare in the achievement standards, if a student has satisfactorily learned this, what will a student be able to do? Those statements can be difficult to interpret in any kind of precise way, so what we are doing now, is putting on the website actual samples of students’ work, produced in response to real classroom tasks with annotations to say this student work meets the standards and why. What we will have up by the end of this year, that is by December 2011, for every achievement standard, is some samples of student work. But then next year, while the curriculum is actually being implemented, we’ll be obtaining a richer set of samples illustrating different levels of achievement at the A, B, C, D and E levels.  The samples of student work will be annotated, for the first time, by teachers across the country, so that we’ll have nationally annotated samples of student work that can move in the direction of getting consistent use of formative assessments across the country.

NCEE: Will that all be available online?

Barry McGaw: Yes, by the end of next year. And the federal government has just put up funds as well to produce some online assessment resources for teachers.

NCEE: Can you expand on why it’s important to have examples of student work when presenting the new curriculum to educators?

Barry McGaw: You will see on the website, that there are statements of achievement standards to give teachers an idea of what students can do, given the opportunity to develop the knowledge, understanding and skills, set out in a particular part of the curriculum. We think that it is difficult to write such statements in a way that is unambiguous for teachers and that it is much more helpful to also provide samples of real student work in response to real tasks created by teachers, but then assessed by a group of teachers from across the country and annotated to provide an explanation for the judgments they make.

Under the previous federal government there was a requirement introduced that all schools report student performance to parents on an A-E (or equivalent) scale. Our annotated samples of students’ work will illustrate performance for each score, A to E, for each subject, each year. We have collected quite a few this year from schools involved in piloting the K-10 English, Mathematics, Science and History curricula, but will collect more during 2012 as some of the states will have already begun full implementation.

The Council of Education Ministers recently approved the K-10 curricula for English, Mathematics, Science and History on October 14th. You can see details of the implementation plans on our website here.

NCEE: You mentioned the necessity of aligning achievement standards with the national curriculum moving forward. Can you clarify where Australia stands with regard to the link between achievement standards and curriculum content? Were national achievement standards developed before the national curriculum?

Barry McGaw: We think that the curriculum should come first as the expression of the goals of education in terms of the learning entitlements of students.  Assessment should follow, shaped by the expectations of student learning.

I recognize that there is a place for ‘assessment-led reform’ where the availability of new forms of assessment can show teachers how to assess learnings that are important but to which they might not attach sufficient significance if they cannot see how to assess them.  In that case, it is still the curriculum and its expectations that come first.

NCEE: While building NAPLAN and the national curriculum, what lessons did you draw from other countries? Are there any countries in particular that you used as a model, and in what ways? What do you see as distinctive about the Australian system?

Barry McGaw: NAPLAN grew out of state-based assessments of literacy and numeracy that began in New South Wales in its then Basic Skills Testing Program in 1990.  The other states followed over the years.  While I was in Paris at the OECD, the Ministers for Education decided that the results should all be expressed on a common scale across the country. The separate tests were equated to achieve this, but then the Ministers decided that it would be better to use common tests.  NAPLAN was the result and the first NAPLAN tests were introduced in 2008. Interestingly, there was no common curriculum behind NAPLAN.  The new test reflected the separate tests that it replaced.

As part of the development of the Australian Curriculum, ACARA was directed also to develop literacy and numeracy continua and then to review and revise NAPLAN as necessary to reflect those continua.  We will time this change on the basis of implementation of the new curriculum with a revised NAPLAN probably to come in 2014.

In our curriculum, we paid attention to practices elsewhere.  Our mathematics curriculum, for example, has been increased in difficulty particularly at the elementary school level on the basis of our analysis of mathematics curricula in Singapore and Finland, two countries that outperform Australia in the international comparisons offered by programs such as OECD’s PISA.

NCEE: We know that the NAPLAN assessments are a combination of multiple choice and short answer questions, and are scored electronically and by trained, independent markers.  How did you arrive at this system – why are they structured in this way?

Barry McGaw: The form of the test was established before responsibility for it was passed to ACARA.  There is a preference in Australia for constructed response questions balanced by cost considerations in favour of machine scoreable responses.  As in PISA, the final choice is based on the two considerations.

NCEE: Many people these days think that it is important to measure creativity and the capacity for innovation. Do you agree? If so, how does NAPLAN (or the other sample tests) measure these things? Are these considerations reflected in the national curriculum?

Barry McGaw: They are important but NAPLAN does not measure them.  They are in our curriculum, embedded in the subject content not as add-on equivalents to additional subjects.  If a teacher wants to focus on creativity, for example, the teacher can apply a filter to the curriculum that will highlight the opportunities that the curriculum in each subject for the school grades of interest to the teacher provides for a focus on creativity. The teacher could use this, for example, in developing an integrating theme through which all the relevant subjects are drawn on.  Such a theme could be followed for some days or weeks.

The opportunities will be expanded as we add additional subjects to the Australian Curriculum.  Development is now well advanced for Geography and the Arts and the rest are following.

NCEE: What are the lessons that other countries trying to build a national assessment system can draw from Australia?

Barry McGaw: First and foremost is to tie assessment to the curriculum. We’ll probably end up making some adjustments to the literacy and numeracy assessments now that the national curriculum has been adopted. What happened historically in Australia was that each of the states developed its own literacy and numeracy assessments, as I said, but did it in relation to their own curriculum. Then they adopted common assessment practices without having adopted a common curriculum. Now we’ve got the common curriculum as well; we just need to make sure that’s aligned, and the developmental sequences are right. One of the big problems is – and I think this is a legitimate criticism of these kinds of assessment programs – that they can narrow the curriculum.  Particularly if you make it really high stakes.  And you can’t make it any more high stakes than putting it on a public website like the My School site. So you start to worry about people gaming the system, encouraging poor performing students to stay at home on the day of the assessment, those kinds of things.

To deal with this, we publish right alongside the school’s performance the proportion of students that were in school on the day assessments were given. So, if there’s any obvious manipulation, or indeed, even if there’s not manipulation, if there’s a low participation rate, that’s evident. There is also the question of whether the system can be gamed by narrowing the school’s teaching focus to what you think might prepare students for a particular form of test. Our view is that the research shows that coaching for tests is effective if what it’s doing is making sure the students are familiar with the test’s format. But it is also the case that if you want to prepare your kids’ literacy skills, the way to do it is through a rich curriculum. Kids learn language in history. They learn language in social science studies. They learn numeracy skills with data representations in geography and other areas of social science as well as in math. They learn it in science. So the best way to develop literacy and numeracy is to have a full and rich curriculum. In Hong Kong they use different forms with different kids in the same class. That’s where we’re heading.

NCEE: Is there anything else you would like to talk about with regard to the report, or the direction the system is going in?

McGaw: I’d like to say something about the curriculum itself, rather than the assessment system. When we got started, we were calling what we did the development of content standards.  I found out from talking to an American journalist that we borrowed that term from you.  I also learned that in the United States you couldn’t talk about national or state curriculum, so you used these words.  What we are doing now is saying that we are developing curriculum or the learning entitlements. We say to schools that by whatever means you teach, this is the knowledge, understanding and skills that your kids are entitled to have the opportunity to acquire. You’ve got to get around the constitutional arrangements in order to do the right thing. Australia has strong constitutional arrangements that say that education is the responsibility of the states, not the commonwealth, not the federal government. So how did we get there? We got there by making it a collaborative arrangement. All of this is decided not by the federal minister; all of this is decided by the six states, two territories and the one federal minister sitting at the table together.

Recent Reports of Note

“Quality Counts 2012: The Global Challenge—Education in a Competitive World,” Editorial Projects in Education, Jan. 12, 2012
This report takes a critical look at the nation’s place among the world’s public education systems, with an eye toward providing policymakers with perspective on the extent to which high-profile international assessments can provide valid comparisons and lessons. It examines effective reform strategies in the US and abroad that have gained traction and may be replicable. And, the report highlights the political and social challenges policymakers will face in improving American education to meet the demands of a 21st-century work force. Learn more here.

Andreas Schleicher, “Chinese Lessons,” OECD Education Today Blog, Oct. 14, 2011
Andreas Schleicher, Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD’s Secretary General and Head of the Indicators and Analysis Division in the Directorate of Education, recently visited China to launch the OECD’s first-ever Chinese edition of Education at a Glance. He blogs about his visit to an experimental school in Shanghai, China’s particularly successful educational Petri dish where potential nationwide reforms are developed and piloted.  Read the full blog post here.

Miller, David C. and Laura K. Warren, “Comparative Indicators of Education in the United States and Other G-8 Countries: 2011,” NCES, October, 2011    
Every two years, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) releases a compendium of statistics intended to enable comparison between the US and the seven other G-8 countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation and the United Kingdom. This report focuses on five topical areas – population and school enrollment, academic performance, contexts for learning, expenditures for education and educational attainment and learning. The statistics are drawn from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and their Indicators of Education Systems (INES). To read the full report, click here.

“Education Indicators in Canada: An International Perspective,” Tourism and the Centre for Education Statistics Division, Sept. 2011
This report is intended to be read alongside the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2011 as an in-depth look at the state of Canadian education. Readers interested in Canada’s education system should note the report’s amendments to OECD data; the report points out, for example, that although the OECD statistics show a smaller gap between teachers’ starting and top of scale salaries in Canada, Canadian teachers actually reach the top of the pay scale in half the time of other OECD countries, suggesting a different interpretation of the OECD data. Another notable statistic is the small correlation between students’ reading performance and socioeconomic status; this correlation is far below the OECD average, perhaps indicating particularly successful management of student class disparity in Canada. To read the full report, click here.

“Thematic Probe: Curriculum specification in seven countries,” International Review of Curriculum and Assessment Frameworks, April 2011
INCA’s Thematic Probe provides curriculum and standards information for Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Scotland, Singapore and South Africa. The information is organized around several questions, as follows: How is the curriculum specified? Are there national standards/expected outcomes? Are curriculum and standards specified and articulated separately or together? Who is responsible for specifying the curriculum? Who is responsible for specifying the standards? How is the curriculum published? Are curriculum components specified locally or nationally? Linked statutory testing – what, when, why? The responses are organized into tables, and provide insight into the links between government control, curricula and standards in some of the top performing countries. To read the full report, click here.

The Role of Benchmarking in Global Education: Who Succeeds at PISA and Why?
Dec. 2-3, 2011, Albany, New York
This conference was hosted by the Institute of Global Education Policy Studies and the Department of Educational Administration and Policy Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. The conference was formed to critically examine PISA’s educational and policy role and explore the institutional and cultural factors of high scoring countries, including national culture, teacher education, curriculum policies, and governance structures. More information is available on the University at Albany web site including archived video and PDFs of the presentation documents.

ICERI2011, 4th International Conference of Education Research and Innovation, International Association of Technology, Education and Development
November 14-16, 2011, Madrid, Spain
The International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation, hosted by the International Association of Technology, Education and Development (IATED) took place this year in Madrid. The conference is an international forum for collaboration in education research in all educational fields and disciplines. Topics for 2011 included new trends in education, curriculum design, accreditation and quality assurance, technology in teaching and learning, e-content management and development, and teacher training, among several others. More information is available on the IATED website. Video from an IATED conference held this past July, the International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, is available here.

World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE)
November 1-3, 2011, Doha, Qatar
This year’s WISE recently took place in Doha, Qatar. The key theme was “Changing Societies, Changing Education.” Presenters came from over 40 countries and included leading academics to policymakers. The sessions took the form of panels, workshops, and debates, and included topics such as “Developing New Approaches to Leadership” and “How Does Innovation Happen?” Visit the website for archived video and other interactive content from the proceedings, as well as general information about WISE and their ongoing projects

Mark Your Calendar

The Annual Conference of the Comparative Education Society of Hong Kong (CESHK)
February 25, 2012, Hong Kong
Theme: “Exploring the value and values of comparative education”
Abstract submission deadline: December 31, 2011
http://www0.hku.hk/cerc/ceshk/index01.html

2012 International Summit on the Teaching Profession
March 14-15, 2012, New York, USA
http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/internationaled/teaching-summit-2012.html

Gulf Comparative Education Society Symposium
March 24-25, 2012, Bahrain
Theme: “Global Innovation, Local Adaptation: Trends and Reactions”
http://gulfcomped.ning.com/page/gces-symposium-2012

The 56th Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES)
April 22-27, 2012, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Theme: “The Worldwide Education Revolution”
Registration deadline: March 19, 2012
http://www.cies2012.psu.edu/index.html

Comparative Education Society in Europe, 25th Conference
June 18-21, 2012, Salamanca, Spain
Theme: “Empires, Post-coloniality and Interculturality: Comparative Education between Past, Post, and Present”
http://cese2012.org/

Canada International Conference on Education (CICE-2012)
June 18-21, 2012, Toronto, Canada
http://www.ciceducation.org/

The 5th International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Research Conference
June 26-28, 2013, Singapore
http://www.iea.nl/irc.html

In every newsletter, we will highlight a particular set of international education statistics.  In this newsletter, we focus on the most recent OECD statistics relating reading ability to students’ socioeconomic background and the socioeconomic background of the other students in the school.  The question of particular interest is the degree to which socioeconomic background predicts student academic performance.  This material is based on the OECD publication, PISA 2009 Results: Overcoming Social Background—Volume II.

Socioeconomic background, as OECD defines that term, refers to the characteristics of a student’s family that describe its social, economic and cultural status.  It includes the occupational status of the father or mother, whichever is higher; the level of education of the mother or father, whichever is higher, converted into years of education; and a measure of family wealth which is constructed on the basis of the families’ home possessions, including books.

It turns out that socioeconomic background does not have to determine a student’s academic achievement.  In fact, OECD reports, “[T]he mean index of socioeconomic background is almost identical for the country with the lowest mean reading performance, Kyrgyzstan, and the economy with the highest mean reading performance, Shanghai-China.”

Nor is it necessarily the case that wide disparities in socioeconomic background in a country are matched by equally wide disparities in student achievement:  “equity in the distribution of learning opportunities is only weakly associated with a country’s underlying income inequality . . . [I]n general, cross-national differences in equalities of performance are associated more closely with the characteristics of the education system than with the underlying social inequalities or measures of economic development.”

This is, of course, heartening news for educators.  It means that one’s socioeconomic status is not destiny; education can make a big difference.  It can greatly reduce the differences in student academic achievement that might otherwise be the result of differences in socioeconomic status.  If that is true, then it is also true that differences in the design of national education systems results in real differences in the degree to which education can help students overcome initial differences in parents’ education and family wealth.

One of the most interesting OECD findings has to do with the difference that the socioeconomic background of the students in a school makes in the academic performance of the students in that school. “[R]egardless of their own socioeconomic background, students attending school in which the average socioeconomic background is advantageous tend to perform better than when they are enrolled in a school with a disadvantaged socioeconomic intake.”  In fact, the relationship between the socioeconomic status of the students in a school and their academic performance is stronger than the relationship between an individual student’s socioeconomic status and that student’s academic performance in the same school.

As the authors of the PISA volume point out, this should not surprise us.  Schools serving students from more advantaged families are more likely to have better teachers, a more challenging curriculum, higher teacher morale, fewer disciplinary problems, better teacher-student relations, and so on.

But the influence of a school’s socioeconomic performance on student achievement is not the same for all countries, a fact that is clearly demonstrated by the chart above.  The chart displays the variation in reading performance explained by schools’ socioeconomic background in PISA 2009, expressed as a percentage of the average variance in student performance in OECD countries.   It displays the data for the United States and the top ten performers. For the rest of the list of nations and their performance on this index, see the OECD volume referenced above, Figure 11.5.4.

The OECD document provides a clue concerning one source of these differences.  In the countries in which school socioeconomic background is a more powerful predictor of student academic performance, schools are more likely to be segregated by the socioeconomic background of the students they serve; there are fewer schools serving students of mixed socioeconomic background and more serving students of a homogenous socioeconomic background.  But the authors of the OECD document point out that there are many other aspects of the design of national education systems that also influence the degree to which school and student socioeconomic background predict student academic performance.

On January 19, 2012, the National Center on Education and the Economy launched the Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB). The new Center will conduct research on the world’s most successful education systems.  It will also offer access to information, analysis, and opinion on the education systems of the top-performing countries from all over the world through its new web portal. Click here to find out more.

In August 2011, Emily Wicken joined NCEE as a research analyst. Emily recently completed a PhD in History from Brown University, following a BA in History from Carleton College in Northfield, MN, where she also completed coursework in Education Studies. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the treatment of criminals in the West Indies, Ireland and India in the 1790s and required a year of independent research in UK archives.

In the Fall of 2011, Wanying Wang joined NCEE as a visiting scholar. Wanying recently completed a PhD in Education from the University of Hong Kong where her studies focused on a curriculum innovation in Peking University in Mainland China; the university is committed to modeling the core curriculum at Harvard University.  She holds a master’s degree in education and a bachelor’s degree in law.

Latest Publications and Events

Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems

On November 10, Harvard Education Press released NCEE’s latest book, Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems. The book, edited by NCEE President Marc Tucker (with a forward by Linda Darling-Hammond), focuses on five countries that have sustained records of superior education performance including Canada (with a focus on Ontario), China (with a focus on Shanghai), Japan, Finland, and Singapore. The authors describe each country’s history, culture, and education system in terms of standards, instructional systems, assessments, teacher quality, school finance, the gateways through the system, and the incentives that affect student motivation. In the final chapter, the book offers recommendations for how the United States can catch up and even outpace these educational leaders. Purchase a copy of the book here.

To celebrate the release of Surpassing Shanghai, NCEE hosted a book signing and briefing on November 15 with Marc Tucker and New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winning-author Thomas Friedman, who co-authored the book, That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind In the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back. The discussion was moderated by NBC correspondent Luke Russert. Video from the event is now available on NCEE’s web site.

NCEE in the News

Dan Rather Reports

On January 12, Marc Tucker participated in Education Week’s Quality Counts event and joined Mary Jean Gallagher, Deputy Assistant Minister at the Ontario Ministry of Education; Anthony Jackson, Vice President for Education at the Asia Society; and Emiliana Vegas, Lead Education Economist at the World Bank for a policy roundtable discussion entitled the Global Challenge. In November 2011, Marc kicked off his new blog, Top Performers, hosted by Education Week. He will be blogging at least once a week on what we can learn from the nations leading the world in student achievement and how those lessons can help shape U.S. policy and practice.  Marc also blogs occasionally for National Journal’s Education Expert blog—check out his latest post on why charter schools should not be driving national education policy.  Last November, Marc also wrote a commentary for Education Next entitled, “A Different Role for Teacher Unions” and appeared on Dan Rather Reports to discuss why the United States has fallen so far behind its international peers in terms of student achievement. Watch part of the interview here or to view the full show, Take a Lesson from Singapore, visit iTunes.