An interview with Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at the Institute of Education, University of London, on his paper entitled Optimizing Talent: Closing Educational and Social Mobility Gap Worldwide, published last year at the Salzburg Global Seminar in Austria.

Marc Tucker:  In your paper, you start out making an argument that today’s children are more intelligent than their parents and their grandparents and you combine that with an argument that the quality of teaching in government-funded schools appears to be higher than that in private schools in most wealthy countries.  Can you tell us more about the research on both points?

Dylan Wiliam:  The first argument draws on the work of psychologist James Flynn (the Flynn effect), an American living and working in New Zealand.  He found that IQ tests need to be re-benchmarked every decade, because IQs are rising, about 3 to 4 points every ten years.  So IQ norms are rising, and people are getting smarter in ways we may not entirely realize.  The average would be around 110 or 115 if we didn’t adjust it.  It has risen 15 points since World War II.  This is occurring on some tests more than others; arithmetic scores have gone up very little while spatial scores and problem-solving scores are increasing substantially.  Maybe young people aren’t using their intelligence today as well as they could be but there is evidence that they are smarter.

Tucker:  Most American teachers think about intelligence in the way they were taught to – it is a function of the genes.  Is the gene pool changing, or do we have a different idea now about what these tests are measuring?

Wiliam:  Research in genetics shows that the nature vs. nurture debate is essentially an irrelevant question.  Interestingly, what you find in that debate is the estimate depends on the variation in environment.  It is an unstable question unless you can calibrate the differences in environment, which no one can do.  Secondly it is a question of epigenetics—the study of changes in gene activity that do not involve alterations to the genetic code but still get passed down to at least one successive generation.  What we are seeing is that certain genes get switched on or switched off depending on the experience we have.  For example, there is one gene that if you have two long forms, nothing happens but if you have two short forms the likelihood of getting depression increases in an abusive environment but the likelihood decreases in a healthy environment.  So what we understand now is that the nature vs. nurture debate is completely irrelevant because different environments switch on or switch off different genes.

The plasticity of IQ is much greater than was previous imagined.  There were some experiments with orphans from Romania and they had extraordinary cognitive deficits when they were in the orphanages, but rich environments helped them to catch up very quickly.  Supportive environments really do help make-up for a lot early on.

Environments vary quite a lot.  Many people are familiar with the Hart and Risley study, Meaningful Differences: An average three-year old from a professional-class family would have accumulated experience with almost 45 million words while an average three-year old from a welfare family would have accumulated experience with about 13 million words, resulting in a 30 million word gap.  A child from a working class house that is in the top ten percent of cognitive development will be overtaken by a child from a middle class house that is in the bottom ten percent of cognitive development by age six. So there are extraordinary differences in the environment that make any kind of speculation about genetics questionable.

I have a goal that we should magnify the impact of genetic effects on IQ because if we give all students a rich environment, then the only difference would be in genetics.  The important thing is that high quality environments do seem to make a big difference.  There are debates about things like Head Start—IQs go up while in the program and decline when they leave that environment, but if they learn to read while in the program, those skills are there for life.

There is the argument that what you do with the talents you have is more important than the actual talents you have.  Teaching kids about delayed gratification, persistence, how to apply themselves— these things are important and we are finding they can be learned.  My conclusion is that there is almost certainly a genetic component to IQ, but we can’t change it so we shouldn’t worry about it and it’s probably not that important.

Tucker:  Your second proposition is that when you take everything as equal, public schools do better than private. Can you explain that in more detail?

Wiliam:  The 2006 OECD data shows that in most countries, kids in private schools outperformed kids in state schools.  In some countries, the gaps are quite large.  But the most extraordinary thing was they had a lot of background about the educational background of the students and have complied an index of socioeconomic deprivation.  When you control for the socioeconomic status of the student and the schools, there is not a single country in PISA where kids in private schools outperform kids in public schools because you are removing group effects.  The effects of the private schools outcomes are peer effects.  So if you’re a parent and can afford to send your kid to a private school you probably should because the teacher may not be good but the peer group is.

Once you control for these things, school effects are small.  By the time kids are 8-years old, one year’s progress is about .4 of a standard deviation.  So the average achievement made by one student in a cohort is very small compared to the overall spread of achievement in a cohort.  The range of achievement within a cohort is ten times the average progress made by a cohort a year.

The consequence is that the differences between students are typically much larger than people imagine, and it’s hardly surprising that any differences in school effects gets swamped by this.  And the second thing is that teacher quality is one of the most important variables in the system, and if teachers are randomly distributed through the system, it diminishes school effects.  For all these reasons, school effects are quite small.  That explains why reform efforts based on changing the kinds of schools available to students are ineffective, because even if the schools are good, they are not making that much of an effect.  That is because teacher quality appears to be randomly distributed across the system.

Tucker:  In the United States, where teachers have more choice about where they teach than in other countries, what you see is teachers with more seniority and experience choosing the higher status and easier positions within a school, and teachers with better reputations preferring to teach in a school with more advantaged students.  So you would expect to see better teachers teaching in schools with more advantaged students – a systematic bias toward having good teachers in more advantaged schools and bad teachers in less advantaged schools.

Wiliam:  It might be true, but it might also be the other way around.  The fact is, those teachers with seniority may not be any better than the others.  Teachers with seniority may be able to migrate to easier to staff schools, but they aren’t likely to be any better – those decisions are made on things only weakly related to teacher quality, like experience.  So it doesn’t distort the system.

Tucker:  Your logic line begins by saying, in effect, that kids’ intelligence is steadily improving and we have every reason to believe that public schools are at least as good as private ones, so you ask, why are employers so unhappy?  And the answer is because the dynamics of the global economy are changing their requirements.

Wiliam:  People haven’t really understood how rapidly the world of work is changing, because it has happened incrementally.  In the 1980s, being able to type in bold on a word processer would increase a secretary’s salary by 25 percent, now, we expect 7-year olds to be able to do that.  What we see is an extraordinary increase in the types of skills that people are expected to have.  More jobs are being automated, so the number of jobs that can be done without basic literacy and numeracy skills has decreased.

People forget how much more skilled people are today then they were 25 or 30 years ago, let alone 50 years ago.  There is an extraordinary destruction of jobs by automation.  Before you were basically renting your physical strength to the employer.  A factory may still be the world’s largest manufacturer but it employs way less people.  What are left are the jobs that not easily automated or off-shored. There are quite a lot of manual jobs that will never be off-shored—Hairdressing and taxi driving will always be required locally.  Middle jobs such as appraising someone’s eligibility for a mortgage – that used to be a skilled job.  Now, computers can do that more reliably, cheaper and quicker.

Tucker:  I always use the example of sail making, it used to be a skilled job, but now there are algorithms that will calculate every single panel in a sail as well as the measurements of the entire sail and it will tell you the conditions you can use that sail and when it will break. And it will also cut and sew the sail automatically.  As long as the work is routine, it’s automatable.

Wiliam:  Routine cognitive jobs turned out to be easy to automate.  And they are often easier to automate than routine manual jobs because computers are simpler than robots.  Shelf stocking is still done by human beings because they can still do it cheaper than a robot.  In the auto industry, there is a woman who does a job for $25,000 a year, whereas a robot arm can do the job for $100,000 a year.  As soon as the robot arm is cheaper than the worker, she will no longer have a job.  This is the race between education and technology, as described by Claudia Goldin from Harvard.  The world of work is destroying jobs faster than we can up-skill.  We have been walking up the down escalator in the past and have been able to make progress but now the escalator is speeding up and we may fall behind.  We need to walk faster and improve our schools faster in order to progress.

America is wealthy enough to give everyone in the country a very high standard of living by redistributing the current wealth.  This will not happen.  If you are a teacher in school today you should be preparing your student for a world where the redistribution doesn’t take place as well as if it did take place—in other words, we have to prepare them for the world we will think will unfold as well as the one we hope will unfold.

Tucker:  At the end of your essay, you make the point that the job of schools used to be to identify talent and let it move to the top.  Now, schools have to be talent incubators or talent factories – we can’t just identify it, we have to create it.  What does that mean in terms of what schools look like?  How do educators have to redefine the task?  What does this change look like?

Wiliam: The talent refinery model held that some kids can learn, and others can’t, and you have to figure out the ones that you should invest time in.  In contrast, the talent factory model holds that every kid has to achieve at a high level.  And many people say that that’s an impossible goal.  I think more good things will happen if we assume that’s achievable than if we assume it isn’t achievable.  I’m not saying there aren’t differences between students – there are huge differences.  So we need a school that is designed to minimize the impact of those differences, rather than to maximize them.  Giving them more time, bringing them in for weekend tutoring – the idea that the school will do whatever it takes to make sure that every child has a reasonable shot at getting reasonable proficiency in the desired subjects.  In high school, we have that model already in athletics.  A high school football coach doesn’t just cancel the season if they only have six good players; they take the students they have and make them the best football players they can be.  We need to translate that into the academic equivalent.

Vivien Stewart, Senior Advisor for Education at Asia Society and CIEB International Advisory Board Member, reports on the proceedings of the inaugural meeting of the Global Cities Education Network, held in Hong Kong.

The 21st century will be the century of cities, according to some observers.  Today, half of all humanity lives in cities.  Massive migration from rural areas and internationally has made cities increasingly diverse, typically including multiple languages, ethnic and/or religious groups.  With rapidly growing populations of poor, often unskilled residents, aging populations to take care of, and overtaxed public services, large cities are the sites of societies’ greatest challenges.  But they also possess significant advantages in terms of wealth and of cultural and social opportunities.  They are the creative hubs of economies and societies, the dominant drivers of both U.S. and global economic growth.

As knowledge- and innovation-based economies become more dominant, a critical factor in determining cities’ future economic success will be the skills and talent of their workforces.  In a world that is increasingly interconnected, the opportunities for success will also require both individuals and cities to be able to compete and cooperate on a global scale.

It was these new challenges that brought cities from Asia, Australia and North America to Hong Kong for the inaugural meeting of the Global Cities Education Network.  Founded and convened by Asia Society, an international, non-profit educational organization, the Global Cities Education Network seeks to act as a mechanism for collaborative learning and problem solving between large urban schools systems.

In recent years, as the role of education in driving economic and social development has become ever more apparent, international benchmarking of educational best practices has become an increasingly valuable tool for policymaking.  However, these international education comparisons have hitherto been made primarily at the national level.  But while education policies are usually set at the national or state level, it is in cities that such policies are actually implemented in real schools and with real students.

So, teams of policymakers, practitioners and researchers from Chicago, Denver, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Seattle, Toronto and the charter network Ed Visions came together in the Global Schools Education Network to discuss the critical challenges they face, and to identify ways to learn from each other and from the world’s best practices.  This first meeting was, in a sense, an experiment.  Although it is clear that good ideas travel across cultures, these cities are very disparate.  The context in Seoul is not the same as in Chicago – would they be able to find common ground?

The participating cities discussed two critical sets of issues — achieving quality education for all students and retooling their education systems to develop the knowledge and skills needed in the 21st century.

ACHIEVING EQUITY AND QUALITY

The highest performing education systems are those that combine quality with equity.  In these systems, the vast majority of students have the opportunity to attain high levels of skills, regardless of their own personal and socio-economic circumstances.  Yet even in the highest performing systems, a significant number of students fail to achieve a minimum level of education.

Every city in the Global Schools Education Network is working to provide greater equity in its education system, some with more success than others.

A particular focus of the discussion among the participants at the meeting was on the increasing diversity of cities.  In Toronto more than 20 percent of the population have been born outside of Canada (and are referred to as “new Canadians”).  And despite the overall increase in student performance and secondary school graduation, there are still groups that are falling behind, especially black males, native Canadians, and students who have come from Latin America and the Middle East.  In Melbourne, 24 percent of students have one parent born overseas and 20 percent speak a language other than English at home.  In Shanghai and Hong Kong, massive migration from poor rural and inland areas poses challenges to the traditional schools.  And while Seoul’s diversity is small in scale (2 percent) compared to other cities, it is nevertheless challenges the traditional processes of the education system.

Most cities give more resources to schools serving disadvantaged students but quantity of resources may not be as important as the ability to have the best teachers working in these schools.  Recognizing that the quality of the teacher is the single biggest in-school factor affecting student achievement, the discussion also focused on how to get enough high-quality people to go into teaching and how to ensure that the neediest students have access to the highest quality teaching.  Some cities such as Singapore have done extensive work on developing a high-quality teaching profession; others have worked on specific aspects of the issue such as Shanghai’s efforts to get the best teachers into the weakest schools.  These efforts and others could be used to inform other cities.

Another trend in most of the cities was towards the greater provision of choice and options for different types of schools.  Singapore, for example, is developing portfolios of schools.  Melbourne has government, Catholic and independent schools.  In the United States, charter schools, like the Education Visions network, are increasingly part of the city mix.  Seattle has pushed a great deal of decision making to the school level, which has stimulated innovation but exacerbated inconsistent results.  In all the participating cities, the trend is towards greater decentralization of authority to the school level with just broad policies set at the city or district level.  However, choice and decentralization can lead to greater inequities if not designed with equity in mind.  So the challenge in running an effective urban system of schools is — what needs to be consistent across schools and where can flexibility be allowed?

Despite their challenges, cities also have many advantages.  Often the broader cultural and economic environment for education is more favorable.  And particular approaches such as choice among schools or professional learning communities among teachers are easier to implement in a city.  Indeed, an analysis conducted by OECD showed that in many parts of the world, cities outperform non-urban parts of their countries.

TRANSFORMING LEARNING: KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS FOR THE 21st CENTURY

Around the world and certainly in each of the participating cities, there is a sense that the aims and processes of education in the 21st century need to be fundamentally different from those in the 20th.  No longer is providing basic literacy skills for the majority of students and higher order skills for a few an adequate goal.

Every participating city is engaged in or contemplating wide-ranging reforms of curriculum, instruction, and assessment to prepare students for the increasingly complex demands of life and work in the 21st century.

While there was real agreement among the cities on the general direction in which education needs to go, there are tremendous challenges of implementation and cities approach the task with different strengths and limitations.  Asian cities have developed highly effective systems for knowledge transmission, where all the elements of the system are aligned and produce high performance, but their pedagogy is more traditional.  Western cities, on the other hand, have a more developed tradition of constructivist pedagogy and more freewheeling societies.  They have schools that are renowned as “peaks of excellence” but they have been less effective in developing systems to get all students to high levels of achievement.

The rapid changes in knowledge today are also putting a greater premium on investing in lifelong learning, raising new questions not just about the goals and focus of schooling but also about how to distribute learning resources over the lifecycle.  Every city it seems faces critical challenges in trying to reduce the enormous gap between what modern societies and economies demand and what education systems currently deliver.

COMMON PRIORITIES

In the final sessions of the meeting, participating cities agreed on a number of key common priorities of policy and practice where international benchmarking efforts through the Global Cities Education Network would be particularly helpful.

1.    Developing High-Quality Teachers and School Leaders
Cities want to know how to improve their efforts to attract, hire, develop, evaluate and retain high-quality teachers – and to ensure that the most disadvantaged students have highly capable teachers.  Since cities differ in the degree of influence they have over certain aspects like teacher training and teacher distribution among schools, a range of strategies for improving quality and distribution need to be identified.

2.    Improving Achievement of Low-Achieving and Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Students
In every city, some groups of students still lag significantly behind.  And the increasing scale and complexity of diversity facing large cities makes improving policies and practices in this area an urgent priority.  Bringing together the best available international research with a comparative analysis of the approaches of selected cities could shed important light on how the achievement of these students can be improved and how cities can make their increasing diversity an asset.

3.    Implementation and Assessment of 21st Century Skills
Every city is trying to varying degrees to modernize the content, methods and outcomes of their education systems towards 21st century skills and learning environments.  Perhaps most strategic in terms of moving systems in this direction is the need to craft ways to better assess these skills.  An analysis of what different systems around the world are doing to measure different aspects of 21st century skills together with an examination of ideas from the world’s best research on measurement would be an important contribution to helping cities transform their systems in this direction.

4.    Effective Systems Design: Centralization, Decentralization and Choice
All the cities are moving away from top-down management, with its emphasis on tight prescription and uniformity of educational practice, to giving more autonomy to individual schools.  They are encouraging portfolios of different types of schools and providing more choices of educational paths to students, especially at the secondary level.  What needs to be centralized and what should be decentralized to address these challenges is a major issue of system design, one that every city is grappling with to varying degrees and would be another fruitful area for comparative work.

This is a shortened version of a longer piece initially published on the Asia Society website.  Click here to read the full report and to learn more about the Global Cities Education Network.

Or do we?  Consider the typical list of  “21st century skills”:  Problem Solving, Creativity, Leadership, Collaboration, Adaptability, Initiative, Critical Thinking, Learning to Learn, Agility, Innovation, Communication, and, of course, Technological Literacy.  What’s interesting about this list is that, except for the last item, Technological Literacy, all of these goals were important to the headmasters and faculty of Harrow, Eton and Rugby—the great British “public” schools at the close of the 19th century and the opening of the 20th.  These schools were responsible for training that era’s “masters of the universe,” the people who would be responsible for running the British Empire.  They needed people who could operate independently, if necessary, who could apply what they had learned to problems no one had anticipated, who could come up with innovative solutions to those problems, who would be good team members, who could lead, who could communicate well, and so on, right through the list.  Back in those days, though, it was clear to everyone involved that much of it would be learned at school but outside the classroom— on the playing fields and by the student as he negotiated the informal, but formidable, social structure of the institution.  Not least important were the values they wanted those institutions to inculcate.  “Its not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game that counts.”  If course, it did matter whether you won or lost, but your standing in society would depend in some measure on how you did it.

What is most important about the skills they were after is that they were reserved for—and, in some respects, actually defined by—the British elite.  They were not for the hoi polloi.  Far less was expected of the ordinary British students and the schools that prepared them.  What is truly remarkable about the typical list of 21st century skills is not their content—it is a very old list—but the fact that the countries that are now leading the PISA league tables expect all their students, not just an elite, to master them, and have more or less completely redesigned their education systems to that end.

But the matter does not rest there.  For some years now, employers in the world’s advanced economies have been complaining that the graduates they get do not measure up to their needs.  Correctly surmising that educators have not understood how dramatically the terms of global business competition have changed the nature of their human resources requirements, they have pursued the not unreasonable idea that they might get a better response if they could only produce a more accurate and detailed list of their requirements.  And thus was born a growing number of efforts to define 21st century skills.

In my mind, these efforts have not so much defined a new set of skills as make explicit the sorts of skills that have always been expected of most elites, but were never codified in this way.  That’s actually very important, because we are here discussing the nature of the demands now being placed, for the first time, on mass education systems.  Countries in the past have always been willing to spend a lot to educate their elites, because they have been so small, and because it has often been the elites themselves that shelled out the money for the education of their own children for this purpose.  This time, it is different.  It is for everyone, it is the public’s money, most of the children who will now have to meet these standards will be harder to educate but there will be no more money than there was before to educate them.  So it is now very important to spell out what society is trying to achieve, and to spell it out in a way that can guide the legions of ordinary teachers who will now be expected to do for ordinary youngsters what only elite teachers were expected to do for elite students before, so that students all over a country will have access to the same opportunities.

But it turns out to be not simply a matter of writing down on paper what the faculty of the English public schools were trying to accomplish.  Elite higher education institutions communicated informally with elite secondary school heads what they were looking for and the heads recommended the graduates who they thought would be most suitable as undergraduates at their elite institutions.  They did not need to spell out the skills nor did they need to have tests that had been proven to be valid and reliable.  Back in those days, there was no organized education research establishment, and there were certainly no cognitive scientists, psychometricians and professional test makers.  So now we have the advantage of science as we go about formulating the skills graduates will need as they enter the workforce and take up their duties as citizens and family members.  And we also have the advantage of a very active business community, as well as private foundations, and government, which have collectively been willing in many cases to fund research intended to produce empirically-derived descriptions of the needed skills.

We’ve been at this awhile.  In 2009, the OECD published a Working Paper on “21st Century Skills and Competencies For New Millennium Learners in OECD Countries.”  The authors, Katerina Ananiadou and Magdalean Claro, gathered together all the definitions of 21st century skills they could find and sent out a survey instrument to the OECD countries asking them whether they were incorporating such skills in their education policies.  Only 16 countries returned the survey form.  Most said that their country’s policies addressed most of the items on the list in some way, usually in the context of an overall revision of their national or state or provincial curriculum.  But virtually all said that they were not measuring the acquisition of most of the mentioned skills in any systematic way, or any way at all, except to the extent that school inspectors chanced to take them into account in the course of their visits.  Apart from skills related to the use of information technology, they reported, schools of education were not training prospective teachers in the development of these skills.  And, though there was mention of these skills in official documents, the terms were not well defined or specific. It seems that not much was happening as the first decade of the new millennium was coming to a close.

But before 2009 was out, the situation changed dramatically.  A consortium formed by three of the world’s leading technology companies—Cisco, Intel and Microsoft—announced that they were partnering with Singapore, Finland, Australia and the United States to create a serious research and development program to identify the 21st century skills with the specificity necessary to produce very high quality web-based assessments of them.  This Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills program (now known by its acronym ATC21S) would be based at the University of Melbourne in Australia and headed by Barry McGaw, formerly the director of the education program at the OECD (McGaw has since retired and the program is now headed by Patrick Griffith).  Costa Rica and the Netherlands have since been added to the ranks of participating countries.  Several other world class universities, in addition to the University of Melbourne, have also been added to the roster of participants, as have several commercial developers.  Leading academics were involved in specifying the 21st century skills to the detail needed to use them to drive a serious research and development program intended to result in high quality curriculum and assessments.  The decision was made by the participants to focus the research and development program on two arenas:  ICT Literacy for Learning and Collaborative Problem Solving.  The first round of piloting those materials is now complete and more is under way.

The reader will note that the choice of these two arenas meant that the research and development would focus not just on what the relevant skills are, and how to teach them and how to assess them, but, in particular, how to teach them and how to assess them using technology.  The participants clearly believe that technology opens up possibilities for enriching teaching and assessment in ways that are not possible without the technology and are out to demonstrate the validity of that belief.  The assessments are performance-based and are designed to model the kind of instruction that will enable students to do well on them.  For a more detailed overview of the ATC21S program, see this video of Patrick Griffith.  To get a feel for the kind of instructional materials being prepared by the project, see this video.  To get access to the papers prepared by leading academics to support the work of the ATC21S consortium, look here.

The ATC21S effort initially involved more than 250 researchers worldwide in the process of defining 21st century skills.  In the end, they organized them into four categories, as follows:

Ways of Thinking: Creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and learning

Ways of Working: Communication and collaboration

Tools for Working: Information and communications technology and information literacy

Skills for Living in the World: Citizenship, life and career and personal and social responsibility

The faculty at Eaton, Harrow and Rugby would have been very much at home with the first, second and fourth of these, and perhaps the second part of the third as well.

The ATC21S acknowledged its debt to a number of other initiatives that preceded it, including the Partnership for 21st Century Skills in the United States, which partnered American firms with American states to develop a list of skills which the partner states then drew on as they developed their academic standards; and the work of the Lisbon Council in the European Union.  And they also acknowledged the work of several groups which had focused more narrowly on defining needed skills in the arena of information technology and communications, including the International Society for Technology in Education and the Educational Testing Service in the United States.

But by far the most interesting contribution to this nascent field in recent times has been a contribution of the National Research Council of the National Academies in the United States, the report of an NRC panel chaired by Jim Pellegrino titled “Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century.”  You can download a brief on the report and a PDF of the prepublication version and order a printed final report here.

The report acknowledges right at the outset that “…these dimensions of human competence…have been valuable for many centuries….The important difference across time may lie in society’s desire that all students attain levels of mastery—across multiple areas of skill and knowledge—that were previously unnecessary for individual success in education and the workplace.”  The Committee identified three broad rubrics under which it organized the relevant skills, as follows:

The Cognitive Domain: Of which there are three clusters—cognitive processes and strategies; knowledge; and creativity.  Included here are critical thinking, information literacy, reasoning and argumentation and innovation.

The Intrapersonal Domain: Of which there are again three clusters—intellectual openness; work ethic and conscientiousness; and positive core self-evaluation.   These include competencies like flexibility, initiative, appreciation for diversity and metacognition.

The Interpersonal Domain:  Of which there are two clusters—teamwork and collaboration; and leadership.  Included here are communication, collaboration, responsibility and conflict resolution.

Pellegrino and company acknowledge that there is not very much research showing a causal relationship between these skills and the kinds of adult outcomes that the societies interested in 21st century skills are hoping for, but they point out that the research that is available points in that direction.  And, of course, they gently suggest that more research on this subject would be useful (there are many calls for more research).

The Committee uses the term “deeper learning” to describe what it is mainly after, the ability to take what is learned in one situation and apply it to new situations.  And they call this process “transfer.”  They then go on to say that deeper learning often involves shared learning and interactions with other people.  Deeper learning is used by the individual to develop expertise in a particular domain of knowledge or performance.  The product of deeper learning is transferable knowledge, including the knowledge of how, when and why to apply this knowledge to answer questions and solve problems.  All of this knowledge is structured around fundamental principles of the content area and their relationships, not lists of facts and procedures.  This, it seems to me, is a very important point.  We hang our knowledge on the conceptual structures of the disciplines, and it is in the process of understanding those structures and learning how both to hang new knowledge on them and use them to understand new situations that we come to be able to solve new and complex problems.  This is why rote learning of facts and procedures is not enough, indeed why it is not the heart of the matter.

But the Committee makes it very clear that it is a great mistake to think about the 21st Century Skills as hanging out there by themselves, to be taught as if they were freestanding subjects.  No, no, it says.  They play out differently for different disciplines and the only way to teach them successfully is in the context of the disciplines.

For those who might have thought that the job was nearly done when the 21st Century Skills have been described, the Committee puts that thought to rest.  Standards documents will need to be thoroughly revised to reflect this much broader range of skills subject by subject.  New curricula will have to be written.  Most important, perhaps, the programs of teachers colleges will have to be completely rethought and new approaches to student assessment will have to be developed, because we now have the tools to assess  only a very small part  of what we need to be assessing and, not least, because assessment always drives what teachers do in the classroom, and, in this age of assessment-driven accountability, if the assessments do not skillfully assess what we now want our students to be able to do, we won’t teach it and the students are not likely to be able to do it.

All of which brings me back to where I began.  These are not new skills.  What is new is the determination of a growing number of nations to teach them to all of their students.  Even though these are not new skills, they will not be widely found among a nation’s students unless the education system of that country, taken as whole, is driven by standards, curriculum, assessments and teacher education systems fundamentally different from those that were previously used to drive that country’s mass education system.  Some nations are well down that road.  Others, like my own, are largely at the beginning of it.  The Pellegrino report provides some very useful insights into the research that can be used to do that, the research that still needs to be done, and the scale and nature of the task ahead.  That is a very useful contribution.

Kathrin Hoeckel, Policy Analyst at the OECD

In May 2012, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its much-anticipated Skills Strategy, a major new initiative aimed at helping governments improve their economies through comprehensive skills policies.  Kathrin Hoeckel, a Policy Analyst at the OECD, worked closely on the strategy and its accompanying report, Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Lives: A Strategic Approach to Skills Policies.  Betsy Brown Ruzzi, Director of the Center on International Education Benchmarking, recently spoke with Hoeckel about the scope of the project, its implications for education and workforce issues, and next steps for countries interested in implementing the report’s recommendations.

Betsy Brown Ruzzi: There is a strong consensus around the world that investing in human capital is a major key to economic success.  The new OECD Skills report was designed to help countries committed to this goal.  Can you give us a brief summary of what the report recommends to policymakers around the world working on investing in their people?

Kathrin Hoeckel: The aim of the Skills Strategy report was to boost development in economic and social terms.  We approached this topic from a number of angles including education, labor and economics.  We examined the issue through three pillars.  First, how economies can develop the right skills, that is, how to ensure the education system produces good quality skills that are needed and makes them available to everyone.  Second, how economies can encourage people outside of the labor market, for example, women or older workers, to participate.  And lastly, how economies use the skills of their labor force, in other words, how they ensure that the jobs that people are in match their skills so there are not a lot of over-skilled or under-skilled people filling jobs.

Brown Ruzzi: Perhaps we can look at the first pillar more closely.  The report suggests that countries gather and use intelligence on the demand for skills.  Can you describe how countries can go about this today?  Are there any countries with particularly good systems for doing this?

Hoeckel: First, countries need to determine the demands of their labor markets. There are a number of countries that have developed sophisticated systems to assess these skills and extrapolate future needs.  Australia has a system to gather data on labor market needs, particularly job vacancies, as well as the Monash University system that is able to help project what the workforce needs will be in the future.  A number of countries, like the UK, work with user surveys from employers; the surveys provide information on recruiting and employers’ plans for the future.  However, OECD is cautious about relying too heavily on future projections of economic needs, because there are limitations to the usefulness of projections given unforeseen changes in the economy.

In addition to collecting data on labor market needs now and in the future, countries need to align the demand for skills and the education system.  Countries that have strong vocational education systems with strong participation from employers are more likely to quickly adapt and respond to the needs of the labor market.  These countries, for example, Germany, Switzerland and Australia, actively involve employers in educating and training their workforce and that leads to a better match between what employers need and the skills their workers have.

Brown Ruzzi: Our own research shows that some countries rely mostly on projections from employers with respect to their future skill requirements.  In those countries, demand will lead supply.  But others make policy decisions about what sort of economy they want for their country and base their projections at least in part on these decisions.  In these countries, supply will produce demand.  Can you name examples of countries that use these different approaches?  What combination of these approaches would you use?  Why?

Hoeckel: Shaping the demand is a major part of the skills strategy, because just having a match between skills and jobs might not be enough to drive an economy forward.  In a local labor market, if there are only low skilled employees doing low wage jobs, it will be impossible to raise the standard of living and the economy will stagnate.  There are a lot of context variables to take into consideration in order to move production up the value chain, such as industrial policy, innovation policy and the promotion of entrepreneurship.  A country that has made major progress on this front is South Korea.  South Korea’s economy was at the level of Ghana’s a few decades ago, but aggressive industrial and human capital policies allowed it to jump to the front of the line in the OECD.  They set ambitious goals regarding what they wanted the country to look like and what industries to invest in, and they provided the human capital to develop these industries to reach higher economic standards.  This required a comprehensive approach, including industrial policies and education policies that run parallel with labor market needs.  However, one thing to always keep in mind is that education policy always lags behind many other areas since it takes time to educate future workers to meet the needs of the new economy.

Brown Ruzzi: The report also recommends that countries design efficient and effective education and training systems.  What strategies should countries use to do this?

Hoeckel: Strategies depend on the country.  But in general, the education and training system should always be of a high quality that delivers not just qualifications but people with strong, comprehensive basic skills.  Another general rule is that you have to include employers in the entire process of building up and running an education system.  If the world of work and learning are too detached, then you won’t get good results.  It is also important to have an inclusive education system.  During the last decades, most countries have focused their attention on raising tertiary graduation rates, but these can distract from fundamentals including insuring a minimum education for all.  We see through our research that the largest problem that many countries face is helping the people with the most limited skills; they struggle in the labor market throughout their life unless they have basic skill levels.  If you look at the whole cross section of people, over a lifetime, it is very costly to educate everyone to a minimum level, but if you compare that to what a country must invest in the welfare system and other costs that might be required to support individuals if they do not have a minimum education, it looks like education is the better investment.

Brown Ruzzi: Raising the quality of education and promoting equity in educational opportunities is another recommendation in the report.  Singapore is a good example of a country that found out years ago that the bottom quartile of its students could not function at a level high enough to succeed in their vocational education system, and they redesigned their system so that they both raised the academic standards for their vocational education system and, at the same time, greatly raised the proportion of the students in the bottom quartile who could meet their standards.  Do you know of other countries that have done this?

Hoeckel: A number of countries have made major improvements here.  One concrete example is a non-OECD member, Brazil.  It is a country that has made large increases in enrollment at the lower levels of education but this also holds true for secondary and post-secondary education.  The trend today is looking at enrollment numbers and the targets you have for getting diplomas.  That is what they initially did in Brazil, but then they realized that while young people were graduating with qualifications, they did not necessarily have the right skills.  To combat this problem, Brazil greatly increased the number of highly qualified teachers, invested in the general infrastructure of their compulsory schools, and put in place financial incentives for poorer students to attend school.  But quality increases cost more.  Finland raised the standards of its least achieving students by adding an instructor to help these students as soon as they find out they are struggling.  It is a huge investment that pays off, as compared to making struggling students repeat a grade, which research shows does not work.

Brown Ruzzi: Another policy lever the report discusses is putting skills to effective use by increasing the demand for high-level skills.  This seems to be quite a task given the economic downturn in many parts of the world; however, it seems to be the real secret to economic success in the 21st century.  What did your report say about unlocking the secret of creating high value-added jobs?

Hoeckel: This is the key ingredient, but also the most difficult area to tackle.  For example, I just visited Spain, and they are struggling economically.  They have a fairly well educated workforce but not enough work.  But there are things countries can do to promote product innovation, innovations in work organization and workforce innovation.  In this arena employers and trade unions must be deeply involved.  For example, in the UK they have a number of incentive funds for innovation, encouraging employers to better use the skills of their staff.  In Northern Italy, private and public actors have invested jointly in a skills hub where local employers work closely with a polytechnic where their people are trained, where they do product research whose results are given back to employers to improve production, and where they provide free training to the unemployed.  This is a very local effort but in that local economy, it has led to moving production up the value chain.  A lot of bottom-up initiative is required, but government can help by providing incentives and an environment where innovation can flourish.

Figure 1.2: Source: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Lives: A Strategic Approach to Skills Policies, Page 23

Brown Ruzzi: Even in the economic downturn, companies across the globe report that they have a shortage of either technical workers or a shortage of workers with high-level math, science, technology or engineering skills, or both.  (See Figure 1.2 above)  What does the Skills report say about this issue to countries that want to help their employers match people with jobs?

Hoeckel: This is an interesting phenomenon—How can you have skills shortages at the same time as high unemployment?  One thing to keep in mind here is that employers always complain about not being able to find the right people with the right skills.  Often there are not really shortages, but the working conditions and pay may be so low that people just don’t want the jobs offered.  Others decide to stay at home if the pay is low and working conditions are bad, particularly if they have good government benefits.  There is always a group of employers with true shortages because of cyclical changes where the education system is not fast enough to provide people with the skills they need.  In Australia, for example, when mining boomed, they needed to recruit outside the country to fill the job vacancies.

If you want to solve this problem through the education system, there are some countries that have retrained older workers in the areas where they need people, for example in the care industry.  But obviously education is always a slow process.  Employers are faster than government in seeing these changes.  That is why we suggest that employers become part of the whole process in designing education systems, because they can be faster in terms of forecasting their skills needs.

Brown Ruzzi: As part of the report, you wrote about early findings from a new OECD survey that will measure the skills of adults in the labor force in member countries.  The survey is called PIACC and results from the first global application will be available in October 2013.  Can you tell us a little more about the early findings of the new PIACC survey that OECD has developed to directly measure skills of adults?

Hoeckel: The survey is about the working age population (ages 16-64) and is being carried out in most of the OECD member countries and in some non-OECD member countries.  It includes responses from 5,000 individuals and looks at foundational skills such as reading, writing, problem solving and math.  It looks at the level and distribution of these skills.  We already see at this early stage in the results that in some countries the share of people not even reaching the minimum level of skills needing to operate in today’s economy and society is quite high.  I am sure to some this will be a shock.

If you look at distribution by level of qualification, the current proxy for human capital, you can see that it is a poor measure.  For example, the level and distribution of skills of people with a tertiary degree in one country is very similar to those with an upper secondary qualification in anotherquality varies across countries.  As the report points out, people acquire skills through work and other experiences and can also lose those skills if they don’t use them.  And, the older you get, the more skills you lose.  But this curve doesn’t have the same slope in all countries.  This means we can do something about it.  The extent to which people use skills in the workplace has something to do with the steepness of this curve, and we can figure out what countries and companies are doing to maintain these skills.  Another thing that is going to be interesting as we get the results from PIACC is the extent to which skills match or don’t match the requirements of your job.  We have observed that the higher your skills and the better the match, the more you will earn and the more training you will receive.

Brown Ruzzi: How do you see countries using the results from the PIACC survey in their skills policy?

Hoeckel: We hope that some of the results will be so striking that countries will wake up.  The issue of low skilled workers is pretty clear:  if countries see that one- third of their adult population is not reaching the minimum skill level, they might do something about it such as investing in adult education, promoting life long learning, and working on preventing high school dropouts.  We need to understand that training someone at the beginning of their working life is not enough; constantly maintaining and extending training should be the goal.  Our message is not just to governments, but to employers and individuals alike.

Brown Ruzzi: The report argues that countries around the world need to create a national skills policy. How is OECD helping their members do this?

Hoeckel: The whole point of the skills strategy is not just to look at skills and education, but to have a strategic approach and look at everything as a system.  There are so many elements that mutually influence each other: whether you are well matched with your job has an impact on your further skills acquisition. These issues are usually handled in different parts of government.  We want to encourage countries to adopt a strategic view.  In the future, starting with the framework we have laid out in the report, we will work with individual countries, offering a menu of options.  As a first step, we will offer a basic assessment using the framework to look at a given countries strengths and weaknesses.  Next, the OECD can help bring all of the key stakeholders together to discuss these issues and come up with joint solutions.  Third, the OECD can help countries take their strategy to an action level.  Our contribution as outsiders is that we can take a step back, take a look at things and put the right people in contact.  Once we have the PIACC data, we will be able to provide even more in the way of contributions to these countries skills strategies.

Education in a Changing World: Flexibility, Skills and Employability.

The World Bank (2012). Education in a Changing World: Flexibility, Skills and Employability.
In order to provide students with 21st century skills, curriculum and examinations must teach and test teamwork, leadership, and communication skills, according to a new report from the World Bank.  Adding their voice to many recent reports on 21st century skills necessary for individuals to succeed in the global economy, the study reiterates that across the world, employers are seeking individuals who possess a combination of technical and “soft skills”, however many schools are not currently organized to easily facilitate the development of these competencies.

Education in a Changing World: Flexibility, Skills and Employability argues that countries must provide people with the right skills to actively participate in the economy.  These skills include “soft skills” which the report defines as communication skills, creativity, leadership, teamwork, the ability to learn, values and ethics.  The report argues that although the labor market demands “soft skills” as well as subject-area knowledge, most schools are organized only according to disciplines.  Most teachers are focused on examinations and most students prioritize good grades above all else.  And teachers are unequipped to teach “soft skills”.  The report recommends that soft skills be developed and integrated into school curricula and that school systems partner with employers to identify skill gaps.

To develop a 21st century skilled workforce, countries should develop flexible education systems that provide learners with the skills they need in response to changing circumstances.  An adaptable system has the advantage of imparting knowledge and skills when people need them and delivering learning wherever it is convenient.  The report advises countries to determine which part of their education system should offer more flexibility by examining their economic needs.  It defines flexibility as learning opportunities that include formal and non-formal education options, full and part-time programs, a variety of majors in both the technical and vocational fields, classes designed for college age and adult learners, financial subsidies for tuition and scholarships, easily transferrable credits and varied course durations.  Middle-income countries, where the challenge is to increase attendance in tertiary education, may want to provide more flexibility in two-year college programs.  Low-income countries, where the challenge is to increase attendance in secondary education, may want to consider providing more flexibility in their technical and vocational education programs and offering various long- and short-term skills training programs.

Education, the report says, does not take place in isolation from the outside world, but is highly linked to the world of work.  The report argues that education tends to be rigid and conservative while labor markets are fluid and unpredictable.  Effective linkages between the two depend on changes in both sectors.  Therefore, apprenticeship programs must respond to the changing context of the labor market and information and career guidance must be readily available for students, particularly for low-income students who have fewer networks and connections to the labor market.  Part of the responsibility also falls on learners to be realistic in their expectations, prepare themselves with the skills in demand and develop self-learning skills to make themselves more desirable to employers.

While much is known about enrollment and completion rates of students in secondary, vocational and tertiary education in OECD countries, much less is known in developing countries where much of the World Bank’s work takes place.  The report calls for more research in this area as well as more information on the skills and competencies required and valued in the job market in low-income countries.  In particular, the report emphasizes the need for more research on school-to-work transition; stressing the lack of data on whether vocational education contributes more to economic growth than general secondary education.

Teaching and Leadership For the Twenty-First Century: The 2012 International Summit on the Teaching Profession.

Asia Society (2012). Teaching and Leadership For the Twenty-First Century: The 2012 International Summit on the Teaching Profession.
Teaching and Leadership For the Twenty-First Century offers reflections from the 2012 International Summit on the Teaching Profession held in New York City this past March and convened by the U.S. Department of Education.  One of the main themes of the conference was how to create the learning conditions that give the next generation the skills to create the future.  A concern that was echoed by many of the Summit participants is the divide between the ideal of “twenty-first century schools” and the reality of schools today.  A representative from Norway said that schools say they test twenty-first century skills, but really only test basic skills.  This conflict in goals sends mixed messages to teachers about what is expected of their students versus what is valued on examinations for which both teachers and students are held accountable.

Participants also discussed the growing demands on teachers and the resources and training they will need to be effective in instilling twenty-first century skills.  A background report (Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders) prepared in advance of the Summit laid out the key elements on this point that participants discussed: effective school systems need clear standards for what teaching graduates should know and be able to do in each subject, accountability on the part of teacher preparation programs for ensuring teachers have these competencies, more mentoring for new teachers, development of a wider pedagogical repertoire among trainee teachers such as co-operative and inquiry-based learning, greater capacity by teachers to incorporate ICT skills in all coursework, greater facility by teachers in using data to guide instruction, greater understanding of local and global cultures and communities and research skills to diagnose and solve classroom problems based on evidence.

Another overarching issue emerging from the Summit was how to best match teacher supply with demand.  Countries must expand the overall supply of high quality teachers, address shortages in specific subjects, recruit teachers to teach in the neediest areas and work hard to retain teachers over time.  To get there, participants agreed that policy responses are needed at two different levels: improving the general attractiveness of the teaching profession and more targeted approaches to getting teachers into high-need areas.  Installing effective leadership at the school level also emerged as a key issue and countries discussed how they recruit highly qualified leaders, provide systematic and high-quality training to their school leaders and maintain ongoing support and appraisal of principals.  Lastly, Summit participants discussed the importance of building partnerships and support for reform among employers, schools of education, university leaders, the media, parents and students.

At the summit, each participating country offered what they viewed as their top priority, commitment, or action steps to improve the teaching profession in their country.  You can find details by country in the full report.  Finland, for example, “Seeks to develop new collaborative models for school development and teacher education development, change assessment to better meet curricula goals, improve pedagogical use of social media, and participate in an international network for teacher education.”  Japan’s goal is to further advance its efforts at reform of preparation, recruitment, and professional development for its teachers.

Barbara Ischinger, Director of Education at OECD, remarked during the closing session that, “it is clear that learning from other countries, whether through a Summit or through visits to other systems, is an increasingly important learning tool for policymakers and educators.”  A third Summit will be convened by the Netherlands and is scheduled to take place in Amsterdam in 2013.

Delivering School Transparency in Australia: National Reporting Through My School.

OECD. (2012). Delivering School Transparency in Australia: National Reporting Through My School.
Australia’s My School website, launched in 2010, is an innovative school reporting tool that was created as part of Australia’s comprehensive education reform program.  This new report from the OECD, part of their Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education series, provides an analysis of the website, couching their findings in the broader contexts of Australia’s recent education reforms and the general challenges of school reporting and providing school transparency to government and the public.  The bulk of the report provides an overview of Australia’s recent adoption of a national assessment program and the manner in which they created and rolled out the My School website, as well as providing a detailed overview of the types of data available on the website.

The authors conclude that the My School website is a particularly effective national data reporting tool, due largely to certain policy decisions made at its inception.  These included identifying international models in this arena and adapting them to create a model appropriate to the Australian context.  Additionally, the goals and objectives for the design of the system were based on scientific evidence from independent experts.  Another strength of the My School website is that it avoids league tables and instead provides school data in a unique way, only comparing a school to other schools with similar student bodies.  This type of data reporting provides greater insight into school performance and prevents misunderstandings that may arise from more common reporting tools such as rankings and league tables.

The OECD, using data from both their own PISA program and the United States, finds that in general, reporting school-level test scores tends to improve school performance, largely because it provides information to the school community who can then use the information to influence needed changes at the school level.  Other countries struggling with issues of school reporting and transparency may draw some policy lessons from Australia’s experience.  Among these are the need to have strong political leadership, to “articulate a clear case for policy change,” to invest in creating good data and to understand the public interest in access to this type of information.  It is also important to note that My School is an integral part of a set of systemic school reforms, rather than a band-aid applied to the existing system.

The case of Australia makes clear that when it comes to school reporting, the type of data available, and the way it is presented, is more important than simply collecting the data.  Merely ranking a school by its test scores is not enough to determine how that school is performing; instead, being able to see how that school compares to similar schools, how the students compare demographically to other students, and how the students in that school have improved or declined over time, tells us much more.  For more on how the My School website and other Australian education reforms are changing the face of education Down Under, please see our interview with Barry McGaw, Chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, from earlier in the year.

Source: Accenture. (2011). No Shortage of Talent: How the Global Market is Producing the STEM Skills Needed for Growth; McKinsey Global Institute. (2012). The world at work: Jobs, pay, and skills for 3.5 billion people.

Judging by the headlines in many developed economies—especially the United States and the United Kingdom—there is growing concern that they are not producing enough STEM workers (people with degrees in science, technology, engineering or math) to meet the growing need for such people.  We often hear of a global “skills mismatch”; millions of new workers are entering the labor force every year, and millions of new jobs are being created, but many jobs are going begging because the available workers do not have the skills for the new jobs.  A recent report from Accenture, “No Shortage of Talent: How the Global Market is Producing the STEM Skills Needed for Growth,” refocuses this argument, contending that the skills mismatch is one of location, rather than overall supply and demand.  The authors of this report argue that while jobs requiring STEM knowledge and skills are growing at nearly twice the rate of other occupations in the United States, just 13 percent of American college students choose a STEM major.  In China, on the other hand, more than 40 percent of college graduates have STEM degrees; this figure is nearly 50 percent in Singapore (see figure 1).  In addition to the East and South Asian power players in the STEM field, countries like Brazil are also experiencing a rapid increase in the number of students who choose to pursue STEM degrees; by 2016, Brazil will have surpassed the United States in the number of engineering PhDs produced every year.  Furthermore, countries like Germany, with strong vocational education programs at the secondary level, are holding their own in terms of STEM degree production, with more than a quarter of students in higher education choosing a degree in these fields.

The benefits of producing a strong STEM workforce are myriad.  In another recent report, “The world at work: jobs, pay and skills for 3.5 billion people”, the McKinsey Global Institute found that in the United States, a STEM worker will earn, on average, $500,000 more over a lifetime than a non-STEM worker.  However, despite the benefits to both STEM workers and to national economies, the authors of this report also found that countries approach the issue of creating STEM workers very differently.  In the United States, there is a laissez-faire approach; students are free to choose their majors or specializations after being admitted into a university, and the vast majority of students do not choose STEM majors.  Many other countries, by contrast, require students to apply for places within a college or a university in a specific specialization in order to be admitted, thereby allowing the country to have a greater degree of control over degree production.  In Singapore, for example, the government estimates the fields in which workers will be needed and the number that will be needed in each field and then allocates the slots in its first year classes in its higher education institutions accordingly, in an effort to align supply and demand as closely as possible.  Individual students can still choose freely among careers for which they want to train, but the government controls the number of slots available in any given field.  This policy clearly has a bearing on the Singapore’s position on the league table above.  This capacity to align supply and demand this way is associated with countries that pay all or most of the cost of higher education—which happens in some countries but by no means all.  Several countries that have such policies, including Singapore, also have in place bonding schemes where the government pays for a student’s higher education in exchange for the student’s agreement to work in the country, sometimes in the public sector, for a certain number of years following graduation.

Source: McKinsey Global Institute. (2012). The world at work: Jobs, pay, and skills for 3.5 billion people.

The issue of a skills mismatch does not end with STEM degrees.  The McKinsey report estimates overall future job shortages and worker surpluses for the global workforce in 2030.  They suggest that there will be an overall shortage of nearly 40 million high-skill workers, or 13 percent of the global demand for people with higher education, as well as a shortage of 45 medium-skill workers (15 percent of the total demand) and a surplus of about 95 million low-skill workers, all of which means large number of people out of work and employers unable to fill positions unless more is done to raise the skills of low-skilled workers, entice more students to enter STEM and other high demand fields, and match employers with the workers they need.  The same countries that are producing high numbers of STEM workers, particularly China and India, are also adding the majority of new workers to the workforce.  China and India alone added enough new workers between 1990 and 2010 to represent 37 percent of the total workforce growth of 706 million; between 2010 and 2030, China’s workforce growth is expected to decline slightly to just 13 percent of all new workers, while India’s workforce growth is expected to grow to 28 percent of all new workers.  Young developing economies including Bangladesh, Pakistan and many African nations, along with young middle-income economies (such as Brazil, Mexico, Vietnam and Indonesia) added half of new workers between 1990 and 2010, while advanced economies (for example, the United States, Japan, Hong Kong and Australia) contributed just 11 percent (see figure 2).  The primacy of developing economies in workforce growth will continue through 2030; in this period, advanced economies are projected to add just 5 percent of new workers to the global workforce (see figure 3).

Source: McKinsey Global Institute. (2012). The world at work: Jobs, pay, and skills for 3.5 billion people.

Of course, not all degrees – STEM or otherwise – are created equal.  A separate 2005 McKinsey report, “The emerging global labor market: The supply of offshore talent in services – Part II” found that just 10 percent of Chinese engineers and 25 percent of Indian engineers are educated to a global standard – that is, suitable for hiring by a multinational corporation, whereas about 80 percent of engineers educated in the United States are considered globally suitable.  This finding is corroborated by the 2011 Aspiring Minds National Employability Report, which found that the majority of Indian engineering degrees are not awarded from the top 100 universities, which tend to be the main institutions that large, multinational corporations recruit from.  Other datasuggest that large portions of these degrees are what the world would consider “sub-baccalaureate.”  However, despite the concerns over the quality of some of the millions of STEM degrees being awarded in China and India, Accenture calculates that even if just 20 percent of Chinese STEM graduates are qualified to a world standard, this would represent more than 700,000 graduates by 2015, as compared to just 460,000 in the United States.  Additionally, while both McKinsey and Accenture recommend putting policies in place to facilitate the immigration of STEM workers to the countries with large STEM shortages, this strategy seems unlikely to address the skills mismatch in the long term.  Developing economies that want to progress by creating successful technology-driven companies within their own borders, must invest in raising the quality of their own education systems and do this while providing the vast majority of their populations with the opportunity to excel in high quality learning environments.  Countries with historically strong economies must work to produce STEM majors at a much higher rate by giving students the knowledge, skills and tools they will need to succeed in STEM courses in compulsory

Source: McKinsey Global Institute. (2012). The world at work: Jobs, pay, and skills for 3.5 billion people.

education.  However, as Marc Tucker has written in his Education Week blog, Top Performers, it is virtually impossible for a country to produce large numbers of high quality STEM graduates from mass education systems that were designed to produce mainly relatively low-skilled graduates overall.  It may be useful to think about the developed world as containing two categories of countries.  In one category there are nations with education systems that are still designed to produce large numbers of students with little more than a basic education and relatively small numbers of students who have what could be termed elite skills, the United States and the UK are in this category.  In the other category are countries that have redesigned their systems to educate all their students to the elite skills standard.  Countries like Finland, Japan, Korea and Singapore are in this category.  Countries in the first of these two categories will find it very difficult to greatly increase the proportion of high quality STEM graduates without redesigning their education systems using the strategies employed by the countries in the second category to provide elite skills to all their students.  This is a tall order for developing countries, and that is the reason that the highly industrialized countries, though small in population relative to the largest developing countries, are likely to have a disproportionate number of high-quality STEM graduates for a while.

OECD Education Working Papers. (2012), “Immigrant Status and Secondary School Performance as Determinants of Post-Secondary Participation: A Comparison of Canada and Switzerland.”

The authors of an OECD paper on Immigrant Status and Secondary School Performance as Determinants of Post-Secondary Participation set out to find out what accounts for the difference in education attainment among immigrants in these two countries.

Up to 50 percent of the participation gap between immigrant students in Canada and Switzerland can be accounted for by immigration policies in those countries.  Canada has what the OECD calls a “highly managed” immigration system.  This form of managed immigration is designed to attract highly skilled and educated immigrants, many from Asian countries.  Because these immigrants are highly educated, they have high aspirations for their children’s education and they can provide their children with an environment that is very conducive to high student achievement.

Switzerland’s immigration system is a different story.  Prior to the early 2000s, people immigrating to Switzerland tended to be lower-skilled workers from developing countries.  Although this has changed somewhat in the last decade due to the European Union’s free movement of labor (with an increasing number of highly skilled immigrants arriving from places like France and Germany), it means that Canada and Switzerland have very different immigrant populations, particularly with regard to socioeconomic status and education backgrounds.

But what accounts for the other 50 percent of the difference in attainment?  Another major contribution is the design of the education system itself.  Our own benchmarking tells us that Swiss students are tracked at a very early age, starting at the sixth or seventh grade, into roughly three steams: an upper school track with demanding courses targeted at university attendance, an intermediate track and a third track offering very basic courses.  Only three percent of students from the basic track enter post-secondary education by age 23 compared to 30 percent of those in the upper track.  Students with a migrant background are overrepresented in the lower tracks, which impacts their later opportunities.  After compulsory education, students move to upper-secondary school, which is also very heavily segmented and affects students’ opportunities to attend university.  Canadian immigrant students attend comprehensive high schools where tracking is largely avoided, and immigrants who need to learn English are provided with early opportunities to learn the native language at all levels of the system.

So not only do Swiss migrant children tend to come from lower-income, lower skilled and less educated families, but those children are shunted early on into ability tracks where expectations for their performance are lower and they are given a less challenging curriculum.  It is hardly surprising that they do not do as well as the average Swiss youngster and do not progress as far with their formal education.

Canadian immigrant children, on the other hand, tend to come from well-educated, higher income families with above average expectations for their children and more cultural resources to offer them as they are growing up.  These kids are in classrooms where the expectations for all children are high and the curriculum is challenging.  Given all this, and the presence in the midst of a large proportion of children from Asian families in which the drive for school achievement and the willingness to work very hard in school is especially high, it is not surprising that the children of Canadian immigrant families do even better than the average Canadian student.  You can think of this analysis as a four-cell matrix, one dimension of which is immigration policy and the other dimension of which is school structure.  The high attainment cell is the one marked “Immigration policy favors high skill immigrants/education policy favors high expectations for all students and provides support for all students to achieve at high levels.”

One last thing of note about the design of the Swiss education system compared to the Canadian system:  the Swiss streaming system makes it possible for students to leave education at the end of secondary school and have fairly favorable job market prospects.  In Canada, this is not the case.  Students generally need some postsecondary education in order to acquire skills that will serve them well in the workforce.  So this last item also contributes to the lower participation rate in post-secondary education in Switzerland.

Attainment, of course, is not everything.  Switzerland has one of the world’s most successful vocational and technical education systems, and that system is the one that recruits from the students in the lower streams.  So, as always, it is most important for a country to think carefully about what it wants from its education system.  But, whatever a country’s goals are, this report raises questions for other countries about both immigration policy and school structure that are very important.

OECD. (June 2012), “Are Large Cities Educational Assets or Liabilities?”
Inner-city school students perform differently depending on the country context.  In most OECD member countries, students in large urban areas (defined as cities with over one million inhabitants) outperform students in rural areas by the equivalent of more than one year of education, according the latest PISA in Focus.  In fact, students in urban areas in countries such as Portugal and Israel, countries that typically perform around the OECD average, perform on par with students in Singapore.  And students in Poland’s big cities compare favorably with students in Hong Kong.

However in Belgium, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the performance of students in large urban areas drags down overall country scores.
The OECD suggests this might be because students in these countries do not have the advantages associated with students living in large urban centers in other countries.  Instead, students living in cities in these countries must deal with high poverty, language barriers, or lack of a two-parent support system.

The study goes on to say that countries succeeding in educating their urban students to high levels should be focused on educating non-urban students to the same high standards.  Countries whose urban students underperform should use big cities’ advantages such as a richer cultural environment and more attractive professional workplaces to recruit better quality teachers.  They should also determine how students can tap into other advantages such as increased school choice and a wider variety of job prospects.

New report from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research

New Zealand Council for Educational Research. (June 2012). “Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching  a New Zealand perspective.”
Education systems must be built around the learner instead of the learner being required to fit into the system, according to a new report commissioned by the New Zealand Ministry of Education.  Supporting future-oriented learning and teacher  a New Zealand perspective, prepared by researchers at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, identifies six emerging principles for future learning as well as describing how these principles are currently expressed in New Zealand educational thinking and practice.

The report challenges educators to use current resources for learning (time, teachers, technology, etc.) and new resources to customize students’ learning experiences.  The report recognizes diversity as a strength for a future-oriented learning system, something to be actively fostered.  In order to cultivate 21st century skills, citizens need to be educated to understand diversity and possess the ability to work with people from various cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds as well the ability to think between, outside, and beyond past paradigms.  Thirdly, the Council emphasizes a shift from student learning focused on acquiring knowledge to student learning focused on developing capabilities to work with knowledge.  The authors write, “From this point of view, disciplinary knowledge should be seen, not as an end in itself, but as a context within which students’ learning capacity can be developed.”  A fourth key principle identified in the report is rethinking the traditional roles or “scripts” followed by learners and teachers.  If the goal of schooling is no longer to just transmit knowledge, then educators must be cognizant of how their roles should be re-envisioned to best support every learner’s potential. The report prioritizes a culture of continuous learning for teachers and educational leaders and an education system that is designed to incorporate what is known about adult learning and cognitive development.  Lastly, the report authors recommend building a wider school community that takes advantage of new kinds of partnerships and relationships.  Students must not only learn from their teachers but from other people, with specific kinds of expertise, knowledge or access to learning opportunities that exist in real-world context.

Ben Jensen, School Education Program Director for Australia’s Grattan Institute

Jensen, Ben. “Pupil power: time to ditch teacher bonuses and focus on student learning,” The Conversation, May 17 2012.
Ben Jensen, School Education Program Director for Australia’s Grattan Institute, author of the recent Catching up: learning from the best school systems in East Asia, and recent CIEB interviewee, recently published an opinion piece in The Conversation about teacher bonuses.  Jensen argues that teacher bonuses are the wrong way forward in education reform.  Jensen contends that because teacher bonuses are so often dependent on student test scores, and test scores are only a partial and often unreliable measure of teachers’ work, bonuses are not based on what truly identifies an effective teacher.  In addition, Jensen contents that newer and more data-driven measures of teacher effectiveness like those currently being promoted by policymakers in the United States such as value-added measures are also problematic, because they do not identify the “practices that most increase student learning”.  To that end, the Grattan Institute produced a report in 2011 outlining how teacher appraisal could be approached.  They recommend using at least four of the following methods, all of which provide feedback on student learning, to assess how well a teacher is performing: peer observation and collaboration; 360-degree assessment; parent surveys; student performance and assessments; direct observation of classroom teaching and learning; student surveys; external observation; and self-assessment.  It is not just teacher evaluations that focus too much on the teacher and not enough on student learning, Jensen argues.  Teacher education, professional development, and debates around teaching career structures are all guilty of the same misdirected attention.  In his article, Jensen note that, “in most examples of teacher bonus reforms around the world, the impact on students has been negligible, and in some cases the negative impact on teachers has negatively affected school improvements.”  He goes on to say that, “Singapore is the only high-performing country that still uses a teacher bonus scheme, but the bonuses are a single component of what has been broader school reform.”