Education Equity

The issue of educational equity is one that is important to policymakers in all top-performing nations, but the situation in China is unique.  Shanghai has one of the best education systems in the world, but it is an anomaly in a country that is also characterized by a sprawling rural populace without many of the benefits of Shanghai’s system.  As recently as a few years ago in China, not all children had access to nine years of compulsory education, though that changed at the end of 2011.  China’s government has been working to redress this gap, and an article at China.org quotes Chinese Education Minister Yuan Guiren as saying that “[China has] made a lot of progress in improving fairness in education in recent years … My dream is to ensure that we can … provide education for all people without discrimination and cultivate every person in this nation to become a talent.”  A great deal of their policy and financial focus has been directed towards poor, minority, female and rural students over the past five years.

Despite Shanghai’s great strengths in education, policymakers and educators are concerned there, too, with a different equity issue.  Unlike in the rest of China, where female students may have less access to education than male students, in Shanghai, female students are outperforming male students fairly significantly.  In 2008, girls made up more than 60 percent of the top scorers on the gaokao, China’s university entrance examination, up from about 34 percent in 1999.  As a response to this dramatic shift in performance, The Japan Times reports that some Shanghai schools have created classes for boys only, hoping learning in a single-gender environment will help to boost male students’ confidence and improve their performance.

In China’s Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, there is concern over the equity of the education provided to students from ethnic minorities.  In that region, almost all schools are required to teach all of their classes in Cantonese; this requirement has been in place since 1997.  The New York Times reports that this policy has been detrimental to students who do not speak Cantonese fluently.  As a response, the government has opened “designated schools” in which classes are taught in English and the student body is 95 percent ethnic minority.  However, many feel that the students attending these schools are at a disadvantage due to their separation (both physically and linguistically) from mainstream society.

Education Funding

Following the release of the Review of Funding for Schooling (better known as the “Gonski Report”) in Australia last year, both the federal government and the states have been working to reach agreement on what school funding will look like going forward.  The report proposed a uniform system of funding schools across Australia, with a base funding amount augmented by a school-specific “loading” to address economic, cognitive and physical disadvantages among the student body.  However, the premier of the state of Victoria has rejected this plan, preferring instead to propose his own system.  The Age has the full story.  Other states, too, have rejected the Gonski proposals.  In Queensland, the Education Minister has announced that they will be developing their own funding plan, while Tasmania has emerged as the first state with a Labor government (the same party that is in power in the federal government) to reject the government’s plans.

Nearby in New Zealand, a recently released study from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research found that, according to a survey of the country’s principals, secondary schools are often struggling financially.  Principals reported budgetary deficits, with a majority stating that their finances were worse in 2012 than they were the previous year.  However, the Ministry of Education rejected the report’s findings, with a staffer contending, “schools are adequately funded to deliver the curriculum so that all students are able to learn and achieve.”  Read more at the Otago Times.

China, meanwhile, has been working to increase funding for schooling as part of their overarching strategy to improve the system and create both greater equity and improved student performance.  An article on Xinhuanet reports that China has been increasing education spending since 2009, with an investment totaling nearly US$5 billion over the past four years.  Four percent of GDP is about the same, proportionally, as what the OECD countries spend on average on education each year; top performing systems such as Australia, Finland and the Netherlands also spend about 4% of their GDP on education. 4-Traders reports that the government plans to increase education spending by 9.3% in 2013 and to focus on educating rural students.

Student Pressure

Most of the top-performing East Asian education systems are known for the the extensive hours students spend studying outside of class, often to prepare for university entrance exams.  The Japan Times reports that students in that country are attending cram schools, or juku, earlier than ever before.  Whereas in the past students began attending juku in their teenage years, now it is becoming increasingly common among elementary and even preschool students.  However, there does seem to be a degree of ambivalence on the part of parents: while many feel that they should not have to pay for private tutoring in addition to regular schooling, they often turn to juku in order to ensure that their children are not falling behind their peers.

In China, by contrast, aware that immense pressure on students is often not conducive to a student’s health, many provinces are making strides in changing the culture of “cram.”  Beijing, in particular, is leading the pack in developing policies focused on reducing student stress in an education system where tests are a central element of schooling.   The Global Times reports that after March 19, primary schools in that city will face limitations on testing and homework, and secondary schools will be prohibited from ranking students based on exam scores.  However, the article also reports that parents are not necessarily on board with these changes.  One parent pointed out that as long as the gaokao, China’s university entrance exam, dominates a student’s academic prospects, the system is unlikely to change. The Shanghai Daily has also recently covered the tension between the government efforts to relax education in the primary grades and parents’ concerns about their children’s futures, while Xinhuanet reports that China will be launching a national campaign to ease stress and move towards more comprehensive evaluations of student performance.

Teacher Quality

Both Australia and the Netherlands have produced new policy plans for improving the quality of their teaching forces in the past month.  In the Netherlands, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science released Working in Education 2012, a policy document that calls for turning schools into professional organizations where teachers would have access to attractive career paths.  The government’s recommendations for improving teacher quality, to be introduced by 2016, include developing a competency document for each teacher that describes their skills and the activities designed to maintain and improve them, implementing a peer review system for teachers, and introducing performance-related pay pilots.

In Australia, both the state and federal governments are concerned with the issue of teacher quality.  In New South Wales, the Education Minister has announced that there will be a new minimum entry standard for teacher education programs.  The Australian reports that teacher candidates would need scores of at least 80 percent in three subjects on the high school leaving exams, including in English.  Another component of the new quality measures is an introduction of a literacy and numeracy test that teacher candidates must pass while they are completing their degree.  The federal government has also announced plans to require literacy and numeracy tests and an assessment interview for students entering teaching programs.  The Education Minister of New South Wales has stated that his state’s plan does not conflict with the federal plan, but would hold teacher candidates to a higher standard than the federal plan.

Early Childhood Education

In Singapore and Shanghai, the government and parents are increasingly focused on early childhood education (ECE).  Singapore plans to spend more than US$2.4 billion on preschool education in the next five years, which doubles their current investment, writes Channel News Asia.  In Shanghai, parents are so eager to enroll their students in early childhood programs that some have begun signing their children up for these programs on the day they are born.  According to the Global Times, however, this demand for preschool has created a boom in the private ECE sector.  This has led to concerns about the quality of the teaching staff and the programs offered, and calls for improved government oversight.

Earlier this month, the Center for International Education Benchmarking introduced a new feature on its web site.  The Study Guide is intended to provide readers with a weekly summary of headlines from the top-performing education systems in the world.  This month’s International Reads highlights some of the most important current issues in the news.

Teachers.  In Japan, changes to teachers’ retirement packages have caused many teachers to think about retiring early before the changes go into effect.  Japan education officials are struggling to figure out a work-around to ensure that students are not left without a teacher for the remainder of the school year, according to The Mainichi.  A Valentine’s Day strike was held by educators in Victoria, Australia in protest of the pay package offered by the state—a modest 2.5 percent a year plus performance-based pay.  The Australian Education Union is demanding a 12 percent raise over three years with no performance-based pay.  But on the issue of improving the quality of the pool entering teaching, the teacher’s union and the government are on the same side—recently, Education Union federal president Angelo Gavrielatos issued a statement supporting the government’s initiative to raise the quality of students entering the teaching profession.  In Ontario, newly elected Education Minister Liz Sandals is facing teacher dissatisfaction.  Last fall, legislation was passed banning teacher strikes in the province.  In January, the new law was used to impose a contract on public secondary school teachers.  In response, teacher unions have asked their members to refrain from supervising extracurricular activities, which they see as outside their regular duties.  Sandals said her first order of business is to ensure that new teacher contracts are the result of negotiation, not legislation.

Early Childhood Education.  In Japan, government officials are considering offering free pre-school to children ages 3-5, in an effort to ease the financial burden on families, according to Inside Japan.  This proposal comes at the same time that President Obama called for free pre-school for all 4-year-olds at or below 200 percent of the poverty line in the United States during his State of the Union address.  Parents in Hong Kong are focused on another concern — that kindergartens are emphasizing grades and tests too much.  In response, they are leading a movement to shift to kindergartens that emphasize learning through play, according to the South China Morning Post.  And in New Zealand, the Pasifika Education Plan 2013-17 aims to lift Pasifika participation in early childhood education from its current rate of 86.8 percent to 98 percent by 2016, according to Radio New Zealand International.

Post-secondary Education.  A February 3rd editorial in the Japan Times calls for major changes in the country’s university entrance exam system, arguing that the current assessments measure knowledge acquired rather than deeper comprehension, aptitude and potential.  Meanwhile, researchers at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIE) say educational inequality is getting worse, despite the increased number of publicly funded university places.  A recent HKIE study found that students from wealthy families are nearly four times more likely to enroll in a university than those living in poverty.  That’s a much wider gap than 20 years ago.  The Netherlands is looking to the liberal arts model to solve some of their higher education challenges related to a lack of differentiation and excellence.  Inside Higher Ed reports liberal art schools (known there as university colleges), “have had an outsized impact on Dutch higher education policies and practices, inspiring the growing movement toward selective admissions and the development of ‘excellence’ programs within a famously egalitarian higher education system.”

Choice and Charters.  The Education Amendment Bill, introduced last year in New Zealand, would create legal recognition of charter schools there.  However, the Treasury has found evidence that school systems using strongly competitive elements do not produce systematically better student outcomes and other critics are arguing that charter schools will take public money but be free from government scrutiny.  While charter schools are not prevalent in Canada, school competition does exist in the form of four separate publicly funded systems catering to the English and French non-religious and Catholic constituencies of Ontario.  With birth rates in that province on the decline, schools are struggling to keep enrollment levels high. But the schools don’t just compete for students in name only: recently, schools have taken to touting their extracurricular programs in advertisements in local media and attending other schools’ open houses in order to gain an edge.  For more on this story, see the article in The Globe and Mail.

International Benchmarking.  And finally, Shanghai is looking forward to the December publication of the 2012 PISA results to show the world that, once again, they are on top of the international education league tables.  According to Shanghai education officials interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald, “tests recently conducted for the next PISA report…will show Shanghai students have further improved their results and consolidated their lead in the world.”  In the same article, Deputy Director of the OECD Education Division Andreas Schleicher says, “Maybe it’s time to change some of our stereotypes.  What you see today in the school system in Shanghai is what you are going to see in the labour market tomorrow.”  Learn more about the results from the most recent TIMMS and PIRLS international assessments by clicking here.

Check back to our web site on a weekly basis for more education news from the top-performing education systems in the world.

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.

Indeed, economists know that deep recessions are typically occasions for transformations in national economies, and it looks as though this one is no exception.  Companies facing stunted demand and plenty of cash have used the opportunity to make major investments in automation.  That means that many of the jobs requiring relatively routine skills are never coming back and many of the jobs that are created as demand comes back will call for considerably higher skills.  This was the general direction before the Great Recession, but that trend, it seems, as been greatly accelerated by those events, ratcheting up skills requirements considerably.

The 2012 issue of Education at a Glance focuses, in particular, on the relationship of compulsory and higher education investments by nations to their economic outcomes noting that, despite the financial constraints on governments because of the recession, spending on education (both public and private) has, in many cases, increased across OECD countries.  The OECD considers secondary education to be the “baseline” qualification needed in today’s economy, with many of their indicators measuring the proportion of the population who hope to achieve or have achieved education beyond this baseline.

There are also a host of new indicators included in this year’s Education at a Glance.  Two are specifically directed at the relationship between the global economy and the education level of a population: how education influences economic growth, labor costs and earning power; and the extent of social mobility in each country studied.  The former supports the growing body of evidence about the importance of workers having some post-secondary education:  the OECD found that labor income growth among highly educated people has contributed to more than half of GDP growth in OECD countries, whereas workers with less than a secondary education actually serve as a drag on labor income growth.

As policymakers around the world have turned their attention to increasing post-secondary education attainment rates, students, too, seem to grasp the increasing importance of higher education in most OECD countries, with educational attainment levels on the rise across the board.  Across all OECD countries, an average of 31 percent of adults have completed a post-secondary education.  Canada is the only country where more than half of all adults (people aged 25-64) have some higher education.  While many countries have steadily increased their percentage of adults with a college degree, some have increased at a much faster rate.  From 2000 to 2010, Canada’s average annual growth rate was 2.4 percent, the United States’ was 1.3 percent, and Finland’s was 1.8 percent.  But, during the same time frame, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Poland experienced growth rates ranging from 6.9 to 7.3 percent. The OECD average growth rate is 3.7 percent.  South Korea is also moving up fast with an average annual growth rate of 5.2 percent and they lead the world in higher education attainment rates for their young adult population, with 65 percent of their people aged 25-34 years completing post-secondary education.  In other high performing countries, like Japan, students who hope to enter higher education are hobbled by high tuition and low student supports.

Another new indicator in this year’s edition of Education at a Glance asks to what extent does parents’ education influence access to tertiary education?  Not surprisingly, the data shows that if at least one parent has completed post-secondary education, students are more than twice as likely than the average student to attend higher education themselves, while students whose parents did not complete upper secondary education have a 44 percent chance of attending post-secondary education.  Some countries are better than others in creating a pipeline to post secondary education even for students whose parents did not complete upper secondary school. Students whose parents have low education levels have greater chances of attending higher education in Iceland, Turkey, Portugal, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Sweden, where the odds of attending are greater than 50 percent.  While not all students in this group who attend higher education actually graduate, some of these countries are also adept at ensuring fairly high rates of completion.  In Australia, the tertiary attainment rate of students without highly educated parents is more than 40 percent; in Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, and Finland, about 30 percent of students from this group attain tertiary degrees.  The OECD average for this group is just 20 percent.  Many of these countries employ a number of strategies to strengthen the educational pipeline for students whose parents are less educated including providing equal access to high-quality K-12 educational experiences, offering robust student support systems such as college and career counseling, and maintaining reasonable college and university tuition costs.  Australia, perhaps the most successful country when judged by the metrics of both the participation and attainment of students whose parents have low levels of education, has annual tuition fees at public institutions of $4200 US per year (fairly high compared to other OECD countries, though not as high as in the United States or the United Kingdom), but more than 75 percent of students receive financial aid.  Sweden, which also has high rates of tertiary participation among students whose parents have low education levels, and a fairly high rate of completion among this group, takes a different tack, not charging tuition fees at all.

In the United States, the odds of a student going on to college if his or her parents have not finished high school is just 29 percent.  The odds are lower in just two countries, Canada and New Zealand (figure 2).  However, the figures may not be as dire as they seem at first reading.  In his webinar presentation prior to the launch of this year’s report, Andreas Schleicher, Deputy Director for Education and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General of the OECD, points out that the OECD did not count associate’s degrees in their analysis. When the definition of higher education is expanded, the United States most certainly will improve in this category; however, this still brings into question the quality of the post-secondary credentials that many young people in the United States acquire compared to those in other OECD countries.

Schleicher also mentioned that OECD researchers had initially hypothesized that high tuition would be a barrier to disadvantaged students attending higher education.  However, the evidence shows this is not always the case.  In countries with high tuition rates and strong student support systems (for example, widespread access to loans and grants and manageable debt repayment plans), high tuition does not generally seem to prevent students from pursuing higher education.  Schleicher highlighted the system in the United Kingdom, which bases student loan repayments on salaries.  If former students do not meet a certain income threshold, they are not required to repay their loans.  Therefore, pursuing higher education is less of a gamble for low-income students; when students do not have to worry about repaying their loans if they cannot find a job, more students are willing to continue their studies.  This is a notable lesson for other countries with high tuition rates and less forgiving repayment programs – Schleicher stated that the UK government has found that the social returns of investing in getting more students into higher education are worth the risk.

Other new indicators ask:

• What is the difference between the career aspirations of boys and girls and the fields of study they pursue as young adults?
• How well do immigrant students perform in school?
• How do early childhood education systems differ around the world?
• Who makes key decisions in education systems?
• What are the pathways and gateways to secondary and tertiary education?

A few highlights from these new indicators tell us that key decisions in education systems are least commonly made at the intermediate level of governance; 16 of 36 countries allow schools to make key decisions (and half of those decisions are made within a framework created by a more centralized structure), and 12 countries fall at the other end of the spectrum, with key decisions made at the central level.  The Netherlands is the most autonomous system in the OECD, with 85 percent of decisions made at the school level.  However, school autonomy does not necessarily predict student performance; the top performers are scattered across the spectrum.

Another indicator looks at secondary and post-secondary gateways in education systems.  Twenty-three of the 36 OECD countries require students to take examinations at the upper secondary level and 22 make those examinations a requirement for passing a grade, graduating from school or earning a certificate.  Very few, however, require national examinations in elementary school, with the United States, Indonesia and Turkey being the only exceptions.  This suggests that most OECD countries value mastery of content and skills at the upper secondary level as an essential component of their education systems.

Some of the top-performing countries in primary and secondary education seem to be slightly behind the curve when it comes to early childhood education – at least early childhood education supported by government expenditures – a point which was driven home in three of the four country notes.  Three countries rely on private investment to drive their systems.  In South Korea, for example, more than 80 percent of four-year-olds are enrolled in a preschool program, but the vast majority (79 percent) attend private preschools, whereas across the OECD, just under 16 percent of students attend private ECE programs.  In Japan, preschool attendance for four-year-olds is nearly universal (97.2 percent), but spending on ECE is among the lowest in the OECD, and household spending makes up nearly 40 percent of all spending on ECE.  In Australia, both enrollment and spending lag; enrollment is the fourth lowest in the OECD at just 52 percent, and spending on ECE as a proportion of GDP is also among the lowest.

The annual publication of Education at a Glance once again serves as the go-to source for up-to-date information on the measurable features of education systems in OECD countries.  New indicators on higher education certainly make this year’s issue the most comprehensive yet.

The OECD’s A Skills Beyond School Review series is currently also being conducted in Austria, Egypt, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, England and the United States with case studies of Florida, Maryland, and Washington state.  Each review follows a standard methodology with the selected country preparing a background report and the OECD team making two visits to the country to discuss important issues with a number of stakeholders.  In addition to this work, the OECD is preparing a range of analytical studies on issues such as access and career guidance and counseling.  The complete body of work will conclude with a comparative report offering key policy messages for all OECD countries expected to be issued at the end of 2012.

In Denmark, postsecondary VET education takes the form of two different programs ⎯ academy profession (AP) degree programs and professional bachelor degree programs.  AP programs are short-cycle higher education programs that typically take about two-years to complete.  Admission is based on qualifications comparable to a Danish high school leaving certificate.  The AP program provides students with analytical and professional skills relevant for employment in businesses or industries.  The program also qualifies graduates for further studies within the same field at the university level.  Along with class work, a minimum three-month work placement and the submission of a project paper are required for graduation.  Most programs are offered at academies of professional higher education, which are independent organizations, separate from universities.  However current legislation outlines that prior to 2015, each academy should decide if they want to remain independent, in which case they will then have to transfer their bachelor programs to a higher education institution or merge with a higher education institution.  As of 2009, almost 19,000 students were registered in AP programs, which is a substantial increase from 2000 when nearly 13,000 students were enrolled.

Professional bachelor programs in Denmark require three to four and half years of study and are equivalent to a university bachelor degree with a stronger focus on professional practice.  The majority of the program takes place at a higher education institution and prepares students with theoretical knowledge and an understanding of how to apply theory to professional practice.  Along with all required coursework, a minimum six-month work placement and the submission of a project paper are required for graduation.  Admission to these programs is based on student performance on high school leaving examinations and other factors such as minimum grades.

A Skills Beyond School Review of Denmark identifies a number of strengths for this country’s postsecondary VET system including the mandatory, well-structured workplace training that outlines clear learning goals.  They also note Denmark’s effective policies to incentivize institutions to help students stay in school through graduation such as the school funding system, which funds institutions according to program completion numbers.  Additional laws are in place to encourage students to stay in school, for example, education institutions are required to refer students that wish to dropout to regional guidance centers and municipalities are legally required to make contact with and offer guidance to young people that are unemployed and not enrolled in school at least twice a year up until age 19.  Another impressive element of Denmark’s VET system is a parallel adult education system.  Over 40 percent of adults participate in formal and/or non-formal education each year and can expect to receive 1,794 hours of instruction during their working life, which is one of the highest levels across the OECD.  Lastly the OECD points out that both the employers and the employees are very engaged in planning, designing and steering the VET system.

In South Korea, postsecondary VET accounts for 30 percent of higher education enrollment and is provided by both junior colleges and polytechnics.  The junior colleges enroll over 50 times more students than polytechnics.  However their admission processes are not very selective and some institutions can struggle to fill their rosters.  Ninety-five percent of junior colleges are private, and government funding accounts for less than 10 percent of total junior college income.  Completion of these programs typically takes two years although three-year and four-year degrees are offered in a number of fields such as engineering.  While the difference in wages between junior college and high school graduates has been decreasing over the past 30 years, there is still a benefit in terms of employment.  The polytechnic schools, on the other hand, are public and access is more selective.  These schools typically offer one- and two-year degrees in technical fields such as electronics, mechanical engineering or telecommunications.  In addition, polytechnics offer shorter programs for employed and unemployed individuals as well as retired military serviceman.  A strength of South Korea’s VET system is the ease with which students can apply credits from VET programs toward a university degree.  Currently about half of junior college graduates continue in the university program.  This can present challenges as the vocational programs and university programs do not align their programs of study, so many junior college graduates are unprepared for the university-level work.

A Skills Beyond School Review of Korea finds a skills mismatch between VET options and labor market needs.  The reviewers make a number of suggestions on this front: convene a national body of key stakeholder groups, including businesses, to lead the development and regular updating of standards and qualifications based on the skill demands in the South Korean economy and make recommendations to ensure students are trained in these important areas.  The reviewers also suggest making transparent standards for VET programs through the development of common, national standards and assessments.  Another recommendation is to improve quality assurance in junior colleges by basing funding allocations and accreditation status on the quality of the training provided.  Lastly, the reviewers suggest that South Korea work to improve career information available to prospective students and that junior colleges make workplace training mandatory.  It is important to note that most of the OECD’s recommendations are focused on the junior colleges, which unlike the polytechnics do not have a strong link to workforce priorities.  The point of building a national framework for VET is crucial so all programs meet the same standards and the value of the each qualification or degree is clear to prospective employers as well as students.

In both of these country reports, workplace training is stressed as a key part of students’ vocational education experiences; not only does it benefit students but it can also serve to substantially enhance relationships between VET providers and employers.  Other key elements of high-performing systems seem to be the high status of these programs and the flexibility for VET students to apply what they have learned and move on to university qualifications.  The quality of the teaching staff is also not to be overlooked.  High quality vocational education and training requires instructors with solid pedagogical skills as well as expertise in the field they are teaching.  This means teachers must have professional development opportunities available within the system.

The Credibility and Value of International Education and Training Qualifications

The European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP), the European Union’s reference centre for vocational education and training, released a new report on International Qualifications in June 2012.  The report looks at a variety of education and training qualifications, diplomas, certificates and licenses that are awarded outside the jurisdiction of any one country.  The authors try to develop a typology for these qualifications and analyze their credibility and value in the labor market.  The qualifications they consider are as diverse as: a certificate for seafarers, the Association of Montessori International primary certificate, Cisco certifications and airplane pilot licenses.  Their typology includes five categories for describing each: purpose (what the qualification is for); type (how complete and how durable the qualification is); coverage (where the qualification can be used); competent body (who awards the qualification); and currency value (what the qualification can be exchanged into).  They look at the case of Welding in more detail where cooperation among different bodies has yielded defacto international standards, driven by the need for safety and quality in this occupation.  The report suggests that while national qualifications are becoming easier to evaluate for quality because of the development of national qualifications frameworks, international qualifications are becoming harder to value because of the lack of any international organizing structure and the new need to align them with national frameworks.  The authors believe that international qualifications will only maintain relevance with the transparency that comes from an overall system for cataloguing and monitoring the quality of these qualifications.

Many countries, of course, have fully elaborated systems of occupational skills standards.  Some have systems less robust and some, like the United States, still have no national occupational skill standards framework.  Those that do have been working to find ways to develop cross walks among their standards systems to make it possible for people certified in one system to have their skills recognized in others.  As the global economy continues to globalize, the pressures to rationalize these systems will increase.   As the pace of technological change increases and work organization changes as a consequence, it will be more and more challenging to make sure that skill standards systems lead and do not follow these changes.

How the Netherlands Successfully Support Child Well-Being 

In July 2012, Every Child Counts published The Netherlands Study: Learning from the Netherlands to improve outcomes for New Zealand’s children.  Every Child Counts is a collaboration of New Zealand-based nonprofits as well as UNICEF and Save the Children that was organized in 2004 as a watchdog for children’s advocacy in the country.  Rowe Davies Research, a New Zealand firm, prepared the report.

The authors were asked to analyze the policies in the Netherlands that contribute to its high levels of child well-being at relatively lower costs than many other OECD nations that achieve similarly high levels of child well-being.  The report notes that the programs in the Netherlands for children are more systemic and widespread than in New Zealand and that New Zealand is currently spending half of what the Netherlands spends on children overall, according to OECD numbers.

The report attributes the Netherlands success to nation-wide programs of support for parents and young children, including a targeted health service for all children from 0-19 delivered by local health centers that ensures preventative care and health education for all youth and also has a significant on-line support aspect; a broad system of free pre- and post-natal care for mothers that includes assistance with basic household chores that relate to the health of the mother and baby; a dramatic increase in childcare since the 2005 Dutch Childcare Act with parents, government and employers splitting the costs overall and subsidies available for lower-income parents; generous housing support for low-income parents with one in three Dutch citizens receiving some housing support; a means-tested childcare allowance and a mandatory 16-week paid parental leave policy; and a youth care agency in each locality to coordinate all youth services and provide a single point of contact.

Based on the lessons from the Netherlands, the report recommends that New Zealand consider the following investments:

• Expand parent support and education programs;
• Expand child care services;
• Develop services to deal with post-natal depression;
• Expand care before and afterschool for children whose parents work;
• Increase parental leave to 18 weeks and widen the eligibility to parents with less stable work histories; and
•   Increase the availability and quality of state funded housing for low-income parents, and add programming to housing to increase social mobility.

They also suggest some longer-term strategies:

• Adapting child digital files so that they can be used to store health information;
• Adopting national indicators of child wellbeing and monitoring new policies by how well they move the country towards these indicators; and
• Continuing dialogue with the Netherlands, as the two countries share many characteristics and are likely to learn from one another.

The report cautions that, in the face of global economic woes, the Netherlands is considering austerity measures that threaten to dismantle some elements of the system just described.  It also points to some of the ways that the Netherlands family and child services could be improved that echo issues in many other countries and systems: increasing professional development for family and child workers, encouraging more collaboration among agencies, better integrating funding streams.  The challenge will be to see how the Netherlands continues to develop and prioritizes investments in children in more difficult economic times.

Sharon Lynn Kagan

An interview with Sharon Lynn Kagan, Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Early Childhood and Family Policy, Co-Director of the National Center for Children and Families and, Associate Dean for Policy at Teachers College, Columbia University and Professor Adjunct at Yale University’s Child Study Center.

Marc Tucker:  Over the years, you’ve travelled all over the world, consulting with governments on early childhood education issues.  Have you seen an increased interest in developed and developing countries in early childhood education recently, and, if so, what do you think has spurred this interest?

Sharon Lynn Kagan:  Unequivocally I have seen growing interest in early childhood education.  Countries all around the globe have been motivated by the results of the neuroscience research showing how the course of development of children’s brains in the early years has irrevocable effects in school and later in life, by the research showing how much money is saved in the long run by governments that invest in early childhood education and by the evaluation research that shows strong academic gains for children who have had early childhood education as compared to those who don’t.  Countries, in other words, are much more aware than they used to be that early childhood education is a social investment that has unusually strong returns.

One of the most interesting things I have observed lately is the growing instances of western countries sending emissaries from business and industry to other countries to speak about the benefits of investing in early childhood education at forums sponsored by organizations like the World Bank and UNESCO.  Academics and other intellectual leaders are doing much the same thing. It is clear that all these efforts are paying off in greatly increased government interest in early childhood education all over the world.

Tucker:  In the United States, until fairly recently, a substantial fraction of adult women were full-time homemakers.  However, as the economy tightened up and more women began to enter the workforce to bring in a second income, that meant that the person who would traditionally provide full-time childcare at home could no longer do so.  This shift appears to be occurring in Asia now.  Do you think this could also be another reason for the rise in government-provided early childhood education?

Kagan:  I do think it is true that this is happening in many countries, but I do not think it is as strong a motivator as the data on the effects of early childhood education.  The most potent motivator has been the neuroscience research, which has revealed that a large proportion of brain development occurs by the age of five.  Social and economic shifts are certainly a factor in the expansion of early childhood education worldwide, but less so than the research.

Tucker:  As countries are beginning to focus on developing early childhood education systems, what shape are these systems taking?

Kagan:  Early childhood education systems are contingent on several different variables.  First, the amount of money a country wants to invest.  Second, the capacity for development and the infrastructure a country has in place.  In some countries, there are limited teacher training facilities and limited regulatory bodies.  These countries are often more interested, therefore, in developing community-based and informal programs.  In countries where there is already an infrastructure in place, they are more likely to move toward formal, center-based programs. The nature of the investments made are based on the context in that country.

Tucker:  Talk, if you will, about the process that governments go through in formulating policy on early childhood education.  Can you characterize these stages?

Kagan:  It is an iterative process.  It begins with governmental awareness of the importance of early childhood education, and the importance of making these investments.  The second step is understanding what already exists in both the formal and informal markets in any given country, since early childhood education frequently takes place in informal markets.  The third step is developing a broad-based, long-term plan.  Often, external experts are called in to help with this step, particularly in countries without a lot of infrastructure already in place.  You’re right in thinking that this all happens incrementally.  Once there is a plan, countries begin to bite off pieces of it that make sense in that context.  The pieces are different depending on the country.  Some begin with infrastructure development, some begin with teacher training, or data and monitoring systems.  In other countries, they think that process is too slow and immediately go out into villages and communities and begin to establish centers.  After gaining awareness of the importance of early childhood education and developing a plan, the steps vary based on the country.

The one thing that is happening with less frequency than I would like is a serious approach to the evaluation of the impact of these programs.  Because money is short, and countries want to maximize the amount of services they can offer, they tend to invest less than they should in evaluation.

Tucker:  Can you characterize what elements need to be in place if a country is to have a world class early childhood education system?

Kagan:  Patience is the most important.  It will not happen overnight. They need at the outset a set of guidelines or principles that reflect the national heritage and national values and priorities of the country, but at the same time serve to guide early educators toward a clear set of goals.  Second, they need to focus on building a professionally competent workforce.  The third component is equitably dispersed, quality facilities, so there are not uneven service patterns in which some children are well-served and have easy access, and others poorly served with little access.  Lastly, they need to figure out how to provide sustained government support.  I’ve observed that, in all countries where the core elements have been put in place, there is strong public support for the program and governments are able to make a sustained commitment.

Tucker:  What kind of institutional and regulatory structures are required to create this type of system?

Kagan:  The number one requirement is a training capacity so you have people who can do the work well.  The second is very clear standards and expectations for what both teachers and children should know and be able to do.  The third is a routinized monitoring system that allows for chronicling the performance of the programs in a child-sensitive way – a whole accountability apparatus needs to be developed.  The most successful countries also find ways to build in mechanisms for parent and community engagement.  Early childhood education is very much a part of the community, and segregating from other community functions does the families a disservice.

Tucker:  If you were designing an early childhood education system, how would you think about the balance between play and cognitive development?

Kagan:  I feel very strongly about this, because it is a false dichotomy.  Play is the pedagogy; play is the means by which children learn.  All programs need a large amount of time for children to explore through play.  By play, I do not mean letting children mill around aimlessly, but guided play, intentional play, so there is meaning derived from what they perceive as play.  There also needs to be very clear specifications about content.  To that end, I strongly believe that standards are a very clear way of delineating what we want children to know and be able to do.  But this can be centered on a play-based pedagogy.

Tucker:  Speaking of standards, how do you think about the staff quality in early childhood education systems?  Do you think that the people delivering early childhood education should have the same kinds of qualifications as compulsory school teachers?  How should countries set the standards for the people who will staff their early childhood education systems?

Kagan:  I actually think being an early childhood teacher takes more knowledge and energy than being a primary or secondary school teacher.  In addition to content, these teachers need to understand child development and child psychology, and they have to deal with parents, so they really need to be deeply knowledgeable about many domains of development.  I would love to see early childhood teachers globally trained to the level of primary and secondary teachers.  But I also think that the strategies used to train primary and secondary teachers are not necessarily relevant to early childhood teachers.  For early childhood teachers, we need to use interactive technology, reflective practice, and competency-based assessments.  I am really hoping for new, very inventive approaches to teacher professional education and development.  I believe that this learning should be ongoing, and I am a big proponent of peer learning and reflective practice.  I don’t think many professional teacher training programs have those qualities yet.

Tucker:  Do you see significant differences in national approaches to early childhood education in East Asia, Australasia and Europe?

Kagan:  Two decades ago, I would have said yes.  A decade ago, I would have said maybe.  Now, I am seeing much more agreement.  In some countries, under different political regimes than those now in place, there was a tendency to educate young children for performances, and a preference for heavily didactic techniques.  But the changes in Asia, and the countries in the former Soviet Union, as well as increased access to information through the new media, have led to a much more universal acceptance of theories of early childhood pedagogy that support play as an approach to instruction.

Tucker:  The countries that are behind the curve often have fewer high-quality people than they need.  How do countries train people at an affordable cost, on a clear timeline?

Kagan:  This is a universal dilemma that affects high-quality early childhood education around the globe.  I do think the use of interactive technology has to be marshaled more effectively.  We need to embrace technology as a normal part of teacher education.  At the micro level, for example, one of the things a training program could do is film teachers and use the film to help them reflect on their practice.  Using these types of technology can make training more widely accessible.  There are people in the United States who are working on this.  I think we can expect a lot of progress in this arena in the next couple of years.

Tucker:  I would like to share with you a modest analytical framework and ask you if it corresponds to your experience. Imagine three cells.  In the first is Western and Northern Europe, where women have been going into the workforce in large numbers for some time now.  These countries also have a larger-than-average proportion of national resources controlled by the government.  Those countries have been ahead of the curve worldwide with respect to early childhood education provision.  Another cell, East Asia, is at the other end of that dimension line.  In most of those countries, women have been slower to enter the paid workforce than in Europe and North America.  They are also cultures in which a woman’s status is measured more by her children’s success than in Europe and North America, so women spend more time with their children and provide the rough equivalent of what is provided in early childhood education programs in Europe.  And finally, I would characterize the United States and some other western-oriented societies as being somewhere in the middle, but having the strengths of neither.  They have neither the amount of personal support of the mother at home, nor the level of institutional support, so children are at a disadvantage with respect to both.  Do you think this is an accurate characterization of the relative positions of these three parts of the world with respect to early childhood education?

Kagan:  I think that holds a lot of water, but it does not account for third-world countries.  We have women all over the world who are “in the labor force,” but are not earning money, and that’s actually the majority of the world.  But I do think your analysis is right.

Tucker:  The Economist Intelligence Unit recently did a special report on early childhood education, a report in which you played a key role as an advisor.  What, in your view, is the significance of this report from the Economist?

Kagan:  I think the fact that the Economist Intelligence Unit elected to focus on early childhood education in the recent survey, Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world, is nothing short of a landmark breakthrough.  They do not usually focus on these issues.  They did an excellent job with their analysis, it demonstrates the increased support for these issues, and it will bring this subject to a new audience.

Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world

At the outset, the report’s authors take care to point out the differences between preschool and childcare.  They point out that there is a growing understanding of the importance of the developmental phase of a child’s life between the ages of three and six, as well as research indicating that preschool programs help with child development and school readiness and serve to help level the playing field among children of different socioeconomic backgrounds.  At the same time, enrolling a child in preschool has been shown to save money on schooling down the road, as children with a strong preschool foundation are less likely to need remediation or to repeat a grade.  Another economic benefit of preschool programs is that they facilitate female participation in the workforce.  The report cites James Heckman’s work on the economic benefits of preschool education; he has found that government investment in preschool yields an annual return of 7 to 10 percent in the form of lifetime wages.  Preschool also yields other lifetime social benefits such as reduced crime rates, lower welfare and education costs, and increased workforce productivity.  Thus the report, and the index used to measure the strength of early childhood education systems, takes the perspective that a universally available, high-quality preschool system is the goal that governments should be working toward.

The index is broken down into four main categories: social context, availability, affordability and quality.  These are weighted and the scores in each category are combined to make up the final score for each country.  Quality carries the most weight, and accounts for 45 percent of the final score.  Availability and affordability each account for 25 percent of the final score, and social context accounts for the final 5 percent.  Within each category, there are several sub-categories indicating how the authors of the report arrived at the final score for each category.  Social context measures the prevalence of malnutrition, the under-five mortality rate, the DPT immunization rate, the gender inequality index and the adult literacy rate of each country.  Availability measures the preschool enrollment ratio at age five or six and for the relevant age group, early childhood development and promotion strategy, and the legal right to preschool education.  Affordability measures the cost of private preschool programs, government spending on preschool education, available subsidies for underprivileged families, and subsidies for preschools that encourage including underprivileged children.  The quality category is comprised of the teacher-student ratio, average preschool teachers’ wages, curriculum guidelines, the training of preschool teachers, health and safety guidelines, data collection mechanisms, the links between preschools and primary schools, and parental involvement and parent education programs.  The scores for each country are derived from a combination of quantitative data and “unique qualitative assessments.”

By these measures Nordic countries fare best, and European countries in general tend to outperform Asian, North American, Latin American and African countries.  The report explains the predominance of Europe in the top 20 countries on the league table (16 of the top 20 places, in fact) by pointing out that, “it is culturally and politically accepted in Europe that the government will assume a significant role in delivering preschool education.”  Thus, the top countries are all countries that have, for the most part, been investing in preschool education for decades: Finland, Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands.  New Zealand and South Korea round out the top ten performers.  In addition to finding that Europe commands the majority of places at the top of the league table, the report finds that the average income per person in any given country correlates strongly with the overall ranking – rich countries perform better than poor countries, for the most part, even within Europe.  That being said, there are several countries, including the United States, Japan, Canada and Australia, that are ranked in the middle of the pack, despite being wealthy.  Many of these countries, while having some very high-quality preschools according to the index, do not have good policies in place to ensure fair and equal access to these programs, thereby accounting for their relatively poor performance.

Of course, the authors acknowledge that every country has its own particular challenges in achieving a universal, high-quality preschool system.  Some have a diverse population made up of students of varying language, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.  Others may suffer from lack of funding.  Still others have large proportions of the population living in rural areas where it is difficult to establish programs.  Less wealthy countries typically have to make a choice between expanding access and improving quality at the outset, and, when that is the case, find that it is particularly important to educate parents on the importance of both early child development and early learning.

The report provides policy recommendations in the areas of both access and quality.  In terms of access, the authors and the experts interviewed recommend putting a system of subsidies into place, either in the form of “demand-side” subsidies (money or vouchers flowing directly to families) or “supply-side” subsidies (funds provided directly to preschools to incentivize enrolling children who cannot otherwise afford to attend).  Although most of the top-performing countries generally pursue supply-side policies because the government provides universal preschool, the authors find that many countries might find it feasible to use a combination of supply and demand strategies to ensure access.

On the quality side of things, the report recommends several important policy changes: improving teacher training and teacher quality, establishing clear curriculum guidelines, managing the transition between preschool and primary school, improving teacher-student ratios, increasing parental involvement, having clear health and safety guidelines in place, and collecting data with “robust data collection mechanisms.”  Teacher quality is perhaps the most centrally important component of providing quality preschool education, and varies widely from country to country, with Finland requiring a bachelor’s degree (many preschool teachers also have master’s degrees) and other countries hiring “literally anybody who is physically able and interested in working with children.”

This report makes clear that in order to establish a quality preschool education system, it must be treated, for the most part, like the primary and secondary education system, with the same types of policy levers and quality assurance mechanisms.  Indeed, the report often relies on well-established primary and secondary best practices in order to draw policy recommendations for early childhood education.  The authors mention, for example, Finland and South Korea’s practices of recruiting teachers from the top of the high school cohort, suggesting that this is a way to manage quality (though they do point out that this is not strictly enforced in either country when it comes to choosing preschool teachers).  They suggest working to build a profession able to attract high-quality recruits by compensating preschool teachers at a fair and living wage, reducing the teacher-student ratio to make the job more attractive, and establishing regulations and specific skill sets that are required of teachers in order to enter and remain in the profession.  They furthermore suggest working to build strong leadership in preschools, which would further contribute to the sense of preschool teaching as a profession while also encouraging the leaders to serve as innovators in the field.  Apart from improving teacher quality, putting curriculum guidelines and learning expectations into place can help bring lower-quality teachers up to a higher standard, and help all preschools provide the type of education expected of them.  Ultimately, the report’s authors and the interviewed experts argue, when funds are limited, human capital development—that is, the preparation of the preschool teachers—must absolutely be prioritized over things like technology and infrastructure.  However, one policy to “improve” early childhood education programs—using standardized tests to measure student performance and holding teachers accountable based on the test scores—which has been growing in favor in countries like the United States is not part of any of the recommendations found in the report, nor is it a tool used by any of the top performers.

It is interesting to note where the world’s top performers in primary and secondary education fall in this ranking, given that preschool is increasingly seen as an important foundation for high student performance in later years.  Four of the top primary and secondary performers crack the top ten in this early childhood education league table, with Finland ranked first, the Netherlands eighth, New Zealand ninth and South Korea tenth.  Hong Kong, Japan, Canada, Australia and Singapore are in the middle of the pack, rated at nineteenth, twenty-first, twenty-sixth, twenty-eighth, and twenty-ninth, respectively.  China fares very poorly, ranked just three steps up from the bottom.  It is interesting to note that Asian countries fare, by this ranking, generally worse than their European and commonwealth counterparts.  It is telling to compare the quality rankings to the overall rankings.  When looking at quality alone, several of the top-performing Asian countries actually fare much better.  South Korea is ranked tenth, Hong Kong eleventh, and Japan thirteenth.

We wonder whether the relatively low rankings of the Asian countries is a function of the perspective from which the data was gathered and analyzed.  More women have been in paid employment outside the home in Northern Europe than in Asia for decades now.  No doubt, that fact goes a long way toward explaining why Asia has not developed anything like the infrastructure for supporting very young children outside the home that Europe now has.  That fact by itself does not mean that children are less well cared for, but it does mean that the observer will see less formal infrastructure there for taking care of very young children.  But women are now entering the paid workforce in Asia in greater numbers than previously and the governments in those countries may find that they are more interested in European-style policies in this arena than was previously the case.

As workforce demographics change and the importance of early childhood education shifts away from daycare alone, we may see some countries, already performing well in quality measures, begin to climb the overall rankings.  Singapore, clearly, as evidenced both by this report and another recent report from the Lien Foundation, Vital Voices for Vital Years, has begun to invest a great deal of support into improving the quality of preschool education, perhaps because Singapore has long encouraged the entry of women into the paid workforce.  As they improve, it seems clear that countries will need to follow, for the most part, a roadmap set by the top performers in primary and secondary education.  At the same time, they will need to take into account some of the important differences at this life-stage, including the need for increased parental involvement outside of school, and quality healthcare for young children.

Starting Strong III: A Quality Toolbox for Early Education and Care provides ECE recommendations for countries in five policy areas including:

• Setting out quality goals and regulations;
• Designing and implementing curriculum and standards;
• Improving teacher qualifications, training and working conditions;
• Engaging families and communities; and
• Advancing data collection, research and monitoring.

In conjunction with the Starting Strong series, the OECD has begun publishing a number of country-specific reports on ECE.  Each of these country reports is organized around one of the policy levers identified above, depending on what the country has prioritized in its ECE agenda.  So far the OECD has released country studies for Finland, the Slovak Republic, United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Korea, Portugal and New Zealand.  We feature Finland, Korea and New Zealand here.  Each is a top performer in the education league tables.

New Zealand and Korea both focused on implementing curriculum standards.  Creating and implementing a common curriculum framework and learning standards is just as important in early childhood education as it is for compulsory education systems.  The framework can ensure quality across different settings and can promote continuity between ECE and primary schooling.  A well laid out curriculum framework with accompanying learning standards can help teachers prepare lessons and give parents direction on how to develop a stimulating home learning environment.

Finland focused on improving qualifications, training and working conditions for ECE professionals.  One of the factors that matters most in early childhood education is the quality of the workforce, measured by their initial education, qualifications and professional development.  The OECD is careful to note that it is not qualifications per se that have an impact on child outcomes, but the ability of better educated staff to create a high-quality learning environment.  Just as in compulsory schools, better working conditions have been shown to improve staff job satisfaction and retention.  The OECD identifies good early childhood education working conditions as high staff-child ratio and low group size, competitive wages and other benefits, reasonable schedules and workloads, a good physical environment and a competent and supportive manager.

So what are the strengths of the early childhood services offered by Korea, Finland and the Netherlands?  New Zealand has created a common, national curriculum framework for early childhood education providers called Te Whāriki in New Zealand.  This document clearly lays out the aims of ECE including what is expected of staff and children at each stage of development along with useful examples.  The curriculum strongly focuses on well-being and learning and emphasizes the importance of tolerance and respect for cultural values and diversity.  The Te Whāriki also provides explicit links to the primary school curriculum, describing what children are expected to do at future levels, how this relates to the experiences in ECE and what activities staff can implement to facilitate a smooth transition. While many countries still use a split system where child care and early education are governed by different ministries or agencies, New Zealand has integrated early childhood education and care under one lead ministry.

Korea, too, chose to focus on curriculum.  This country has created the Standard Child Care Curriculum, which covers children ages zero to five.  Implementation began in 2007 and was revised in 2010 to improve the quality of child care services, extend operating hours to accommodate family needs and strengthen the link between child care and elementary schooling.  In addition to this child care curriculum, Korea has developed a National Kindergarten Curriculum for children ages three to four. Based on research undertaken in 2010, this document provides common standards for organizing and implementing the kindergarten curriculum and places a heavy focus on creativity and character.  In September 2011, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and the Ministry of Health and Welfare developed and launched the Nuri Curriculum for all five-year old children participating in early childhood education and care.  It is focused on five distinct objectives: developing basic physical abilities and establishing healthy and safe routines; learning how to communicate in daily life and developing good practices in language use; developing self-respect and learning how to live with others; developing interest in aesthetics, enjoying the arts and learning how to express yourself creatively; and exploring the world with curiosity and enhancing children’s abilities to solve problems by applying math and science in daily life.  Starting in March 2013, the government has plans to extend this curriculum to three- and four-year olds, which is a step towards streamlining the overall ECE curriculum framework in Korea.

Choosing to focus on the early childhood education and care workforce made sense for Finland, a country that puts a strong emphasis on recruiting, hiring and supporting the ECE workforce.  The qualifications for teaching staff, professional development opportunities and favorable working environments make Finland’s ECE workforce one of the best in the world.  Finland requires ECE teaching staff to have at least some post-secondary education as in the case of New Zealand and Sweden.  Professional development is mandatory and individuals do not have to shoulder the full costs as the government and the employer contribute.  The maximum number of children per early childhood professional in Finland is among the most favorable in the OECD with one staff member to four children ages zero- to three and 1:7 for older children in early childhood education or care.  New Zealand has slightly less favorable minimum ratio standards and Korea, at the other end of the spectrum, allows a 1:25 ratio for four-year olds.

In each of the Quality Matters studies, the featured country is evaluated against how it has responded to a number of challenges that commonly arise in the selected policy area of focus.  In enhancing ECE curriculum, those common challenges include defining goals and content; aligning curriculum for continuous child development; implementing effectively; and evaluating systematically.  Korea has made some progress in tackling these challenges.  To develop the Nuri curriculum the government formed a task force, including stakeholders from early childhood education and childcare sectors and ministry officials, charged with collaborating on the design and content of the curriculum.  To help ease implementation efforts, Korea held large-scale public hearings and seminars before and after announcing the revised versions of the National Kindergarten Curriculum and the Standard Childcare Curriculum.  Twenty thousand ECE professionals were trained in 2011 to implement the Nuri Curriculum in 2012.  The OECD suggests that the country could further enhance quality in its ECE agenda by developing one curriculum for children in the whole ECE range and ensuring that assessment practices meet the aspirations of the curriculum.

New Zealand has also made significant headway in facing these common curriculum challenges, most importantly by covering the entire early childhood education and care age range as an integrated system with one national framework.  The Te Whāriki is developed for children from birth to school entry but, to ensure the framework is age-appropriate, the content of the curriculum is divided into three age groups: infants, toddlers and young children.  To answer the evaluation challenge, New Zealand has implemented the Assessment for Learning, which requires teachers to develop effective assessment practices aligned to the curriculum.  The national government offers regular training on this practice.  The Te Whāriki states that “assessment of children’s learning and development should always focus on individual children over a period of time and staff should avoid making comparisons between children”. The OECD suggests that the Te Whāriki place a greater emphasis on strong communication skills for ECE staff so they can effectively work with colleagues on job issues and with parents on child development issues.

As already mentioned, Finland has made several efforts to answer the common workforce challenges highlighted by the OECD report (improving staff qualifications, securing a high-quality workforce supply, retaining the workforce, workforce development and managing the quality of the workforce in private ECE organizations).  Their responses include their efforts to set minimum qualification standards for ECE staff and to encourage professional development.  Additionally, in the mid 1990s, Finland moved kindergarten teacher education to the university level where classroom teacher training was already established.  Once kindergarten and primary teachers were trained, they were better able to support children’s transition from pre-primary to primary school.  The OECD made several suggestions to Finland.  First they observe that the country does not have licensing renewal requirements in place whereas staff in New Zealand must renew their license every three years.  Second, they recommend further developing leadership and computer skills for ECE staff.  And lastly they point out that Finland’s ECE workforce is highly female and the majority is above the age of forty.  An effort to attract more diverse and younger staff to the field is needed.

Additional country reports are expected for Canada, Japan, Norway and Sweden in late September 2012.  Starting Strong III examines ECE through a broad lens and provides a roadmap for anyone with a role to play in developing ECE policy.

Source: OECD. (February 2011). PISA in Focus 1: Does participation in pre-primary education translate into better learning outcomes at school?)

The new report, Starting well, by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and the Lien Foundation profiled in our Global Perspectives section this month urges the importance of having strong early childhood education systems in place in order to ensure future success in school.  The OECD provides data that backs up this assertion in a 2011 PISA in Focus brief, Does participation in pre-primary education translate into better learning outcomes at school?, which outlines the correlation between participation in pre-primary education and later PISA performance.  The OECD defines pre-primary education as different from preschool – this category encompasses “all forms of organized and sustained center-based activities,” including both preschools and daycare centers, so their definition is somewhat different from that in Starting well, which makes a clearer distinction between daycare and preschool.  The data is unequivocal.  After accounting for socio-economic background, they found that students who attended more than one year of pre-primary education had, on average, a 33 point advantage on PISA over students who had not attended pre-primary education for more than a year.  The average difference between students who had attended for more than one year and students who had not attended at all was even higher, at 54 points on the reading portion of the test.  With 39 PISA points being equivalent to a year of schooling, this difference is quite significant.  Of the 65 countries participating in PISA, students attending more than a year of pre-primary education had at least a small advantage over students who did not in all but one case.

Some countries have a particularly large gap on PISA; in France, Belgium and Israel, the gap between students from similar backgrounds ranges from about 60 to 80 points.  And the brief’s authors found that when socioeconomic status was not taken into account – that is, when all students who attended pre-primary school for more than a year were simply compared to all students who had not – there was an even greater gap of more than 100 points in all three cases.  This is perhaps unsurprising in the case of Belgium and France, given that these two countries rank highly on the Starting well index, and Belgium is in fact ranked first in the world in terms of availability of early childhood education.  If a country has a high quality, widely available preschool system, it is not surprising that students who did not take advantage of that system would fare poorly compared to their classmates who had.

The OECD data lends credence to the assertion by the Starting well authors that inclusion is one of the most important factors of a strong preschool system.  Not only does the system need to be high-quality, it must be available to all children in order to raise the entire student population’s educational performance; according to the OECD, the correlation between PISA performance and pre-primary attendance is highest in countries that provide more access to pre-primary education.  Furthermore, in many of the countries, the brief finds, participation in early childhood education is more effective for immigrant students in closing the performance gap than for native students.  On this front, the authors of Starting well investigated whether countries with greater income equality were more likely to have an affordable preschool system.  They plotted each country’s affordability ranking with its Gini coefficient, which we have recreated below.  The Gini coefficient is a measure of a country’s income equality, expressed either as a number between 0 and 100.  A country with a Gini coefficient of 0 has perfect income equality, while a country with a Gini coefficient of 100 has perfect income inequality.  The report’s authors found that countries with greater affordability in early childhood education were also more likely to have greater income equality (figure 1).  However, affordability was not the only aspect of early childhood education ranked by the Economist Intelligence Unit.  In addition to affordability, the Economist Intelligence Unit also ranks countries’ early childhood education systems in terms of quality and availability, and produces an overall ranking that takes all three of these categories, as well as social context, into account.  We plotted the availability, quality and overall rankings with the countries’ Gini coefficients in order to determine whether income equality was likely to predict these other features of an early childhood education system, as well.

Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit. (2012). Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world.; The CIA World Factbook

Figure 2 indicates that the lower the Gini index, the higher the ranking is likely to be in terms of position in the ranking – a low ranking number means a high spot on the league table.  Like affordability, quality also correlates fairly strongly to income equality (figure 3), as does availability (figure 4), though availability correlates to income equality less so than do affordability and quality.  The overall ranking actually has the strongest correlation to income equality (figure 5), possibly because this ranking takes into account not just affordability, availability and quality, but also social context.  Social context is measured in this case by the prevalence of malnutrition, the mortality rate of children under the age of five, the DPT immunization rate, the gender inequality index and the adult literacy rate.  It follows that countries with high income equality, such as the Nordic countries and other Western European countries, would have strong rankings in these areas, while countries with a higher income inequality such as South Africa, Thailand and Mexico may not fare as well.

Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit. (2012). Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world.; The CIA World Factbook

Notable, too, is that the countries with the greatest income equality and generally the best early childhood education systems are not the countries that spend the most on this service.  Finland spends just $5,334 annually per student, well below the United States, which spends a staggering $10,070 per student per year, and is ranked solidly in the middle of the 45 countries in the Economist Intelligence Unit league tables.  However, the other top-ranked countries, except Belgium, spend a little more than the OECD average on these services.  Across the

Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit. (2012). Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world.; The CIA World Factbook

OECD, countries spend on average $6,210 per student per year.  The countries rounding out the top five in the overall ranking along with Finland – Sweden, the United Kingdom, Norway and Belgium – for the most part spend a little more, but not substantially so.  Belgium spends just a bit more than Finland at $5,732, while Sweden, the United Kingdom and Norway spend $6,519, $7,119 and $6,572, respectively.  Chile has been working hard in recent years to improve their early childhood education

Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit. (2012). Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world.; The CIA World Factbook

programs, and is now ranked at number 20 – several spots above the United States – in the overall rankings.  They spend just $3,951 per year, and have achieved their rapid improvement through expanding access (the number of preschools increased by 550% between 2006 and 2009) through public and private providers, and establishing national curriculum guidelines.  While quality preschool education cannot apparently be had at incredibly low prices, it appears that social context and access are more important in building a high-quality system than spending alone.

There can be little question that early childhood education programs can provide strong educational advantages for students later in their education.  But building and strengthening these programs seems to have more to do with ensuring that high proportions of children are included in them, rather than what is spent on them.