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.

By Marc Tucker

My apologies to Maimonides.  But I would not blame you if you were perplexed about the recent dust-up after the latest PIRLS and TIMSS data came out.  Some of the best-known names in education research worldwide came out with guns blazing, mostly at one-another, in a rapid-fire exchange about what the numbers meant.  I thought some of you might welcome a guide to the shooters and the shots, and a bit of commentary on the profound meaning of it all.

Tom Loveless, the head of the Brown Center at the Brookings Institution jumped on the data to say that they called for a “rethinking of the Finnish miracle success story….If Finland were a state taking the 8^th grade NAEP [the sample survey used in the United States to monitor the progress of American students over time], it would probably score in the middle of the pack.”  Jack Buckley, Commissioner of the National Center for Educational Statistics in the U.S. Department of Education confessed that, “I’ve always been a little puzzled” by the high level of attention paid to Finland.  Well, so much for Finland!

Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein wrote an analysis of the data claiming to show that while reading achievement of American students on PISA was growing between 2000 and 2009, it was falling by an even larger amount in Finland.  Similarly, they said, in math, US students from the lowest social class were also gaining substantially, while scores of comparable Finnish students declined.  “This is surprising,” they said, “because the proportion of disadvantaged students in Finland also fell…” And they go on to say that, by their analysis, the achievement gap between the most and the least advantaged students in the United States is actually smaller than in “similar postindustrial countries, and often only slightly larger than gaps in top-scoring nations.”

Ha!  That means that the withering criticism showered on American schools for their poor performance was totally undeserved.  The problem, if there is a problem, lies not in the schools, poor Horatio, which have been doing a much better job than anyone has given them credit for, but in the enormous disparities in family income that have opened up in American society.  And Finland, according to this analysis, hardly deserves its status as the model that the United States should be adopting.

Not so fast, say Paul Peterson, Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann.  Peterson is at Harvard, Hanushek at Stanford and Woessmann at the University of Munich.  The data, they say, don’t show that at all.  What they actually show is that, even if such corrections are made, American students at the top do not perform anywhere near as well as the students in the top performing countries, or, at least, not such a high proportion of them do.  Things are just as bad as they always said they were, and the need to turn up the heat on the schools to perform up to international standards is as great as ever.

But wait a minute, says Andreas Schleicher.  The Carnoy-Rothstein analysis depends, he said, on a challenge to the methods used by OECD-PISA to do its survey research, and that challenge, says Schleicher, just won’t hold up in court.  To which Carnoy and Rothstein said in reply to the reply, Oh yes it will.

So what is going on here?  Why are all these people so exercised about this data?  What are their agendas anyway?  Who is right and who is wrong?  Why does it matter?  And what does it mean?

I know that research is supposed to go where the evidence leads it and the researcher is only there to record the ineluctable result, without fear or favor.  But the reality is that researchers have values to support and reputations to protect, and their conclusions are more often than not influenced by both their values and the reputations they have established as a result of the policy positions they have taken.  So, perhaps it would help to sketch in the positions taken on the relevant issues by the people I have named.

It should surprise no one that spokespeople for the Brookings Institution and the United States National Center for Educational Statistics should be waiting to pounce on Finland and on the people who have used the Finns’ standing in the international league tables to make a case for using the educational strategies the Finns have embraced.  Both Brookings and a series of U.S. Department of Education research executives, some of whom have gone to Brookings when they left the Department of Education, have been deeply skeptical of international education benchmarking and ardent advocates of what they have described as the “gold standard” of education research, meaning the use of experimental research techniques as the only legitimate way to attribute cause in social research.  It is obviously impossible to randomly assign national “treatments” to national populations in the arena of education, so, from their point of view, all statements that this or that set of policies “causes” these or those national outcomes in the arena of education policy are necessarily suspect.

Brookings and the Peterson, Hanushek, Woessmann team are both strong supporters of charters and the introduction of market forces generally as school reform strategies.  Brookings, as well other Washington-based think tanks, are eager to deflate the recent enthusiasm for international education benchmarking in part because they fear that the close examination of the strategies used by the top-performing countries will show little evidence that charters or market strategies in general are effective strategies for raising student achievement at a national scale.

Peterson, Hanushek and Woessmann each have their own views on what is most important in education reform, but all are advocates of charters and reform agendas based on market forces, and all appear to believe that it will take fear of foreign competitors to put this reform agenda over the top in the United States.  They have also done research that they say supports their claim that market strategies do work in the top-performing countries.  Implicitly, then, they believe, unlike their Brookings colleagues, that it is possible to do rigorous research using comparative data gleaned from these international surveys that attributes cause and from which, therefore, it is possible to draw policy conclusions.  This team of researchers has consistently advanced the view, like my own organization, that economic ruin will be the fate of any nation that fails to hold its own in international education competition, though their prescriptions as to the most effective policy agenda are different from our own, based on the study of pretty much the same data.

But Carnoy and Rothstein come from a very different place.  They believe that the relatively poor performance of American students on the international surveys of student achievement is a function of the large and increasing disparity in incomes among Americans, in absolute terms and in relation to other countries.  They are outraged that organizations like my own and researchers like Peterson, Hanushek and Woessmann hold the schools accountable for poor student performance, when they think the fault lies not in the schools and teachers, but rather in a society that tolerates gross and increasing disparities in income among Americans.  They would have us focus on promoting policies that would result in a fairer distribution of income in the United States.

Which puts them in direct conflict not just with Peterson, Hanushek and Woessmann, but also with Andreas Schleicher, the driver of the whole PISA system at the OECD.  Schleicher’s primary framework for the analysis of the PISA data displays the country data on two axes, one for student achievement on the subjects assessed by PISA and the other for equity, the pattern of the distribution of results from the poorest to the best performers within countries.  Countries with short tails in that distribution are described as having high equity; those with long tails are described as having low equity.  Schleicher points out that the United States just barely escapes being among those countries in the worst quartile on both measures.  Another table in Schleicher’s slide deck shows that, when socio-economic status is held constant, the schools of some nations do a much better job than others of reducing achievement disparities among students.  Carnoy and Rothstein would take American teachers off the hook, saying that the performance of poor and minority students is actually improving, the gap is not so large as was thought, and the performance of poor and minority students in the top performing countries is actually declining.  To the extent there is a problem, it is a problem caused by socio-economic status of the students, not the teachers’ performance.  Schleicher would say, no, that is not so.  Even when we look at students from comparable socio-economic backgrounds, American schools do less to close the gap with the students from more favored backgrounds than schools in most other countries.  They cannot both be right.

So it is no wonder that Carnoy and Rothstein go after Schleicher and his data and methods with hammer and tongs.

So who is right and who is wrong here?  All of the people I have named are competent researchers from well-regarded institutions.  Just as each of these people have their own values and established positions on the relevant policy issues, the same is true of me and the organization with which I am associated.  Our analysis of the dynamics of the global economy strongly suggests that high wage countries like the United States will find it increasingly difficult to maintain their standard of living unless they figure out how to provide a kind and quality of education to virtually all their children that they formally thought appropriate only for a few.  And we also believe that the most likely source of good ideas for strategies that will enable them to do that is the countries that have already done it.  We think that whether the source of poor performance is mainly growing disparities of income or relatively poor performance of the education system, the dynamics of the global economy are unforgiving and countries like the United States do not have the option of saying that the educators can do nothing, that the only thing that will save us is income redistribution.  We do not think that the only way to learn what strategies are likely to work is research methods derived from the experimental sciences.  Indeed, we think that the record clearly shows that American business recovered from a devastating assault from Japanese firms in part by inventing and using the very method—industrial benchmarking—that we and others are now using in the field of education.

To me, the most important conclusion to be drawn from the debate whose contours I have just rather roughly outlined is that now, for the first time in the United States, the international surveys of student achievement really matter.  That is a big, big change.  It was not the case before that advocates of the most hotly debated education reforms in the United States felt that they needed to take the data from these surveys seriously, to defend their positions or to advance them.  Clearly, they do now.

The second point is that the data from the international surveys is being used to make points not about peripheral issues, but central issues.  It really matters whether the cause of the United States’ relatively low standing in the international league tables is income disparities among the students’ families or poor education in the schools.  It really matters whether or not countries like Finland have important lessons for the rest of the world.  It matters whether the survey methods being used by the organizations that design and administer them bear up to scientific scrutiny or not.  And, lastly, it also matters whether the methods used by those who do research comparing the effects of different policies and practices on student achievement in multiple countries have enough scientific merit to justify their use by policy makers to make national policy. These are consequential questions.  This is the first time that we have seen a sustained debate by some of America’s leading scholars on these matters.  It is not likely to be the last, and that appears to herald an era in which, for the first time in the United States, international surveys of student achievement are likely to take a prominent place in the public debate about education policy.
You may be wondering where I come out on the welter of claims and counterclaims I described above.  Now that I have laid my analytical framework on the table along with those of the other analysts, you are in a position to apply the same dose of skepticism to my conclusions as I urged you to apply to the others.   My take on the data we now have in hand is more or less as follows.

First, the usual note of caution.  One snapshot does not a movie make.  We should not declare a trend before we have more than one data point.  So we might want to see whether the changes in rankings suggested by the recent PIRLS and TIMSS data hold up over time.

Second, as many have pointed out, TIMSS and PIRLS put the accent on measuring how students do on what amounts to a consensus curriculum.  Did they learn what international experts think they should have been taught in the subjects they assess?  PISA measures the capacity of students to apply what they have learned in the classroom to proxies for real-world problems of the sort they might actually encounter outside the classroom.  I have a strong preference for the latter goal over the first, which mainly comes from an experience I had years ago, when Archie Lapointe, the director at that time of the Young Adult Literacy Survey, told me the following.  The survey asked the young people surveyed to add a column of figures and take a percentage of the result. Almost all could do it.  It also asked the same respondents to take a restaurant check, add up the items, get a total and calculate a tip.  Very few could do it.  Like Alfred North Whitehead, I have very little use for what he called “inert knowledge.”

Third, we need to keep in mind that the fine-grained distinctions in the rankings, for most countries that are near one another, are not statistically significant.  What we should really be paying attention to is the groupings of countries in the rankings, when countries are grouped in such a way that the measured differences among the groups are statistically significant.  If you look at it from this perspective, what we see is the United States still has a long way to go before the vast majority of its students score in the front ranks of performance at many grade or age levels in many subjects, which is how I would define top performers.

Fourth, I think it is pretty clear from the OECD data that smaller proportions of American students score in the higher deciles of performance on the PISA tests, and more in the lower deciles than is the case for students from the top-performing countries.  If that is true, then it cannot also be true that the United States would do as well as the top-performing countries if only the poor, Black and Hispanic students were taken out of the rankings, as many American teachers and some policymakers maintain.  It is also clear from the OECD-PISA analysis, as I pointed out above, that, when the data are corrected for students’ socio-economic status, American schools are less effective than the schools of most of the countries measured at closing the gap between these students and students with higher socio-economic status.

This, of course, is not where Carnoy and Rothstein come out, but I think Andreas Schleicher won the battle between him, on the one hand, and Carnoy and Rothstein on the other.  But don’t take my word for it.  Read the claims and arguments made by both sides carefully.  There is a lot at stake in this conflict.

So, what then are we to make of the fact that, if Massachusetts, North Carolina and Florida were countries, they would have done very well indeed in the most recently released rankings?

The case of Florida, I think, is pretty straightforward.  The Florida Center for Reading Research, administered by Florida State University, is one of the nation’s leading centers for reading research.  Its methods are widely admired throughout the United States.  The state of Florida has managed to leverage this research program and its key figures to produce widespread implementation throughout the state of the methods advocated by the Center.  We can see the results in the PIRLS fourth grade reading results.  The question, of course, is what effect, if any, this will have on student performance in the upper grades as the students who have benefitted from these programs mature through the years.  That story has yet to be told.

In North Carolina, we are looking at a program of education reform that began with Governor Terry Sanford, whose first term as governor began in 1961.  Sanford’s unrelenting emphasis on improving education in the state laid the base for Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., who served as governor from 1977 to 1985 and again from 1993 to 2001, making him the longest serving governor in the state’s history.  Through that whole period, he never lost his focus on education as the key to the state’s economic growth, and, during that period, North Carolina showed more progress on student achievement as measured by the National Assessment of Education Progress than any other state in the United States.  Hunt’s agenda for education reform was profoundly affected by what he was learning about the strategies adopted by the top-performing countries in the world.  Like them, he focused on teacher quality, high quality instructional systems and early childhood education.  North Carolina was among the very first states in the United States to send delegations of key state policy-makers abroad to study the top performers.

Massachusetts is a similar story.  In this case the first phase of the reforms were driven by the business community, organized by Jack Rennie, a very successful businessman who worked hard to organize that community, and Paul Reville a public policy analyst.  They played the key role in pushing the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 through the legislature.  The Act provided hundreds of millions in new funding for the schools in exchange for explicit performance standards for students, set to international benchmarks and carefully drawn curriculum frameworks, also set to international benchmarks; a new comprehensive assessment system set to the standards and curriculum frameworks; much tougher standards for getting to be a teacher, intended to greatly ratchet up teachers’ command of the subjects they intended to teach, and a system to disclose student performance, school by school, with results reported by student subgroups, so that poor performance by these subgroups would not be hidden in the average scores for the school.  Right after the Act was passed, David Driscoll, until then the Deputy Commissioner of Education, was made Commissioner and remained in that position for ten years.  Under Driscoll’s leadership, Massachusetts, despite a great deal of pressure to do so, never backed off of its decision to set and to maintain internationally benchmarked standards, for both student performance and teacher certification.  After Driscoll left, the new governor created a new position in state government, to provide leadership to all the parts of government concerned primarily with education at all levels.  He filled that position with Paul Reville.  Between them, Driscoll and Reville provided the same kind of strength and continuity of leadership that Governor Hunt provided in North Carolina, and for a very similar agenda, an agenda that is in many respects consistent with our own analysis of the strategies used by the top performing nations to get to the top of the league tables.

You may or may not agree with my analysis of the kerfuffle over the release of the TIMSS and PIRLS results.  You may or may not agree with my explanation for the rise of Florida, Massachusetts and North Carolina on the PIRLS and TIMSS league tables.  But, in any case, I urge you to look at the contending papers, and come to your own conclusions.  All of us could benefit greatly from a long, loud, contentious effort to define what it means to be educated, and to better understand why some nations are more successful than others at educating the vast majority of their young people to whatever standard they choose.

* This is a second version of the original post for this month.  We misstated the conclusions presented by Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein in the report described in this newsletter.  We believe we have stated those conclusions accurately here, and apologize to the authors for the error.

For the record, however, the version of the Carnoy-Rothstein conclusions that we based our first statement on was itself based on the version of the report that Carnoy and Rothstein originally released, which claimed that their re-estimate of United States PISA scores would result in the United States ranking 4^th among OECD countries in reading, and 10^th in math, a major revision upwards of the US PISA rankings.  In their most recent version of their report, released last week, Rothstein and Carnoy revised these numbers downward somewhat to 6^th in reading and 13^th in math, but, as the post points out, even these numbers are contested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACHIEVING EQUITY AND QUALITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRANSFORMING LEARNING: KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS FOR THE 21st CENTURY

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

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

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

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

COMMON PRIORITIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marc Tucker interviews Ray Marshall on the links between immigration policy and education policy.  Marshall is Professor Emeritus and Audre and Bernard Rapoport Centennial Chair in Economics and Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor.  Marshall, a labor economist, is an expert on international education and immigration issues.  Recent publications include 2009’s Immigration for Shared Prosperity: A Framework for Comprehensive Reform and 2011’s Value Added Immigration: Lessons for the United States from Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.  Marshall is Co-Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

Tucker: Why should education policymakers be interested in immigration policy?


Marshall: Education policymakers should pay attention to immigration policy for a number of reasons.  In almost all advanced economies, immigrants will be an increasingly important part of the population and the workforce.  This means that all of these countries will have many students who are also immigrants, depending on the extent to which they rely on immigration to add to their populations and their workforces.  So if schools want to educate all children to a high standard, they will have to pay particular attention to the characteristics of immigrant students.

Countries’ experiences with immigrant students have been very different.  For example, if you have a good immigration selection system as the Canadians do, then you will have immigrants who are strong students.  The Canadians, in fact, claim to have the highest-achieving second-generation immigrant students in the Western world.  Part of that is due to the way they select immigrants, and part of it is due to the vast improvements they have made to their education system since the 1970s.  They understand, when selecting immigrants, that they are choosing future Canadians.

Other countries have immigration policies that are producing large numbers of very hard-to-educate students which has important consequences for the cost of education and for the quality of the national workforce and for those countries’ competitiveness, especially when immigrants will constitute the main source of growth in the national workforce, as will in fact be the case in many industrialized countries.

Tucker: In writing your new book, why did you choose to study the immigration systems in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom?

Marshall: For some time, Canada and Australia have been widely viewed by experts in this arena as setting the benchmark for national immigration policies.  The UK has been catching up rapidly, by building on their experience, and may be ahead of them in some areas.

All three countries had long had policies heavily favoring immigrants who had family connections.  However, the intensive globalization of the economy in the 1980s changed that in Canada and Australia.  When the closed economies of the former Soviet Bloc countries, as well as China and India joined the global economy, they doubled the workforce involved in the global trading system—now about 3 billion workers—almost overnight.  These new workers were suddenly in both direct and indirect competition with workers around the world, including Australia and Canada.  That had a profound significance, because the countries entering the global trading system had very large numbers of well-educated, highly motivated people who could either migrate to the developed countries, or be employed where they were by global firms.  Almost overnight, what had been the globalization of product markets suddenly became the globalization of labor markets.  People with high skills were willing to work for below-market wages.  They were eager to have the standards of living available in industrialized countries, and were willing to work very hard to do that.

When that happened, both Canada and Australia took action.  In a competitive market, wages will tend to converge.  The question was in which direction would the convergence go?  The Australians saw that the most likely outcome would be that their wages would move in the direction of the wages in the low-wage countries.
But the Australians thought there was another possibility, one in which everyone’s positions could improve, but in which wages in the developing countries would improve faster than those in the developed countries.  I call this a “value added competitive strategy,” which was an alternative to a direct cost competitive strategy.  In this model, countries like Australia would not compete on the price of labor, a game they could only lose, but on the quality of their products and services, the productivity of their workforce and their capacity for innovation.  This would earn them a premium in the market, because they were producing things that could not be produced everywhere.  To do that, they needed a world-class education system, but also a value added immigration system in which they would import highly skilled workers to fill jobs that domestic workers could not fill.  That became Australia’s basic strategy.

To do this, they dramatically reduced the proportion of visas allocated for family reunification, and greatly increased the proportion allocated for highly skilled workers and entrepreneurs who had skills not readily available in the Australian marketplace.  They also had to coordinate education policy, workforce development policy, economic policy and immigration policy.  This is important because otherwise what is being done in one area can diminish what is being done in the other areas.

Tucker: What Australia did was very different from what countries like Germany did when they brought in low-skilled guest workers to fill economic gaps.

Marshall: Yes.  The immigration world learned some big lessons from the Bracero program in the United States, which brought in low-skilled Mexican workers for agricultural work, and the German guest worker program.  Low-skill guest workers are never temporary.  It is extremely hard to prevent guest workers from becoming illegal immigrants, especially if there is a vast different in the living conditions in your country and their home country.  Legal low-skill temporary workers quickly become illegal permanent workers because they do not want to go back to the poor conditions in their home country.  Many employers preferred these workers for their hard-to-fill jobs that pay low wages. They make very good workers because they work hard and are scared.

When you have unauthorized workers unable to protect themselves against their employers, or even authorized workers willing to work for low wages, they undercut the wages for all workers in the country.

Tucker:  In Value Added Immigration, you write that the initial response to globalization in Canada and Australia was to establish a minimum level of education required for all immigrants.  Why did they choose this strategy, and why did it fail?

Marshall: They chose this strategy because the economists argued that, with a high level of education, immigrants could adjust to any type of economic environment.  But first Australia and then Canada discovered this was not true.

In the late 1990s, the Australian government made dramatic changes in the system. There was a fairly large burden on their welfare system because they had selected immigrants who were unable to support themselves due to the mismatch between their skills and the skills and characteristics that employers were looking for in the workforce.

Both countries had strong data and research – much better than what is available in many other countries, and were able to use this information to discover which types of immigrants were most likely to succeed in the long run.  They knew they were not importing workers; they were importing future citizens.  What they found after doing a great deal of study was that the most successful immigrants were people who had skills that were in high demand in the economy, and people who had a high command of the language.  There was a direct and strong correlation between the degree of language competence, as measured by an international language test, and how well people did in the economy.  Command of language was most important for highly skilled professionals.

Those who came in with highly skilled family members were much more likely to succeed than those with low-skilled family members.  Age, too, made a lot of difference; it was possible to be either too young or too old to succeed in the economy.

A points system was developed in Canada in the 1960s in which immigrants earned points for various characteristics to allow them entry.  This system was adopted by Australia in 1989, and has since been adopted by several other countries.  The points system is a way to quantitatively calibrate the characteristics that help immigrants be successful in the economy.  That was a valuable selection device for a number of reasons.  First, prospective immigrants could go online and determine whether they were qualified to enter the country.  This decreased the number of applications.

It is also a very flexible system, because if you have too many people immigrating to your country, you simply raise the total score necessary to make a successful application.

It is flexible because it is research-based.  Just this past year, for example, Australia eliminated all points awarded for a master’s degree, because their research showed them that immigrants with a master’s degree turn out to be no better off, economically, than immigrants with only a bachelor’s degree.  So they decided not to award points for that.

The research showed that, if a prospective immigrant had a firm job offer, their chances of success were much greater, so Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom decided to award them a large number of points for that.  But the offer had to be for a job that was first offered to residents of the country, or it had to be on the shortage list.  In the British system, an immigrant needs to have 10 points for command of language, and 10 points for demonstrating that they can support themselves.  You need 70 points overall to be admitted.  If you have a job offer from the shortage list, you automatically get 50 points.

In all countries, however, just being qualified will not get you in.  The test they have all learned to apply is what in Britain they call the “sensibility test.”  That is, they ask whether immigration is the best way to fill that particular vacancy.  They look at employers, and if they are not making a good-faith effort to recruit and retrain domestic workers, they cannot import the immigrant.  That prevents immigration from substituting for the domestic workforce.

Australia now has over 20 years of longitudinal data on the characteristics that help people succeed.  This data shows that, over 10 years, most of the immigrants they have become positive contributors to the economy.  The only ones that fail to do so are the uneducated family members of immigrants – This is particularly true of uneducated parents who come in with skilled immigrants.

Tucker:  We are seeing very severe voter backlash against immigrants in many industrialized countries.  What has been the story in the countries you are describing, those with value-added immigration systems that emphasize high skills in their selection process?

Marshall:  In all of these countries, the population is generally supportive of the immigrant population.  This is largely because the selection system is designed to bring in people with skills that complement the skills of the native population, so the immigrants do not compete with the native population for jobs.  It is also because the immigrants are much less likely to become a drain on the country’s welfare system, because they are much more likely to have jobs and pay taxes.  And it is also because, especially in the cases of Canada and Australia, immigration policy is designed to deal with the kinds of cultural conflict from immigration that is now a burning political issue in Europe.  Canada and Australia require immigrants to pledge that they understand that their new host country has certain values that an immigrant is expected to agree to, knowing that the failure to do so would be a violation of the pledge. Few have ever been penalized for violating it, but the pledge has created an environment in which immigrants respect the rule of law and such values as the equality of men and women, that all creeds and religions are expected to be tolerant of others and so on.

Tucker: In your book, you talk about two stages of temporary workers and how that relates to the higher education system. Can you tell us more about that connection?

Marshall:  One of the best sources of value-added immigrants for any developed nation is the foreign students who come to study in that nation’s higher education system.  This is true both because they are a source of revenue for that country’s education industry, but mainly because they typically come with language proficiency, high skills and strong cultural knowledge.  So they developed a two-track system.  Immigrants could come in through the regular points-based system or another system that allowed people who both earned a degree from an Australian or Canadian university and had the other required characteristics to apply for status as a permanent resident.  But they didn’t want people to use the higher education system as a way to gain permanent residency, so they required such people to go home first and then apply.  Eventually they decided that process was self-defeating if they wanted highly qualified people who knew the language and were familiar with the values and customs.  So they let qualified graduates of their institutions apply directly.  In Canada, such people could get permanent residence without going through the points system, either for skilled workers or students.  At first, they were reluctant to take skilled workers on the basis of their vocational qualifications, but they found those people actually had better economic performance than regular university students so they started taking them.

It is important to view the children of immigrants as future Canadians, Americans, Australians.  You are building your future with those kids.  That’s the reason you need to pay attention to their education and to the selection of their parents.  The United States does not do this and has the lowest level of literacy in our foreign-born population of any OECD country as a result.  We are building future problems for ourselves with such policies.

The countries with value-added immigration policies, unlike our country, are using their immigration system for the same purpose as their education system—to produce a highly educated, highly skilled population that will be able to support themselves and to contribute to increasing the wellbeing of the entire population.  In doing so, they are not only bringing in adults who can contribute personally, but they are also bringing in children who will be far easier to educate to a high standard.  In an era in which all industrialized countries are going to have steadily increasing proportions of immigrants in their populations, immigration policy might be thought of as an extension of both education policy and economic policy.  All three are vital elements of successful competitiveness policies, which will by definition determine whether the incomes of the citizens of the industrialized countries will rise or fall in the years ahead.

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.

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.

Learning Beyond Fifteen: Ten Years After PISA finds that the largest gains in reading achievement typically occur during compulsory education. But the study shows that many adolescents who leave high school with relatively low reading comprehension greatly improve their reading ability and some of these students can close the gap altogether.

The study examines reading gains of Canadian youth between the ages of 15 and 24.  The report uses data that Canada collected from the PISA assessment of 15-year- olds (PISA-15) in 2000, the first time the test was administered.  The test was given to 30,000 students across all ten Canadian provinces.  In 2009, when the original PISA-15 students were 24 years old, a subset of the cohort took the PISA exam again (PISA-24).

The report also takes into account information from Canada’s Youth in Transition Survey (YITS), developed to analyze education and labor-market outcomes of Canadian youth.  The survey collected data from the PISA-15 respondents and their parents at the time they took their initial PISA test at age 15.  Every two years thereafter, the survey also collected information from students about their education and employment experiences, their life choices, and their attitudes.  In 2009, when the surveyed students were 24 years old, a subset of the cohort completed a PISA reassessment.

Overall, there was a clear improvement in reading performance among all the students that were reassessed for the Learning Beyond Fifteen study, with the average reading score increasing 57 points from 2000 to 2009, which is equivalent to the difference in average proficiency scores for 15-year-olds in Canada and their counterparts in countries like Croatia, Israel, and Austria.  To put it in another context, the learning gains were equal to roughly one school year in Canada.  In 2000, 21.4 percent of Canadian 15-year-olds scored below proficiency Level 3 on the PISA scale, which indicates an ability to locate multiple pieces of information, make links between different parts of text, and relate it to familiar everyday knowledge.  By 2009, 7 percent of the test takers still scored below proficiency Level 3.

OECD (2012). Learning Beyond Fifteen: Ten Years After PISA

Examining the reading proficiency gains by demographic characteristics, Learning Beyond Fifteen finds that by age 24, women continue to outperform men by a slightly smaller margin than they did when they were 15 years old.  In almost all participating OECD countries, girls outperform boys in reading by a large margin.  The participating Canadian women achieved an average increase of 50 points in reading performance during the nine-year period, while males achieved an average increase of 63 points.  Similar to many other subgroups, the poorer-performing groups acquired reading skills at a quicker pace than the better-performing groups, but were still not able to close the achievement gap entirely.

This was the case when examining reading gains by family socio-economic background.  The evidence suggests that students from disadvantaged homes continue to have lower scores at age 24 than their more advantaged peers (by a difference of 50 percentage points).  A similar pattern was found for Canadian French speakers versus English speakers and rural students versus urban students, with French speakers and rural students narrowing but not completely closing the achievement gap by the time they were age 24.

What was quite interesting in this report is that twenty-four-year-olds with an immigrant background fully bridged the gap in reading performance.  These students scored an average of 524 points in PISA-15 while those born in Canada averaged 545 points.  In PISA-24, all students, regardless of their birthplace, averaged around 600 points.  Students born outside of Canada improved 77 score points from the time they were 15 years old until they were 24 years old, an improvement equivalent to more than one proficiency level on the PISA reading scale.  The authors point out that these results demonstrate that the appropriate integration policies can help to reduce, if not eliminate, differences in student performance, at least for immigrants in Canada.

OECD (2012). Learning Beyond Fifteen: Ten Years After PISA

The report finds, not surprisingly, that participation in some form of post-secondary education is consistently and substantially related to growth in reading skills between ages 15 and 24.  For example, students with a university degree at age 24 had an average score of 652 points in PISA-24, while those students with only a high school education at age 24 had an average score of 564 points, almost 100 points lower than college graduates.  When those same college graduates took the test at age 15, they had averaged 596 points on PISA, a score still substantially above the scores attained nine years later by those students that had not obtained any formal education beyond high school.

Students who spent four or more years in a higher education institute between ages 15 and 24 but did not complete a degree, still showed improvements in skills that were similar to or greater than (70 points or more) those skills observed among young people who did complete a college degree.

On the other hand, students that were poor performers at age 15 and entered the labor market soon after compulsory education tended to continue to be poor-performers at age 24 with their general rate of improvement being relatively modest.

This report also took a look at the factors that relate to improvements in reading skills when students were 15 to age 24.  From childhood to age 15, the report study finds that the strongest influences on reading proficiency are parents and the home environment along with the quality of teachers and the classroom-learning environment.  When students are older, the degree of control they feel over their life is strongly related to improvements in reading.   Independence and the capacity to make individual life choices is generally related to larger improvements in reading performance, particularly if it is coupled with participation in post-secondary education.

Young people who had the advantage of a supportive learning environment up until age 15 showed relatively slower learning improvements as they made their transition to independence.  On the other hand, those students that did not succeed in their school, made greater improvements if they experienced a life change, for example changing the status of their relationship (from single to married) or moving out of their parents’ home.

Other Reports of Note
Education Week Quality Counts 2012. “Canada Musters Resources to Serve Diverse Student Needs.”
This article, part of Education Week’s special 2012 Quality Counts edition focused on “The Global Challenge for Education,” examines Canada’s commitment to equality in its public schools, and particularly the provinces’ ability to provide a high quality education for their most at-risk students by managing school funding at the provincial, rather than the local, level.  Although Canada has a higher immigrant population and a higher proportion of students living in poverty than many other OECD countries, they have been able to integrate these students into mainstream classrooms while still giving them targeted support both in the classroom and out, with some districts even providing subsidized health services like vision and hearing screenings.  In addition to the article, Education Week has made a video, produced for the Quality Counts release event, as well as audio from the live event.

OECD. (May 2012). “Does performance-based pay improve teaching?”
Performance-based pay for teachers is a hot topic in many countries.  So this month’s PISA in Focus will be of interest to many of our readers.  The authors explain that,  “A look at the overall picture tells us that there is no relationship between average student performance in a country and the use of performance-based pay schemes.”  But in countries with comparatively low teacher salaries (less than 15 percent above GDP per capita), student performance tends to be better when performance-based pay systems are in place, while in countries where teachers are relatively well paid (more than 15 percent above average GDP per capita), the opposite is true.  So for countries that do not have the resources to pay all of their teachers well, it is worth having a look at the experience of those countries that have introduced performance-based pay schemes.  This finding, of course, is consistent with our own finding in Surpassing Shanghai that relatively poor countries just starting out on the economic development curve that cannot afford to pay their teachers developed world salaries will tend to use Tayloristic management schemes because their teachers will not have the professional skills required to succeed in a professional work environment.  Conversely, the same Tayloristic management methods won’t work when a country is employing highly educated and trained teachers.  Put another way, blue-collar work organization is appropriate for relatively low-skilled teachers and for use in the early stages of economic development, but professional norms of work organization are needed as a country moves up the economic development ladder and begins to employ highly educated and trained teachers.  Only the latter are likely to produce world-class high quality, high equity education systems.

International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Attainment. (2012). “Policy, Practice and Readiness to Teach Primary and Secondary Mathematics in 17 Countries: Findings from the IEA Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M).”
Using findings from the 2008 Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M), this report examines country-level policies related to the preparation of future mathematics teachers, how these policies impact the participating countries’ teacher education programs and instructional practices, and the implications of these polices and practices for student learning. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Attainment (IEA) published initial results from the TEDS-M study in 2009. The participating countries include Botswana, Canada (four provinces), Chile, Taiwan, Georgia, Germany, Malaysia, Norway, Oman (lower-secondary teacher education only), the Philippines, Poland, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Spain (primary teacher education only), Switzerland (German-speaking cantons), Thailand, and the United States.  According to Policy, Practice and Readiness to Teach Primary and Secondary Mathematics in 17 Countries, the countries that best prepare math teachers have implemented a number of common practices including rigorous math instruction for all high school students, including potential teachers; teacher-preparation programs that are highly selective and demanding; and an attractive profession with excellent pay, benefits and job security.  According to this study, Taiwan and Singapore top the list of the countries that do the best job of preparing math teachers and Russia also scored highly.  Poland, Switzerland and Germany did well but this is partially explained by their reliance on specialist teachers in the lower-grades.  The United States generally finished below this group but above other countries that scored below the international average.

OECD Education Working Papers. (May 2012). “School Funding Formulas: Review of Main Characteristics and Impacts.”
This working paper provides a literature review on school funding formulas across OECD countries.  It examines what kinds of school formula funding schemes exist and how they are used, in particular, for promoting the needs of socially disadvantaged pupils and how school formula funding systems perform according to equity and efficiency standards.  The paper discusses the difficulties of striking the right balance in school funding formulas between more or less weight given to local differences.  For example, when funding formulas give more consideration to the local costs of education and other local specificities, this can lead to more convoluted and obscure formula designs.  The authors also focus on the challenges of measuring how much it costs to educate students with a given background to a pre-defined standard and ensuring school autonomy while making sure funding is spent on what it was intended for.

(Source: OECD. (2011). Education at a Glance: 2011, OECD. (2010). PISA 2009 Results: Overcoming Social Background, Vol. II.)

One challenge shared by many countries as they work toward improving student performance is insuring that new immigrants are provided the kind and quality of education needed for success.  Often, these students, who may speak different languages at school and at home, and who may come from cultures very different from that of their adopted country, are invoked as a reason for low scores on international exams.  Some top performers like Finland and the Netherlands have in recent years begun to integrate large immigrant populations into their school systems, and are working to establish effective policies to ensure that these students are able to achieve at the same high levels as native-born students.  Other top performers, however, have a long history of educating immigrant students to high levels.  Australia, New Zealand and Canada fit into this category.  All three countries have student bodies in which nearly a quarter of students are immigrants, defined by the OECD as either first- or second-generation transplants (Figure 1).  And notwithstanding the high proportion of immigrant students in these countries, they consistently top the international league tables of student performance.  In some cases, notably in Australia, immigrant students in fact do better than native students on international assessments, and in Canada, there is only a small gap between immigrant and native students’ performance (Figure 2).  Furthermore, because Canada instituted a longitudinal study of students who first took the PISA exam at age 15 in 2000, we are able to see that immigrant students’ performance in that country has improved over time.

(Source: OECD. (2011). Education at a Glance: 2011.)

In their annual report, Education at a Glance, the OECD takes immigrant students’ socioeconomic background into account when assessing the gaps between immigrant students and native-born students in order to determine to what degree socioeconomic status may impact performance.  They found that when controlling for socioeconomic status, the gap between native and immigrant students decreased in almost every case.  On average across OECD countries, the performance gap in reading decreased from 44 points to 27 points.  In the United States, while native students outperform immigrants by more than 20 points before accounting for socioeconomic status, immigrant students actually outperform native students by about 10 points once their socioeconomic background is accounted for.  Other countries, particularly Canada, Australia and New Zealand, do not have a large gap in the performance of immigrant students before and after taking into account their socioeconomic status, suggesting that they are more successful than other countries including the United States in integrating the vast majority of their immigrant students into their education systems.

The successful integration of immigrants into a country’s school system can be seen clearly in the case of Canada, which has been able to produce high achievement among its immigrant students, as demonstrated by a very close relationship between immigrant students’ average PISA scores and the national average (Figure 3).  Australia and New Zealand have also achieved some measure of success here, while Finland and the Netherlands have large gaps between the national average and the average of their immigrant students.  In the report Pathways to Success: How Knowledge and Skills at Age 15 Shape Future Lives in Canada, OECD observes that new immigrants tend to perform less well than their Canadian counterparts.  However, immigrants who have been in Canada for five or more years nearly match native students’ performance.  They also note that more immigrant students go on to university (61%) than do native-born students (43%).

(Source: OECD. (2011). Education at a Glance: 2011; OECD. (2010). PISA Ranking by Mean Score for Reading, Mathematics and Science.)

In a recent look at the results from a Canadian longitudinal study of students who took the PISA exam in 2000, the OECD found that by the age of 24, immigrant students were able to erase the gap that had been present between immigrant and native students when they took their PISA exam at the age of 15, with the average PISA score of immigrant students at the second administration of the test (at age 24) being two points higher (601) than that of Canadian-born students (Figure 4).  This is an increase of 77 points over the average score of immigrant students at the age of 15, which represents more than one proficiency level on the PISA scale.  Canadian-born students, by contrast, gained just 54 points between the ages of 15 and 24 – still a large improvement, but not as large as the improvement made by students who had immigrated to Canada.  It is important to note that immigrants are an exception.  Other groups of students who were low performers on the 2000 administration of PISA (among them students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and Francophone students) continued to be low performers in the second administration of the exam, and the performance gap between these groups and the overall Canadian average was relatively unchanged ten years later.  The authors of this report argue that the more equitable outcomes at the age of 24 are a result of both Canadian immigration and education policies, and that Canada provides effective education pathways to immigrant students, particularly beyond the level of compulsory education.  The authors suggest that Canada’s policies can be useful to other countries experiencing high rates of immigration, and note that skills gaps can be addressed in the years between lower secondary school and the time at which students enter the workforce.

While Learning Beyond Fifteen does not go into real detail about the policies Canada employs to produce success among its immigrant students, the authors of the 2010 OECD publication Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons from PISA for the United States, have identified several strategies.  The first is Canada’s immigration policies.  Canada has encouraged, through public policy, the highly educated to move to Canada to fill specific economic and labor force needs.  Because preference is given to these highly educated immigrants, they are not seen as a major threat to native-born Canadians and are therefore accepted more readily into Canadian society.  Their children, too, have access to better resources. Immigrant children in Canada, unlike in most OECD countries, generally have access to resources that are equal to or greater than what their native-born counterparts are provided including high quality school buildings, low teacher-student ratios, healthy classroom climates and positive teacher morale.  Immigrant students are typically mainstreamed into classes taught in English or French, to quickly integrate them into the system.  At the same time, these students are provided with additional language classes both in and out of the classroom to allow them to keep up with their peers.

(Source: OECD. (2012). Learning Beyond Fifteen - 10 Years After PISA.)

Steve Hargadon of the Future of Education recently interviewed Tucker on the shared strategies used by the top-performing education systems and Emily Richmond, of the Education Writers Association, chatted with Tucker about why United States fares so poorly on international comparisons, how fundamental changes are needed in how society views and treats teachers, and why there doesn’t have to be a choice between equity and quality when it comes to public schools. In his Education Week blog, Top Performers, Tucker challenges the new generation of business leaders to turn their talents and influence to systems-change so that U.S. students can perform at world-class levels.

In this section of our newsletter, we provide a summary of the key findings of the OECD report.  In our Statistic of the Month section, you can find graphic displays taken from this report and another recent OECD report that neatly summarize some of the most important findings and show how a number of the countries surveyed for the report sort themselves out along the dimensions of interest.  This article should be read in conjunction with those graphics.

Unsurprisingly, the report finds that certain investments in educational equity pay off.  They argue for early government investment in education, and maintaining a strong investment in the system through upper secondary school, with specific, targeted investments in and policies for low-performing schools. The authors recommend elimination of system practices that hinder education, among them grade repetition, early tracking, school-choice schemes that do not actually offer “choice” to all students, and “dead-end” upper secondary programs as opposed to academically demanding vocational tracks in upper secondary school that ensure that all students have a high quality pathway to the job market.  The authors also propose several broadly outlined strategies for improving low-performing schools with a particular emphasis on strong school leadership, highly-qualified teachers and strong links to the community.

The report points to countries that have been unusually successful at minimizing the effects of socio-economic status on school performance. Finland, in particular, and to a somewhat lesser extent Canada, South Korea and Japan, have all been able to help a high proportion of their students from low socio-economic backgrounds achieve at high levels, as measured by the 2009 PISA scores in reading. The OECD average reading score is far lower than it is in any of the countries just listed, while the average percent of variance in reading achievement among students from various social backgrounds is nearly twice as high as it is in Finland. Other countries, like the United States and New Zealand, have higher average PISA scores than the OECD average, but also a higher percent of variance in those scores – showing that those systems are both lower achieving overall and more unequal within their countries.

Other Recent Reports of Note

• The measurement of educational inequality: achievement and opportunity, The World Bank (publication date: November, 2011). The authors of this working paper examine educational inequality and measurement issues in international standardized assessments like PISA. They use these measurement issues to calculate inequality indices for 57 countries and provide results along with an analysis of whether education inequality correlates with factors like GDP, school spending and student tracking.
• Student Standardised Testing: Current Practices in OECD Countries and a Literature Review, OECD (publication date: October 11, 2011). This report discusses the most relevant issues concerning student standardised testing in which there are no-stakes for students through a literature review and a review of the trends in standardised testing in OECD countries. It provides an overview of the standardised testing typology in the no-stakes context, including identifying the driving trends behind the gradual increase in standardised testing in OECD countries and the different purposes of standardised tests.
• Teachers’ and School Heads’ Salaries and Allowances in Europe, 2009/10, Eurydice (publication date: October 4, 2011). This Eurydice data collection and comparative study on teachers’ and school heads’ salaries and allowances covers full-time, fully qualified teachers and school heads at pre-primary, primary, lower secondary and upper secondary education levels for the 2009/10 school year. The cross-country comparative analysis focuses on comparing the decision-making levels that are responsible for setting teachers’ and school heads’ statutory salaries. The minimum and maximum statutory salaries are presented relative to the GDP per capita in each country, with an indication of salary progression and its relation to professional experience. The latest increase/decrease in the purchasing power of personnel employed in education in relation to the impact of the economic crisis since 2008 is also analyzed. Finally, the different types of allowances that teachers may receive are presented as well as the decision-making levels responsible for their allocation and their levels.