In December, the results of the 2011 administration of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) were published in three separate reports, each examining international performance in reading (at the fourth grade level), math (at the fourth and eighth grade levels) and science (at the fourth and eighth grade levels).  These assessments provide a picture of international student performance in the years before a student reaches the age of 15, which is the age at which students take the OECD’s Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA).  However, there are some central differences between the TIMSS/PIRLS and PISA assessments.  Michael Martin, the Co-Executive Director of the TIMSS and PIRLS Study Center at Boston College, notes that while PISA is intended to measure a student’s general skills in the arenas of reading, math and science, TIMSS and PIRLS are more focused on content mastery.  Additionally, Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, has pointed out that the countries participating in both assessments do vary – the TIMSS and PIRLS groups are smaller and represent a mixture of countries at different levels of economic development as compared to the participants in PISA.

Because of the differences between the assessments, the countries that are in the top ten or fifteen of the TIMSS and PIRLS rankings are somewhat different than the top performers on the last incarnation of PISA in 2009.  While league tables of the top countries based on their average scores always garner the most press when the results of international assessments are released, we decided to take a more in-depth look at what level of proficiency students in the top fifteen countries are actually reaching in these subjects.

The IEA has established four “international benchmarks” on their score scale for these assessments.  While the score scale for both PIRLS and TIMSS runs from 0-1000, the vast majority of scores fall between 300 and 700.  The IEA has identified a score of 400 as the “low” international benchmark, indicating that students at this score point have been educated to a “basic” level.  Beyond that, there is a score of 475, or “intermediate;” a score of 550, or “high,” and a score of 625, or “advanced.”  Below, we have plotted the percent of students at each benchmark in the top fifteen countries on the 2011 administration of PIRLS and TIMSS.  This is useful when thinking about the top performers, because it shows, in a clearer way perhaps than the average scale score, what students in each country are really able to do.

In the fourth grade PIRLS reading assessment, a student who reaches the “low” international benchmark is able to “locate and retrieve an explicitly stated detail” in a literary text, and “locate and reproduce explicitly stated information … at the beginning of the text” in an informational text.  By contrast, at the “advanced” international benchmark, students are able to “integrate ideas and evidence across a text,” and “distinguish and interpret complex information from different parts of a text,” among other skills.

The chart above, like the others to follow, is organized from top to bottom in the order of average scale score.  However, the average scale score does not always correlate to the highest percentage of students reaching the “advanced” benchmark in each country.  In this case, it does not, though Hong Kong does have the highest proportion of students meeting either the “high” benchmark or “advanced” benchmark – 67 percent – while in the United States, just 56 percent of students meet those levels.  The tail of students either meeting the “low” benchmark or not meeting a benchmark is also significantly smaller in the top three countries – Hong Kong, the Russian Federation, and Finland (7, 8 and 8 percent, respectively), than in the majority of the other countries.  This more specific data on student performance is useful in terms of thinking about a country’s overall performance, because it gives a clearer sense, potentially, of the equity of the school system, and the ability of the system to educate all students – or any students – to high levels.  It also demonstrates that there are clear differences in student performance between the top handful of countries and the rest of the countries rounding out the top ten or fifteen.

For fourth grade math, in order to reach the “low” benchmark, a student must be able to demonstrate “basic mathematical knowledge,” such as adding and subtracting integers and being able to recognize familiar shapes.  At the “advanced” benchmark, a student must have an understanding of how to apply their knowledge, for example, by solving word problems with multiple steps, and they must show some understanding of more difficult concepts like fractions and decimals.

In the case of TIMSS fourth grade math, the percent of students reaching the “advanced” benchmark does correlate to the country’s average scale score, at least for the top six performers.  This chart indicates very clearly how well the East Asian countries do compared to the rest of the world in instilling advanced-level math skills in their students, even at an early age, with about a third of students or more reaching the “advanced” benchmark in Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, and an overwhelming majority reaching either the “advanced” or “high” benchmarks in all cases.  These countries also have the smallest proportions of students who failed to meet the most basic level.  By contrast, starting with Northern Ireland, which is in sixth place in the overall league table in this subject, the other countries have higher proportions of students failing to reach at least the “intermediate” benchmark, and generally much lower proportions of students reaching the “advanced” benchmark.

In eighth grade math, students at the “low” benchmark “have some knowledge of whole numbers and decimals, operations, and basic graphs.”  At the “advanced” level, students are able to demonstrate many mathematical skills, such as solving linear equations, reasoning with geometric figures, and expressing generalizations algebraically.

The pattern in proficiency seen in the TIMSS fourth grade math results is continued in the TIMSS eighth grade math results.  Andreas Schleicher from the OECD and US Education Secretary Arne Duncan have commented on the drop in math and science skills from fourth grade to eighth grade in the United States, and the data bears this out.  In fourth grade, 47 percent of American students met either the “high” or “advanced” benchmarks; in eighth grade, just 30 percent of students did.  Furthermore, twice as many American students – 8 percent – failed to meet any benchmarks in eighth grade than in fourth grade.  In Singapore, however, the number of students meeting the “advanced” or “high” benchmark holds steady at 78 percent in both grades, and the other East Asian countries also do not lose any substantial ground.  Taiwan increases the number of students at the “advanced” level from 30 percent in fourth grade to about half (49 percent) in eighth grade.

In fourth grade science, students at the “low” benchmark “show some elementary knowledge of life, physical and earth sciences,” and “demonstrate knowledge of some simple facts … interpret simple diagrams, complete simple tables, and provide short written responses to questions requiring factual information.”  At the “advanced” benchmark, students can “apply knowledge and understanding of scientific processes … and show some knowledge of the process of scientific inquiry.”  Additionally, “they have a beginning ability to interpret results in the context of a simple experiment, reason and draw conclusions from descriptions and diagrams, and evaluate and support an argument.”

On the TIMSS fourth grade science assessment, the East Asian countries do not dominate in terms of student proficiency at the “advanced” benchmark as completely as they do in math, although perennial top performers South Korea and Singapore still top the list in this measure.  Fewer students overall, across the board, seem to have reached the “advanced” benchmark in science as compared to reading and math.  The United States seems to have a particular problem in this subject, with 19 percent of students either failing to meet any benchmark or only meeting the “low” benchmark.

At the eighth grade level in science, students meeting the “low” benchmark are expected to “recognize some basic facts from the life and physical sciences,” and can display this knowledge by “interpret[ing] simple diagrams, complet[ing] simple tables, and apply[ing] basic knowledge.  Students at the “advanced” level can “communicate an understanding of complex and abstract concepts in biology, chemistry, physics and earth sciences.”  They also “understand basic features of scientific investigation … [and] combine information from several sources to solve problems and draw conclusions, and … provide written explanations to communicate scientific knowledge.”

Like in fourth grade science, overall, there seem to be fewer students who reach the “advanced” benchmark across the board.  The United States sees a 5 percent decline in the number of students reaching the “advanced” benchmark from fourth to eighth grade, and a four percent decline in students reaching the “high” benchmark.  This is compounded by a large jump in the percent of students who either do not meet any benchmarks (7 percent compared to 4 percent) or meet only the “low” benchmark (20 percent compared to 15 percent) – more than a quarter of all US students, in fact.

A separate, but equally interesting, set of data from the 2011 PIRLS results is the level of proficiency of students in two types of reading – literary and informational – as compared to a country’s overall score.  Debates over the value of each type of reading as emphasized in a curriculum have been raging for some time now, and while the PIRLS data does not solve this debate, it does provide interesting new fodder to the discussion.

The chart above depicts the overall average reading score on PIRLS, which is administered to fourth grade students, for the top fifteen systems on that assessment, as well as the average score on the literary reading tasks and on the informational reading tasks.  The top performing countries (Hong Kong, the Russian Federation, Finland and Singapore) all have average informational reading scores that are higher than or equal to their overall reading score, with literary reading scores somewhat lower than or equal to both the overall score and the informational score.  By contrast, the United States, Northern Ireland, Denmark, Ireland, Canada and England all display the opposite trend – literary reading scores that are higher, often statistically significant, than either their informational reading scores or their overall scores.  There is also, in the case of the United States, Ireland and Northern Ireland, a statistical significance in the difference between the lower informational reading score and the overall score.

This suggests that informational reading may, in fact, help aid a student’s overall reading skills, at least as measured by the PIRLS assessment.  It is notable that several East Asian countries, including Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, all of which traditionally do very well in the math and science assessments, also have students who perform better on informational reading tasks than on literary reading tasks.  In the case of Hong Kong and Singapore, this results in a very high overall score.  In Taiwan, the informational reading score is extremely high compared to the literary reading score, and actually fairly comparable to Singapore’s informational reading score.  However, in this case the literary reading score of Taiwan’s students brings the overall score down, suggesting a need for balance.  In terms of balance, Finland seems to have gotten this just right; the informational, literary and overall scores are indistinguishable from one another, and are all very high.

Ben Jensen, Program Director of the School Education Program at Australia’s Grattan Institute

This month, Betsy Brown Ruzzi, Director of the Center on International Education Benchmarking, interviewed Ben Jensen of Australia’s Grattan Institute about the Institute’s most recent report, Catching up: Learning from the best school systems in East Asia.  Jensen is Director of the School Education Program at the Grattan Institute, an independent public policy think tank that was established by the Australian government, major research organizations and business leaders in 2008.  The Institute focuses on domestic issues including elementary and secondary education, higher education, healthcare, economic wellbeing and productivity growth.  Prior to joining the Grattan Institute, Jensen spent five years at the OECD Education Directorate, where he focused on teacher policy, how schools operate and are organized, and how to accurately measure school performance.

Brown Ruzzi: We know that the Grattan Institute is engaged in research in many areas of Australian public policy, and particularly in education. Can you give us a brief overview of the work you do in primary and secondary education, what your research covers, what methods you use and the projects you have planned in the coming years?

Jensen:  Much of our work is focused on government policy, but we also do work at the school level.  We are particularly interested in how to increase teacher effectiveness. The evidence is quite clear that the greatest impact we can have is increasing teacher effectiveness, which also has the greatest impact on student learning.  As part of that work, we started to look internationally, partly because of my background at the OECD, and partly because Australia, despite its proximity to Asia, has actually been quite slow to learn form the high-performing systems in East Asia. We are doing some work in Shanghai, looking at various programs that deal with inequality, and we are also going to start to look at issues of initial teacher education because I think that is an area that is really crying out for reform. There are an alarming number of teachers in Australia, and in other countries, who say that they come out of their teacher education programs not prepared for the classroom. I think initial teacher education is going to be our next main area of research and again, we would like to do that in the international sphere.

Brown Ruzzi:  Based on your work in East Asia and your experience at OECD, what do you see are the key policy levers that drive high-performing education systems?

Jensen:  There are some very basic drivers.  In terms of education strategy, there are two in particular that I consider to be a difference between Australia and East Asia. The first is an unrelenting focus on student learning.  Student learning is the basis of everything in the East Asian systems, and the systems work to allocate resources to the areas that have the biggest impact on student learning, linking policy to the classroom.  The evidence is very clear that teacher effectiveness has the biggest impact on student learning, and those systems invest in the development of their teachers and in their professional learning in a way that far outstretches other systems.  For example, a few years ago in Singapore, the National Institute of Education (the place where all teachers are trained in Singapore) received feedback from their graduates that not all of their courses prepared them for the classroom, so they reworked their core curriculum to actually remove some subjects such as philosophy of education or history of education in order to put a greater emphasis on classroom practices. They do less of the professional development that a lot of teachers say is not as useful, and they put an emphasis instead on feedback and classroom observation.

The second main driver is connected to the first. The old saying is that successful education strategy is 20 percent design and 80 percent implementation, and I think that is true. In Australia and some other OECD countries, there is a severe disconnect between design and implementation.  However, once you begin to focus on implementation, you get public policy operating in a very different way. If you look at Hong Kong’s education strategy, it largely reads like an implementation framework. If you look at education strategies in some other countries, they are very broad statements of goals. Improving teaching and learning is about behavioral change, and if you focus on the behavioral change you want, you are focusing on implementation – how we can get into schools and help support and develop the behaviors we are looking for. Once you focus on student learning and implementation, you actually get results.

Brown Ruzzi: The Grattan Institute’s most recent report, Catching up: Learning from the best school systems in East Asia, discusses those issues in depth, and how, in particular, the four systems you examined (Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and South Korea) have both a strong focus on learning and a strong connection between policy and classroom-level implementation.  Digging a little deeper, what other commonalities did you find in the top-performing East Asian education systems?

Jensen: Well, first of all, there are of course some substantial differences between the systems, which we do outline in the report. So we focused on particular areas of particular systems that we saw as essential to success, such as initial teacher education in Singapore, because they are way ahead of even the other East Asian countries. In Shanghai, they have a very strong system of professional learning, teacher induction and mentoring. They have a huge amount of classroom observation incorporated into their teachers’ professional development, as does Singapore. These practices have a huge impact on student learning and I think a lot of OECD countries are struggling with the question of how to improve learning and professionalizing teaching, and these countries are clearly doing it well.

Brown Ruzzi: Essentially, then, your central point is that two common features of successful education systems, a constant focus on learning and an effective implementation plan, require high quality teacher education, strong induction programs for new teachers, a system of teacher mentoring and a cooperative learning environment for teachers?

Jensen: Yes, though it is important to recognize that it is not just about professional development or professional learning. Having an impact on student learning is our end game. And don’t forget, the high performing systems in East Asia have greater equality in student performance than what you see in other systems, because they often begin system change with equity programs.

The notion of professional cooperation is prevalent across all of the East Asian systems we studied.  While these systems put an emphasis on observing learning in the classroom, the really important difference here is that they are not just observing the teachers, but also observing the students, all the time. I think that is a really powerful mechanism not just to increase the professional learning of teachers, but also in helping students.  You have more than one teacher in the classroom working to identify the students who are falling behind and then helping them catch up. These systems also share the notion of teachers as researchers. This is, in particular, incredibly strong in Shanghai. No other system compares with them in this respect, though I think professional learning communities and teachers as researchers are very effective in Singapore as well, and a little bit less so in Hong Kong and Korea.  I think this is one of those areas where we are going to see quite a bit of change in school education in many countries.

Once there is some movement towards this professionalization, school improvement actually becomes an organic process where the system is improving internally – you have professional learning communities that are trying to find new teaching methods and new curricula, and really examine what is working or not working in their schools.

Brown Ruzzi: So when you speak of teachers as researchers, it’s not only that teachers are publishing in academic journals, but they are collaborating to identify strategies and tools that help improve student performance and this role is built into their career ladder systems?

Jensen: Yes, though I do think there are some academic expectations as well in some of these systems.  But to elaborate, in Shanghai, there are teacher research groups that identify an issue that they are going to study, then they work closely with students and look at practices within the school. The teachers are in each other’s classrooms observing what is working and what is not, and then at the end of the year, you have results. In Shanghai and Singapore this is carried out with a very sophisticated methodology that teachers have learned in the universities and teacher training programs.  And it helps to have the universities and the teacher training institutions closely linked with the schools.  This has a huge impact on both the teachers’ professional careers and on student learning.  Organizing this way leaves fewer students behind because these systems include a lot of observation and feedback of both the teachers and students so that they are able to quickly identify students who are at different levels and address their individual needs in a much more effective manner.

Brown Ruzzi: Are there any other things that these high performing systems have in common that you would like to mention?

Jensen: Yes, it is the quality of the people at all levels of the system from the Ministry through to the schools.  These systems put a heavy emphasis on finding and supporting effective professionals and this support helps increase the status of the profession.

Brown Ruzzi: In reading Catching up, I was surprised that you did not mention high quality, aligned instructional systems (aligned syllabi, curriculum frameworks, assessment and professional development) as one common element found in these top-performing countries.  In our research, we have found that this tends to be a central feature of these systems.

Jensen:  I do believe that is the case in each of these systems, but I see it as a matter of implementation. In Australia, we have just had a national curriculum introduced and I think it is really interesting to compare our curriculum with the curriculum in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, the curriculum is primarily about pedagogy – how to teach the subjects – while in Australia it is more about content or what to teach. When speaking about alignment, you do need links between professional development, assessment, curriculum and pedagogy. Australia is not there yet, but we are headed down that road. Australia is much like the United States in terms of having local jurisdictions responsible for education rather than being able to adopt a common approach, although we are headed in that direction.

Brown Ruzzi: Your report highlighted some of the major differences between East Asian countries and Australia in terms of how the teacher’s job is structured, ranging from the number of students assigned to each teacher to the amount of hours spent in a classroom versus working with other teachers.

Jensen: Yes. In the high performing East Asian countries, there is a clear message that professional learning is not something that you do after hours.  It is built into the system. I think that has a huge impact on student learning and how schools are organized.  Compared to the United States and Australia, the high-performing East Asian countries have larger class sizes and the teachers are spending less time in the classroom during working hours and more time collaborating and planning with their colleagues.

Brown Ruzzi: What has been the response to the report in Australia?

Jensen: I don’t think there has been any education report that has had more media attention than this one. At a policy level, there have been questions about how we take these findings and incrementally employ them in the education system. In Australia, we generally start education reforms with a focus on school funding. But now it is not just about spending more money, we really have to change how we operate our educational system and change our priorities. We don’t have effective teacher preparation, we don’t have professional collaboration, and we don’t have the student results we want. And yet, we are really spending a lot and the costs are only going up. I think our report has been effective in shining a spotlight on what meaningful reform looks like and how we can accomplish it. We have had a number of people tell us that we are changing the education debate in the country, and that is really exciting for us.

Brown Ruzzi: That is exciting. Are policymakers learning what you hoped they would learn from your report on these high performing systems?

Jensen: I think so. They may not be able to go as far as we would like, but we are already seeing policymakers talking along the lines of how to really improve professional learning. I also think there is a realization that we may never get the top performing graduates to enter teaching, so we really need to focus on professional learning in order to develop a strong teaching force.

Brown Ruzzi: Because the Confucian cultures of the countries you studied are different from Australia’s culture, what does Australia have to do differently from the East Asian countries in order to get the same strong results?

Jenson: If you look at the systems highlighted in the report, many of the areas in which they have established reforms are not culture-dependent. They are very practical reforms focused on improvements of professional learning systems and teacher education. If you look back just ten years, Hong Kong and Singapore were ranked, I think, about 14th or 15th [on international assessments] and then made a number of the reforms we have talked about, and now are some of the world’s top-performing systems. That does not require cultural change.

Brown Ruzzi: Do you see a contrast between what you learned from the East Asian systems and what we know about reforms in Finland, and if so, can you describe the central differences?

Jensen:  Finland certainly has the same emphasis on teachers and teaching that you see in the East Asian systems we studied. In Finland, the very top graduates go into teaching and they are then taught to the master’s level in higher education.  That is not true in all of the systems in East Asia.  I think Korea is the most similar in terms of the very highest achieving graduates going into teaching.  I also think there is a difference in pedagogy particularly in primary schools in Finland that use play-based learning more than other systems.  The East Asian systems have had to consciously move away from their historical focus on exams and towards a new focus on 21st – century skills and a constructivist approach to pedagogy. The East Asian systems are in the middle of moving in this direction while the Finns have made much more progress. I also think that in Finland, the connection between policy and the classroom is implemented differently, but that strong link exists, just in a different way. I would also include Ontario in the systems that use policy to create change at the school level.

Brown Ruzzi: Australia has put in place a number of major education reform initiatives in recent years including the National Assessment Programme in 2009, the national curriculum in 2011, initiatives targeting underserved students, the National Partnerships to improve teacher training and retention and the My School effort to report publicly on school performance as part of Australia’s accountability system.  What is the relationship to these reforms and the findings in your report on the East Asian top performers?

Jensen: There are some commonalities between Australia’s reforms and the ones that have taken place in East Asia. I think it is important to have a national curriculum in place. I think at the core, the reforms share a concern about how we improve teaching in the classroom, but the implementation strategy is very different partly because we are coming from a very different starting point. The East Asian systems are trying to move away from an exam-based culture, and we have done just the opposite.

Brown Ruzzi: Do you mean moving from a locally-driven to a centrally-driven accountability system?

Jensen: Exactly. And generally, in Australia, there is not a focus on implementation and how what we do impacts the classroom, except for the national assessments and perhaps eventually the national curriculum. Though again, if you compare our national curriculum to Hong Kong’s, ours is focused on what is taught with very little discussion of how it is taught whereas in Hong Kong, the focus is very much on teaching.

Brown Ruzzi: How does the current reform program fit into the politics of education in Australia today?

Jensen: It is a really interesting time for education in Australia, because we have had a change in government in three eastern states, and they were incredibly convincing wins and we are expecting them to be long-term governments. Having long-term governments opens the door for long-term strategic planning at the state level.

Brown Ruzzi: Given that Australia’s economy is powered by Asia’s need for raw materials, do Australians think they need a highly educated and trained workforce in the years ahead to drive the economy or do they believe that commodities will last forever?

Jensen: I don’t think you see many people at the state level saying that education is the most important priority, possibly because Australia has enjoyed economic growth for well over a decade.  With that said, we are now getting to a stage where unemployment is starting to increase, and that has led to more attention on the issue of training in some areas.  But when a country is doing well, it is often hard to make arguments for change.  You just don’t get that real need for reform or the support for reform that exists in other countries.  At least not yet.

Brown Ruzzi: In light of the change in government in some of your states as well as the overall conversations about reform in Australia, where do you see the recent Review of Funding for Schooling, or the “Gonski Report,” recommendations going? What impact will this report ultimately have on policy?

Jensen: I think our report made it clear that funding is not the main game. But in Australia, a central feature of the debate, as I mentioned earlier, is about funding government and non-government schools. There has been a lot of concern in Australia about inequality between schools and, because of that, Gonski was initially successful in getting support from different stakeholders for his effort to look hard at how schools are funded in Australia.  But with the release of his report and his panel’s recommendations to substantially increase education funding, achieving agreement between the federal and state governments will be difficult, particularly because next year there is a federal election in Australia. I do think there are good things in the report.  In particular, the recommendation for consistent funding for students with disabilities and increased funds for students who require more support.

Brown Ruzzi: Finally, what were your main takeaways from the most recent International Summit on the Teaching Profession in New York City?

Jensen: I think the overarching theme of the summit was the need for strong professional collaboration among teachers and an emphasis on teachers as researchers and how countries can benefit from instilling these qualities in their teaching forces. It was interesting that a number of different countries included these as priorities, and it made me think that these two areas are going to be a focus of change in the future.

In their recent report published in February of this year, the Grattan Institute examined the school systems of several East Asian countries with a view towards drawing policy recommendations from what they learned for Australia. In the report, titled Catching Up: Learning from the best school systems in East Asia (and featured in last month’s International Reads) the authors look to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Korea and Singapore and focus particularly on teacher education, professional development, and approaches to learning. It is the combination of these factors, the authors believe, that produces such impressive results whenever their students are compared to their counterparts in other countries on international assessments such as PISA.

One of the most striking findings in this report is the rate at which students in Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Korea are learning as compared to their counterparts in the United States, the United Kingdom and, of course, Australia. Using the conversion rates utilized by Thompson et al. in their 2010 ACER publication, Challenges for Australian education: results from PISA 2009: the PISA 2009 assessment of students’ reading, mathematical and scientific literacy (based on OECD analysis of PISA score levels and student competencies), the authors of Catching Up were able to produce a table demonstrating how many months ahead students in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea were compared to students in the US, the UK, Australia and the EU21. A difference in reading of 39 points represents a full year of difference in learning; the number is similar in math (41 points) and in science (38 points). Thus the difference in student learning between the 2009 PISA top performer (Shanghai) and the bottom performer (Kyrgyzstan) is six to six and a half years of learning in all three subjects.

What emerges from viewing the PISA scores in this way is it shows how far ahead students in Shanghai are, even compared to their top-performing East Asian counterparts. In mathematics, students in Shanghai are more than two and a half years ahead of the average OECD student, with students in Singapore and Hong Kong about a year behind them. Students in the UK and the US, on the other hand, lag a few months behind the average OECD student. In science, again, students in Shanghai have a huge leg up on most others: they are nearly two years ahead of the average OECD student and at least half a year ahead of the other top performers, whereas in the UK, students have just a tiny advantage over the average OECD student, while the United States remains average. Finally, in reading, Shanghai is still the frontrunner by far, but the overall gaps are smaller. Students in Shanghai are “only” about a year and a half ahead of the average OECD student, and again about half a year ahead of the next-best top performer. The United States performs better, by a handful of months, than the average OECD student, while the UK is approximately on par with average.

A common perception about education in Asian countries is that students – and particularly teenagers like those tested in PISA – spend the vast majority of their time either in school or in “cram schools” in order to compete for spots at selective universities. While it is certainly true that the culture of “cram schools” persists in these countries, the authors of Catching Up argue that it is not the extra hours spent studying that lead to these massive gaps in student achievement between East Asian countries and other OECD countries. Instead, these gaps emerge from “effective education strategies that focus on implementation and well-designed programs that continuously improve learning and teaching” (12), which are in place in the top performing countries. As evidence for this statement, they point to Hong Kong, which leaped from 17th place in PIRLS to 2nd place in just five years. Cram schools and Confucian values, they contend, cannot explain that rise.  Neither can system size; although Hong Kong and Singapore are relatively small (Singapore has just under half a million students while Hong Kong has about 700,000), South Korea has 7.2 million students and is also a top performer. Rather, Hong Kong, like Singapore and other rapidly-improving East Asian countries, took it upon itself to implement a series of effective and well thought out reforms with a focus on teacher education, teacher professionalism, and funding equity to get to the top of the pack.

To our surprise, our hosts had very little interest in talking about what we regarded as the stunning performance of their students.  They were very focused on the global economic competition and, from their standpoint, their schools were far behind, even though they considerably outstripped the United States in mathematics and science performance.  They pointed to the low number of Nobel prizes won by Asian scientists and especially to what they saw as the paucity of entrepreneurs who could lead enterprises that leapfrogged others in the invention of new technologies and entire industries.  They were certain they would lose in the years ahead if they could not produce their own Steve Jobs and Bill Gates—lots of them.

So they pressed us hard to tell them how we taught creativity and innovation in our schools.  And we laughed.  We don’t teach creativity and innovation in our schools, we said.  The origin of American creativity and innovation lies elsewhere, mainly in the great value that the society places on the individual, rather than the group.  In sports, the arts, industry and everywhere else, it is the excelling individual we celebrate.  Our literature puts the rebel, the individual inventor, the lone pioneer, the general who disobeys orders and wins the battle because he did so and the sheriff whose town deserts him but defeats the bad guys anyway on the highest pedestal.  Again and again, these are stories about the individual who, all alone, and often in defiance of convention, society and his superiors, advances the frontier, wins the battle and invents the future.  Our schools are certainly part of this culture, but we do not, we said, teach creativity or innovation.  The larger culture creates an environment in which people have much more social support than elsewhere to invent something new, challenge the established order, rebel against those in authority or create something different.

But they did not want to hear this and did not stop asking the question.  That’s because they understood that Americans place the individual much higher than the group in the hierarchy of our values.  And they believe that it is this value that produces insolent students, disorderly schools and a great deal of violence in American society that they do not want in theirs.

In Asian culture, much higher value is placed on respect for the group, for the elderly and for those higher in the social or managerial hierarchy than in the United States.  This respect for the group is responsible for the Asian saying that it is the nail that sticks out that gets hammered down.  American youth are taught that each individual has to look out for himself.  Asian youth are taught that, if you support the group effectively, you can expect the group to look out for you; if you rebel against the group, you can expect nothing.  If you give your superiors credit for your achievements, and defer to them in many other ways, your turn will come in time, but, if you do not defer, and insist on being recognized for your achievement and openly challenge the developing consensus in the organization, you can expect no support for yourself or your views.

I came back from that trip to Asia with a strong sense of irony.  We went to Asia to find out how they produce such strong mathematics and science skills in their students only to find out that they did not value that achievement half as much as we did.  They look at the United States for ways to improve their capacity for creativity and innovation only to find out that we do not teach those things in our schools.  The United States would very much like to achieve the levels of mathematics and science competence in our students that we see in Asian students.  But we are not willing to pay the price if getting that level of competence requires us as individuals to surrender the independence of spirit that characterizes our nation.  The Asians we had met want very much to gain the kind of creativity and innovative capacity we have, but not at the price of the kind of social disorder they believe to be a consequence of our devotion to the individual over the group.

But since that time, my sense of irony has greatly diminished and I have come to see these relationships among school performance, creativity and innovative capacity as much more complicated than I did then.

We can see now that there are countries in the West that are achieving levels of student performance in mathematics and science comparable to those we see in Asia. Asian values are certainly not responsible for that.  We can now see that there are a number of specific features of the structures of education systems that the top-performing Asian countries and the top-performing Western countries both embrace.  These features are independent, then, of unique national histories or culture and a compelling case can be made that they account for a substantial amount of the ability of these countries to top the league tables year after year.

And we can also see the Asian countries funding planeload after planeload of edu-tourists to visit Western countries in a continuing effort to find something they can take home in the hope that it will enable them to produce graduates who are more creative and innovative.  I have observed that, over the years, these visiting Asians are asking ever more sophisticated questions about the origins of our capacity for creativity and innovation and are getting steadily better at adapting their systems in the light of what they are learning.

All those years ago, I was inclined to agree somewhat uncritically with the Asians who saw themselves at a great disadvantage to the West with respect to creativity and innovation, and who also worried that their devotion to the group would prove a major handicap in the economic sweepstakes ahead.  Now, I am not so sure.  It is undoubtedly true that the West, and the United States in particular, has the edge in terms of “disruptive” innovation, the kind of innovation that produces new industries and wipes out old ones in a stroke.  But the consensus style of the Asian countries, combined with the very high general level of learning in the workforce, is a very powerful engine for the kind of continuous improvement that is very difficult for the Western countries to match.  Who is to say which of these—continuous improvement or disruptive change—will prove to be more useful to national economies in the years ahead?

Which brings up my last point.  When I completed the trip to Asia all those years ago, I thought that there might be ineluctable tradeoffs in the design of national education systems.  To get more of this, you would have to settle for less of that.

Now I am not so sure.  Culture matters.  But history is full of successful attempts by nations to change their cultures in order to better adapt to a changing environment (and of the stories of those that failed to adapt).  It is possible now to construct a sort of dimension line framed by the degree to which nations are currently benchmarking their competitors in the field of education in a disciplined way and, in an equally disciplined way, taking what they find from other successful nations and adapting it to their own needs, in a never-ending round of adaptive change.  At one end of the dimension line are those countries that are bending every effort in this direction.  At the other are those barely making any effort at all.

The Asian countries, for example, are ever more determined to find ways of developing citizens who are more creative and innovative without lowering their academic standards or their tolerance for what they see as antisocial behavior.  They are not alone in their eagerness to learn and adapt.  Those are the countries I would bet on.