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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New report from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research

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

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

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

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

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.)