Elsewhere in this newsletter, we summarize the paper prepared by the OECD for the recent International Teachers Summit in the Netherlands and the remarks made by Andreas Schleicher in his webinar on the subject.  These documents are well worth reading, as is Vivien Stewart’s account of the event.  Here, I will attempt to share some of the dynamics of the summit.

I did not attend the summit, and so have assembled this account on the basis of conversations with several people who were there.  My purpose is to describe some of the differences in views among the participants, because they are consequential, and reveal much about the direction education policy is likely to take in the coming years.

This was the third in the series of summits, the first two of which were held in New York City at the invitation of United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, invitations extended to the ministers of education and education labor leaders from the top-performing and most rapidly improving countries.  The United States acted as host country for those meetings and Education International (EI) and the OECD were the principal co-sponsors.  The aim was to provide a venue in which the top officials involved in making policy for teachers and teaching in their countries could, aided by analyses provided by the OECD and EI, compare notes on strategy and implementation, and by so doing, further improve their own education systems.  Nothing quite like this had ever happened before.

The first summit was focused on attracting and recruiting high quality secondary school candidates into the profession.  It covered initial teacher education, strengthening professional practice and retention.  There was broad agreement that no nation could have a high quality education system without high quality teachers.  One could feel a palpable sense of excitement among the participants as they reinforced each other’s conviction that a policy focus on teacher quality could yield great dividends and that the nations around the table could learn a lot from each other.  It ended with a call for a second meeting, one that would go deeper on teacher preparation, teacher supply and demand and school leadership.  Subsequent meetings, the planners thought, might similarly focus on other key aspects of policy for teachers.

The second meeting reached the objectives its planners had for it in the realm of leadership, though it came up a little short on the subject of supply and demand.  But the big difference was a difference of tone.  Key differences in policy direction among the participants emerged, differences grounded in different interpretations of the nature of the challenges facing the industrialized nations’ education systems, and the appropriate responses.  The differences in tone became obvious both in exchanges between the participants at the table and later, when the observers had a chance to ask questions of those participants.  There was, in particular, a certain chill in the exchange between U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Sing Kong Lee, the Director of the Singapore’s National Institute of Education, in their exchange on the subject of teacher evaluation and the role of teacher evaluation in the design of accountability systems.  Secretary Duncan appeared to be pressing for some support for the proposition that teacher evaluation—in particular teacher evaluation tied to measured student performance—was an important key to teacher quality.  Sing Kong Lee acknowledged that teacher evaluation was important, but expressed some reservations about the American approach.  There were echoes of this difference at other points during the discussion at the table and again, in somewhat more strident tones, when the observers joined in the discussion.  Though many in the room nodded their heads when Sing Kong Lee spoke on this topic, it was clear that Duncan was not alone in his view that countries interested in improving student outcomes needed strong accountability systems, and that teacher evaluation systems tied to student performance should be part of those systems, but it was just as clear that the labor leaders, teachers in the audience and many ministers were very wary of such systems.

Toward the end of the second summit, the ministers and labor leaders gathered for separate lunches.  Both gatherings acknowledged that the issue of teacher evaluation and appraisal had become the “elephant in the room.”  To the extent that teacher evaluation is tied to promotions, retention, incentives, rewards and so on, such discussions can easily lead to confrontations with the teachers unions.  But it was not just fear of confrontations between governments and unions that was at play here.  Many of the ministers had considered and rejected the idea of basing policy in any important way on tough accountability systems focused on teacher evaluation because they did not think such management strategies would enable them to recruit and retain the kind of high quality professionals they wanted.

Thus, this issue appeared to engage issues of policy, management and strategy central to the work of everyone.  Andreas Schleicher, realizing that the great promise of the summits could be squandered if they did not deal with this issue, pressed those present to make the “elephant in the room” the focus of the next summit.  Rather than trying to push it into a corner, he wanted to deal with it head on.  EI agreed.

Some of the experts and observers in the room argued that teacher evaluation should not be the central topic of the third summit, that it was but one component among many in a high-performing system.  But Schleicher and others agreed that this set of issues was so central that it needed to be dealt with head on and the decision was made to focus the third summit on teacher evaluation and appraisal.

That decision would put great pressure on the OECD to come up with a paper setting the stage for the meeting that all the attendees would regard as a fair point of departure for the discussion.  The planners agreed on the following lens for that paper:

• How should teacher evaluation and appraisal be defined and who should define it?
• What processes and techniques should be used?
• What can research tell as about the impact of teacher evaluation and appraisal?

And thus the stage was set for the third summit.

I was not there, and could not in any case get inside the heads of those who were, but, at this distance am very much inclined to agree with what I take to be Schleicher’s strategy.  Shoving this issue under the rug would have doomed the summits.  Ministers would have drifted away if the discussions were inhibited by very important issues that could not be discussed.  The alternative was to try to frame the issues in such a way that they could be discussed.  This was the path that was chosen.  It was broadly agreed that teacher evaluation and appraisal is very important and that it could be effective only in systems also designed to:

• Make teaching an attractive profession,
• Provide very high-quality initial teacher education,
• Create a school management system in which teachers could act as autonomous professionals within a collaborative culture, and
• Engage teachers in developing the evaluation system.

And that was frame with which OECD and EI opened the third summit.

This is a very sensible approach.  It could potentially provide a roadmap leading to sound policy that would also provide an opportunity for all parties to claim victory, but it would have been too much to expect that it would relieve all the tensions with which the second summit ended.

In the eyes of several observers, no one at the table at the third summit was advocating that teacher evaluation and appraisal be used to weed out bad teachers.  And everyone agreed that teachers both needed and wanted feedback.  But, with that off the table, there was still tension between those who are most comfortable with the use of evaluation for professional growth and development, on the one hand, and those who see it as a vital tool in the design and implementation of tough-minded accountability systems on the other.  And, in the middle, were those who were naturally inclined to the position apparently so well articulated by Andreas Schleicher at the meeting, namely that teacher evaluation is best thought of as an important component of a much larger system built around a conception of teachers as highly capable professionals, not as cogs in a Tayloristic management design.

That vision assumes that the criteria against which teachers are being judged is not limited to student performance on basic skills in a narrow range of subjects but on their ability to help students succeed against the full range of outcomes now widely referred to as 21st century skills, many of which are difficult if not impossible to measure.  In Tayloristic systems, everyone assumes that management will assess the workers in any way they see fit, usually according to fairly simplistic criteria; in professional environments, the direction of accountability is at least as much to one’s colleagues as to one’s superiors in the organizational structure.  So who is to devise the criteria for judging teachers and who is to decide whether an individual teacher meets them?  In blue collar environments, all workers are regarded as equal, if not interchangeable.  But, in a professional environment, the professionals acquire increasing responsibility, authority and compensation as they demonstrate increasing competence and skill.  Perhaps, as nations move toward conceptions of teachers and teaching grounded in the idea of teacher as professional, the idea of teacher evaluation and appraisal should be inextricably connected to the development of formalized career ladders for teachers.

The third summit did indeed address these and other issues.  This made for some tough conversations.  It became very clear that it was going to be hard to resolve these issues without some real trust among the parties, both at this table, and, by implication, within the countries represented.

Nonetheless, the people I talked with about the summit came away encouraged.  The honesty of the conversation, the fact that what had at the preceding meeting been the “elephant in the room” had now been addressed and that there was substantial consensus on many points was a relief to many who had feared going into the meeting that it might end badly.

That it did not is no doubt in part the result of the good will of those who came.

But new cracks emerged.  Among the rules set by the conference organizers is one that says that a country cannot be represented at all unless it is represented by the top education official (usually the minister of education) and the top teachers union official.  But, especially for the Asian nations, there is a strict limit to the number of out-of-country trips officials can make, often no more than two a year.  If a minister more senior than the education minister calls a meeting on the date of the summit, the education minister must cancel the trip to the summit.  Under the current rules, this means that the country is not formally represented and for that reason, a number of jurisdictions that had been invited to the third summit attended in a participating observer status.

The rule could, of course, be abandoned.  But that could easily lead to the summit not being a summit of top officials with policy-making authority, but rather a meeting of functionaries.  No one wants that.

There is another problem.  It is important to the host country to be able to invite observers, people—mostly educators—who are interested in the proceedings and want to express their views on the issues being discussed by the delegates.  But this desire for what has become something of a public fishbowl can inhibit the desire of the organizers of the summits to have a frank discussion among the delegates.  The frankness of the discussion is one of the big attractions of the meetings for the delegates.  The openness of the meetings is a big draw for the host countries.  This potential conflict of goals did not loom large when the summits were first conceived, but, now that the conversation has begun to tread on sensitive issues, it has become clear that some way must be found to resolve the tension between the desire for openness and the need for some measure of privacy.

Lastly, as in so many other international organizations, there are tensions with respect to which nations are invited to sit around the table.  The original conception was to include both top performers (on the PISA rankings) and the countries whose education systems were improving the fastest.  But, if Asian top performers drop out because education ministers are not able to attend, the summit could get to be a meeting dominated by countries that are not among the top performers, and, if that happens, the top performers who remain may decide not to come, and then the summit ceases to be a summit.

These are tough challenges, but they are neither unprecedented among such international meetings nor are they, in principle, insurmountable.  The three meetings that have taken place thus far have served as a unique venue for the people on whose shoulders rest the fundamental redesign of the world’s leading education systems to exchange information, share views and challenge each other’s conception of the right policies and strategies.  That is a very worthwhile function.  I very much hope the organizers are successful as they seek a path through this thicket.

In order to successfully evaluate teachers, education systems first must work with key stakeholders to define what it means to be a good teacher and then develop clear standards for the profession, according to a new background report released by the OECD in advance of the 2013 International Summit on the Teaching Profession.  The report, Teachers for the 21st Century: Using Evaluation to Improve Teaching, provides an analysis of how the countries studied evaluate their teachers by identifying the elements of teacher performance that are most frequently appraised, the tools used in teacher evaluation and the ways in which evaluation results inform teaching and learning.

During a webinar which provided an overview of the report’s findings, Andreas Schleicher, Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD’s Secretary-General, emphasized that teacher evaluation by itself will not significantly affect student learning, but should be considered as part of a larger set of strategies: teaching must be an attractive career choice, high quality teacher education programs must be available to future teachers, teachers should be granted professional autonomy once they enter the classroom, effective in-service professional development opportunities must be provided and teachers must be active participants in the development of any teacher evaluation system.

Why Evaluate Teachers?
According to the report, teacher evaluations are mainly conducted for two reasons  — to improve teaching and learning and to provide accountability.  Formative evaluations are used to provide teachers with meaningful feedback that can inform profession development.  Summative evaluations can be used as the basis of accountability systems focused on individual teachers and are usually linked to some type of consequence for teachers such as career decisions or salary changes.

While many countries use evaluations for both summative and formative purposes, the report authors point out that the approach used for each should be quite different.  For example, if the goal of the evaluation is to improve teaching practices, then self-evaluations makes sense because teachers are more likely to admit their faults with the expectation that providing this information will lead to effective decisions about their developmental needs and future training opportunities.  However when the purpose is accountability and teachers face potential consequences concerning their career or salaries, self-evaluations do not work.  Summative evaluations need to have a strong external component, such as an accredited external evaluator, and a more formal process to ensure fairness. And, formative evaluations need to be more context-based, taking into account the unique circumstances surrounding the teacher’s history and the school’s setting.

What Elements Are Evaluated?  
During the webinar, Schleicher commented that education systems cannot improve what they cannot define.  Therefore, he said, standards that define what teachers need to know and be able to do are essential to developing effective evaluations systems.  The report emphasizes the importance of involving teachers in developing standards for the profession.  The process used to develop national teacher standards in Australia included a consultation phase that involved all key education stakeholders including teachers, teacher associations, teacher educators, employers, unions and regulatory authorities.  Similarly, in New Zealand, the professional body for teachers led the process of defining standards for the profession with the extensive involvement of teachers, employers and teacher unions.

The report found that the elements of teacher performance that are most frequently evaluated are related to planning and preparation, instruction, the classroom environment and professional responsibilities. Teacher evaluations could also take into account working in teams and managing and sharing leadership responsibilities.  In New Zealand, for example, teaching standards call for appraising professional relationships and values and responsiveness to diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Evaluation Methods
The report found that the most common methods used to evaluate teachers include classroom observations, teacher portfolios, self-evaluations and performance goals set by the individual teacher in agreement with school management.  Almost all countries use classroom observations to some degree.  As the figure below shows, an average of over 70 percent of high school teachers reported that classroom observations were considered to be of “high or moderate importance” in the teacher evaluations or the feedback they received.  However in using classroom observations as part of teacher evaluation, some experts advise avoiding announced classroom observations, because they do not provide an authentic experience of a teacher’s day-to-day practice.

In some countries, teachers must take tests to assess their general knowledge, but only two of the countries studied in the report, Mexico and Chile, use teacher tests to determine career advancement or dismissal.  A few countries also use surveys of students and parents as one element of gauging teacher competence.

Speaking to a point that is very controversial, the report makes it quite clear that it is challenging to identify the specific contribution that a given teacher makes to a student’s performance.  Student learning is largely influenced by student’s innate abilities, motivations and behaviors and the support students receive from their family, peer group and school.  And students are influenced not only by their current teacher, but also by their former teachers.  The report explains that while value-added models can control for a student’s previous results and have the potential to identify an individual teacher’s contribution to student performance, there is wide consensus in literature that these models should be used only in addition to other evaluation measures.  The report also contends that using student results as an evaluation instrument is likely to be more relevant for whole-school evaluations than for individual teacher evaluations.

Delaware is featured in the report for their work on incorporating student outcomes into teacher evaluations.  The state’s system calls for teachers to use three measures of student progress including performance on state tests, test results on an instrument other than the test used for state accountability and goals for student progress developed by the teacher.  During the 2011-2012 school year, Delaware engaged hundreds of teachers in developing a wide-ranging library of resources that supports implementation of the new policy.

While there is no consensus on the right types of evaluation methods to use to evaluate teachers, the report makes it clear that using several methods is essential to drawing a comprehensive picture of teachers’ abilities.  The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is one of the most sophisticated analyses to-date on how evaluation methods can be used to identify the skills that make teachers effective.  The findings stress that assigning equal weights to multiple measures creates a more accurate assessment of teacher effectiveness than other models in which one measure is given a greater weight over others.

Who Conducts Teacher Evaluations?
While this varies across countries, the most common bodies that conduct teacher evaluations include inspectorates, professional teacher organizations, unions, school leaders and peer teachers.  The report recognizes the importance of using multiple evaluators to assess teacher performance to provide different perspectives.  For example, while external, highly trained evaluators assess teacher performance as accurately as school heads or principals, school leaders have the benefit of being more aware of variables in the particular school context that may affect a teacher’s performance.  On the other hand, some researchers have found that while principals may be able to successfully identify the high- and low-performers, they are unable to distinguish between teachers in the middle of the performance distribution.  Regardless of who is conducting the evaluation, the report notes that, “the effectiveness of appraisals crucially depends on whether evaluators have the knowledge and skills to evaluate teachers reliably in relation to established criteria,” so it is very important that all evaluators receive proper training.

How Are Evaluation Results Used?  
The results from teacher evaluation systems are used in a variety of ways including informing teacher practice; designing professional development opportunities that address teacher shortcomings; establishing rewards and consequences based on evaluation results; and developing lines of communication so the information gathered can inform education policy.

Results from a 2008 teacher survey found that over 40 percent of teachers reported that they did not receive suggestions for improving their practice after an evaluation and 44 percent agreed that teacher evaluations were conducted merely to fulfill an administrative requirement.  During the webinar, Schleicher said that it is very important for teachers to see teacher evaluations as a basis for professional support and career development.

The report also found that of the countries studied, very few use teacher evaluations to reward high-performing teachers with salary increases.  In the chart above, of the countries surveyed only Chile, Korea and Mexico have these types of policies in place.  When countries do use teacher evaluation results to reward teachers, few provide teachers with career advancement opportunities.  Because the organizational structure of schools in many OECD countries is typically flat, with few opportunities for teachers to be promoted or to gain increased responsibilities, the report recommends that education systems should look to high-performers such as Singapore for guidance in using teacher evaluation for career advancement.  This city-state has established a robust appraisal system that is linked to defined career ladders.  Singapore has created career structures at all school levels providing a teacher with the opportunity to advance to master teacher status or move into administration or research and policy.  And as Singaporean teachers move up the career ladder, they are rewarded with higher compensation levels.

The report, Teachers for the 21st Century, is largely based on two prior OECD reports: the Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes, a 2009 study that involved 24 countries and looked at the various components of evaluation and assessment strategies that countries use, and the latest edition of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), published in 2008. To access the new report visit:
http://www.oecd.org/site/eduistp13/TS2013%20Background%20Report.pdf.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other new indicators ask:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Credibility and Value of International Education and Training Qualifications

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

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

How the Netherlands Successfully Support Child Well-Being 

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

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

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

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

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

They also suggest some longer-term strategies:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathrin Hoeckel, Policy Analyst at the OECD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.