Education Equity

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

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

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

Education Funding

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

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

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

Student Pressure

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

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

Teacher Quality

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

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

Early Childhood Education

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

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.

Review of Funding for Schooling

Following the release in late 2010 of the PISA 2009 results, the Australian government, unhappy with how the nation stacked up against other high performing countries in Asia and Europe, commissioned a report to determine what changes, if any, were necessary in how schools in Australia are funded.  The Review of Funding for Schooling Final Report, delivered to Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard last month, is the first comprehensive review of Australia’s school funding system in almost 40 years.

The focus was on funding because, although Australia has for years been among the top performers on the PISA assessments, it has not fared well on the OECD rankings for equity.  The commission’s remit was to find a way to make Australia’s funding for the schools more equitable.

Up until now, the states have had the main responsibility for funding the regular public schools, and their formulas for doing that have been quite different.  About half of the schools in Australia are private—mainly Catholic—schools. The federal government has been supplementing their funding, mostly in the form of funding for particular programs.  The result has been a crazy quilt funding pattern.

The Commission started from the position that a modern advanced industrial economy has to educate all children—not just some—to a much higher standard than was formerly thought either possible or necessary.  It costs more to educate some children to a high standard than others, the Commission observed, so it follows that a fair, equitable and effective funding system would have to find a way to put more funds behind students who cost more to bring them to a high standard than it does behind students who can be brought to the same high standards more easily.

That reasoning brought the Commission to propose a form of pupil-weighted funding for Australia, in which all students would receive the same base amount of foundation funding, and amounts would be added for each student answering to certain specified criteria, such as language status, socio-economic status and disability status.

As with all such systems, the state could, in theory, simply redistribute the money currently available, in which case, for every school that received more, there would be another that got less, or government could “level up,” so that no school loses anything, most schools get more money, everyone is happy, and the treasury goes bankrupt.

The Commission chose a middle course, proposing to increase total school funding by $5 billion.  But not all of that would come from the federal government.  Some would come from the states.  And there would be a complicated dance done in order to make sure that all students would be served by the same funding formula, with different amounts being contributed by the different states and by the private schools’ constituents.

Australia is, of course, not the first nation to come to these conclusions, nor would it be the first to implement such a plan.   A growing number of countries have led the way.  As elsewhere, the reaction has been swift and predictable.  Although the Commission is proposing to add $5 billion Australian to the pot, that is not enough to “level up,” so there would be winners and losers.  Predictably, the elite private schools are upset because they could potentially lose if this proposal succeeds.

The Commission report signals that the members were very much aware that redistributing school funding would not by itself solve the equity problem in Australia’s schools.  They realized that it would be no less important to ensure that any additional resources are used effectively.  They urged the government to move away from the creation of a plethora of government programs mandating particular kinds of changes in the schools, often for narrow purposes or constituencies, and toward giving schools clear goals and much more discretion in how they use the funds allocated to them for the achievement of those goals.

How Australia’s School Funding System Works
Under the current system, which the authors of the report feel “lacks coherence and transparency” and is “unnecessarily complex,” money is allocated to schools based on the school’s socio-economic status.  As in the United States, the Australian states and territories are primarily responsible for funding their school systems.  This funding is allocated in a variety of ways depending on the state; each has a formula that enables the state to determine how much money each school or system should receive; states also can determine whether – and how – this funding must be spent. The federal government is responsible for providing funding for things like capital improvements and major education initiatives, and, unlike most other countries, is also the primary funder of non-government schools.  When funding non-government schools, under the current system, the government does not take into account what schools charge for tuition or other revenue streams.

What the New Report Proposes
In the proposed system, the authors would put in place what they call the Schooling Resource Standard to be uniform across Australia.  School funding to meet this standard would be achieved through several separate funding streams.  These streams include per student funding, with differentiated amounts for primary and secondary students and “loading,” which is additional funding for students and schools based on socioeconomic status, school size and location, special needs, English language learners and indigenous students.  And finally, they include a funding stream for capital improvements.  Every government school would be funded to the Schooling Resource Standard plus any applicable loadings.  All non-government schools would be funded to the Schooling Resource Standard as well, although in this case, the standard will be achieved through a combination of private and public funding.  Depending on the socioeconomic makeup of the students in each non-government school, the school would be expected to contribute between 10 and 80 percent of the standard, with the balance provided by the government, though the panel recommends that the minimum contribution per student be set at between 20 and 25 percent of the Schooling Resource Standard, excluding loadings, which will be fully publicly funded in all schools, government and non-government alike.

The federal government would be expected to bear about 30 percent of the overall $5 billion increase annually.  The central change that the new system would make is that the money would follow the student, not the school, which is expected to be a major step towards educational equity.

Public Reaction
As mentioned earlier, the proposal outlined in the panel’s final report has received mixed reactions in Australia.  Peter Garrett, the School Education Minister, has stated that the proposed model is not government policy, but has provided the states and territories with the modeling tool used in the report to enable them to test the model using current budgets.  The reform plan faces opposition from some state governments, concerned that the plan is too expensive, and from proponents of non-government schools, who feel that the reforms would mean that many of the elite non-government schools would lose funding and require greater outlays from private partners and parents.  While it is too early to tell if the report’s recommendations will be adopted in Australia, the report describes the education funding system in Australia today and provides a detailed approach to designing a weighted student funding system that may have implications for other countries interested in moving in this direction.

Other reports of note:

OECD (2012). Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools. Spotlight Report: Netherlands. This report was released as part of the OECD’s Overcoming School Failure: Policies that Work project, which provides evidence from OECD countries on policies that effectively reduce school failure.  This spotlight report draws from the OECD’s study, Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools, and provides a country overview of PISA scores, the degree to which students’ socio-economic background predicts student performance, and employment rates as related to degree attainment. The report examines some of the current issues and related school policies in the Netherlands including the country’s higher than average grade repetition rates, their policy that allows students to be tracked at 12-years old, their efforts to ensure equity in their school choice procedures, their school funding formula that is weighted for disadvantaged students and their strategies to prevent high school dropouts, improve low-performing schools, and increase parental engagement, particularly among migrant families. To prevent school failure, the report authors recommend using two parallel approaches: eliminating education policies and practices (such as grade repetition and early tracking) that hinder equity and targeting low-performing disadvantaged schools.

OECD (November 2011). Background Report for the Netherlands. This report is also part of the OECD’s Overcoming School Failure: Policies that Work project. It offers an overview of the Dutch approach for ensuring education equity, overcoming school failure and reducing drop out rates. The report describes that the number of high school dropouts in the Netherlands decreased from 71,000 in 2002 to 41,800 dropouts in 2009 and targets a 25,000 decrease in dropouts for 2016.  The report reviews the Netherlands’ education structure, governance system, and approach to fair and inclusive education practices and resourcing.  The last chapter provides an overview of Dutch educational policies including developing an ambitious learning culture; changing the amount, intensity and quality of learning time; learning from results and performance oriented cultures in schools; and improving teacher quality by, for example, developing more teachers to the master’s level.  The final chapter also analyzes the current and foreseeable causes of education failure (such as helping students overcome disadvantaged backgrounds) and reviews “Aanval op de uitval”, the Dutch dropout prevention program which is committed to activities to reduce the number of early leavers as well as systematic changes to prevent student failure.

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

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

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

Other Recent Reports of Note

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