By Jennifer Craw From 2006 to 2011 the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), the organization that produces the TIMMS and PIRLS international assessments, worked with teacher education programs in seventeen countries to administer a survey to d

By Emily Wicken In their September 2012 Global Employment Outlook, the International Labour Organization (ILO) drew particular attention to the plight of the young worker worldwide.  They project that the global youth unemployment rate (youth being defined as between the ages of 15 an

By Emily Wicken 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 r

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has produced a new education league table of the best international education systems for Pearson, which is published in a new report titled The Learning Curve: Lessons in Country Performance in Education. The rankings take into account additional

Recently, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released their 2012-2013 Global Competitiveness Report.  In this report, the WEF ranks 144 countries based on a global competitiveness index; their definition of competitiveness encompasses “the set of institutions, policies, and factors that d

The new report, Starting well, by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and the Lien Foundation profiled in our Global Perspectives section this month urges the importance of having strong early childhood education systems in place in order to ensure future success in school.  The OEC

Judging by the headlines in many developed economies—especially the United States and the United Kingdom—there is growing concern that they are not producing enough STEM workers (people with degrees in science, technology, engineering or math) to meet the growing need for such people.

In their recent report published in February of this year, the Grattan Institute examined the school systems of several East Asian countries with a view towards drawing policy recommendations from what they learned for Australia. In the report, titled Catching Up: Learning from the be

What guarantees a high-quality teaching force?  We have examined this question from several angles in this issue, with Marc Tucker’s reflections on the second International Summit on the Teaching Profession, our review of the World Bank SABER findings on teacher policies in top-perfor

In every newsletter, we will highlight a particular set of international education statistics.  In this newsletter, we focus on the most recent OECD statistics relating reading ability to students’ socioeconomic background and the socioeconomic background of the other students in the