IAP NEWS UPDATE March 3rd – 16th 2012 Publication: OECD educationtoday Title: Knowledge and skills are infinite – oil is not Author: Andreas Schleicher Website: http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.com/2012/03/knowledge-and-skills-are-infiniteoil.html
As the bible notes, Moses arduously led the Jews for 40 years through the desert – just to bring them to the only country in the Middle East that had no oil. But Moses may have gotten it right, after all. Today, Israel has an innovative economy and its population enjoys a standard of living most of its oil-rich neighbours don't offer. More generally, countries with greater total rents from natural resources tend to be economically and socially less developed, as exports of national resources tend to appreciate the currency, making imports cheap and the development of an industrial base more difficult. And as governments in resource-rich countries are under less pressure to tax their citizens they are more prone to autocratic leadership.
But there is more to this: OECD’s PISA study shows that there is also a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their school population (see figure): Israel is not alone in outperforming its oil-rich neighbors by a large margin when it comes to learning outcomes at school, this is a global pattern that generally across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment. Exceptions such as Canada, Australia and Norway, that are rich of natural resources but still score well on PISA, have all established deliberate policies of saving these resource rents, and not just consuming them. Today’s learning outcomes at school, in turn, are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.
One interpretation is that in countries with little in the way of natural resources - other examples are Finland, Singapore or Japan - education has strong outcomes and a high status at least in part because the public at large has understood that the country must live by its knowledge and skills and that these depend on the quality of education. So the value that a country places on education seems to depend at least in part on a country’s view of how knowledge and skills fit into the way it makes its living. Placing a high value on education may be an underlying condition for building a world-class education system and a world class economy, and it may be that most countries that have not had to live by their wits in the past will not succeed economically and socially unless their
political leaders explain why, though they might not have had to live by their wits in the past, they must do so now.
The most troubling implications of these data relate to the developing world. Many of the countries with below-average GDP succeeded to convert their national resources into physical capital and consumption today, but failed to convert these into the human capital that can generate the economic and social outcomes to sustain their future.
But there is an important message for the industrialised world too. Particularly in these times of economic difficulties, it is tempting to resource our standard of living today through incurring even greater financial liabilities for the future. But in the long term, there is no way to stimulate our way out or to print money our way out. The only sustainable way is to grow our way out, and that requires giving more people the skills to compete, collaborate and connect in ways that drive our economies forward. Without sufficient investment in skills people languish on the margins of society, technological progress does not translate into productivity growth, and countries can no longer compete in an increasingly knowledge-based global economy.
In short, knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st century economies. But there is no central bank that prints this currency, you cannot inherit this currency and you cannot produce it through speculation, you can only develop it through sustained effort and investment by people and for people.
Moreover, this new ‘currency’ depreciates as skill requirements of labor-markets evolve and individuals lose the skills they do not use. The toxic coexistence of high unemployment and skill shortages in many countries today illustrates that producing more of the same graduates is not the answer. To succeed with converting knowledge and skills into jobs, growth and social outcomes which nations require, we need to develop a better understanding of those skills that drive strong and sustainable economic and social outcomes; we need to ensure that the right mix of skills is being taught and learned over the lifecycle of people; we need to develop effective labor-markets that use their skill potential; and we need better governance arrangements with sustainable approaches to who should pay for what, when and where. OECD’s new Skills Strategy is now providing a framework to support countries with building, maintaining and using their human capital to boost employment and growth and promote social inclusion.
Publication: The New York Times Title: Pass the Books. Hold the Oil.
Author: Thomas Friedman Website: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/friedman-pass-the-books-holdthe-oil.html
Every so often someone asks me: “What’s your favorite country, other than your own?” I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan. “Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask. Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of — it even has to import sand and gravel from China for construction — yet it has the fourthlargest financial reserves in the world. Because rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million people, their talent, energy and intelligence — men and women. I always tell my friends in Taiwan: “You’re the luckiest people in the world. How did you get so lucky? You have no oil, no iron ore, no forests, no diamonds, no gold, just a few small deposits of coal and natural gas — and because of that you developed the habits and culture of honing your people’s skills, which turns out to be the most valuable and only truly renewable resource in the world today. How did you get so lucky?” That, at least, was my gut instinct. But now we have proof. A team from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., has just come out with a fascinating little study mapping the correlation between performance on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, exam — which every two years tests math, science and reading comprehension skills of 15-year-olds in 65 countries — and the total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of G.D.P. for each participating country. In short, how well do your high school kids do on math compared with how much oil you pump or how many diamonds you dig? The results indicated that there was a “a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their high school population,” said Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the PISA exams for the O.E.C.D. “This is a global pattern that holds across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment.” Oil and PISA don’t mix. As the Bible notes, added Schleicher, “Moses arduously led the Jews for 40 years through the desert — just to bring them to the only country in the Middle East that had no oil. But Moses may have gotten it right, after all. Today, Israel has one of the most innovative economies, and its population enjoys a standard of living most of the oil-rich countries in the region are not able to offer.” So hold the oil, and pass the books. According to Schleicher, in the latest PISA results, students in Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan stand out as having high PISA scores and few natural resources, while Qatar and Kazakhstan stand out as having the highest oil rents and the lowest PISA scores. (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran and Syria stood out the same way in a similar 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or Timss, test, while, interestingly, students from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey — also Middle East states with few natural resources — scored better.) Also lagging in recent PISA scores, though, were students in many of the resource-rich countries of Latin America, like Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Africa was not tested. Canada, Australia and Norway, also countries with high levels of natural resources, still score well on PISA, in large part,
argues Schleicher, because all three countries have established deliberate policies of saving and investing these resource rents, and not just consuming them. Add it all up and the numbers say that if you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century, don’t count its oil reserves or gold mines, count its highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students. “Today’s learning outcomes at school,” says Schleicher, “are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.” Economists have long known about “Dutch disease,” which happens when a country becomes so dependent on exporting natural resources that its currency soars in value and, as a result, its domestic manufacturing gets crushed as cheap imports flood in and exports become too expensive. What the PISA team is revealing is a related disease: societies that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills. By, contrast, says Schleicher, “in countries with little in the way of natural resources — Finland, Singapore or Japan — education has strong outcomes and a high status, at least in part because the public at large has understood that the country must live by its knowledge and skills and that these depend on the quality of education. ... Every parent and child in these countries knows that skills will decide the life chances of the child and nothing else is going to rescue them, so they build a whole culture and education system around it.” Or as my Indian-American friend K. R. Sridhar, the founder of the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company Bloom Energy, likes to say, “When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.” That’s why the foreign countries with the most companies listed on the Nasdaq are Israel, China/Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, South Korea and Singapore — none of which can live off natural resources. But there is an important message for the industrialized world in this study, too. In these difficult economic times, it is tempting to buttress our own standards of living today by incurring even greater financial liabilities for the future. To be sure, there is a role for stimulus in a prolonged recession, but “the only sustainable way is to grow our way out by giving more people the knowledge and skills to compete, collaborate and connect in a way that drives our countries forward,” argues Schleicher. In sum, says Schleicher, “knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print.” Sure, it’s great to have oil, gas and diamonds; they can buy jobs. But they’ll weaken your society in the long run unless they’re used to build schools and a culture of lifelong learning. “The thing that will keep you moving forward,” says Schleicher, is always “what you bring to the table yourself.” Publication: The Atlantic Cities Title: Hold on Tom Friedman … Resource-Rich Places Can Be Smart, Too Author: Richard Florida Website: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/03/hold-tom-friedmanresource-rich-places-can-be-smart-too/1467/
Last weekend, Thomas Friedman wrote a provocative column in The New York Times about the relationship between a country's natural resources and its education level.
Friedman draws upon a major new study by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development which examines the connection between student performance in math, science, and reading (based on their Program for International Student Assessment exam scores), and natural resource-related earnings as a percent of economic output.
The study finds a negative and statistically significant relationship (-.433) between the percent of economic output that comes from natural resources and the knowledge and skills of their people. As Friedman puts it: "Oil and PISA don't mix."
Friedman builds much of his column around the example of Taiwan. The argument is fine as far as it goes, and I agree with it in principle. When it comes to economic prosperity, in most cases, ideas trump oil.
But there are exceptions, and those exceptions suggest that oil can sometimes facilitate ideas and knowledge-based development. Take the case of Norway, one of the largest oil and gas exporters in the world. It also ranks quite highly on virtually every measure of human capital, not to mention overall human development and happiness and well-being.
Australia is another, and Canada a third. All three countries combine large endowments of natural resources with high levels of economic development and cutting edge knowledge and creative economies. All three have done good jobs navigating the economic crisis as well.
While the conventional wisdom may be that these nations have distinct city-regions devoted to ideas versus natural resources, that is only partly true. Calgary is one of the most naturally endowed places on the planet, but it has made substantial investments in knowledge and idea generation and has a tech-based and creative economy that can rival just about anywhere else. It is more affluent on a per capita basis than Silicon Valley, New York, or Washington, D.C.
Then there's the case of the United States itself. It's perhaps the world's best example of the combined power of natural resources and ideas. Houston is not only a center of oil production and refining, it's home to one of the largest clusters of IT workers and software engineers in the world, who work on technology related to oil production and processing. The state of Texas is a veritable case study of how to use natural resources as a lever to invest in innovation and human capital. Its state university system was built in large measure by funds coming from its natural resources.
The real issue is not oil versus ideas, but how nations manage and harness their natural and human assets. This turns on their institutions, and even more so on their attitudes toward personal freedom, self-expression, and openness. My own simple model for economic development draws attention to technology, talent, and tolerance. In this model, tolerance is not an add-on but a key factor in a nation or city's capacity to develop and harness their natural and human assets.
A detailed study of the economic performance of Middle Eastern nations by economists Marcus Noland and Howard Pack of the Peterson Institute of International Economics sheds light on this. The study finds that comparisons to Taiwan or South Korea are unfair given their very different economic development trajectories. Instead, it puts the burden of explaining economic performance on social and cultural norms and attitudes. Their research finds the factor that most holds back economic development in these countries is not oil per se, but close-minded attitudes toward globalization and homosexuality. This holds for both oil-dependent and non-oil-dependent countries in the region.
Oil and ideas can go together, as long as leaders harness their resources to promote create open institutions that harness and channel human capabilities.
Publication: BBC News Title: Raise teacher status to improve schools, says OECD Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17357646
Teaching must be made more attractive for the brightest students, says a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Report author Andreas Schleicher says teachers need to be given "status, pay and professional autonomy".
The international report identifies the quality of teachers as the key to raising education standards.
The most successful systems, such as Finland and Singapore, recruit high-achieving students, says the report.
The report is being published at an international summit on the teaching profession, held in New York and arranged by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the US Education Department.
'Knowledge workers'
Mr Schleicher, the OECD's special adviser on education, argues in his report that if school systems want to be competitive they need to recruit and reward the right type of staff.
He says that a modern economy needs teachers who are "high-level knowledge workers" - able to support the learning of children in a digital age.
Where children can access facts and information through Google, he says, there is now a need for a different and more versatile kind of teacher.
"But people who see themselves as knowledge workers are not attracted by schools organised like an assembly line, with teachers working as interchangeable widgets in a bureaucratic commandand-control environment," says Mr Schleicher.
At present, teachers across the industrialised world are not receiving levels of pay that reflect their importance, says the report.
It highlights that the most successful countries for education are often those that deliberately recruit the best students into teaching.
It says that good levels of pay, progression and training are necessary to keep high quality teachers.
In Finland, a high social status is attached to teaching, making it very competitive, with nine out of 10 applicants for teacher training being turned away.
In Singapore, teachers are drawn from the top third of students and they are paid at levels competitive with other graduate careers.
Across the OECD, teachers on average are paid less well than other graduate professions - receiving about 80% of the average for workers with degrees.
The report says that teachers in England are paid at about this international average for teachers better in relative terms than teachers in the US, but worse off than in Scotland, France, Germany, Spain, South Korea and Finland.
The report also warns that a failure to recruit staff in some subjects, such as science and maths, can damage countries' efforts to raise standards.
Chris Keates, leader of the NASUWT teachers' union, said: "The teaching profession is constantly evolving and adapting to reflect changing circumstances and this summit is an opportunity to share the best practice that exists across the highest-performing education nations in the world.
"Teachers and school leaders in the UK are rightly helping to lead this debate."
Publication: OECD educationtoday Title: Great (Career) Expectations? A Tale of Two Genders Author: Marilyn Achiron Website: http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.com/2012/03/great-career-expectations-tale-oftwo.html
International Women’s Day (March 8) is always a great occasion to focus on the obvious: that some women have made great strides in recent decades in fulfilling their potential; that there is still a long way to go before all women enjoy true equality in all societies. This month’s edition of PISA in Focus decided to dig a little deeper: given that girls are doing as well as, if not better than, boys in most core subjects at school, do boys and girls now expect to pursue similar careers when they become adults?
In 2006, PISA asked 15-year-old students what they expect to be doing in early adulthood, around the age of 30. In almost all OECD countries, girls are more ambitious than boys: on average, girls were significantly more likely than boys to expect to work in high-status careers such as legislators, senior officials, managers and professionals. France, Germany and Japan were the only OECD countries where similar proportions of boys and girls aspired to these careers; while in Greece and Poland the proportion of girls expecting to work in these careers was 20 percentage points higher than that of boys.
PISA found that not only do boys and girls have different aspirations, in general, they also expect to have careers in very different fields – regardless of how well they perform in school. For example, the fact that girls in many countries have caught up with or even surpassed boys in science proficiency does not necessarily mean that girls want to pursue all types of science-related careers. In fact, careers in “engineering and computing” still attract relatively few girls. On average among OECD countries, fewer than 5% of girls, as compared with 18% of boys, expected to be working in engineering and computing as young adults. This is remarkable, especially because the definition of computing and engineering includes fields like architecture, which is not particularly associated with either gender.
And even among the highest-achieving students, career expectations differed between boys and girls; in fact, their expectations mirrored those of their lower-achieving peers. For example, few top-performing girls expected to enter engineering and computing.
But in every OECD country, PISA found that more girls than boys reported that they wanted to pursue a career in health services. On average, 16% of girls expected a career in health services, excluding nursing and midwifery, compared to only 7% of boys. This suggests that although girls who are high-achievers in science may not expect to become engineers or computer scientists, they direct their higher ambitions towards achieving the top places in other science-related professions.
The kind of gender differences in career expectations that PISA reveals may be one of the factors behind gender-segregated labour markets, which are still prevalent in many countries and which are often associated with large differences in wages and working conditions – not to mention wasted talent and thwarted human potential.
Meanwhile, one of the most gender-segregated fields turns out to be education. Another OECD study found that, on average among the 23 countries that participated in the Teaching and Learning International Survey, almost 70% of lower secondary school teachers were women – while only 45% of school principals were.
Which brings us back to the obvious for International Women’s Day 2012: Some of us have made great strides, indeed; but we all still have a long way to go.
Country-Specific Education Articles Publication: WalesOnline Title: Minister doesn’t expect any ‘real improvement’ in next Pisa results Author: Gareth Evans
Website: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/education-news/2012/03/10/minister-doesn-texpect-any-real-improvement-in-next-pisa-results-91466-30501101/
Education Minister Leighton Andrews has warned he does not expect Wales to show “real improvement” the next time school systems are ranked.
Mr Andrews said many of the Welsh Government’s educational reforms would not have had time to bed in by the time the Pisa assessments are carried out in November.
He did not commit himself on whether Wales’ education system would rise to his earlier pledge of becoming one of the world’s top 20 by 2015.
“I think we’ve got to make a judgement on the back of the 2012 results, which we won’t see until 2013,” he said.
“What I’m clear about is that we are giving the right level of support to heads – a better understanding of Pisa and what it brings to the education system – and I think we’ve been able to put a system in place to support teachers as well.
“I think there’s still a lot of work to be done and clearly there will be more countries involved in Pisa this year.
“Most of our reforms, of course, would not have kicked in with a sufficient degree of time elapsed to make a real improvement [in 2013].”
The Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) tests teenagers from around 70 participating countries in maths, reading and science. Compiled every three years, it is considered one of the best gauges of school performance. But results from the most recent snapshot – taken in 2009 – found Wales languishing below the rest of the UK and Eastern European countries, including Latvia.
Mr Andrews described Pisa as a “wake-up call to a complacent system” and called on sector stakeholders to take collective responsibility.
The results formed the basis for a new raft of proposals designed to raise school standards and propel Welsh education up the international league table.
Unveiling his 20-point improvement plan in February 2011, Mr Andrews said he wanted to see Wales’ school system establish itself in the world’s top-20 when Pisa tests in 2015.
Earlier this week, Mr Andrews admitted that the Welsh Government had “made mistakes” in its drive to improve school standards.
He told delegates at a teaching conference in Cardiff that his Department for Education and Skills had not always focused on better implementation of fewer initiatives.
Shadow Education Minister Angela Burns said: “Barely a year on from the minister’s flagship 20point plan to turn around educational decline, this is an admission that important parts of it are failing.
“The minister quickly needs to re-establish confidence in his agenda.”
Plaid Cymru’s education spokesman Simon Thomas accused the Welsh Government of failing children in Wales.
“The minister is at last beginning to realise that exhortation is not enough and that the Labour Government has to put specific interventions in place in order to up our game in Wales,” he said.
Professor Gareth Rees, an expert on Welsh education based at Cardiff University, said it was difficult to construct “meaningful league tables” using Pisa data.
“Along with other forms of information, they should be used to provide an analysis of school performance in Wales that recognises the complexities that are involved here,” he said.
“My own view is that Pisa scores for Wales will rise over coming years – it would be very surprising if they didn’t given the intense focus on them and the various kinds of support that are being provided to teachers and schools.”
A Welsh Government source said: “The difference in approach between the Welsh Labour Government and the Welsh Tories could not be clearer. Leighton Andrews has a 20-point plan to drive-up standards in Welsh schools. Angela Burns wants a 20% cut in schools spending.”