IAP NEWS UPDATE March 24th – May 4th 2012 Publication: Education Week Title: Individual U.S. Schools Take Part in PISA Pilot Author: Erik W. Robelen Website: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/05/04/30pisa.h31.html
More than 100 U.S. schools will soon find out how they stack up against the world, and perhaps take away some valuable insights to improve their practices.
The schools, spanning 20 states, are participating in a new pilot project in which 15-year-olds take a 2½-hour test based on a high-profile global assessment best known by the acronym PISA. The results will be comparable to those of dozens of nations that take part in the Program for International Student Assessment, including some of America’s top economic competitors.
The paper-and-pencil exam seeks to measure students’ higher-order thinking skills in reading, mathematics, and science, with a focus—as with the main PISA—on applying knowledge to realworld situations.
Led by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which oversees PISA, the new initiative is being implemented with support from several private U.S. grantmakers and partner organizations.
“We just keep hearing how bad U.S. schools are and that we don’t measure up,” said James R. Hogeboom, the superintendent of the 10,700-student Lucia Mar district in California, in explaining his system’s system’s plans to have one of its high schools take part. “Well, is that true or not true? And what do we need to improve our kids’ critical-thinking skills? I’d love to know that.”
The pilot test is scheduled to take place this month and next, with results expected back to local schools and districts by September. It’s up to local officials to decide whether the results are made public.
The initiative is separate from the United States’ planned participation in the upcoming administration of the regular PISA, scheduled for next fall, which provides national-level data.
The pilot comes as the Obama administration, in its fiscal 2013 budget request, proposed spending $6 million to create a separate PISA pilot initiative that would allow individual states to compare their achievement against other nations’. ("NAEP Would Slip, PISA Gain in 2013 Budget Plan," Feb. 29, 2012.)
Broad Interest
Many education, business, and political leaders have lamented the United States’ standing in international achievement comparisons and have argued that the situation spells trouble for the nation’s economic competitiveness.
In the latest round of PISA, in 2009, U.S. achievement in science and reading was about average for the 34 member nations in the OECD. In math, U.S. students’ achievement was below average.
The United States ranked in the same statistical category for math as 12 other nations, including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, and Spain. Meanwhile, 17 OECD nations had measurably higher scores, including Canada, Germany, Japan, and South Korea.
In all, 60 nations participated in PISA in 2009, as well as several large, non-national education systems, including Shanghai, China, which is a municipal province.
The new pilot brings together 104 American schools, nearly all of them public, to participate in the PISA-Based Test for Schools, from Arizona, California, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island, among other states. In addition, 18 schools from the United Kingdom will take part.
Organizers declined to provide a complete list of schools, saying it’s up to the schools and their districts to decide if they want to make their involvement public.
Private funders supporting the work include Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Kern Family Foundation, the National Public Education Support Fund, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (The Hewlett and Carnegie foundations provide financial support for some of Education Week’s news coverage.)
The Rhode Island education department issued a press releaseRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader in March on plans for six of its public schools to participate.
“We’re very keen on understanding how our performance compares to international benchmarks, because our goal is to prepare our students for success in the 21st-century global economy. As clichéd as it sounds, it’s really, really true,” Deborah Gist, the state’s education commissioner, said in an interview.
The Rhode Island schools are a mix and not just high-fliers.
“[They] ... range from schools identified as persistently low-achieving all the way up to those with really strong assessment results,” Ms. Gist said.
The U.S. schools taking part are not considered a statistically representative sample, but organizers say they are intended to reflect a diverse mix of student demographics, achievement, and locations.
Patti Dicenso, the secondary performance officer for the 8,600-student Pawtucket district in Rhode Island, which has three high schools signed up, said her system jumped at the chance.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity for us to really feel like we’re comparing ourselves in a more global way,” she said, “and reaching out beyond our own boundaries here.”
Seeking Improvement
Organizers and participants emphasized, however, that the pilot is not simply a way to see how they compare, but also to assist in setting a course for improvement.
“The key thing is to learn what we need to do to help our kids become more competitive in critical-thinking skills,” said Mr. Hogeboom from the Lucia Mar district. “Really, this is a catalyst for reflection and discussion on what we’re doing at the school level.”
Several organizers suggested that some participating schools may come together later to compare notes about the experience and what to take away from their results.
The initiative is separate from the main PISA, which involves assessments every three years. While PISA is intended to provide aggregate national results for international comparison and to inform policy discussions, the PISA-Based Test for Schools is “designed to provide school-level results for benchmarking and school improvement purposes,” according to an OECD overview.
Once the pilot phase is completed, the OECD will consider with its member countries taking steps to make the new PISA-based assessment available, starting in 2013, to virtually any school or school district that wishes to take the exam. It could eventually be offered in multiple languages so that schools in a variety of countries could participate.
That said, this is not the first time school-level reports will be provided on PISA. In fact, the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Education, offered schools that were part of the U.S. sample in 2009 the option, for the first time, of getting such information. Those confidential school-level reports enabled schools to compare their performance against the United States’ and other participating nations’, as well as to similar schools in this country, and to some extent around the globe, based on different school characteristics. However, schools had to meet requirements for sample size and participation to get the reports.
The NCES, which is currently recruiting schools for the next round of national PISA testing in the fall, will once again make available such school-level reports to participants.
Whose Crisis?
With the PISA-based pilot test, the school reports will provide a performance summary in reading, math, and science comparable to the PISA scales, with some breakdowns by subgroups, if enough students are tested at the school. They also will contain comparative tables that allow for benchmarking the school results in the context of PISA 2009 scores for participating countries and economies. In addition, the reports will consider the socioeconomic status of students so that the school might better understand how its achievement results compare with those of schools in other countries with similar socioeconomic profiles.
Jon Schnur, the executive director of a new nonprofit organization called America Achieves, which is the U.S.-based coordinator for the PISA pilot, said one value of providing school-level data is to move beyond national averages that may be easier for communities to dismiss.
“It often seems like someone else’s crisis,” he said, “and doesn’t feel like your own.”
Publication: The Washington Post Title: What the U.S. can’t learn from Finland about ed reform Author: Pasi Sahlberg Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/what-the-us-cant-learn-fromfinland-about-ed-reform/2012/04/16/gIQAGIvVMT_blog.html
As the United States is looking to reform its public school system, education experts have increasingly looked at other countries for examples on what works and what won’t. The current administration has turned its attention strong performing foreign school systems. As a consequence, recent education summits hosted in the United States have given room to international education showcases. This commitment to think outside of the box was illustrated two years ago, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan asked for a report titled “Strong Performers
and Successful Reforms: Lessons from PISA for the United States,” prepared by a team of analysts — I was one of them — with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). One of the strong performers that is gaining increasing interest in the United States is my home country, Finland.
During the last decade, Finland has become the go-to place for education reformers all around the world. The main reason is its success in the international survey comparing 15-year-olds in reading, math and science learning called PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). Since that OECD report, I have been privileged to meet legislators, administrators, teachers, and parents here in the United States. Anywhere I go, people are eager to hear about Finnish education and its accomplishments. Especially, they want to know what they can learn from it.
What I have to say, however, is not always what they want to hear. While it is true that we can certainly learn from foreign systems and use them as backdrops for better understanding of our own, we cannot simply replicate them. What, then, can’t the United States learn from Finland?
First of all, although Finland can show the United States what equal opportunity looks like, Americans cannot achieve equity without first implementing fundamental changes in their school system. The following three issues require particular attention.
Funding of schools: Finnish schools are funded based on a formula guaranteeing equal allocation of resources to each school regardless of location or wealth of its community.
Well-being of children: All children in Finland have, by law, access to childcare, comprehensive health care, and pre-school in their own communities. Every school must have a welfare team to advance child happiness in school.
Education as a human right: All education from preschool to university is free of charge for anybody living in Finland. This makes higher education affordable and accessible for all.
As long as these conditions don’t exist, the Finnish equality-based model bears little relevance in the United States.
Second, school autonomy and teacher professionalism are often mentioned as the dominant factors explaining strong educational performance in Finland. The school is the main author of curricula. And the teacher is the sole authority monitoring the progress of students.
In Finland, there is a strong sense of trust in schools and teachers to carry out these responsibilities. There is no external inspection of schools or standardized testing of all pupils in Finland. For our national analysis of educational performance, we rely on testing only a small sample of students. The United States really cannot leave curriculum design and student assessment in the hands of schools and teachers unless there is similar public confidence in schools and teachers. To get there, a more coherent national system of teacher education is one major step.
Finland is home to such a coherent national system of teacher education. And unlike in the United States, teaching is one of the top career choices among young Finns. Teachers in Finland are highly regarded professionals — akin to medical doctors and lawyers. There are eight universities educating teachers in Finland, and all their programs have the same high academic standards. Furthermore, a research-based master’s degree is the minimum requirement to teach in Finland.
Teaching in Finland is, in fact, such a desired profession that the University of Helsinki, where I teach part-time, received 2,300 applicants this spring for 120 spots in its primary school teacher education program. In this teacher education program and the seven others, teachers are prepared to design their own curricula, assess their own pupils’ progress, and continuously improve their own teaching and their school. Until the United States has improved its teacher education, its teachers cannot enjoy similar prestige, public confidence and autonomy.
Third, many education visitors to Finland expect to find schools filled with Finnish pedagogical innovation and state-of-the-art technology. Instead, they see teachers teaching and pupils learning as they would in any typical good school in the United States. Some observers call this “pedagogical conservatism” or “informal and relaxed” because there does not appear to be much going on in classrooms.
The irony of Finnish educational success is that it derives heavily from classroom innovation and school improvement research in the United States. Cooperative learning and portfolio assessment are examples of American classroom-based innovations that have been implemented in large scale in the Finnish school system.
Those who are looking at Finland’s education system as a possible model for reform in the United States point out, quite correctly, that our two countries are very different. In these comparisons, one critical difference is often overlooked that is also essential to understanding what our two countries can or cannot learn from one another.
In the United States, education is mostly viewed as a private effort leading to individual good. The performances of individual students and teachers are therefore in the center of the ongoing school reform debate. By contrast, in Finland, education is viewed primarily as a public effort serving a public purpose. As a consequence, education reforms in Finland are judged more in terms of how equitable the system is for different learners. This helps to explain the difference between the American obsession with standardized testing and the Finnish fixation on each school’s ability to cope with individual differences and social inequality. The former is driven by excellence, the latter by equity.
Quality and equity in education must be conceived as concomitant. Based on its global data, the OECD recently drew precisely this conclusion: “The highest-performing education systems across the OECD countries are those that combine quality with equity.”
What Finland can show to others is how equity and equal opportunity in education look like. However, school reformers in the United States need to be careful when considering equity-based reform ideas to be imported from Finland. Many elements of Finnish successful school system are interwoven in the surrounding welfare state. Simply a transfer of these solutions would add another chapter to already exhausting volume of failed education reforms.
Publication: The Copenhagen Post Title: Copenhagen drops PISA tests Author: Claudia Santos Website: http://cphpost.dk/news/national/copenhagen-drops-pisa-tests
Copenhagen students will no longer take the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams, the deputy mayor for child and youth affairs, Anne Vang (Socialdemokraterne), has decided.
Designed to measure students in reading, science and mathematics, the test was used in 2004, 2007 and 2010, and revealed several less-than-desirable results, begging the question of whether this is the real reason why it is now being declared obsolete.
In an interview with Politiken, Vang denied any connection between the decision and media coverage of the previous tests’ results.
"It hasn’t only been negative, there have also been positive results,” she said. “I am convinced that there will still be ample opportunity for journalists to write about the progress and decline in the quality report which will be made.”
Vang claims that the 700,000 kroner spent on the test, known as PISA København, could be put to better use.
She told Politiken that PISA København is starting to become a “tyranny test, which is fundamentally unhealthy for public schools”. Her goal is to invest the funds on the teachers. "We would rather spend the money on upgrading the skills of teachers. We must go from the test culture to the culture of evaluation."
Chantal Pohl Nielsen, senior researcher of governmental research organisation Anvendt Kommunalforskning, however, said that the council is likely to miss important information about students' academic abilities without the PISA exam.
"What Pisa does, which is unique, is to take a measurement on how well students are able to apply the academic knowledge that they have when they're 15 years old,” Nielsen told Politiken. “For example, how good they are at finding and evaluating information from a text. PISA also provides important information regarding the percentage of students who will be able to complete a secondary education.”
Nielsen also said that PISA København is a vital tool when it comes to detecting ‘red flags’ in the students’ learning process.
Jan Mejding, a researcher and PISA expert at Aarhus University, told Politiken that he agrees with Nielsen.
"Pisa is a broader reading test than the graduation exam,” he stated. “If the politicians want to try something new for a period, you cannot blame them. But after a while, you will be forced to pick up the issue again and see if the students have become better, and that can only be done by measuring them."
Past PISA results have revealed, among other things, that nearly half of children born to immigrants do not have functional reading capabilities, that boys had regressed the equivalent of a half year’s worth of studies between the 2007 and 2010 tests, and that Danish students perform poorly in maths.
Publication: The Guardian Title: How Finnish schools shine Author: Adam Lopez Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2012/apr/09/finish-schoolsystem
In 2009 the UK's education policy directors suffered a significant blow. The PISA tests (OECD Programme for International Study Assessment) results were published, ranking the UK way down the international league table in reading, maths and science.
In total 65 countries were assessed; the UK scored: 25th in reading, 28th in maths and 16th in science. The overall best performer in the 2009 test was the region of Shanghai, China. Results from PISA suggested that school autonomy in defining the curriculum and assessment methods relates positively to overall performance. Additionally, the PISA data reported that creating homogeneous schools and/or classrooms through selection is unrelated to the average performance of education systems.
As if these facts weren't enough to send policy makers and directors into a whirlwind of confusion, it was also noted that UK ranked as 8th in the table for spending per pupil, but had a 23rd position
average overall – this raises the question: "Who does score consistently highly and how do they approach the delivery of education in a pedagogic, political and cultural sense?"
One western country that has excelled in PISA ratings consistently over the years and is highly regarded across the globe as a leading education nation is Finland. Their sustained success has for many years prompted educationalists to consider how they have achieved this.
The reasons behind Finland's success are complex, not because they have one particularly incomprehensible approach to education, but instead, the evolved working parts within their system, framed within their cultural backdrop complement each other tremendously. Therefore an explanation, in my view, cannot be plucked out of their model in isolation, as each element is interdependent and inherently contingent on various other tacit and inconspicuous aspects that ultimate play a significant role within the mechanics of the model. It is this complexity that has perhaps been the source of difficulties experienced by authorities attempting to directly emulate their system.
In Finland teaching is a prestigious career. Children aspire to be doctors, lawyers, scientists and in the same breath teachers. They are respected and appreciated; they are highly qualified (requiring a Masters degree for full time employment) and job selection is a tough process with only best candidates gaining the posts.
The Finnish curriculum is far less 'academic' than you would expect of such a high achieving nation. Finnish students do the least number of class hours per week in the developed world, yet get the best results in the long term. Students in Finland sit no mandatory exams until the age of 17-19. Teacher based assessments are used by schools to monitor progress and these are not graded, scored or compared; but instead are descriptive and utilised in a formative manner to inform feedback and assessment for learning.
Great emphasis is put on pupil and teacher trust and well-being. Outdoor, practical learning opportunities and healthy related physical activity sessions are a regular feature in the curriculum: helping to maintain a healthy body and mind.
Finnish schools receive full autonomy, with head teachers and teachers experiencing considerable independence when developing and delivering their own individual curricula: suited to their setting. Combinations of alternative pedagogic approaches, rather than mere instructional methods
are utilised by the teachers. The pedagogical freedom experienced facilitates greater creativity, pro-activity and innovation.
This naturally allows a greater degree of individual emotional well being, that no doubt plays a role in fostering positive learning role models and environments: positively shaping the minds of teachers and pupils alike.
Finland's Ministry of Education's philosophy has been to trust the professionals, parents and communities to guide their own policy: and it would appear that their investment has paid off.
From this secure base, in which high quality teachers are appreciated and trusted to do their job effectively as they see fit and political agendas are deflected, there emerges an impressive education system to be proud of that serves its students, communities and country very well.
All students in Finland receive a free education from when they start at seven years of age until they complete their university studies. As a result 80 per cent of Finns attend university. During their educational journey all pupils receive free school meals, resources and materials, transport and support services.
Professional Learning Communities are integral to sharing and spreading good practice in a collaborative manner. The systematic introduction of languages is also striking and very effective. Pupils will often begin learning a third language by 11 years of age and some a fourth at 13.
A no child is left behind approach means that all classes contain a mixture of ability level pupils, with most classes containing two or more teachers who focus on those needing additional support. By having professionals working in conjunction, the needs of the pupils can be better met within a happy and familiar environment. Many teachers also stay with a single class for many years, moving with them through the school.
Many institutions are combined primary and secondary schools with no major unsettling transition stages; this also allows a consistent ethos and common language to pervade. Students address teachers by their Christian names, do not wear uniforms, and are encouraged to relax in their surroundings.
As with any system there are of course strengths, areas for development and ideological conflict. The Finnish system is aware of this and prides itself on positively evolving with the pupils' needs and interests at the heart of all decisions.
The Finnish system's success is built on the idea that: "less can be more". This may appear counterintuitive to many within other educational systems in which standards and effectiveness are measured in standardised data and evidence trails. The absence of corrosive competition and an egalitarian ethos inherent in the Finnish culture has surely played a role in shaping this very impressive system.
With PISA 2012 on the horizon, the outcomes are sure to provide more food for thought for all educators and policy makers around the world.
Publication: The Diplomat Title: Inside Shanghai’s Schools Author: Jiang Xueqin Website: http://the-diplomat.com/china-power/2012/04/10/inside-shanghai%E2%80%99s-schools/
Ever since it topped the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings, Shanghai schools have been the envy of the world. Last week, I visited Shanghai to get a sense of how it’s educating the world’s smartest 15 year-olds.
I found all the school principals I met with to be dedicated, their schools well-funded, their students disciplined, and their teachers responsible (teachers only teach nine hours a week, but use the rest of their workday to prepare for class, mark homework, attend training workshops, and tutor their failing students). In other words, I found Shanghai’s schools to be like Shanghai itself: organized and efficient. But I also discovered that while seemingly open and progressive, Shanghai schools are burdened by an impossible mission: They have to educate high-performing test-takers who are happy and creative.
Shanghai education officials know that the stress on tests is killing children’s curiosity and creativity, and so they decree that elementary school children must have an hour of sports and not more than half an hour of homework each day, and that schools must not stream students and must not have weekend classes.
But principals will be promoted based on test scores. Only the top 60 percent of Shanghai students can go on to high schools. Starting in grade six, there are district-wide examinations each year for four years, culminating in the high school entrance examination (the zhongkao). That means starting in sixth grade, each student and each school is ranked publicly. Those schools that are just not making the cut will either face a parent revolt or a student exodus. What’s more, the government, concerned with social opportunity, demands that all students reach a minimum score on the zhongkao (which forces schools to secretly stream students and secretly tutor those failing).
These contradictions manifest themselves in Shanghai classrooms in tragi-comical ways.
In the first primary school I visited, my host, Miss Zhang, told me she had to fight tooth and nail against teacher and parent opposition to ensure that her 600 students got 30 minutes of playtime in the morning and in the afternoon. Her school is one of the city’s “creative education” laboratories, and she showed me her digital classroom where students could design furniture and clothes. The classroom was equipped with a 3-D printer and a hologram projector, and there was another play classroom that displayed Transformers made of Lego parts. These rooms were neat and orderly, always with a teacher on hand to ensure that the kids were playing creatively in a neat and orderly manner.
In art class, students made clay dolls, and Miss Zhang proudly showed me how creative her firstgraders were. Neatly stacked at the back of the room, the dolls were beautiful, although they all looked the same, and Miss Zhang told me that the parents had “helped.”
The dolls were of “Lil’ Create,” the school’s official creativity mascot who encourages kids to be open and curious explorers. “Lil’ Create” in posters around the school and in the comics given to students exhorted the kids to see creativity as “a pleasure, a habit, and an ideal.” (Only in China could they turn “creativity” into a political movement.)
In the next elementary school I visited, the principal there, Mr. Zhang, waxed eloquently about his “sunshine education.” He had TVs positioned all around the school, blaring all day about how students shouldn’t do too much homework, or get stressed over tests. He showed me his digital
classroom where his fourth-graders were coloring in pictures, as surveillance cameras monitored their every movement (one young boy who sat near one of the cameras stopped coloring, and sat transfixed by the large black eye that was staring back at him). In the next room, there were monitors that showed the children coloring. Mr. Zhang explained that the point of the surveillance technology was that teachers could monitor how full of sunshine the kids were at being able to color, without being disturbed.
When we visited an empty classroom, I picked up one of the student backpacks, and commented how heavy it was for a second-grader. Mr. Zhang opened the backpack, saw the ten textbooks neatly packed inside, pulled out the pencil case, and started blaming the pencil case for making the bag so heavy: “When I was young, our pencil cases were so much lighter.” Then his assistant looked for a backpack that didn’t weigh twenty pounds. We couldn’t find one, and so Mr. Zhang explained to me that the issue was the classroom didn’t have lockers, and so the students were forced to use their backpacks as lockers – they don’t actually take the backpacks home.
We saw four fourth-graders sweeping their classroom, and I began talking to them. I asked them what they wanted to do when they grew up. The first two kids didn’t know, and the third said he wanted to be a police officer so he could help the motherland by catching pickpockets, and the fourth thought that was a pretty good answer, and so said, “Yeah, what he said.” Then I asked the kids what they did after school. Their bodies shook uncomfortably, and one of them accidentally told the truth: “We do homework until at least eight.” And at that point Mr. Zhang kicked me out of the school. (I’m used to getting kicked out of Chinese schools.)
Mr. Zhang’s “sunshine education,” like every other new slogan or idea in Chinese schools, was something that was for show, and if he were serious his school wouldn’t be oversubscribed, forcing him to convert dance studios into classrooms. (I also noticed that his classrooms had on average 43 students when Shanghai has limited elementary school classrooms to forty students.)
During my Shanghai visit, I had an opportunity to converse with four Shanghainese seventh-graders at a new private Western-style boarding school catering to the growing minority of progressive parents who could afford to opt out of the Shanghai’s public school system. All four were happy with their experience so far; “I finally have control over my own life,” one freckle-faced boy told me with joy and pride in his face. When I asked them about how much homework they had to do in elementary school one cherub-faced boy begged me to stop asking. With his head hung low, he said in a failing voice, “I don’t want to re-live that trauma.”
Publication: OECD educationtoday Title: How can education help tackle rising income inequality? Author: Ji Eun Chung Website: http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.fr/2012/04/how-can-education-help-tacklerising.html
The gap between the rich and poor has widened in OECD countries over the past 30 years. As the latest issue of the OECD’s new brief series Education Indicators in Focus describes, the average income of the richest 10% of people in OECD countries was about nine times greater than the income of the poorest 10% before the onset of the global economic crisis. This ratio was 5 to 1 in the 1980s.
What’s more, existing income inequality may also limit the income prospects of future generations in some countries. In countries with higher income inequality – such as Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States – a child’s future earnings are likely to be similar to his or her father’s, suggesting that socio-economic background plays a large role in the development of children’s skills and abilities. Meanwhile, in countries with lower income inequality – like Denmark, Finland, and Norway – a child’s future income is not as strongly related to his or her family’s income status. In these countries, the development of children’s skills and abilities has a weaker link with socioeconomic factors.
The implications for education policy are clear. Education policies focusing on equity in education may be a particularly useful way for countries to increase earnings mobility between generations and reduce income inequality over time. Countries can work towards this goal by giving equal opportunities to both disadvantaged and advantaged students to achieve strong academic outcomes – laying a pathway for them to continue on to higher levels of education and eventually secure good jobs.
Four top performers on the 2009 PISA reading assessment show the potential of this approach. Canada, Finland, Japan, and Korea all have education systems that put a strong focus on equity – and all have yielded promising results. In each of these countries, relatively few students performed at lower proficiency levels on the PISA reading assessment, and high proportions of students performed better than would be expected, given their socio-economic background.
Yet while each of these countries focuses on equity, they’ve pursued it in different ways. In Japan and Korea, for example, teachers and principals are often reassigned to different schools, fostering more equal distribution of the most capable teachers and school leaders. Finnish schools assign specially-trained teachers to support struggling students who are at risk of dropping out. The teaching profession is a highly selective occupation in Finland, with highly-skilled, well-trained teachers spread throughout the country. In Canada, equal or greater educational resources – such as supplementary classes – are provided to immigrant students, compared to non-immigrant students. This is believed to have boosted immigrant students’ performance.
Income inequality is a challenging issue that demands a wide range of solutions. In a world of growing inequality, focusing on equity in education may be an effective approach to tackle it over the long run.
Publication: Mashable Title: 2.5 Million Laptops Later, One Laptop Per Child Doesn’t Improve Test Scores Author: Sarah Kessler Website: http://mashable.com/2012/04/09/one-laptop-per-child-study/
At $200 per computer, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has sold or facilitated donations of about 2.5 million laptops to classrooms in 42 different countries. A new study suggests those laptops do not, however, have any effect on achievement in math or language. The study, which was conducted by development funding source in Latin America called InterAmerican Development Bank, looked at 319 public schools in Peru. It found that although OLPC students were more likely to use computers than their non-OLPC counterparts, the two groups scored about the same on math and language assessments 15 months after laptops were deployed. Furthermore, the laptop program did not affect attendance, time allocated to school activities or quality of instruction in class. Even though the laptops came loaded with 200 books, reading habits of recipients matched those of their control-group peers — 74% of whom have five or fewer books in their homes. “It has been suggested that the introduction of computers increases motivation, but our results suggest otherwise,” write the study’s authors. Students with OLPC laptops did, however, score better than their peers on tests for general cognitive skills.
Considering previous research on one-to-one laptop initiatives, the lack of evidence that OLPC influences learning outcomes isn’t surprising. Five years after Maine implemented a statewide one-laptop-per-student program, with one exception (for writing skills), no measurable improvement in test scores could be found. Evaluations of one-toone programs in Michigan and Texas showed similarly mixed results. A 2010 review of one-on-one laptop initiative research by the government of New South Wales boils down the reason for such mixed results to simply “leadership is crucial.” In other words, laptops are not magic cure-alls for educational woes (surprise!). “One-to-one laptop programs may simply amplify what’s already occurring—for better or worse—in classrooms, schools, and districts,” writes Bryan Goodwin in a recent article about one-on-one computing in Educational Leadership.
NCLB did not respond to requests to comment on this article. But it’s hard to argue its mission of increasing access to computers, even computers that don’t magically improve tests scores, is a bad idea. The bigger question is whether $200 laptops are the best education investment that low-income countries — which spend on average $48 per year per student — can make. Should the lack of evidence that students learn better with NCLB laptops change this equation, or are the benefits of individual laptops that can’t necessarily be measured more important? Let us know in the comments.
Publication: OECD educationtoday Title: Women’s outcomes in education and employment: strong gains, but more to do Authors: Éric Charbonnier and Corinne Heckmann Website: http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.fr/2012/03/womens-outcomes-in-educationand.html
There’s no denying it: when it comes to education and employment, women are on a roll, all over the world. As described in the latest issue of the OECD’s new brief series Education Indicators in Focus, the achievement gap between boys and girls has narrowed so much at lower levels of education that the focus of concern is now on the underachievement of boys. On the 2009 PISA reading assessment, for example, 15-year-old girls outperformed boys in every OECD country, on average by 39 points – the equivalent of one year of school.
Young women are also making strong progress in higher education in OECD countries. In 2000, 51% percent of women could be expected to enter a university-level programme at some point in their lives; today, the number is 66%. In fact, the proportion of women who hold a university-level qualification now equals or exceeds that of men in 29 of the 32 OECD countries for which data are comparable. This figure is below 50% only in China, Japan, Korea and Turkey.
At the same time, still more can be done to improve outcomes for girls and young women in the classroom. In mathematics, for example, 15-year-old boys tend to perform slightly better than girls in most countries, while science performance is more variable. And in higher education, women remain under-represented at the most advanced levels. Across all OECD countries, less than half of advanced research qualifications such as doctorates were awarded to women in 2009. In Japan and Korea, the figure is only around 30%. This pattern holds in all countries except Brazil, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal and the United States.
In addition, some fields of study are still branded as “masculine” or “feminine”. In 2009, more than 70% of higher education students in the field of education were women, and an average of 75% of the degrees in the fields of health and welfare also went to women. By contrast, in most countries, fewer than 30% of all graduates in the fields of engineering, manufacturing and construction were women.
Nonetheless, women’s strides in education have led to improved labour market outcomes for women overall. For instance, the gender gap in employment narrowed from 25 percentage points in 2000 to 21 percentage points in 2009 among those without an upper secondary qualification, and from 19 percentage points in 2000 to 15 percentage points in 2009 among those with an upper secondary qualification. And it’s narrower still among those with a higher education qualification, shrinking from 11 percentage points in 2000 to 9 percentage points in 2009.
Increasingly, OECD countries are doing more to address gender gaps – both in education and employment. For example, in the Czech Republic, Germany and the Slovak Republic, the proportion of women graduating with science degrees grew by more than 10 percentage points between 2000 and 2009. As a result, these countries are now closer to the OECD average of 40% -a figure that has remained stable over the past decade. In 2000, the European Union announced a goal to increase the number of university graduates in mathematics, science and technology by at least 15% by 2010, and to reduce the gender imbalance in these subjects. So far, however, progress toward this goal has been marginal.
On the employment side, the Nordic countries, Germany and Portugal have instituted policies allowing fathers to receive parental leave and income support so their spouses can remain in the workforce. In Iceland, Norway and Spain, some firms are required to have at least 40% of their boardroom seats assigned to women. Meanwhile, other companies, such as Deutsche Telekom, have introduced voluntary quotas for women in management and family-friendly practices such as flex-times and tele-working.
The bottom line is clear: while girls and women have made strong gains, it’s time to finish the job. To promote gender equality even further, policymakers should be encouraged to pursue policies to increase mathematics and science performance among girls – as well as reading achievement among boys. Meanwhile, initiatives to break down gender stereotypes in fields of study and progressive corporate policies can do more to increase women’s employment opportunities.
Publication: Daily Edventures Title: “You can’t get around the need for great teaching”
Author: Andreas Schleicher Website: http://dailyedventures.com/index.php/2012/04/12/you-cant-get-around-the-need-forgreat-teaching-france/
According to US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Andreas Schleicher “understands the global issues and challenges [of education] as well as or better than anyone I have ever met.” And Schleicher is using this knowledge, based on global testing data, to galvanize change. An outspoken critic of government policies that don’t prioritize education, Schleicher has been influential in translating hard data into real-world guidance for policy-makers struggling to prepare students for the demands of the 21st century. Schleicher’s views are represented in a great New York Times editorial on the correlation between a country’s resources and the success of its students (hint: it’s not the story you think it is), and I was fortunate to speak with him recently to get his views on what PISA is telling us, and what needs to change.
What are some of the outcomes and lessons learned coming from the PISA work?
Lower performing countries are paying a lot of attention to raising performance. Higher performing countries are looking at raising or changing standards. Overall, while policy responses have been different (depending on the country), PISA has sparked an enormous amount of debate and discussion, along with concrete policy initiatives. If you look at some of the countries with the most rapid improvements, clearly PISA made an impact. Countries have used the opportunity of having comparative data to raise learning outcomes.
PISA seems to be making clearer connections between academic performance and economic conditions – would you agree?
Yes, there is a growing awareness of that link, and an understanding that education is a key lever for social and economic progress — not just for individuals but for the aggregate.
How can we integrate a more holistic foundation of skills, including collaborative problemsolving? How do you see that work evolving?
There is a very significant awareness among schools and governments that skills that matter most are not sufficiently emphasized in curriculum or evaluation. Teachers are getting mixed messages – they are told to teach 21st century skills, but assessments are backward-looking. And the education community is looking at what parents expect from the schools, and 21st century skills don’t feature as high on the list as you might think. We are facing challenges on two fronts – convincing educators that this is a relevant agenda and developing instruments that support it.
What have you learned about good systems/good practice?
The essence of what I’ve learned is that you can’t get around the need for great teaching. All the 21st century skills ultimately depend on teachers who understand what learning is, have an indepth understanding of what learning processes are, and are capable of personalizing learning through understanding that different students learn differently at different stages in their life. For example, there has been a belief that technology will bypass teaching. I don’t agree, but what we do see is that good technology can leverage great teaching. The principle lesson I’ve learned is that focusing on teaching is going to be key. The second lesson is that there’s been an increase in educational spending (especially in industrial countries), but if we look at the way we spend the resources, they’re often focused on lowering class size rather than creating more engaging learning environments and raising the quality of teaching. The systems that are doing well are making more intelligent spending choices. There’s no way to short-circuit the need for upgrading teaching policies and practices.
Are there any trends you see from countries looking to take these findings forward?
The trend is to give greater emphasis to skills that are harder to teach, like advanced thinking, creative thinking and innovation. At least that’s the desire. Also, a lot more attention is being paid to equity in education. We know that countries have to capitalize on students from all backgrounds.
There’s also a realization that in order to deliver all of this, we must make teaching a profession of high quality knowledge workers rather than the industrial work organization that we currently have. Finally, 21st century learning environments. This isn’t exactly a trend, but giving people more room to figure out when, how and where they learn is clearly an issue.
Country-Specific Education Articles Publication: The Star (MY) Title: The learning tower of Pisa Author: Zainah Anwar Website: http://thestar.com.my/columnists/story.asp? file=/2012/4/1/columnists/sharingthenation/11024378&sec=sharingthenation
AS the Government sets out yet again to reform the Malaysian education system, I hope the experts will pour over the vast amounts of resources and data already available on what makes for a successful education system.
For the first time ever, Malaysia has joined 73 other countries in the highly regarded Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) administered by the OECD which evaluates key competencies of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics and science. The results for Malaysia are due to be released this year.
Have students acquired the knowledge and skills essential to meet the challenges of the future? Can they analyse, reason and communicate their ideas effectively? Have they found the kinds of interests they can pursue throughout their lives as productive members of the economy and society?
The Pisa triennial surveys seek to answer these questions. Participating governments wait with bated breath for the results and analysis of the voluminous data generated, to find out where they stand in comparison to others in this globalised world and what kinds of interventions are needed
to help students to learn better, teachers to teach better, and school systems to become more effective.
As the man who directs PISA at the OECD, Andreas Schleicher said: “Today’s learning outcomes at school are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.”
In the latest 2009 PISA assessment, the Shanghai education system, which was evaluated for the first time, stunned the world by coming up tops in all three categories. It topped Singapore in maths, South Korea in reading and Finland in science out of the 65 countries surveyed.
More than one-quarter of Shanghai’s 15-year-olds demonstrated advanced mathematical thinking skills to solve complex problems, compared to an OECD average of just 3%. “Large fractions of these students demonstrate their ability to extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge very creatively in novel situations,” said Schleicher, breaking the myth of a Chinese education system focused on rote-learning.
Significantly, too, of the top five performers, four are Asian countries or economies – Shanghai, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. Finland is third. Other countries making up the top 10 are Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Australia and Belgium.
What is hopeful about the Pisa assessment is that it provides evidence that change is possible. In his report, Schleicher concluded that the best school systems became great after undergoing a series of crucial changes. They made their teacher-training colleges much more rigorous; they prioritise developing high-quality principals and teachers above efforts like reducing class size or equipping sports teams; and they held teachers accountable for results while allowing creativity in their methods.
There are also gratifying findings about equity in education. The successful education systems are those that devoted equal or more resources to the schools with the poorest kids. There is little difference found in the performance of students from private schools and those from public schools, once socioeconomic differences have been factored out. It found that cooperation between schools and between teachers lead to better learning outcomes than aggressive competition. Trapping the most disadvantaged students in the least successful schools exacerbate social inequality and negatively impact a nation’s overall performance.
What is also interesting is that the top performing countries have contrasting approaches to education. While the Asian countries emphasise academic hot-housing and tests, Finland in contrast adopts a progressive approach. There are no standardised national tests, no streaming or ability grouping. Teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves.
The main driver of Finnish education policy that has brought it success today is the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location, says Pasi Sahlberg, the Finnish education expert. Education is regarded as an instrument to even out social inequality – an approach Malaysian policy makers should really be familiar with.
Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counselling, early access to special education, and individualised student guidance. What Finland has shown is that a shift from an elitist and socially divided education system into an equitable public education system has produced top rate performance from students across all backgrounds.
While Finland’s approach differ from the top Asian countries, what they have in common is this: priority on quality teachers and school leaders. They depend on expert, experienced teachers and on excellent teacher training. They pay their teachers well and teaching remains respected and prestigious. Finland recruits from the top 10% of its university graduates into teacher training. Every teacher has a Masters degree and teacher training programmes are among the most selective professional schools in the country.
Interestingly, too, the finding in Shanghai shows that its high performance is also due to a “sea change in pedagogy”. From an emphasis on rote learning, the new school slogan today is: “To every question there should be more than a single answer.” Something I am afraid that Malaysian officialdom remains unfamiliar with.
In the age of Google where facts can be found at the click of a mouse, Chinese students today learn how to learn, rather than how to memorise, thus developing minds that are more adept at learning how to solve complex problems, rather than regurgitate facts.
The Pisa study also finds that parents who are more focused on their children’s education can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement. The Pisa team interviewed 5,000 parents from 18 countries in 2009 about how they raised their children and compared that to the test results.
According to Schleicher: “The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socio-economic background. Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance.”
Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in Pisa 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently. Students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child “every day or almost every day” or “once or twice a week” during the first year of primary school have markedly higher scores in Pisa 2009 than students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child “never or almost never” or only “once or twice a month”.
Schleicher explained that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”
I hope the Education Ministry and its team of experts will pour over the Pisa findings on what makes a school successful. We want an education system that will help every Malaysian child realise his or her full potential. We want the highly effective teachers, the equitable education system that embraces diversity and is less competitive, that emphasises critical and creative thinking and problem-solving over rote learning.
We too need parents committed to their children’s studies and schooling experience. These all count for successful learning outcomes today that help define the success of the nation tomorrow.
Publication: The Irish Times Title: Fee-paying students two years ahead in literacy Author: Sean Flynn
Website: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0413/1224314683768.html
Students in fee-paying schools are two years ahead of their counterparts in vocational schools in literacy skills, according to a study which underlines the two-tier nature of Irish education.
The study says the performance of 15-year-old students in 254 vocational schools – many from socially deprived backgrounds – also lags behind other teenagers in community and comprehensive schools and those in other non-fee-paying secondary schools.
It also finds that students from fee-paying schools are drawn from the most advantaged strata of Irish society – despite claims these schools have students from all backgrounds.
Responding to the report last night Teacher’s Union of Ireland General Secretary John MacGabhann said it was now time for the State to stop providing “a turbo boost to the already privileged.’’
Fee paying schools receive €100 million annually from the exchequer.
The OECD study analyses the 2009 OECD/Pisa rankings on literacy among Irish teenagers.
Ireland was ranked 17th in the OECD on literacy, down from fifth in 2000, the sharpest drop experienced by any developed nation.
The Department of Education is examining how these schools spend an additional €100 million they receive annually in fee payments from parents. It is also examining admission policies in schools, including the use of sibling policies where family members of current and former pupils are given preference.
The use of these sibling policies is specifically criticised in the new report. It says they play a key role in helping private schools draw students from the better-off section of society. “On average,
schools that exercised this preference had a student enrolment with a socioeconomic score that was . . . higher than schools that did not.”
The study says parents are drawn to private schools “mostly because of the composition of their student bodies. This finding suggests that (socioeconomic) stratification may increase over time unless some structural changes occur”.
Dr Jude Cosgrove, of the Educational Research Centre at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Dublin, which oversees Pisa in Ireland, says the findings show pupils in fee-paying schools do better because their students are the most advantaged. “Clearly, achievement differences between school types in Ireland are related to the socioeconomic background of their students,” she said.
Overall, vocational schools had an average reading score of 466 points, compared to 487 in community and comprehensive schools, 504 in non-fee-paying secondary schools, and 539 in feepaying secondary schools.
Students in vocational schools, however, had above-average levels of disadvantage when compared with other schools.
Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn is under pressure from the Labour grassroots and from the TUI to end State supports for private schools.