IAP NEWS UPDATEDecember 24th – December 30th 2010

Publication: The Boston GlobeTitle: Learning from FinlandDate: December 27th, 2010Author: Pasi SahlbergWebsite: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/12/27/learning_from_finland/Survey: PISA

If Americans harbored any doubts about their eroded global edge, the recent release of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s fourth international comparison of educational performance should rattle the nation from its “We’re No. 1’’ complacency. The latest Program for International Student Assessment study revealed that, although the United States made some modest gains, it is lagging behind many other developed nations in the ability of its 15-year-olds. The country isn’t flunking: like France, England, and Sweden, learning here has stagnated at below-average levels. That “gentleman’s C’’ should be a call to change course.

As recently as 25 years ago, Finnish students were below the international average in mathematics and science. There also were large learning differences between schools, with urban or affluent students typically outperforming their rural or low-income peers. Today, as the most recent PISA study proves, Finland is one of the few nations that have accomplished both a high quality of learning and equity in learning at the same time. The best school systems are the most equitable — students do well regardless of their socio-economic background. Finally, Finland should interest US educators because Finns have employed very distinct ideas and policies in reforming education, many the exact opposite of what’s being tried in the United States.

Finland has a different approach to student testing and how test data can or should not be used. Finnish children never take a standardized test. Nor are there standardized tests used to compare teachers or schools to each other. Teachers, students, and parents are all involved in assessing and also deciding how well schools, teachers, or students do what they are supposed to do. Politicians and administrators are informed about how well the education system works by using sample-based learning tests which place no pressure on schools, and by research targeted to understand better how schools work. Parents and politicians think that teachers who work closely together with parents are the best judges of how well their children are learning in schools.

Another difference is that Finland has created an inspiring and respectful environment in which teachers work. All teachers are required to have higher academic degrees that guarantee both high-level pedagogical skills and subject knowledge. Parents and authorities regard teachers with the same confidence they do medical doctors. Indeed, Finns trust public schools more than any other public institution, except the police. The fact that teachers in Finland work as autonomous professionals and play a key role in

curriculum planning and assessing student learning attracts some of the most able and talented young Finns into teaching careers.

Educational leadership is also different in Finland. School principals, district education leaders, and superintendents are, without exception, former teachers. Leadership is therefore built on a strong sense of professional skills and community.

The secret of Finnish educational success is that in the 20th century Finns studied and emulated such advanced nations as Sweden, Germany, and the United States. Finns adopted some education policies from elsewhere but also avoided mistakes made by these leading education performers.

What could the United States learn from the Finns? First, reconsider those policies that advocate choice and competition as the key drivers of educational improvement. None of the best-performing education systems relies primarily on them. Indeed, the Finnish experience shows that consistent focus on equity and cooperation — not choice and competition — can lead to an education system where all children learn well. Paying teachers based on students’ test scores or converting public schools into private ones (through charters or other means) are ideas that have no place in the Finnish repertoire for educational improvement.

Second, provide teachers with government-paid university education and more professional support in their work, and make teaching a respected profession. As long as teachers are not trusted in their work and are not respected as professionals, young talent in the United States is unlikely to seek teaching as a lifelong career.

Finally, with the fourth PISA study again showing that the US education system is lagging those in many other countries, Americans should admit that there is much to learn from these systems. Relying on one’s past reputation is probably not the best approach for transforming an educational system to meet tomorrow’s needs and challenges. With America’s “can do’’ mentality and superior knowledge base in educational improvement, you could shift course before it’s too late.

Pasi Sahlberg is director general of the Center for International Mobility and Cooperation at Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture and is a former Washington-based World Bank education specialist.

Publication: National Public RadioTitle: Chinese Top In Tests, But Educators Call For ReformDate: December 29th, 2010Author: Rob GiffordWebsite: http://www.npr.org/2010/12/29/132416889/chinese-top-in-tests-but-still-have-lots-to-learnSurvey: PISA

This year, for the first time, schools from China took part in international standardized tests, which provide an interesting if imperfect picture of which countries' students are doing best in reading, writing and math.

And in their inaugural outing, Chinese students came out on top in the test, known as the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA.

Some educators are calling it "a Sputnik moment," like the launch of the Soviet satellite in 1957 that so shocked America. But the Chinese are not gloating about their success: They realize their educational system — which stresses memorization and largely ignores critical thinking — is in need of reform.

Chinese academic Zhang Minxuan is a happy man. The jovial administrator has just learned that the Shanghai school system he oversees has topped the global PISA tests.

"All Chinese people, no matter poor or rich, they have very high expectations in education. That kind of culture pushes people to study and study and study. I think this is very important," Zhang says.

Limitations Of The System

At the Zhabei No. 8 Middle School in the northern part of Shanghai, it's business as usual.

The teacher teaches, the students repeat, and even the principal admits the feared final high school exam that gets you into college — known as the gaokao — is all simply about memorization and rote learning. That principal, Liu Jinghai, though he is proud of his students for testing well, says the West shouldn't worry about the PISA results.

"Developed countries like the U.S. shouldn't be too surprised by these results. They're just one index, one measure that shows off the good points of Shanghai's and China's education system. But the results can't cover up our problems," he says.

Liu is very frank about those problems — the continuing reliance on rote learning, the lack of analysis or critical thinking — and he says the system is in dire need of reform.

"Why don't Chinese students dare to think? Because we insist on telling them everything. We're not getting our kids to go and find things out for themselves," he says.

As well as the limitations of the Chinese education system, Liu says, it was only students in Shanghai who took the PISA tests, and Shanghai has some of the best schools in China.

Zhang Chi, 17, was one of those students, and she noticed the difference in the way the PISA questions were framed.

"I can't go straight to answer the questions. I must think a while for the question, and give me some time to think," she says.

The Root Of The Problem

"Having some time to think" is not the norm in Chinese high schools. Zhang thinks Chinese students would like a little more of it.

"I think we can mix it together, use the Chinese ways of answering the questions and the foreign ways. Combining this together, I think, will be better," she says.

The trouble is that despite all the talk of educational reform, combining East and West, Chinese and foreign, is, in the end, simply not possible. However well she did in the PISA test, or however much she liked the questions, Zhang has to sit down next summer and take the high school university entrance test — the gaokao — where writing different, creative answers gets you nowhere, and writing the standard answer that you've memorized gets you into a good university.

Lucia Pierce is an educational consultant in Shanghai. She says the gaokao is the problem.

"As long as the gaokao scores are what get you, a student, into college — and those are the scores that also rank the high schools — parents and principals and teachers can't afford to really experiment with a kind of learning that encourages independent thinking, and perhaps, learning from mistakes," she says.

Pierce and others say that's why the recent PISA results are not the Sputnik moment some have talked of. It will take major reform of China's educational system before that happens, she says. And that is not happening anytime soon.

Publication: The American ConservativeTitle: The Limits of LearningDate: December 27th, 2010Author: Patrick J. BuchananWebsite: http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2010/12/27/the-limits-of-learning/Survey: PISA

“That speaks about who is going to be leading tomorrow.”

So said Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Every three years, the Paris-based OECD holds its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of the reading, math, and science skills of 15-year-olds in developing and developed countries. Gurria was talking of the results of the 2009 tests.

Sixty-five nations competed. The Chinese swept the board.

The schools of Shanghai-China finished first in math, reading and science. Hong Kong-China was third in math and science. Singapore, a city-state dominated by overseas Chinese, was second in math, fourth in science.

Only Korea, Japan, and Finland were in the hunt.

And the U.S.A.? America ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math, producing the familiar quack-quack.

“This is an absolute wake-up call for America,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “We have to face the brutal truth. We have to get much more serious about investment in education.”

But the “brutal truth” is that we invest more per pupil than any other country save Luxembourg, and we are broke. And a closer look at the PISA scores reveals some unacknowledged truths.

True, East Asians — Chinese, Koreans, Japanese — are turning in the top scores in all three categories, followed by the Europeans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders.

But looking down the New York Times list of the top 30 nations, one finds not a single Latin American nation, not a single African nation, not a single Muslim nation, not a single South or Southeast Asian nation (save Singapore), not a single nation of the old Soviet Union except Latvia and Estonia.

And in Europe as in Asia, the northern countries (Finland, Norway, Belgium, Iceland, Austria, Germany) outscore the southern (Greece, Italy, Portugal). Slovenia and Croatia, formerly of the Habsburg Empire, outperformed Albania and Serbia, which spent centuries under Turkish rule.

Among the OECD members, the most developed 34 nations on earth, Mexico, principal feeder nation for U.S. schools, came in dead last in reading.

Steve Sailer of VDARE.com got the full list of 65 nations, broke down U.S. reading scores by race, then measured Americans with the countries and continents whence their families originated. What he found was surprising.

Asian-Americans outperform all Asian students except for Shanghai-Chinese. White Americans outperform students from all 37 predominantly white nations except Finns, and U.S. Hispanics outperformed the students of all eight Latin American countries that participated in the tests.

African-American kids would have outscored the students of any sub-Saharan African country that took the test (none did) and did outperform the only black country to participate, Trinidad and Tobago, by 25 points.

America’s public schools, then, are not abject failures.

They are educating immigrants and their descendants to outperform the kinfolk their parents or ancestors left behind when they came to America. America’s schools are improving the academic performance of all Americans above what it would have been had they not come to America.

What American schools are failing at, despite the trillions poured into schools since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is closing the racial divide.

We do not know how to close the gap in reading, science, and math between Anglo and Asian students and black and Hispanic students.

And from the PISA tests, neither does any other country on earth.

The gap between the test scores of East Asian and European nations and those of Latin America and African nations mirrors the gap between Asian and white students in the U.S. and black and Hispanic students in the U.S.

Which brings us to Bad Students, Not Bad Schools, a new book in which Dr. Robert Weissberg contends that U.S. educational experts deliberately “refuse to confront the obvious truth.”

“America’s educational woes reflect our demographic mix of students. Today’s schools are filled with millions of youngsters, many of whom are Hispanic immigrants struggling with English plus millions of others of mediocre intellectual ability disdaining academic achievement.”

In the public and parochial schools of the 1940s and 1950s, kids were pushed to the limits of their ability, then pushed harder. And when they stopped learning, they were pushed out the door.

Writes Weissberg: “To be grossly politically incorrect, most of America’s educational woes vanish if these indifferent, troublesome students left when they had absorbed as much as they were going to learn and were replaced by learning-hungry students from Korea, Japan, India, Russia, Africa and the Caribbean.”

Weissberg contends that 80 percent of a school’s success depends on two factors: the cognitive ability of the child and the disposition he brings to class — not on texts, teachers or classroom size.

If the brains and the will to learn are absent, no amount of spending on schools, teacher salaries, educational consultants or new texts will matter.

A nation weary of wasting billions on unctuous educators who never deliver what they promise may be ready to hear some hard truths.

Publication: The Epoch TimesTitle: Chinese Students Shun Chinese SchoolsDate: December 24th, 2010Author: Sophia FangWebsite: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/47897/Survey: PISA

Despite the on paper success of education in China there is a strong and growing movement for students to head abroad to be educated.

This is apparent in how many more high school graduates in China choose not to participate in the Chinese national college entrance exam: instead, they opt to apply to a college overseas.

And this is in spite of recent successes, such as that scored by students from Shanghai recently, who came first place in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) 2009 Program for International Student Assessment. Their victory, however, highlighted some of their problems.

Shanghai high school students scored the highest in math, science and reading comprehension on the OECD administered test, said Xiong Bingqi, Director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute.

But it is a matter of how the questions on that test were framed, which happened to match the content and formula of exams in mainland China, suiting the students' strong points, but not testing their weaknesses, Xiong explained.

Facets of education such as innovation, imagination, physical strength, individual personality and unique interests, however, were not tested, and these are the aspects of personal development that education on the mainland systemically neglects.

Chinese education falls behind in the cultivation of personality, morality and creativity, Xiong said. In the recent International Assessment of Educational Progress survey in 21 countries, Chinese students ranked first in their ability to calculate things, and last in their ability to imagine them.

More Young Abroad

Chinese parents, particularly the educated ones, have lost hope in the country’s education system, its college entrance exam system, and mainland universities as a whole. The wealthy and middle-class families in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, would rather spend their money on sending their children overseas to get a foreign education.

According to statistics published by the Ministry of Education, in 2009 there were 840,000 students who opted out of the college entrance exam. A July 14 report by Southern Weekly estimated about 1 million students would opt out in 2010. Among them, 21.1 percent say it is because they will continue education overseas.

In the prestigious public high schools in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the number of students who choose to attend overseas colleges is increasing.

The Department of International Exchange of Shanghai’s Municipal Education Commission published a report about students who attend overseas colleges, of whom 30 percent are between 15 and 18 years old. Statistics from several agencies that assist in applying for overseas colleges in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangdong province show that the amount of students going overseas has increased by 10 percent this year. Link

English First (EF) Ltd. and Sina Education published survey results about students in top Chinese high schools, where 86 percent of the parents wish to send their children overseas. The biggest motivation is to provide them with better education and broaden their outlook.

The Contrast

Dong Dong, who finished his second year of high school in China before leaving for Toronto in September 2010, is a typical example

Compared to the environment in China, the difference is like “heaven and hell,” Dong Dong told The Epoch Times. In Canada he normally spends only half an hour on homework every day, but in China the homework was interminable, and came with enormous pressure.

“Students in China are drowned in an ocean of exams. That is the only way to get a good score in the college entrance exam. We must do a lot of practice exams,” he said.

Canadian teachers pay attention to the development of capabilities in their students: “In science class, the teacher does not just tell us how to solve the problem, but teaches us the basic concepts and lets us solve the problem ourselves,” lest the students fail to be self-reliant, he said.

Once in Canada, Dong was especially excited about enrolling in speech and drama classes; both require students to perform on stage. Although his hands were shaking, heart thumping, and voice trembling the first time he stepped out, he loves it. But it is courses of this sort that are considered a waste of time in China.

“In China, all people care about are test scores. Nobody is interested in abilities such as verbal communication,” he said. “The high schools in China do not encourage cultivating students’ interests; instead, they try hard to stifle personal interests.

”Students coming out of the current education system in China often aim high but achieve very little, lack creativity and innovation, cannot endure hardship, and are not willing to start at the bottom—I don’t think they will accomplish much in life,” Dong says, delivering a dour message to his peers. “High school here is like heaven,” he waxed. “I would recommend that all my friends attend schools in Canada.”

Publication: The Register-GuardTitle: International rankings overlook U.S. students’ strengthsDate: December 24th, 2010Author: George RussellWebsite: http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/opinion/25692521-47/american-berliner-china-group-international.cspSurvey: PISA

A widely reprinted article in the Dec. 7 New York Times and a Dec. 9 editorial in The Register Guard reflected on the poor performance of U.S. students on international tests such as the Program for International Student Assessment exam. In a response to the Times, the National Superintendents Roundtable, a group of superintendents from across the country

that I co-chair, tried to address some of our concerns with trying to compare our students to those from Shanghai or elsewhere.

We’re concerned that while Shanghai’s recent test scores do raise eyebrows, as The New York Times reported, the comparison of the performance of Shanghai students with that of students in the developed world may well be a comparison of apples and oranges.

The PISA test assesses the performance of “15-year-olds” in about five dozen countries. The term “15-year-olds,” according to PISA, is shorthand for students between the ages of 15 years and three months and 16 years and two months. These are mostly high school students in the United States, but in Shanghai and throughout China, students in this age group may be either in middle school or high school. Chinese middle school students are tested before entering high school.

Based on analysis of public documents and four visits to China in the last three years, my colleagues in the National Superintendents Roundtable estimate that only half the Chinese age group tests successfully into high school. Without more information on the actual grade level of the Shanghai students, it is impossible to know whether 100 percent of American students are being compared to a more selective sample of students in Shanghai.

That reality alone might explain the Shanghai phenomenon. But it helps also to remember that public schools in China typically do not enroll students with disabilities, who make up 10 to 15 percent of school enrollments in the United States.

Could we match the tested educational performance of 15- to 16-year-olds in leading PISA nations? Probably, but it would require changes foreign to the American experience. We could restrict high schools to 50 percent of potentially eligible students and ignore students with disabilities, as China does.

We could virtually require students to double learning time in extended tutoring programs, which in South Korea leads to reports of students arriving home daily near midnight.

Or we could imitate Finland, which essentially has eliminated childhood poverty and finds itself with the highest PISA rankings in the West.

David Berliner of Arizona State University, in a 2005 study titled “Our Impoverished View of Educational Reform,” suggested that the most powerful policy for improving our nation’s school achievement may be the reduction in poverty.

With respect to the PISA, Berliner reported that what stands out first is a common pattern in international studies of achievement — namely, that U.S. average scores are very close to the international average. But, he says, in a country as heterogeneous and as socially and ethnically segregated as ours, averages are not useful for understanding how we are really doing in international comparisons.

In disaggregating the PISA data, Berliner observed that white U.S. students (without regard to social class) were among the highest performing students in the world. But our African-American and Latino students, also undifferentiated by class, were among the poorest performing students in the international sample.

When he took social class into consideration by looking at the scores of students who attend schools where there are few or no children of poverty, he found that this group of public school students performed quite well when compared to their international peers.

There are many things we can learn from places such as Shanghai, Korea and Finland, and we believe that we should be interested in assessing their practices and approaches to teaching and learning.

However, in many ways the PISA results reflect not just school effectiveness, but each society’s commitment to developing the talents of all its young people.

George Russell is superintendent of the Eugene School District and co-chairman of the National Superintendents Roundtable.