IAP NEWS UPDATEDecember 3rd – December 9th 2010

Publication: The White HouseTitle: Remarks by the President in Winston-Salem, North CarolinaDate: December 6th, 2010Author: President ObamaWebsite: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/12/06/remarks-president-economy-winston-salem-north-carolinaSurvey: N/A

Below is an exerpt from a speech by President Obama on December 6th

As it stands right now, the hard truth is this: In the race for the future, America is in danger of falling behind. That's just the truth. And when -- if you hear a politician say it’s not, they’re not paying attention. In a generation we have fallen from 1st place to 9th place in the proportion of young people with college degrees. When it comes to high school graduation rates, we’re ranked 18th out of 24 industrialized nations -- 18th. We’re 27th in the proportion of science and engineering degrees we hand out. We lag behind other nations in the quality of our math and science education.

When global firms were asked a few years back where they planned on building new research and development facilities, nearly 80 percent said either China or India -- because those countries are focused on math and science, and they’re focused on training and educating their workforce.

I sat down with President Lee of South Korea, and I asked him, what’s the biggest problem you have in education? He said, you know, these parents, they come to me and they are constantly pressuring me; they want their kids to learn so fast, so much -- they’re even making me import English-speaking teachers in, because they want first-graders to know English. I asked him about investment in research and development. He says, we're putting aside 5 percent of our gross domestic product in research and development -- 3 percent of it in clean energy.

You go to Shanghai, China, and they’ve built more high-speed rail in the last year than we've built in the last 30 years. The largest private solar research and development facility in the world was recently opened in China -– by an American company. Today China also has the fastest trains and the fastest supercomputer in the world.

In 1957, just before this college opened, the Soviet Union beat us into space by launching a satellite known as Sputnik. And that was a wake-up call that caused the United States to boost our investment in innovation and education -– particularly in math and science. And as a result, once we put our minds to it, once we got focused, once we got unified, not only did we surpass the Soviets, we developed new American technologies, industries, and jobs.

So 50 years later, our generation’s Sputnik moment is back. This is our moment.

Publication: The New York TimesTitle: Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun EducatorsDate: December 7th, 2010Author: Sam DillonWebsite: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/education/07education.htmlSurvey: PISA

With China’s debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam.

American officials and Europeans involved in administering the test in about 65 countries acknowledged that the scores from Shanghai — an industrial powerhouse with some 20 million residents and scores of modern universities that is a magnet for the best students in the country — are by no means representative of all of China.

About 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai were chosen as a representative cross-section of students in that city. In the United States, a similar number of students from across the country were selected as a representative sample for the test.

Experts noted the obvious difficulty of using a standardized test to compare countries and cities of vastly different sizes. Even so, they said the stellar academic performance of students in Shanghai was noteworthy, and another sign of China’s rapid modernization.

The results also appeared to reflect the culture of education there, including greater emphasis on teacher training and more time spent on studying rather than extracurricular activities like sports.

“Wow, I’m kind of stunned, I’m thinking Sputnik,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., who served in President Ronald Reagan’s Department of Education, referring to the groundbreaking Soviet satellite launching. Mr. Finn, who has visited schools all across China, said, “I’ve seen how relentless the Chinese are at accomplishing goals, and if they can do this in Shanghai in 2009, they can do it in 10 cities in 2019, and in 50 cities by 2029.”

The test, the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, was given to 15-year-old students by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group that includes the world’s major industrial powers.

The results are to be released officially on Tuesday, but advance copies were provided to the news media a day early.

“We have to see this as a wake-up call,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview on Monday.

“I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable, and we have to see them as a challenge to get better,” he added. “The United States came in 23rd or 24th in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.”

In math, the Shanghai students performed in a class by themselves, outperforming second-place Singapore, which has been seen as an educational superstar in recent years. The average math scores of American students put them below 30 other countries.

PISA scores are on a scale, with 500 as the average. Two-thirds of students in participating countries score between 400 and 600. On the math test last year, students in Shanghai scored 600, in Singapore 562, in Germany 513, and in the United States 487.

In reading, Shanghai students scored 556, ahead of second-place Korea with 539. The United States scored 500 and came in 17th, putting it on par with students in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and several other countries.

In science, Shanghai students scored 575. In second place was Finland, where the average score was 554. The United States scored 502 — in 23rd place — with a performance indistinguishable from Poland, Ireland, Norway, France and several other countries.

The testing in Shanghai was carried out by an international contractor, working with Chinese authorities, and overseen by the Australian Council for Educational Research, a nonprofit testing group, said Andreas Schleicher, who directs the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s international educational testing program.

Mark Schneider, a commissioner of the Department of Education’s research arm in the George W. Bush administration, who returned from an educational research visit to China on Friday, said he had been skeptical about some PISA results in the past. But Mr. Schneider said he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable.

“The technical side of this was well regulated, the sampling was O.K., and there was no evidence of cheating,” he said.

Mr. Schneider, however, noted some factors that may have influenced the outcome.

For one thing, Shanghai is a huge migration hub within China. Students are supposed to return to their home provinces to attend high school, but the Shanghai authorities could increase scores by allowing stellar students to stay in the city, he said. And Shanghai students apparently were told the test was important for China’s image and thus were more motivated to do well, he said.

“Can you imagine the reaction if we told the students of Chicago that the PISA was an important international test and that America’s reputation depended on them performing well?” Mr. Schneider said. “That said, China is taking education very seriously. The work ethic is amazingly strong.”

In a speech to a college audience in North Carolina, President Obama recalled how the Soviet Union’s 1957 launching of Sputnik provoked the United States to increase investment in math and science education, helping America win the space race.

“Fifty years later, our generation’s Sputnik moment is back,” Mr. Obama said. With billions of people in India and China “suddenly plugged into the world economy,” he said, nations with the most educated workers will prevail. “As it stands right now,” he said, “America is in danger of falling behind.”

If Shanghai is a showcase of Chinese educational progress, America’s showcase would be Massachusetts, which has routinely scored higher than all other states on America’s main federal math test in recent years.

But in a 2007 study that correlated the results of that test with the results of an international math exam, Massachusetts students scored behind Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Shanghai did not participate in the test.

A 259-page Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report on the latest Pisa results notes that throughout its history, China has been organized around competitive examinations. “Schools work their students long hours every day, and the work weeks extend into the weekends,” it said. Chinese students spend less time than American students on athletics, music and other activities not geared toward success on exams in core subjects. Also, in recent years, teaching has rapidly climbed up the ladder of preferred occupations in China, and salaries have risen. In Shanghai, the authorities have undertaken important curricular reforms, and educators have been given more freedom to experiment.

Ever since his organization received the Shanghai test scores last year, Mr. Schleicher said, international testing experts have investigated them to vouch for their accuracy, expecting that they would produce astonishment in many Western countries.

“This is the first time that we have internationally comparable data on learning outcomes in China,” Mr. Schleicher said. “While that’s important, for me the real significance of these results is that they refute the commonly held hypothesis that China just produces rote learning.”

“Large fractions of these students demonstrate their ability to extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge very creatively in novel situations,” he said.

Publication: The Wall Street JournalTitle: The Test Chinese Schools Still FailDate: December 9th, 2010Author: Jiang XueqinWebsite: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703766704576008692493038646.htmlSurvey: PISA

High scores for Shanghai's 15-year-olds are actually a sign of weakness.

It's ironic that just as the world is appreciating the strengths of China's education system, Chinese are waking up to its weaknesses. These are two sides of the same coin: Chinese schools are very good at preparing their students for standardized tests. For that reason, they fail to prepare them for higher education and the knowledge economy.

On Tuesday, Shanghai's 15-year-olds topped the global league tables in reading, science and math in the Program for International Student Assessment, a test run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This comes as no surprise to anyone working in Chinese schools.

With its demanding parents, ambitious students, and test-obsessed culture, China's K-9 schooling is probably the most rigorous in the world. And Shanghai, an open and

cosmopolitan city that is boundlessly ambitious and fiercely competitive, has always been China's K-9 education leader.

So China has no problem producing mid-level accountants, computer programmers and technocrats. But what about the entrepreneurs and innovators needed to run a 21st century global economy? China's most promising students still must go abroad to develop their managerial drive and creativity, and there they have to unlearn the test-centric approach to knowledge that was drilled into them.

The failings of a rote-memorization system are well-known: lack of social and practical skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning. Chinese students burn themselves out testing into university, where many of them spend their time playing World of Warcraft. Both multinationals and Chinese companies have the same complaints about China's university graduates: They cannot work independently, lack the social skills to work in a team and are too arrogant to learn new skills. In 2005, the consulting firm McKinsey released a report saying that China's current education system will hinder its economic development.

But don't the PISA results at least show that China's K-9 education is the best in the world, and that standardized testing, as U.S. President Barack Obama seems to believe, is necessary to improve American schools?

Not really. According to research on education, using tests to structure schooling is a mistake. Students lose their innate inquisitiveness and imagination, and become insecure and amoral in the pursuit of high scores.

Even Shanghai educators admit they're merely producing competent mediocrity. The OECD report states, "[T]he dictates of the examinations have left students with little time and room for learning on their own. 'There is an opportunity cost in terms of time and space,' said [one experienced Shanghai educator]. 'Students grow with narrow margins' and are not fully prepared for their lives and work in the future. This is seen as a deep crisis, exacerbated by the reality of single-child families."

A consensus is growing that instead of vaulting the country past the West, China's schools are holding it back. They equip everybody with the basic knowledge to be functional in a socialist economy. But now that China is a market economy hoping to compete globally, it's jealous of America's ability to turn its brightest students into the world's best scientists and businesspeople.

Reform is on the horizon. This year the Chinese government released a 10-year plan including greater experimentation. China Central Television's main evening news program recently reported on Peking University High School's curricular reforms to promote individuality and diversity.

As director of Peking University High School's government-approved International Division, an experimental program to prepare students for study in America, I've attended meetings where Beijing's top education officials endorsed importing Western

curricula. Nevertheless, it's safe to say China won't challenge America's leadership in education anytime soon.

Shanghai's stellar results on PISA are a symptom of the problem. Tests are less relevant to concrete life and work skills than the ability to write a coherent essay, which requires being able to identify a problem, break it down to its constituent parts, analyze it from multiple angles and assemble a solution in a succinct manner to communicate across cultures and time. These "critical thinking" skills are what Chinese students need to learn if they are to become globally competitive.

So the first step of education reform is trying to teach students who are good test takers to be good essay writers. To write well in English, students need to understand concepts such as thesis and argument, structure and support, coherence and flow, tone and audience, diction and syntax—concepts that are barely introduced in Chinese schools. One way we'll know we're succeeding in changing China's schools is when those PISA scores come down.

Mr. Jiang is deputy principal of Peking University High School, and director of its International Division. Publication: The EconomistTitle: No longer bottom of the classDate: December 9th, 2010Author: Website: http://www.economist.com/node/17679798Survey: PISA

Weak and wasteful schools hold Brazil back. But at least they are getting less bad

In 2000 the OECD, a group of mostly rich countries, decided to find out how much children were learning at school. At the time, only half of Brazilian children finished primary education. Three out of four adults were functionally illiterate and more than one in ten totally so. And yet few Brazilians seemed to care. Rich parents used private schools; poor ones knew too little to understand how badly their children were being taught at the public ones. The president at the time, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, saw a chance to break their complacency. Though Brazil is not a member of the OECD he entered it in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Brazil came last.

A decade on, it is clear that the shock was salutary. On December 7th the fourth PISA study was published, and Brazil showed solid gains in all three subjects tested: reading, mathematics and science (see chart 1). The test now involves 65 countries or parts of them. Brazil came 53rd in reading and science. The OECD is sufficiently impressed that it has selected Brazil as a case study of “Encouraging lessons from a large federal system”.

Across Latin America there is far more awareness than a decade ago that poor education is holding the region back. Eight countries in the region took part in the latest tests. Chile did best among them, and continues to improve (see article and chart 2). But all came in

the bottom third globally. In both Panama and Peru more than a third of 15-year-olds in school are borderline illiterate, able to make sense only of the simplest texts. Argentina’s schools, which a century ago were among the best in the world, continue to decline: they performed worse than ten years ago, and worse than Brazil’s.

The OECD highlights that Mr Cardoso’s reforms of school funding in the 1990s, which mandated minimum per-pupil spending and teacher salaries, made a huge difference in the poorest areas. His government also started to pay poor families to keep their children in school. The report praises the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for continuing and extending both policies.

Barbara Bruns, an economist at the World Bank who has written a book about Brazilian schools, praises the system, created over the past 15 years, of rating schools on how much students learn and how many of them drop out or repeat grades. “From a starting point of having no information on student learning, the two presidencies constructed one of the world’s most impressive systems for measuring education results,” she says.

But the recent progress merely upgrades Brazil’s schools from disastrous to very bad. Two-thirds of 15-year-olds are capable of no more than basic arithmetic. Half cannot draw inferences from what they read, or give any scientific explanation for familiar phenomena. In each of reading, mathematics and science only about one child in 100 ranks as a high-performer; in the OECD 9% do. Even private, fee-paying schools are mediocre. Their pupils come from the best-off homes, but they turn out 15-year-olds who do no better than the average child across the OECD.

One reason the poor learn so little is that a big chunk of school spending is wasted. Since teachers retire on full pay after 25 years for women and 30 for men, up to half of schools’ budgets go on pensions. Except in places such as São Paulo state, which has started to take on the unions, teachers can be absent for 40 of the year’s 200 school-days without having their pay docked. More than a tenth of spending goes on pupils who are repeating grades: an astonishing 15% of those graduating from secondary school are over 25.

Brazil has set itself the goal of reaching the average standard of the OECD over the next decade. At the current pace, it will only get halfway there. Some of its plans will help, such as to test new teachers on both content and pedagogy. Others, such as spending lots more, are unlikely to make much difference. Brazil already spends a higher share of GDP on schooling than most OECD countries.

Bad teachers are the biggest handicap. In few parts of the world do high achievers aspire to teaching (exceptions like Finland and South Korea have the best schools). Uruguay is the only Latin American country where would-be teachers have above-average school grades. Factor in that the region’s average is abysmal, and by global standards Latin American teachers are themselves very poorly educated. Brazil compounds the problem by training teachers in neither subject matter nor teaching skills (they learn about the philosophy of education instead). Nearly half of teachers in São Paulo failed to reach state standards for a permanent contract.

Ms Bruns sees hope in thousands of innovative education schemes across Brazil. Some are run by foundations: Itaú Social, the charitable arm of a big bank, is coaching teachers in struggling schools, paying for parent-school liaison workers and training head teachers in management. Others are led by a new breed of public-sector managers: São Paulo state has created a career track for teachers who do well on tests of subject knowledge; the city of Rio de Janeiro is tackling teacher absenteeism by giving schools bonuses for hitting targets—to be shared out only among teachers with good attendance records. If Brazil does make the grade, it will be because it has managed to spread such innovative practices everywhere.

Publication: The Financial TimesTitle: Why are Chinese schoolkids so good?Date: December 7th, 2010Author: Henry ManceWebsite: http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2010/12/07/why-are-chinese-schoolkids-so-good/Survey: PISA

There are two stereotypes about schooling in east Asia: the students work extremely hard, and the learning is by rote. In fact, things are more complicated, as the OECD’s latest global schools survey has shown.

Shanghai came top in the Pisa survey, with three other east Asian territories in the first five. But not all east Asian countries did well, says the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher, adding that it’s innovative thought that is assessed. Shanghai schools aren’t turning children into walking textbooks: they are channelling their ability and enthusaism into exceptional results. How?

Undertaken every three years, the Pisa survey tests 15-year olds, with a rotating focus on maths, reading and science. The emphasis is on broad learning: literacy tests involve reasoning, for example. In the three previous editions - 2000, 2003 and 2006 - Finland came top. But this year, with the focus on reading, Finland was displaced by Shanghai, with South Korea second, Hong Kong fourth and Singapore fifth. (Thousands of children are normally tested in each country; but in China the survey was centred on Shanghai.)

So why did Shanghai do so well? The OECD points to Chinese school reforms: it was impressed by the initiative shown by teachers, who are now better paid, better trained and keen to mould their own curricula. Poor teachers are speedily replaced. China has also expanded school access, and moved away from learning by rote.

The last point is key: Russia performs well in rote-based assessments, but not in Pisa, says Schleicher, head of the indicators and analysis division at the OECD’s directorate for education. China does well in both rote-based and broader assessments.

The OECD also points to cultural factors - widespread expectations of high performance, and pressure from parents. And it’s the interaction between culture and the system that is hard to untangle, says Schleicher.

If schools did well just because of hard work, then countries with similar cultures should see similar results. But Finland beats Sweden by a distance, Shanghai beats Taiwan, and Hong

Kong beats Macau. Equally, if the schools themselves were uniquely important, then why do young Chinese immigrants do so well in UK classrooms? Culture and system almost certainly reinforce each other: with a merit-based system stimulating hard work, and vice-versa.

What can the Pisa survey - recognised as authoritative by many education policymakers - say about universities and employment? Schleicher tells beyondbrics that, according to medium-term data from Canada, students who do well on the Pisa survey are very likely to do well in higher education and the job market.

However, that correlation would not necessarily be repeated in China. For one thing, parental pressure eases once students get to universities. For another, Chinese universities have been accused of corruption in how they award degrees - which may undermine the incentives for hard work.

There are other unanswered questions. Is Shanghai the exception or the rule in Chinese school standards? In some countries, major cities underperform the national average, but that seems less likely in China, given the coast-interior disparities. However, the OECD did look at some rural areas, and found they matched Shanghai’s quality.

Second, if school education is so strong in China, is the country at risk of over-educating its youth? South Korea, second in the Pisa list, has an enviable knowledge economy, for example in terms of patent applications. Yet even the mighty chaebol can’t employ all graduates - leaving some to retrain as bakers (see article).

Third, does the future success of Chinese schools depend on changes in the economy? If Chinese manufacturing continues to revolve around low wages, many students may see less reward - and less incentive - for hard work. Or they make work even harder and more innovatively to grab the few good jobs on offer, or to move overseas.

These are questions for other surveys. What the Pisa results suggest is that, just like Chinese companies, Chinese schoolchildren won’t be pushed to the back of the class.

Publication: ABC NewsTitle: High Test Scores, but China Education FlawedDate: December 9th, 2010Author: Sherisse PhamWebsite: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/chinas-education-prepares-students-tests/story?id=12348599Survey: PISA

High Test Rankings Mask Underlying Problems

Chinese students made international headlines this week when Shanghai high school kids outscored their counterparts on PISA, an international standardized test. China came out on top and the U.S. was buried somewhere in the middle -- but it was no surprise to education experts or even to people familiar with China's progress as a global presence.

"The entire system is geared toward that one goal -- taking [a] test," said Yasheng Huang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It would be the equivalent of American students spending four or five years preparing for the GRE or SAT, he said. So when it comes to exams, Chinese students are stellar performers. But when it comes to other barometers of success, they fall short.

"In terms of imaginative talking, coming up with good ideas, taking risks, those are actually very weak," said Huang.

Such weaknesses are closely linked to an education system that effectively shortchanges Chinese students.

"When you spend all your time as a student at school going after high scores, you lose opportunity to develop anything else," said Yong Zhao, an education professor at Michigan State University. Zhao said the Chinese system spends too much time focused on instruction, and not enough on education. Instruction, he explained, is imparting knowledge. Education is something entirely different.

"It's a long-term process of developing human beings, and well-rounded human beings who are curious, passionate and creative," said Zhao.

China's Standardized High School Test is 'Miserable'

From a very young age, China breeds a test-oriented educational environment.

In junior high, they write the zhongkao -- "middle test" -- to get placed in a good high school.

In high school, the stakes are higher with the gaokao -- "high test."

The final prize is entrance to a coveted college, which could lead to a leg up in the competitive job market, which could lead to a well-paid job, which in turn could lead to a happy and prosperous life. Failure or low scores on the test send many students back to high school for one more year of gaokao preparation.

The two- to three-day exam is nothing short of an obsession for parents. And it's nothing short of miserable for students.

"I scare my children," Zhao said. "I tell them if they don't take the trash out I'll send them to China to take the gaokao."

Jokes aside, many Chinese parents are sending their children in the opposite direction. The Institute of International Education found that the number of Chinese students coming to the U.S for undergraduate studies increased by more than 50 percent last year.

Peggy Blumenthal, executive vice president of the Institute of International Education, believes the possibility for a better educational experience lures such students away from China's education system.

"If you are spending all your time drilling what the answers are for your test, does that prepare you for the kind of innovative self-reliant, challenge-the-status-quo kind of thinking that is rewarded at the college level ... in the United States?" asked Blumenthal.

Beyond the classroom, the obsession with test-taking leaves many Chinese graduates ill-prepared for the job market. A McKinsey study found that 44 percent of executives in Chinese companies reported that insufficient talent limited their global ambitions. Multinationals also find the labor pool lacking.

Meanwhile, Chinese colleges graduated nearly 6 million students in 2008.

After chasing test scores for their entire lives, graduates of China's education system face another grim reality: According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the average college graduate earns just 300 yuan -- roughly $45 -- more than average migrant worker.

As reported in the Beijing Times, the study found that monthly salaries for college graduates have been at a plateau of about 1,500 yuan since 2003. Meanwhile, wages for migrant workers rose from an average of 700 yuan to 1,200 yuan over roughly the same period.

China Scoring High on Tests Was Big News 20 Years Ago

Still, there are some experts who maintain that, while flawed, the Chinese education system has its strengths.

Shijing Xu, an education professor with the University of Windsor in Toronto studying the interaction between schools in China and Canada, said Chinese students get a better foundation in all subject areas at a young age.

Specialized subject teachers -- one for math, one for science, one for language, and so on -- are present from the very beginning in Chinese schools.

In the U.S., most public schools have one teacher that teaches all subjects until grades three or four. Xu, like all the experts ABC News spoke with, said that the advantage in U.S. is that they encourage and foster creativity and initiative.

"If we really can combine the two together, we really would provide a better education for children on both sides," said Xu.

Change in China, Xu added, will not come overnight. With a population of 1.3 billion, it is difficult to develop a fair system that is not centered on standardized tests.

Yasheng Huang of M.I.T. said news that China came out on top in PISA is a far cry from a "Sputnik" moment, as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called it.

Duncan's label made Huang think of another news maker out of China. When China sent its first astronaut into space in 2003, it prompted Jay Leno to joke that this would be big news ... if it was 1962. The same, said Huang, holds true for Chinese students outperforming international students on the standardized PISA test.

"Yes, this would be big news for China," Huang said, "if it were 1981."

Publication: CNNTitle: The U.S. must start learning from AsiaDate: December 7th, 2010Author: Vishakha DesaiWebsite: http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/12/07/school.results.us.asia.desai/index.htmlSurvey: PISA

Results of a global education survey today show U.S. high school students come in a dispiriting 26th out of 65 places worldwide in combined scores for math, science and reading tests.The OECD's Program for International Assessment (PISA) suggests that while America lags, Asia soars: Out of the top 10, eight are in the Asia-Pacific region -- led by Shanghai and Hong Kong in China, Singapore, South Korea and Japan.The rise of education in Asia is no accident. It reflects deliberate policies and long-term investments that recognize the centrality of quality education to a nation's economic growth.Studies on PISA data show that higher test scores in math and science are associated with higher growth rates that, in turn, lead to higher incomes. These countries understand, as former Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong has said: "A nation's wealth in the 21st century will depend on the capacity of its people to learn."What do Asian school systems do to produce such achievement?There is no one "Asian way" to academic success, just as not all Asian nations are equally successful. Shanghai is the leading edge in China but disparities remain within the country.There are, however, common themes that permeate high-performing Asian school systems. These include:• Rigorous standards and coherent curricula. Asian nations establish high academic standards and a demanding school curriculum that clearly defines the content to be taught and is sequenced to build on a student's abilities step by step. Teachers are expected to teach the full curriculum to all students, and schools have substantial responsibility and autonomy to design a program of instruction that meets students' needs.• High-quality teachers and principals. Teachers are routinely recruited from among the top high-school graduates and, unlike in the U.S., principals generally do not apply to become school leaders as much as they are selected and prepared to do so. There are comprehensive systems for selecting, training, compensating and developing teachers and principals -- delivering tremendous skill right to the classroom.• Emphasis on math and science. Math and science training begins early in primary school and rigorous courses such as biology, chemistry and physics, as well as algebra and

geometry are part of a core curriculum for secondary school. Specialist teachers are often employed in elementary schools unlike "generalists" usually found in U.S. schools.• Time and Effort. With longer school years and sometimes longer school days, Asian students often have the equivalent of several more years of schooling by the time they finish high school than the typical American student. Asian students are also expected to work hard in school, reflecting a societal belief that developing one's skills and knowledge reflects effort more than innate ability.Aligning education goals to economic development, Asian nations have built strong school systems by scouring the world -- including the United States -- for effective practices and weaving them together in ways that mesh with their cultural values.Recognizing the fast pace of change in the world's economic and civic environment, their focus now is on developing teachers, principals and students who are expected to have a global outlook and be "future ready."U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said: "The simple truth is that America has a great deal to learn from the educational practices of other countries."Models of best practice exist all over the world, but are most noticeably increasing in Asia. And, it's not a one-way street. Asian nations struggle with outmoded instructional practices and an over-reliance on high-pressure examinations -- and they continue to look to America for clues in cultivating innovation in teaching and creativity in their students.The time has come for America to learn from -- and with -- Asia and the world.Our ability to compete and lead in a global economy may well depend on it.

Vishakha N. Desai is president of Asia Society, which promotes the teaching of Chinese language and international studies in U.S. schools.

Publication: The Daily YomiuriTitle: Shanghai OECD test results reflect fierce competitionDate: December 9th, 2010Author: Takanori Kato, Tetsu Okazaki and Yasuhiro MaedaWebsite: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T101208005398.htmSurvey: PISA

The success of students in Shanghai--which topped every league table in the test under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)--reflected fierce competition for entry to higher educational institutions in the city.

"We introduced school curricula that placed importance on how to apply students' accumulated knowledge, which is linked to university entrance examinations," a Shanghai city official said.

Shanghai, which scored the world's top marks in reading, mathematics and science in the tests, is said to be the city with the most improved education system in China.

Many people in Shanghai regarded the result as quite natural. "It isn't surprising," a female middle school teacher said.

Meanwhile, a local reporter on education issues said: "It wasn't a result that represents the whole of China. It only indicates how getting into better schools in an urban environment is highly competitive."

In Shanghai, school entrance exams have become more competitive each year due to the difficulty in students finding jobs following the increased academic achievement levels.

Examinations are held almost every month at middle and high schools, and lists of higher ranking students are posted on school walls at terms' end.

The higher the percentage of students who go on to prestigious schools, the more teachers reap additional income and benefits--so the incentive among teachers to raise student achievement levels becomes heated as well.

China's one-child policy is another social factor inflaming the fervor for education.

Meanwhile, the zeal for education has spawned various undesirable effects, such as an increase in the number of student suicides, due to the worry and pressure of achieving high exam results.

"The PISA results could encourage further fierce competition in education," said Wu Zunmin, professor of East China Normal University in Shanghai who has studied at Kobe University.

Singapore, which last year joined the OECD program for the first time, also showed high achievement.

"Singapore's good performance at PISA 2009 shows that beyond their strong grasp of knowledge, our students have the ability to think critically and solve real-life problems," the Education Ministry of Singapore said Tuesday.

A nation with a scarcity of natural resources, Singapore has devoted much effort toward nurturing an elite citizenry based on a merit system.

Examinations are held to screen excellent students when they are in fourth and sixth grades of primary school, fourth grade of secondary school and second grade of junior college.

Parents are frantic, as the door to a university will almost certainly close if their children fail but one examination.

In South Korea, Kim Seong Yul, president of Korea Institute of Curriculum and Evaluation, a government-funded research institute in charge of administering the PISA, boasted of

its results, citing Tuesday an OECD statement that South Korea offered a striking example because its achievement rate went beyond that of a privileged elite.

South Korea's achievement test system has primary, middle and high school students take examinations.

When a certain percentage of students falls beneath basic academic levels in a school, the Education, Science and Technology Ministry infuses additional funds to the school for it to take special measures such as hiring temporary teaching staff.

Publication: PoliticoTitle: Education spurs innovationDate: December 7th, 2010Author: Wendy HawkinsWebsite: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46053.htmlSurvey: PISA

The new “basic” level of understanding required of all students today is significantly higher than in the past. They must understand math and science at levels that allow them to participate fully in the 21st century.

This means knowing how to use technology – an ever-more ubiquitous tool in every kind of work environment – effectively. Students must be scientifically and mathematically literate to understand the news of the day and how to budget for their families. They need to be able to manage their own health care effectively. They need to be able to understand crucial topics, like global warming and alternative energy.

Yet, it’s a bitter truth: The United States, which once produced the world’s best students in math, science and engineering, is falling behind.

The best practices that fueled America’s innovation economy — and made us the leader worldwide — have now been adopted by other countries. Chief among these is investing in education.

After all, for any country to grasp the potential breakthroughs just over the horizon – cleaner more sustainable energy solutions, advances in nanotechnology, significant medical developments – it must have a reliable pipeline of highly educated, highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately for the United States, other nations are outpacing us.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan today is set to reveal how American students compare to the rest of the world, unveiling the 2009 test scores from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) at “Education for Innovation,” a digital town-hall discussion about the key role education plays in developing entrepreneurs, sponsored by Intel.

PISA, an international evaluation of 15 year olds, is the most comprehensive international study of student performance. It measures reading, mathematics and science levels in 64 countries and economies.

If past PISA scores are any indication, U.S. students are likely to have continued their struggles in comparison to other countries. Fortunately, we can do something about this. As a nation, we can launch an unprecedented effort to invest in science and mathematics education that ensures that all students get a basic level of understanding in science and math. This will equip our next generation with the tools necessary to fuel the modern economy.

It also keeps the door open for students to decide if they have the passion to pursue careers in technology, science and entrepreneurship — even if they don’t realize this until they’re in high school, or even college. The most talented math and science students should have every opportunity to push the boundaries of learning — to do authentic research and learn science in a hands-on, engaging environment that challenges and inspires them.

But these opportunities require resources at a time when they are limited. In this climate, some critics suggest that we should focus only on the few, investing in those who show greater aptitude in mathematics and science. That would be a serious mistake.

Education, as we know at Intel, is the critical driving force behind American innovation. Innovation helps us create high-quality jobs and a standard of living that remains the envy of the world. Curiosity, critical thinking and a strong foundation in math and science are necessary for tomorrow’s workforce to compete for the high-tech jobs of the future.

In the international marketplace, the United States has lost ground. Experts agree that one reason for this decline has been our failure to produce enough students with sufficient skills in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Statistics are staggering: Only 43 percent of 2010 U.S. high school graduates are ready for college-level math. Only 29 percent are ready for college-level science.

Yet, the traditional math and science related-fields are important -- representing 5 percent of the total U.S. workforce, or about 8 million jobs by 2018. It is the second fastest-growing occupational group, second only to health care – which certainly requires high levels of math and science - and contributes to roughly half of all U.S. growth.

All this means that the future is going to be more competitive, not less. We need to give our best and brightest opportunities to grow as far and as fast as they can. But we must also ensure that all today’s students are equipped to thrive in the ever-more challenging world they inherit.

For the sake of our next generation, it’s an investment Congress – and the American people --must make.

Wendy Hawkins is the executive director of the Intel Foundation.

Publication: Education WeekTitle: Global Study Tracks Common Paths to Improving SchoolingDate: December 8th, 2010Author: Stephen SawchukWebsite: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/12/08/14mckinsey.h30.htmlSurvey: McKinsey & Co.

Around the world, school systems whose students have posted gains over time on international exams also appear to have embraced common clusters of interventions at particular phases of their improvement, concludes a report released last week by a prominent international consulting firm.

Such commonalities appear to transcend differences in nationality, size, demographics, and school spending, according to the analysis, which has drawn praise and skepticism from academics who study international comparisons.

Drawing from an analysis of nearly 600 reform strategies instituted across 20 international school systems over a quarter-century, the report by the London-based McKinsey & Co. suggests that school systems seeking to improve could do well by taking cues from the strategies used by those with similar performance trends—rather than trying to appropriate wholesale the techniques of the highest-performing countries.

See specific results here: http://www.edweek.org/media/14mckinsey-c1.pdf

Teachers' Latitude

In general, the report finds that lower-performing school systems with weaker teaching forces, such as the education system now serving the Madhya Pradesh province of India, tend to provide teachers with prescriptive curricula and pedagogical techniques to ease the delivery of lessons and ensure consistency across classrooms and access for all students to achieve basic literacy and numeracy.

But systems that have mastered the basics and are striving for higher levels, like the Long Beach, Calif., district in the late 2000s, gradually give teachers and local schools more say over pedagogy and curriculum, transforming a tight central role into that of a supporting player that encourages local school personnel to use creativity and innovation to get students to reach ever higher.

The report also finds that growth in school systems can occur regardless of their starting point: Both the lowest- and highest-performing systems studied made improvements and narrowed gaps between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, sometimes in as few as six years.

“It’s not the case that we have to wait 10, 15 years in order to see something happen in a school system,” said Mona Mourshed, a partner at McKinsey, during a Web presentation on the report. “It’s also not the case that rising performance means forsaking the achievement gap. Both of these are possible simultaneously.”

Common Interventions

The McKinsey report comes as the idea of “international benchmarking” education standards in the United States with those in other countries gains prominence. To an expanding base of literature on that topic, the McKinsey report indicates that the success of education interventions depends on when they are deployed, how they are adapted to fit the context of local circumstances, and how leaders go about gaining support for the initiatives.

For the report, McKinsey analysts examined gains on national and international exams since 1980 and identified two groups for study. The first consists of “sustained improvers” with five or more years of academic data points showing improvement, and the second of “promising starts”—developing countries with fewer years of improvement data.

From those groups, the authors selected 20 school systems—some encompassing an entire nation, others states or provinces—to study in depth. The list includes three systems in the United States: Boston; Long Beach, Calif.; and the Aspire Public Schools charter network, in California.

Each system’s results on various international and national assessments, between 1995 and 2007, were translated onto a common scale. They were used to categorize systems’ performance trends in four stages: “poor to fair,” “fair to good,” “good to great,” and “great to excellent.”

Finally, the analysis catalogued a total of 575 interventions instituted in the 20 school systems during the period of their improvement and conducted field interviews with their leaders.

The researchers found that interventions fell in six different areas: revising curriculum and standards; establishing an appropriate reward and compensation structure for educators; building educators’ technical skills; assessing students; establishing data systems; and implementing laws and policies supporting the interventions. But the way those interventions manifested themselves at each performance stage differed.

For instance, systems that were poor-to-fair tended to rely on incentive funding for teachers and schools for meeting high performance targets. Those systems in the midlevel ranges had teacher salaries at a level comparable to gross domestic product per capita, while those in the great-to-excellent range tended to have salaries that far outpaced GDP per capita.

Similarly, lower-performing countries tended to use many more interventions based in accountability, like standardized student assessments, but systems in the good-to-great performance category and beyond, even those that had previously had formal accountability systems, reduced their frequency. And teacher evaluations gradually became less standardized as the teaching force got better and as teachers held one another accountable, through collaboration and demonstrations, for helping students to learn.

The report notes that context of the school system helps to shape the successful implementation of improvement strategies.

All the school systems studied share a focus on achievement data, for instance. But whereas the U.S. school systems and those in the United Kingdom and Canada have tended to make performance targets public, Asian and Eastern European countries tend to share data privately with schools for improvement.

The analysis also indicates that stable leadership appears to be a factor in all the improvements. Among the countries studied, education leaders oversaw reforms for an average of six years, at least two years longer than the average U.S. superintendent’s tenure.

Scale Concerns

Academics who have written about international benchmarking raised some questions about the universal-scale methodology used in the report. Created by Stanford University economist Eric A. Hanushek, the methodology has been used for other, less-extensive analyses of performance.

“I respect what they try to do in the study and I think it is certainly a move in the right direction as opposed to just saying [to education leaders], ‘Be like Finland; be like Singapore,’ ” said William H. Schmidt, a professor of statistics and education at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, who has compared content standards across countries. “But combining different subject matters across different tests and time points just poses enormous psychometric problems.”

Tony Wagner, an Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard University, raised questions about the different content of the exams on which the performance-trend data points were selected.

For instance, PISA consists mainly of open-ended questions designed to measure critical thinking, while the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, better known as TIMSS, is based heavily on multiple-choice questions that measure factual recall.

“When you dig deeper to figure out what’s being measured and how students are being motivated to succeed, there’s a difference of night and day in these systems,” said Mr. Wagner, who has written extensively about international comparisons.

McKinsey officials, however, said the universal-scale methodology used a control group of “mature and stable” systems to ensure accuracy.

The report’s implications for the United States are hard to tease out, given the country’s size, scope, generally decentralized nature, and disparities in income and population from district to district. Its more than 14,000 districts likely fall all along the report’s improvement continuum.

In the meantime, the nine-year-old No Child Left Behind Act, which requires states and districts to administer tests in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and intervene in low-performing schools, has been awaiting a rewrite since 2007. Proponents say that law has increased pressure to pay attention to neglected groups, but critics contend it has led to a focus on basic skills.