IAP NEWS UPDATEJanuary 6th – February 3rd 2012

Publication: Education WeekTitle: U.S. Education Pressured by International ComparisonsAuthor: Sean CavanaghWebsite: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/01/12/16overview.h31.html

Americans learn a bit more every year about the strengths and shortcomings of the education systems in other countries, thanks to a steady raft of international test data, academic scholarship, and analysis arriving from home and abroad.

Sometimes, what they learn inspires them. Sometimes, it confuses them. And sometimes, to judge from the collective angst on display, it alarms them.

Today, elected officials of all political stripes and advocates for a range of school policies scrutinize the results from international exams and comparisons with the intensity that, a decade ago, would have been reserved for state and local test scores. U.S. policymakers and researchers also study the teaching methods, curricula, and academic programs of high-performing countries for lessons that can be applied to American schools—and the influence of those foreign-born ideas can be seen in many nationwide, state, and district policies.

Many U.S. leaders say that the performance of American students on a handful of high-profile international tests and measurements—while mixed—underscores the weaknesses of the American education system, and foreshadows the serious economic challenges the country will face if it does not improve the skills of its future workforce. Those results show the following:

• American 15-year-olds scored at the international average of industrialized nations in science and reading and below the international average in math on the most recent Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, released last year.

• Although students in the United States scored above the international averages in both 4th and 8th grade math and science, they performed well below high fliers such as Japan and Singapore on the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, which compares developed and nonindustrialized nations.

• U.S. 4th graders topped 22 participating jurisdictions, and were outscored by just 10 of them, on the most recent Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, or PIRLS, though American students' literacy marks stagnated from the previous exam.

• Americans account for more than a quarter of the college-educated workforce among nations that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Group of Twenty, or G-20—the largest representation of any such country by far, according to OECD data released last year. But the United States' share of the global college-educated population fell from about 36 percent among 55- to 64-year-olds to 21 percent among 25- to 34-year-olds, partly because of the surging college attainment in foreign countries, such as China.

Driving the Debate

Such numbers dismay many American policymakers, who say the country needs to raise its performance, or risk becoming a less prosperous, less productive, and less innovative nation.

"It is an undeniable fact that countries who outeducate us today are going to outcompete us tomorrow," President Barack Obama declared at a White House event in September. "If we're serious about building an economy that lasts—an economy in which hard work pays off with the opportunity for solid middle-class jobs—we've got to get serious about education."

Elected officials and advocates routinely cite the United States' mediocre standing, and what they know of the educational practices of high-performing nations, to gird their arguments for their favored changes to American education—from encouraging greater parental involvement to revamping school curricula and standards to paying teachers more.

But analysts and researchers caution that while self-examination is a good thing, American elected officials and educators need to take a nuanced approach to interpreting test scores and lessons from abroad, one that considers the full basket of educational, societal, and cultural factors that shape school practices in top-performing nations, and in the United States.

"Education is a complex system," says James Stigler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied teaching methods in Japan. "You can't take one element or one variable out of a system and expect it to work. We need to understand how different countries are producing results, but we need to be sophisticated in how we interpret those results."

Still, frustration with the United States' lackluster showing on international tests is widespread and bipartisan. Elected officials at all levels routinely point to high scores turned in by such nations as Finland and South Korea—and economic growth in countries such as China and India—as evidence of American complacency, and the urgent need to improve.

"[O]ur nation is falling behind," said U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., in arguing in 2010 in favor of legislation designed to strengthen K-12 and college math and science. The goal, said the former U.S. secretary of education, is "to preserve America's brainpower advantage, so our high-paying jobs don't head overseas to places like India and China."

Specific policies in high-performing nations are also held up as worthy of emulation. Both President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, for instance, have noted that South Korea has a significantly longer average school year than the United States does, and have argued that American students' academic skills tend to wither during long summer breaks.

At a forum on international education held last year, Duncan said that while U.S. officials should be selective in weighing the merits of high-performing countries' education systems, they also should be aggressive consumers of what works well abroad.

"Every nation, of course, has unique characteristics of its teaching profession, culture, and education system, which may not be directly analogous to the U.S.," the secretary said at the event, sponsored by the National Center on Education and the Economy, in Washington. "But to the extent that the U.S. can copy or adapt, and beg, borrow, and steal, successful practices from other nations, we should do so."

In one sense, American policymakers' interest in other countries' education systems is easy to understand, because the comparison with those nations—at least on a superficial level—is as easy as looking at a test score.

Concerns about American students' performance on the international stage date back decades. Over time those worries have become increasingly intertwined with a belief that mediocre scores on nation-by-nation comparisons point to a loss by the United States of its overall economic edge.

That belief has roots that can be traced back at least as far as the Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, and it echoed through the 1983 publication of the influential report "A Nation at Risk," which famously warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity" in American education that threatened "our very future as a nation and a people." The theme resounded with the 2005 release of "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," a report published by the congressionally chartered National Academies that argued that U.S. economic growth would depend in large part on the capabilities of the education system. That report was widely circulated on Capitol Hill and in the business community.

'Decline' Dispute

Yet the "nation at risk" rhetoric has always struck some educators as unduly pessimistic, given the relatively modest changes in the arc of U.S. performance on international measures over time. To the extent that the United States' educational standing has slipped, it is largely because less-populated nations and countries that are surging economically have made faster gains, according to many analysts' reading of those results.

From a statistical standpoint, "there is no decline on any measure that we have for the United States," says Andreas Schleicher, the head of education indicators and analysis for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based group that administers PISA. The issue, he says, is that "the rate of improvement in other countries, in terms of getting more people into school and educating them well, is steeper."

For instance, the percentage of Americans who have completed at least a high school education has risen over time to 88 percent from 78 percent, according to the "Education at a Glance" report released last year by the OECD. The report compared the attainment of adults born between 1975-84 and those born a generation earlier, between 1933-42. But the data also show that while the United States has improved in that category, countries that were once behind now meet or exceed the U.S. standard. Some of them, such as Finland and South Korea, have "transformed themselves from countries where only a minority of students graduated from secondary school to those where virtually all students do," OECD officials noted in the report.

The United States, in fact, has a history of performing poorly on international comparisons, which belies the notion that the skills of the country's students have eroded, says Tom

Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in Washington. In 1964, three decades before the inaugural TIMSS, the United States participated in the First International Mathematics Study, along with 11 other nations, including Australia, England, Finland, and Japan. The United States' 13-year-olds finished 11th out of 12 countries taking part, beating only Sweden, according to an analysis by Loveless, who examined those results in a report published in 2010.

The idea that the United States has slipped educationally from a position of global dominance is a "myth," he says. Much of the press coverage following the release of the 1964 math results carried the same worried tone that TIMSS and PISA inspire today, notes Loveless, who went back and read those stories.

"People assumed our schools were number one, and they weren't," says Loveless. Unimpressive test scores periodically trigger American anxieties about educational atrophy, he argues, particularly when the U.S. leaders and the public feel challenged—as they did after the launch of Sputnik, or during Japan's rapid economic expansion of the 1970s and 1980s. The tendency is "to look at the American school system, and say, 'Something's wrong'," Loveless observes.

Reason for Worry

Others say there are clear reasons to be worried about the United States' uninspiring international test results and their potential implications for the economy.

Economists have long seen a connection between the strength of nations' education systems and their long-term economic prosperity. While myriad factors, including the stability of a country's economic, political, and legal institutions, can contribute to national productivity, researchers say, an educated workforce is widely regarded as critical to producing innovations and allowing businesses to make use of them.

Over the past few years, some scholars have sought to draw a specific link between the kinds of academic skills that can be measured on international tests and nations' economic growth.

One of those researchers is Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford University. While the average number of years of education has often been cited as an indicator of a country's "human capital," Hanushek and others have found cognitive skills in math and science have a stronger effect on a nation's economic growth rate in later years, particularly if the country has a relatively open economy.

By Hanushek's calculation, if the United States managed to boost its math performance by 40 points on PISA, to reach roughly the level of Canada, it would add between 7 percent and 11 percent, on average annually, to the nation's gross domestic product over the next 80 years. Projected over that time period, the increased productivity would amount to pumping an additional $75 trillion into the U.S. economy, as measured in present value, or the current worth of the future additions to GDP. The United States' current annual GDP, by comparison, is roughly $15 trillion.

"We face very, very different economic futures, depending on how our schools develop," Hanushek says. "Other nations are investing in the education of their populations, and

they're doing other things to make their economies better. We're no longer going to be able to assume we're at the forefront of the world, in terms of our economy."

Others, such as Hal Salzman, an economist at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, N.J., say there's little evidence that economic growth of that magnitude would result from improved educational performance. The link between the educational and economic prowess of nations, as measured by tests like TIMSS and PISA, says Salzman, is tenuous at best. The intense focus on that connection among U.S. business and political leaders in recent years "leads to a certain distortion about where to focus" efforts to improve education and workforce skills, he says.

"If the reason we're concerned about education is economic competition," Salzman says, it's worth noting that "a large portion of those high-ranking countries are economic train wrecks."

Salzman and Lindsay Lowell, of Georgetown University, in Washington, are the authors of research arguing that, despite concerns that the United States' K-12 system is not producing students with sufficient skills, specifically in math and science, American schools are in fact meeting and exceeding the current need of the U.S. labor market in that area. They examined data going back to the 1970s and concluded that the flow of students with math- and science-related skills who are choosing and staying in those fields is strong and has gotten stronger over time.

The exception was among high-achieving students, who appear to be choosing other careers—not because they lack the necessary skills, but because they seem to regard math- and science-focused careers as less attractive than other options, such as business, health care, and the law, the authors conclude.

Some observers suggest the United States is not keeping pace with the earlier educational standards it set, which proved so essential to its economic prosperity. In the 2008 book The Race Between Education and Technology, Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz argue that for most of the 20th century, advances in technology boosted the demand for educated American workers, and U.S. education kept pace, resulting in strong economic growth, shared across income groups.

But beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, educational attainment, as measured by high school and college completion, began to lag behind technological advances in that "race," they say, which led to reduced economic growth and to rising inequality. Among the factors contributing to that imbalance: large number of high school dropouts, students graduating from the secondary system without the preparation to succeed in college, and increased financial barriers to college, Goldin explains.

When the workforce cannot keep up with demands for skills, "those who can make the adjustments as well as those who gain the new skills are rewarded," Goldin and Katz write. "Others are left behind."

One of the persistent questions American policymakers ask: Should the United States be more concerned about raising the performance of high achievers than with raising the achievement of the vast pool of students performing at relatively low levels, by the measure of tests like TIMSS and PISA?

But some of the countries and jurisdictions that outperform the United States on various measures, such as Canada and Japan on the PISA reading scores, also have smaller gaps between their highest- and lowest-performing students, suggesting that their education systems do a better job in challenging students at all levels. The takeaway is that "you don't have to compromise equity to achieve high levels of success," says Schleicher, of the OECD.

Hanushek, who has described the question as a debate over "rocket scientists" vs. "education for all," has done research suggesting that improving the skills of students at the basic level and improving those of elite achievers are equally important to economic growth.

The Role of Culture

One of the most common mistakes that policymakers make in interpreting international test results is focusing on one aspect of high-performing nations' school systems and assuming it can be replicated wholesale in American schools, many analysts say.

Loveless, of the Brookings Institution, sees that tendency in the view that national standards are driving high performance in high-achieving countries, when in fact many low-scorers have national standards, too. Advocates of various policies tend to "seize on one country, one policy, and say that's why the test scores are going up, when in fact it was a dozen things," Loveless argues. "You have to look at policies over the full distribution of countries, if you want to get lessons."

Any single-policy analysis also fails to take into account how great a role cultural norms play in shaping the effectiveness of educational strategies in high-performing nations, others say. For instance, when U.S. officials look at teaching methods in Japan, they're often surprised by the extent to which educators in that country allow students to struggle with problems, rather than help them, says Stigler, of UCLA. Americans look at those methods and wonder why U.S. instruction isn't modeled on that tough-love approach.

But it's not that simple. Japanese cultural norms—transmitted by parents and others—create different expectations for what goes on in the classroom, Stigler says.

American students "aren't socialized to struggle hard," says Stigler. "They're socialized to put their hands up and say, 'I don't know.' " While a Japanese parent would be inclined to tell a child's teacher, "Thank you for helping my kid struggle," Stigler suggests, an American parent might be more inclined to say, "Why are you torturing my kid?"

Education, he says, "is a cultural system, and cultural systems evolve over time to satisfy the needs of a whole range of forces."

Shared Traits

Even so, some researchers see a number of shared characteristics among top-performing education systems. For example, high-scoring countries tend to recruit and retain talented teachers and help them continually improve their classroom skills; they also combine clear, ambitious academic standards for all students with a strong degree of autonomy at the local school level, argues Schleicher, basing his analysis on OECD data.

By looking at those characteristics, "you can actually go pretty far in understanding what makes education systems succeed, at least in the policy area, and derive a lot of lessons from them," he says.

Where, then, should U.S. policymakers direct their attention in gleaning lessons from abroad? Some say that the most important educational lessons are found at home, in Massachusetts and Minnesota, which have participated as individual states in the TIMSS and scored exceptionally well. Those states have roughly the population of high-performers like Finland and Singapore, those observers argue, and focusing on them removes many of the cultural and political variables across countries.

Others say that one of the keys to understanding the success of high-performing countries is not to focus on specific policies, but on the quality of the work the United States puts into implementing policies that fit within its educational, political, and cultural context.

A number of scholars who have studied Asian nations' educational success, for example, say those countries do a much better job than the United States of improving and revising their policies in curriculum, instruction, and other areas, rather than simply focusing on the immediate results they bring.

"They really worry about quality and implementation," says Alan Ginsburg, a retired director of policy and program studies at the U.S. Department of Education, who has examined Asian education systems. "That's time-consuming. We don't do that. …We worry much more about outcomes than about how to get there."

Stigler, the UCLA researcher, agrees. He cites the effect of an "improvement culture" that infuses Japan's education system—one that requires patience and attention to detail in putting new policies in place.

"The story of education reform in our country is that things get rolled out very quickly, and there's a lot of variability in how [they] get used," Stigler says. American school leaders "are on a short time frame. They want to know that it will improve results at the end of the year. It takes time and [patience] for that to happen."

Ginsburg says one lesson from high-performing jurisdictions is that U.S. policymakers and researchers should look to new approaches to building core math and science skills among a much broader swath of the student population, rather than just designing and implementing curriculum and instruction for students who are already on a college track.

American schools could do more to integrate algebra, geometry, statistics, and other core competencies across the curriculum—especially in such course areas as career-and-technical education—and give struggling and average performers more time to master those concepts, he argues. That approach would give students an understanding of the practical application of academic work, he says, and it would provide students, especially those who don't go to a four-year college right away, stronger workforce skills.

Too often, U.S. schools promise to make students "career- and college-ready," Ginsburg says, but they end up not ready for either one.

Goldin, the Harvard economist, says gauging what kinds of skills will prove most valuable to U.S. students is difficult, if not impossible. But evidence suggests that students need a

strong educational foundation, without "breaks in the chain," from early education through college, she contends.

It also seems likely that demand will continue for skills that are not easily replaceable, such as analytical faculties, and the ability to think abstractly across disciplines, she says.

Such skills, Goldin points out, are not always easy to test, internationally or domestically—or to develop in the classroom.

"It's much easier to teach with a textbook," she says. But "life is not about answering questions correctly. That's why it's difficult to teach it right."

Looking Beyond U.S. Borders

The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center asked state education agency officials whether their agency uses international education comparisons to inform reform efforts. Officials in 29 states indicated that their agency uses such comparisons. In 21 states and the District of Columbia, respondents said they are not currently using education data from other nations as a policy resource.

Using Global Comparisons

Those states indicating that they used international comparisons often cited a need to align student preparation with the demands of a global economy and learn from ”best practices“ in high-achieving nations. In describing the specific ways in which they use data from other nations, states most frequently pointed to the role of international indicators in comparing student achievement and developing academic-content standards.

Of the 29 states using international comparisons for specified purposes:

18 are comparing student data

12 are developing academic content standards

9 are improving assessments and accountability systems

8 are identifying support structures for current and future teachers

5 are establishing performance standards for state assessments

Importing Ideas

Policymakers in the United States have become increasingly keen on the lessons that American schools can draw from foreign nations, particularly those that outperform the United States. Some foreign-born strategies and practices have already worked their way into the American education system, on a small or large scale.

Lesson Study

Since the 1990s, U.S. schools have used or experimented with Japanese “lesson study,” a strategy designed to help improve teachers’ instruction. Known in Japan as jugyou kenkyuu—roughly translated as “lesson research”—the practice asks teachers to plan together, observe each other’s classes, and work to continually test, refine, and improve teaching methods. Florida is supporting schools’ use of lesson study through its $700 million award in the federal Race to the Top competition.

Singapore Math

Originally developed by Singapore’s Ministry of Education, this curriculum has taken hold in many American school districts. It emphasizes extensive coverage of a relatively small number of concepts at early grades, compared with many U.S. math textbooks, and integrates math concepts, such as algebra and geometry, in secondary grade levels. A commercial developer, SingaporeMath.com Inc., says its materials are used in more than 1,700 schools in the United States.

Reading Recovery

This intensive one-to-one tutoring program, which focuses on the lowest-achieving 1st graders, originated in New Zealand in the 1970s and took hold in the United States in the 1980s. An estimated 63,000 students in 1,500 school districts per year receive Reading Recovery, and an estimated 2 million have been served over time, according to the Reading Recovery Council of North America.

Montessori Schools

These schools, which typically group students by age rather than grade, shun formal testing, and encourage students to progress at their own pace, were the creation of Maria Montessori, an Italian physician who founded the first school in Rome in 1907. The concept migrated to the United States, where interest surged, by some accounts, in the 1950s. Known mostly as a private school program, the Montessori concept has spread to public education.

International Baccalaureate

This demanding, college-prep curriculum, which places a heavy emphasis on international language and culture, was founded in 1968 in Geneva, Switzerland. Today the program, which has expanded to elementary and middle schools, is in place in about 1,300 schools in the United States and is the best-known alternative to another college-prep curriculum, the College Board-directed Advanced Placement program.

School Inspections

Some U.S. districts, including those in New York City, Charlotte, N.C., and Sacramento, Calif., have recently experimented with the use of formal school inspections to help gauge academic quality. National inspection systems have long been in place in some nations, including England, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Singapore.

Publication: Education Week

Title: Teacher Quality, Status Entwined Among Top-Performing NationsAuthor: Stephen SawchukWebsite: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/01/12/16teachers.h31.html

One of the most troubling things that the 2010 National Teacher of the Year, Sarah Brown Wessling, hears about her profession can be summed up in a single observation: the idea that she and other top-performing colleagues are "just" teachers.

The word "just" serves as a reminder of a subtle mindset among some in the United States that a career in K-12 teaching, while considered noble, is nevertheless somehow seen as beneath the capacity of talented young men and women.

"People go into teaching because they are committed to young people, because they are incredible communicators or experts in their field," says Wessling, a high school English teacher in Johnston, Iowa. "But many people in our country see teaching as though it's a second-choice profession."

It is a sentiment that is virtually unheard of among countries such as Finland, Singapore, and South Korea that top the charts on high-profile international assessments.

"Teaching is a similar career to a lawyer or a medical doctor. It's an academic profession, an independent profession," says Jari Lavonen, the director of teacher education at the University of Helsinki, in Finland. "There is lots of decisionmaking at the local level, and teachers enjoy freedom and trust. They work as real experts."

Similarly, in territories within other nations that have led the pack on improvements to their systems, such as Canada's Ontario province, leaders credit investment in their teaching force as an important reason for their improvements.

"The key idea to get better student performance was to help teachers to get better, and to expect them to get better," says Ben Levin, a former deputy minister of education in Ontario, who helped oversee reforms begun in 2004. "But we wanted an approach that was respectful of teachers as professional educators, as opposed to assuming that they needed to be slapped into line in some kind of way."

Even nations such as Chile that still have a steep hill to climb to improve student learning have focused policy efforts on improvements to the profession and are beginning to see dividends from those undertakings.

The specific strategies deployed by these countries to raise the status of the profession have been filtered through their own political and cultural contexts, but several common themes stand out. They include a movement toward rigorous recruitment and training regimes, more competitive teacher salaries, and support systems to help teachers perfect their craft.

"The combination of better working conditions, higher pay, and higher share of pay based on effort and performance all work together to attract people who are smart,

hard-working, and want to make a difference," says Emiliana Vegas, the lead economist for education at the World Bank, in Washington.

In short, successful nations have made teaching a respected and supported profession, if perhaps not a lucrative one.

There's little disagreement that U.S. educators deserve a similar degree of prestige, but the translation of that lofty goal into effective public policy is anything but clear—and the policy levers at hand are not easy ones to pull.

"The institutional structure for training, employment, and compensation in medicine [in the United States] is radically different from K-12 education," notes Dan Goldhaber, an associate professor of economics at the University of Washington Bothell campus, who has studied the structure of the teacher labor market. "[The medical profession] has higher starting salaries, higher eventual salaries, much more rigorous selection up front, and many fewer training institutions. ... I don't think there's any short-term fix, bottom line."

A Different Landscape

One of the key challenges to building on the lessons from international practices lies in the fact that the United States' teacher-quality system differs so greatly from that of most other nations. To name just one significant difference, the sheer size of the United States, coupled with its federated structure, has produced a complex melange of 50 different licensing and preparation systems across some 1,400 training institutions. Even accounting for population differences, that's almost three times the proportion of such institutions in Canada or Finland.

And unlike smaller, centralized nations, the United States trains nearly all interested aspirants to teaching and filters out only a small percentage. Those filters consist both of formal ones, such as the licensure, certification, and evaluation systems states have created, as well as informal ones, such as high teacher turnover, particularly at the lowest-performing schools.

Alternative-certification programs, meanwhile, have sprung up partly to meet market needs in shortage subjects or locations. Some of them, like the Teach For America program, are among the most prestigious and selective routes to teaching in the nation. Yet teachers note that the nation's patchwork selection system carries a downside.

"When I'm driving to the airport and see a sign saying, 'Become a teacher in six weeks,' I don't think that sends a message that teaching is a profession," says Wessling, the Teacher of the Year. "I think it sends the message that we need bodies."

Teacher-quality measures in many top-performing countries begin with a highly selective process, in which candidates are screened closely before entering classrooms, and hiring decisions are closely matched to projected demographic needs.

In its most recent admissions cycle, the University of Helsinki accepted just 7 percent of the approximately 1,700 students who applied to the teaching program, according to Mr. Lavonen. In addition, entry standards to teacher preparation include a review of high school work and a written assessment asking teachers to read and analyze 250 pages of material from academic journals, among other steps.

According to profiles of the country prepared by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, mainly a group of developed nations, teaching is the most popular career for high school graduates in Finland, and training programs typically select only one in 10 applicants from the top quarter of their classes.

By contrast, the United States' elementary-level teachers continue to hold below-average high school grade point averages and SAT scores, despite some recent improvements in those figures. Few teacher-training schools, meanwhile, can boast the selection ratios seen in Finland, and states set generally low entry requirements, including cutoff scores on required licensure exams that frequently fall far below the 50th percentile of test-takers.

Would it be possible to move the needle if the United States' training institutions were to recruit stronger students in the Finland mold? However common sense that proposition, it remains something of a best-guess theory. Studies linking teachers to student-achievement growth have failed to find any "silver bullet" preservice teacher characteristics that consistently predict higher student achievement. Determining who, on the front end, will prove to be an effective teacher remains an imprecise science.

Nevertheless, several clues exist within the data. Specific measures of academic competence, such as high verbal ability and college-entrance-exam scores, do appear to give those who hold them an edge in the classroom in the earlier grades. At the secondary level, math content knowledge also appears to be correlated.

Finally, there is the observation that so many of the highest-performing countries have made rigorous recruiting of teachers with strong academic qualifications one of their guiding educational principles. "It's difficult to imagine that we wouldn't be in a better place with the education system if we had more-capable teacher-candidates to choose from," Goldhaber says.

A handful of teacher-training programs in the United States have embraced a similar theory of action. Two years ago, Indiana University began a system whereby those high school students with a minimum of 1100 on their SAT and a 3.7 GPA who are interested in becoming teachers can be directly admitted to its education school. (Typically, Indiana University undergraduates must have a 2.5 GPA in their lower-division courses to enter the school.)

About a third of those who enter undergraduate teacher preparation now come through the direct-admit program, said Gerardo M. Gonzalez, the dean of the school of education. And the program has had the added benefit of making the school more prestigious.

"High-quality students want to be with high-quality students," Gonzalez says. "We're competing for the best students with every field."

Yet obstacles, both cultural and financial, have served to slow widespread adoption of more-rigorous recruiting endeavors in the United States.

"I think there's a lot of validity to the argument that when you raise standards, you attract better-quality students," Gonzalez says. "But there's also, I think, the understanding that, in many cases, institutions are working against significant social and professional attitudes, and frankly, the reality of the marketplace. They will not always be able to recruit the kinds of students they want to because of the competition."

The incentives built into an increasingly tuition-based higher education system also pose challenges, teacher educators acknowledge.

"It is profitable, certainly in the for-profit realm, to produce as many teachers as you can," says Arthur E. Wise, the president emeritus of the Washington-based National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. "Frankly, [that incentive] exists even in the public sector, because training a teacher is still pretty cheap, the way it's practiced."

Best and Brightest

In the United States, the idea of recruiting the best and brightest is complicated by the sheer numbers of candidates needed for a professional workforce the size of public K-12 teaching, which counts about 3.2 million individuals in all.

School districts face the challenge of balancing increased selectivity with the need to recruit enough teachers to meet demand. That is especially true in higher-poverty schools and districts, where turnover is typically higher and recruiting more difficult, notes Matthew Di Carlo, a senior fellow at the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank that receives support from the American Federation of Teachers.

"You can't quite recruit teachers the way you recruit Navy SEALS or traders at Goldman Sachs. Those fields require comparatively fewer candidates," Di Carlo says. "We need to be careful about applying this small-scale thinking to a very large, diverse, and geographically dispersed labor market."

One of the particular downsides to the teaching profession in the United States, economists point out, is the relatively low starting compensation relative to comparable occupations, and the many years it takes to achieve a maximum salary. And while few prospective teachers go into the profession for the salary, wages in the U.S. are generally associated with prestige.

OECD data show that U.S. salaries for teachers with 15 years of experience are, on average, just 60 percent of the full-time earnings for 24 to 64 year olds with college educations, compared with 80 percent in other OECD countries. Meanwhile, studies suggest that, in the United States, the most highly skilled college graduates who select

teaching over other occupations for which they're qualified can forfeit thousands of dollars in wages.

Here again, international practices provide stimulating food for thought. In a relatively short time frame, Chile's performance on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, an international exam, improved enough to surpass its South American neighbors'. Though not a top-performing country, it now approaches the mean score of all countries affiliated with the OECD.

Chile's dramatic improvements are thought to be partly related to its investments in salaries, which were gradually tied to reforms, including a new teacher-evaluation system in 1996, and later, several bonus-pay programs, the World Bank's Vegas says.

Between 1990 and 2007, the country raised teacher salaries by more than 150 percent; during that period, applications to teacher education programs increased by 39 percent, and the average score of entrance exams increased by 60 percent, according to research on the country's labor force.

As for the United States, a market-research analysis by McKinsey & Co., a New York City-headquartered consultancy, concluded that if teacher salaries here began at $65,000 and maxed out at $150,000, the number of high-performing college graduates who would consider the profession would rise from 14 percent to 68 percent. (Beginning teacher salaries in the United States average about $39,000 and rise to $67,000, the report states.)

Raises for all teachers could be prohibitively expensive in the United States, given its current fiscal state. The alternative approach—salary differentiation targeted to specifics at certain career milestones, subject taught, performance, or other criteria—has won the support of economists, who view the nation's current compensation system as too flat and inefficient.

"You can't repeal the laws of supply and demand, however much you think you can," says Michael Podgursky, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri, in Columbia, who urges, for instance, higher pay for math and science educators. "The kind of skills these teachers have demands a market price."

Such efforts have traditionally been frowned on by teachers' unions. But several new experiments, in cities such as Pittsburgh and Baltimore, are beginning to restructure teachers' base compensation to identify top-performers, and those plans have been approved by the local unions.

The prestige associated with the teaching profession, as many teachers volubly remind policymakers, comes from more than just higher salaries. Teachers enter the profession for its intrinsic rewards, such as influencing young people. Their reasons for leaving the profession often have to do with feeling as though factors outside their control are impinging on that goal.

Research on teacher mobility, for instance, shows that teachers' decisions about whether to stay in a specific school are more strongly linked to working conditions, including the quality of their principal, as well as characteristics of the student body, than to their salaries.

In Wessling's view, one of the biggest differences between teaching and high-prestige professions such as medicine is the perceived lack of trust in educators and absence of professional autonomy in schools.

Nurses and doctors are vested with the power to collaborate and are trusted to diagnose and solve problems; teachers, by contrast, often work in isolation, and the profession in general offers few opportunities for leadership or advancement, she notes.

"The culture of schools is really powerful," Wessling says. "Amazing teachers can come into a school, but if that culture is so stifling, all their creativity can go unused."

Many of the highest-performing systems have gradually helped schools and educators build their skills, but without a strict, top-down approach. It is the key lesson from Ontario, according to comparative case studies conducted by analysts for the OECD.

Beginning in 2003, the province's education ministers began crafting reforms to raise students' literacy and numeracy skills. They chose not to use an approach that, for example, required specific time allotments for certain reading activities, fearing that the best teachers would find such an approach off-putting. Instead, the province's education leaders convened teams of expert researchers on those topics to build capacity in each school, says Levin, the former deputy education minister.

"We emphasized consistency of practice around classrooms and did a lot of work to create teams of teachers in the schools," he says. "You get commitment to the practices because teachers believe in it. It's about building people's sense of professional commitment and skills."

The percentage of students reaching basic reading and math goals in the province has risen from 55 percent to about 70 percent since 2004. Importantly, the changes also appear to have stemmed a teacher shortage by making the profession more appealing, Mr. Levin says.

Opportunities to improve one's craft are better integrated into the school day in several other top-performing countries, too. Teachers in OECD countries spend 700 hours a year, on average, engaged in face-to-face instruction of students; in South Korea and Finland, where much of the school day is spent planning and refining lessons with colleagues, that figure drops to 600 hours. Teachers in the United States, by contrast, average about 1,100 hours a year.

Countries such as Singapore couple professional development with a career ladder, so that teachers identified as being especially effective are given opportunities to advance to positions in which they are given formal responsibility for coaching and helping colleagues improve.

Take, for example, Japan and China's Shanghai province. They use "lesson study" as a form of professional development. Teachers watch a colleague teach a lesson and then meet as a group to discuss ways in which it could have been strengthened. In such a system, teachers whose skills fall behind both have incentives to improve and higher-skilled role models to emulate.

The McKinsey group has identified a handful of school systems in the United States that have developed similar practices around professional development, including the Long Beach, Calif., district.

Current Efforts

Interest in teacher-quality policy in the United States has increased considerably under the Obama administration, which has put it at the front of the agenda.

The administration has emphasized changes to teacher-evaluation systems as the central component for improving teaching, its theory holding that establishing common definitions of good teaching and measuring performance will help knit together other aspects of the profession. For instance, such systems could identify top-performers for promotion or extra pay, help improve the relevancy of professional development, and identify which teachers should be counseled out of the profession. A handful of districts, including Hillsborough County, Fla.; Pittsburgh; and New Haven, Conn., are beginning to institute these systems.

Some scholars, such as Goldhaber of the University of Washington, see promise in the movement toward improved teacher evaluation. He believes that such initiatives could build constructively on the nation's back-ended teacher-selection system. Research suggests, for instance, that teaching performance in the first few years on the job is a significant predictor of future performance.

The evaluations could be tied to other ideas to boost the profession's prestige, such as a national teaching certificate to recognize those identified as being especially effective, he said.

"The fact that we have 50 different licensing regimes makes a teaching credential less valuable because it's less portable," Goldhaber says.

Yet observers say many nuanced issues remain to be worked out before evaluations can effectively be used to improve teacher performance.

"The design and implementation of new teacher evaluations—what they consist of, how they are used, and whether the results are presented to teachers in a useful manner, will determine their success or failure," says Di Carlo of the Shanker Institute, who has blogged on a number of occasions about those issues. "I'm concerned that these details are taking a back seat, when they should be driving the process and debate."

The move toward incorporating student test scores into evaluations has been hugely controversial in the United States, and one where there is little international precedent. Though other nations do look at student work and some, such as Singapore, review student scores, standardized tests generally receive less weight than other sources of information, including parent surveys, inspections, and peer review. Indeed, teacher evaluation is generally broader in scope and less formalized in countries where much professional accountability comes from colleagues rather than outside monitors.

For Randi Weingarten, the president of the AFT, such examples offer a frustrating contrast.

"We talk about the conclusions from these international reports, but we don't dissect and deconstruct them in a way that follows how they got to those conclusions," she says. "Singapore has embedded professional development in evaluation so it becomes about improving practice. That's something we should learn from."

She contends the evaluation systems currently being created in the United States "are not about board of education responsibility, school superintendent responsibility, student responsibility, or parents' responsibility. They're only about teacher and principal responsibility."

For her part, Teacher of the Year Wessling is unsure where the teacher-evaluation discussion will lead, but she believes that attempts to raise the prestige of the profession will need to be comprehensive—a point of view that reflects the conclusion of most international-comparison studies.

She adds that teachers must play a role in the transformation, both by making their voices heard by those who set policy, and by setting an example in their own schools of how teachers can reshape individual school environments to reflect the professional practices of teachers in the best-performing countries.

After all, she reasons, cultural change begins from within.

"Teachers and educators can't subscribe to this outside perception of what we are," she said. "The responsibility for defining the profession is ours."

Publication: Education WeekTitle: Yardsticks Vary by Nation in Calling Education to AccountAuthor: Erik W. RobelenWebsite: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/01/12/16testing.h31.html

Ten years ago this month, President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, setting the stage for a new—and more aggressive—phase of accountability in American education.

The United States isn't alone in promoting accountability in elementary and secondary education. The notion in recent years has become a global phenomenon among nations looking to improve their school systems.

What accountability practices look like in other countries, however, varies considerably, from publicly reporting school results on assessments to conducting school inspections and administering high-stakes "gateway" exams that play a big role in determining students' academic and career prospects.

Experts say the U.S. approach appears to be something of an outlier, at least as defined in the No Child Left Behind era, with the main focus on grade-by-grade standardized testing that drives an escalating set of sanctions for schools that fail to meet specific achievement targets over time.

"Right now, it's very much an American experiment," says Yong Zhao, an education professor at the University of Oregon who has studied comparative education and is a critic of NCLB testing and accountability provisions. He was a member of the Quality Counts 2012 advisory panel.

At a time when American policymakers are rethinking elements of accountability, and amid increased concern about how U.S. students stack up globally, questions arise about how the American approach compares and contrasts with that of other nations and whether there are practices from abroad to consider.

One such possibility: school inspections. A number of countries, such as England, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Singapore, require these external reviews to help gauge academic quality and hold schools accountable for improvement.

Also, as the idea of making student achievement a central element of teacher evaluations appears to be building steam in the United States, experts note that the professional judgments of supervisors and sometimes of peers, rather than test scores, remain the mainstay in most developed nations, including top-achievers. Indeed, some analysts say the most powerful lessons may well come from places like Finland and Singapore that have taken a comprehensive approach to ramp up the quality of their teaching forces. ("Among Top-Performing Nations, Teacher Quality, Status Entwined," this issue.)

Meanwhile, the main weight of accountability in many industrialized nations tends to fall on students, rather than schools or teachers, as seen through the gateway-exam systems common in Europe and East Asia.

"We go very heavy on school accountability," says Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. "The rest of the world is fairly light on that but is much heavier on student accountability, where they hold students accountable for what they're supposed to know, and there are consequences attached to that, such as the track or stream they're placed into."

Although a gateway system may not be deemed politically feasible or desirable in the United States, some observers suggest it's worth exploring ways to foster more student accountability.

The design of educational accountability in the United States has long been the subject of fierce debate, especially in the years since the NCLB law's enactment. A central concern is the perceived rigidity of the law's mandates for identifying low-performing schools and the steps required to intervene, including corrective actions and restructuring that may involve removing teachers or converting to a charter school.

In addition, many educators and analysts say U.S. policymakers rely too heavily on standardized tests to measure student learning and school quality. The pushback is especially pronounced given the widespread belief that the tests most states administer for accountability purposes under the law provide limited information on student achievement.

Daniel Koretz, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, laments the intense "weight and faith given to test scores" in the United States.

"You generally don't find people [in other countries] saying, 'We're going to impose a 90-minute math exam and we're going to evaluate a school based on that,' " he says.

Although U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has made clear that he sees testing as a vital ingredient to accountability, he has pushed to improve the quality of assessments used for that purpose, saying the nation must move beyond "fill-in-the-bubble" tests that measure basic skills.

Fueled by more than $350 million from the federal Race to the Top program, two state consortia are developing common assessments—pegged to the common standards in English/language arts and math recently adopted by most states—intended to be more rigorous and to better evaluate learning.

Global Outlier

Speaking at a global education forum last year, Duncan said the work to devise strong common standards and aligned assessments reflects a "sea change" in American education in line with top-achieving countries. The new exams, he said, "will test higher-order thinking skills, much like the high-quality assessments used overseas."

Duncan observed: "High-performing nations may differ on how they assess learning. Yet every top-performer is using data in one form or another to inform instruction and to monitor and improve performance."

Some key aspects of U.S. federal policy on testing and accountability appear to be unusual in the global sphere. For one, analysts say that national or state standardized tests typically occur far less often overseas than is required under the NCLB law, which calls for annual testing in grades 3-8 and once again in high school.

Another apparent outlier is the U.S. mandate to disaggregate performance data at the school level by student subgroups, including race, ethnicity, and income status.

"I don't know of any other countries that do that," says Sir Michael Barber, a former top education adviser to then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair and a student of education globally. "Given the history of race and civil rights in the United States, I think that is unusual, and I personally think it is important. It really puts the [achievement] gaps on the agenda."

Many nations do, however, make school-level achievement data publicly available.

Australia, which launched national exams in 2008, recently unveiled a federal website with a snapshot of individual schools, including test results as well as a comparison of any given school's achievement with others that have similar student demographics.

Although analysts say tying penalties to schools based on test scores is unusual, that is not to say nothing happens with struggling schools overseas.

Many nations use test data to "guide intervention, reveal best practices, and identify shared problems ... in order to encourage teachers and schools to develop more supportive and productive learning environments," the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development explains in a 2010 report, "Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education."

"We don't declare our schools to be failing," says Ben Levin, an education professor at the University of Toronto and a former deputy education minister in Ontario. "But we differentiate our support for schools based on their level of performance. ... So if you're in a school that has not very good performance, you're going to get more support both from the district and the province."

In Singapore, notes a 2005 report from the Washington-based American Institutes of Research, schools use a national exam to identify upper-elementary students who struggle in math. Those students receive specialized instruction based on an adapted curriculum, as well as more instruction so that they can cover the same rigorous content, only at a slower pace, the study says. (Singapore also provides financial rewards to schools that show better-than-expected performance on value-added measures of school outcomes, according to the study.)

The United States' closest cousin when it comes to school accountability may well be England, experts say. In addition to publicly reporting achievement data down to the school level, the country sets "floor targets" for schools based on national tests at the end of primary school and again in secondary school, though those results do not take into account student demographics. A school's failure to meet the targets can result in government-mandated intervention and possible takeover, closure, or conversion into a government-managed academy.

(In 2010, about one-quarter of England's primary schools boycotted the exams, according to the BBC, citing concern about pressure to "teach to the test" and frustration with the news media's use of the results to rank schools based on achievement in so-called league tables.)

School Inspections

But England brings another dimension to accountability lacking in the United States: a national school inspection system. Such systems exist in a number of countries, especially in Europe, and in some instances date back more than a century.

Craig D. Jerald, a Washington-based education consultant who recently wrote a report on the English inspectorate, the Office for Standards in Education, Social Services and Skills—known as OFSTED—suggests that this approach may be a promising option for states looking to move beyond a simple reliance on test scores.

"We need to bring expert judgment into school evaluation and accountability, and one way to do that is inspection," he says. "It's a way to handle a multiple-measure approach to evaluating schools. You can either hand that over to a spreadsheet or a trained expert."

Under the English system, inspectors typically visit a school for two days. Schools are rated "outstanding," "good," "satisfactory," or "inadequate." Test data are used in the evaluation, but so are other factors, including classroom observations to determine the quality of instruction. Schools rated inadequate can be placed into "special measures," which involves developing an improvement plan and more regular inspections. If the school fails to improve, more-severe consequences may follow, such as replacing the principal or closing the school.

England last fall revised its inspection framework, amid concern that the inspections have focused on an overly lengthy list of topics. The new framework narrows the scope to four areas: student achievement, teaching and learning, school leadership and management, and standards of behavior and safety. A key objective, OFSTED explained, was for inspectors to spend more time observing classrooms, including listening to children read in primary schools, assessing their progress, and observing student behavior.

At least a few U.S. school systems have recently tried conducting formal inspections, including in New York City, Charlotte, N.C., and Sacramento, Calif.

"We wanted to give a qualitative assessment of a school, and to do that, we developed a highly specific rubric," said Jerry Winkeljohn, the former director of school improvement in the 134,000-student Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, which halted the inspections last year amid budget cuts.

Melanie Ehren, an education researcher at the University of Twente, in Enschede, the Netherlands, who has studied school inspections, said that given the limits of testing, inspections could be a powerful tool for the United States to home in on "instructional quality." Given the expense involved, she said, a state might consider only visiting struggling schools or those deemed at risk of falling behind. In fact, her country just instituted such a policy for "risk-based" inspections as a cost-saving measure, she said.

Use of Testing

Experts say one core dimension of accountability lacking in the United States is the use of high-stakes, government-sponsored gateway exams.

"Virtually all high-performing countries have a system of gateways marking the key transition points," such as from basic to upper-secondary education and from upper-secondary education to university, writes Marc S. Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, in a 2010 report, "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants."

Such exams, which typically are set to national standards and derived from a national curriculum, create strong incentives for students to work hard and take tough courses, explains Tucker, who served on the advisory board for Quality Counts 2012. "Students who do not do that will not earn the credentials they need to achieve their dream, whether that dream is becoming a brain surgeon or an auto mechanic."

John H. Bishop, a Cornell University professor who has studied gateway exams, said the pressure has ripple effects. "It automatically produces stakes for the teachers, even if there is nothing formal about it," he says.

In a 2005 articleRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader, Bishop noted that the high school exit exams in many countries, typically developed by the education ministry, last two weeks or more, with the curriculum-based tests for each subject lasting three hours or longer. They generally require students to write essays, describe science experiments, and show how they solve multistep mathematics problems, he explained. Also, the exams usually signal different levels of achievement, not just whether a student has met a minimum standard.

But many U.S. analysts are skeptical of importing European- or Asian-style gateway exams.

"I think we have a wonderfully different system," says Marshall "Mike" Smith, a former U.S. deputy secretary of education and a visiting scholar at Harvard University. "We have multiple opportunities for kids to get to college, and I think that's one of our greatest strengths." ("Even With Educated Workforce, U.S. College, Career Issues Loom," this issue.)

Some external exams do count for U.S. students, but there are significant differences. First, nearly half of states have exit exams students must pass to graduate, but analysts say they generally set a low bar. Also, U.S. universities generally don't consider the results in making admissions decisions. The privately run SAT and ACT certainly are high-stakes exams, but those voluntary tests are not directly connected to the curriculum, and analysts say schools feel little responsibility for student performance on them.

In any case, some observers suggest the United States could benefit from more incentives for students to take high school assessments more seriously. In fact, the effort to develop common standards may create a new avenue. A variety of higher education institutions have signaled that they would recognize in making placement decisions the high school exams being crafted by two state consortia as part of the common-standards initiative. They would not determine admission, but would allow students to skip the remedial courses many universities require some students to complete.

"We've always thought about these college-ready assessments as door openers, not door closers, not the same as exit exams," says Michael Cohen, the president of Achieve, a Washington-based group working with the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, a consortium composed of 23 states, plus the District of Columbia.

Tests and Incentives

Meanwhile, teacher evaluation has become a core theme in U.S. discussions of accountability, with a push to base those evaluations—as well as decisions on pay, tenure, or dismissal—at least in part on student test scores.

A 2011 OECD report notes that across the organization's 34 countries, teachers are judged, and in some cases rewarded, on a range of criteria. They include qualifications, how teachers operate in a classroom setting (such as attitudes, expectations, and instructional strategies), and measures of effectiveness. Instruments include standardized assessments, classroom observations, teacher interviews, and parent ratings.

Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's education director, says Singapore has developed an especially "systematic and thoughtful" evaluation system.

"They have a range of criteria that feed into this judgment, including test scores, including professional judgments, including inspections," he said. "There are a lot of things you need to do as a teacher to demonstrate performance."

As an incentive, Singapore awards performance bonuses to teachers.

Some observers also note that informal accountability, where teachers feel a professional responsibility to one another, plays a powerful role in countries such as Singapore and Japan.

Stepping back, many analysts caution against the temptation simply to cherry-pick isolated elements of another nation's education system. There are important structural factors of the U.S. system to keep in mind, not to mention social and cultural differences,and political realities.

That said, a variety of observers say the United States may be reaching a pivotal point on educational accountability, especially with recent efforts, following previous false starts, to revise the NCLB law. With that in mind, this could be a time to test out some different approaches, such as school inspections, says Jerald.

"A certain number of states could try it out to get a sense of whether inspection can translate well in the United States," he says. "It would be a very different approach."

Jerald adds: "After 10 years of a very standardized approach to accountability that has had its advantages and disadvantages, it's time to experiment a little bit."

Publication: OECD educationtodayTitle: Improving equity in education: a critical challenge Author: Ben LevinWebsite: http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.com/2012/01/improving-equity-in-education-critical.html

Improving equity in student outcomes remains a critical challenge for every country in the OECD. Even those countries with the lowest levels of inequity must still be concerned with gaps in outcomes that are not related to students’ motivation and capacity, while in other countries the inequities are so large as to pose a fundamental challenge to ongoing security and prosperity.

The new report, Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools, provides a cogent analysis and many ideas for addressing these issues. The report provides a blueprint for any country that wishes to make genuine progress in promoting equity while also improving quality. These ideas are well grounded in the best available research evidence (though in some cases that evidence is not as strong as one would want, simply due to insufficient research on many important educational issues).

The larger issue is whether countries will have the will and skill to make these changes. As outlined in my 2008 book, ‘How to Change 5000 Schools’, knowing what to do is important but not enough. In many cases we already know what to do, but we do not do it. As a

simple example, consider physical exercise and good eating habits. Everyone knows these are essential to health, yet many people simply do not do them. How much more difficult to make changes in a large and complex institution like a school system!

There are two aspects to effective implementation of the right changes. The first is whether the will exists to make the changes. In many cases the beneficiaries of the status quo will be vocal in opposing anything that they think might diminish the relative advantage of their children. Less streaming is one good example of this situation, often opposed by parents and teachers who benefit from a streamed system despite the strong evidence that this practice is, overall, a bad one. There can be very difficult politics around making some of the changes that would actually benefit students. These conflicts cannot be ignored; they must be faced directly.

Second, and just as important, is whether systems have the capacity to bring real change about. As the report notes, real improvement requires real changes in classroom practice. These do not occur through issuing policy statements, developing new curricula, or even through changes in accountability and testing. Changing people’s daily behavior takes sustained and relentless attention to the way daily work is done. This attention must extend over time and take into account everything the organization does. Very few countries have this capacity. Very few ministries of education have much capacity to lead and support school improvement. Very few school leaders know how to do this work.

Countries that are serious about greater equity – and greater quality – will need to consider carefully how they can support real and lasting implementation of the necessary changes. Luckily, the OECD does offer some examples, in its higher performing countries, of the kinds of organizational measures that are needed to achieve these important goals. We know this can be done; the question is how many countries will make the required effort.

Publication: EdutopiaTitle: International Comparisons in Digital Literacy: What Can We Learn?Author: Anne O’BrienWebsite: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/digital-divide-literacy-resources-anne-obrien

The importance of "digital literacy" for all citizens in the 21st century seems to be universally accepted. The Obama administration has launched DigitalLiteracy. Microsoft has launched a curriculum on digital literacy as well. Educators across the nation are incorporating it into their schools and their teaching.

But I often wonder if what we are doing in the name of "digital literacy" is actually developing the skills that we hope to develop in our students. So when I recently learned that PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment, a worldwide evaluation of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance -- and one of the main sources of concern over the state of reading, math, and science education in the US) had released an overview of performance in digital reading, navigation and computer use in 2009, I was excited. Unlike standardized assessments that measure how well a student can regurgitate knowledge, PISA attempts to measure skills and competencies -- what we hope to impart on students.

Unfortunately, the US did not participate in this section of the assessment. I don't know why (a brief Google search didn't turn up any indication), but I still think that we can learn a lot from those that did take part as we as a nation struggle to figure out how to best impart digital literacy to students.

The Definition

For starters, I appreciate that PISA uses the same definition of "reading literacy" (understanding, using, reflecting on and engaging with written texts in order to achieve one's goals, develop one's knowledge and potential, and participate in society) for both print and digital reading. In doing so, it helps ensure that computer skills are not substituted for digital reading skills. Students who can simply scroll and navigate through web pages and locate simple information are not considered performing well. While such lower-level digital skills are critical to eventually gaining what we as a nation mean when we say "digital literacy," those aren't the skills critical to life in the new century.

The Results

The top performing system in digital reading was Korea, by a significant margin. Also performing above average were New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Iceland, Sweden, and Belgium. In most countries, performance in digital reading and print reading are closely related.

There were a number of additional findings in the report, but a few in particular stood out to me. Not surprisingly, socioeconomic background is associated with digital reading performance. And while overall access to information and communications technology (ICT) has grown significantly in recent years, a digital divide (often linked to socioeconomic background) still exists between and within countries.

But there were a couple surprises here. The biggest? While using a computer at home is related to digital reading performance in all participating countries and economies, computer use at school is not always. The report suggests this means that that "students are developing digital reading literacy mainly by using computers at home to pursue their interests."

What Does This Mean for the US?

Given my limited knowledge of education here in the US, I think that it is unlikely that we would perform much differently than those participated in this study. So for educators and education advocates, there are a number of important policy implications pointed out in the report.

For starters, we need to do more to eliminate the digital divide and ensure disadvantaged students have access to computers at home, not just at school. Some programs, such as Connect to Compete and Internet Essentials, have already started on this work, offering low cost computers and Internet access to families of students that

receive free or reduced price lunch. There are also one-to-one programs that allow students to take home devices. And there are examples like those of the Salesian School in Hong Kong, which provides their old computers to low-income students.

In addition, we must reconsider how we use computers at school. Perhaps computer use in school should look more like computer use at home. The report suggests offering more project-based activities using ICT, particularly those that do not impose constraints on how to accomplish tasks but allow students to explore various approaches to problem-solving (like they do when they use the computer at home) to improve their navigation skills. At the same time, we must develop assignments that improve students' ability to judge whether material is relevant or not, and that help students learn to structure, prioritize, distil and summarize text.

Of course, this vision for learning is much more difficult to enact than simply putting students at a computer to type, make a spreadsheet, or go to three pre-assigned websites. It requires extensive professional learning by educators at all levels, as well as the development of new materials and the purchase of new technology. But if we truly want to ensure that all students have the digital literacy skills required to succeed in the new economy, we have to do it.

Country-Specific Education ArticlesPublication: Helsingin Sanomat (Finland)Title: Newspaper readership shows up in Finnish teens’ PISA results Website: http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Newspaper+readership+shows+up+in+Finnish+teens%E2%80%99+PISA+results/1135270312175

The gap in reading skills of teens with diverse reading habits is almost 1.5 academic years

Active reading of newspapers also shows up in the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures the reading skills of 15-year-olds, along with their mathematics and science literacy. Those Finnish teenagers who were in the habit of reading newspapers several times a week got better scores in the 2009 PISA survey in all fields of the evaluation than did those teens who read newspapers less frequently or not at all. When it comes to reading skills, the difference between the scores of active readers and those of the most passive pupils was so high that it equals the progress made at school in almost a year and a half of full-time education. Compared with the previous PISA study from 2006, the correlation between newspaper readership and reading skills had nevertheless declined to some extent. More significant explanations than newspaper readership for the greater disparity in reading skills are for example the gender of a given pupil, general interest in reading, and the pupil’s socio-economic background. ”Newspaper readership is increasingly often linked with the readers’ general prosperity. One also has to notice that the survey studied only the readership of the printed press in relation to reading skills, without taking into account the fact that young people are largely

transferring from newspapers to the web”, says lecturer Sari Sulkunen from the University of Jyväskylä.The transfer to the web is also confirmed by Nina Karinoja, 16, and Iiris Pärssinen, 16, who go to the Alppila Upper Secondary School. On Wednesday, they came after school to the City Library located in the former Main Post Office in downtown Helsinki. The girls had to study for their physics exam, and in passing, they also skimmed through some newspapers. Both girls’ families subscribe to Helsingin Sanomat. ”Nevertheless, I read news mostly on the web, as it is more convenient. If I had to read newspapers in the morning, it would take a lot of time”, Karinoja comments. ”Besides, the size of newspapers is so uncomfortable. If there is an interesting headline and article, I will read it”, she adds. Pärssinen for her part says that when it comes to paper editions, she mostly reads only advertisements. ”Sports, mainly ice-hockey, and entertainment I also read even in the newspaper”, Pärssinen notes. She also reads the TV-schedules in the printed edition.Even though regular newspaper readership among Finnish teens has declined, it is still above the OECD average. In geographical terms, the most active newspaper readers could be found in the eastern and western parts of Finland, while in the province of Uusimaa, newspaper readership was lower than elsewhere in the country. The survey on newspaper readership and reading skills was commissioned by the Finnish Newspapers Association and conducted by the University of Jyväskylä. The study was based on the PISA results from 2009.

Publication: Deccan Chronicle (India)Title: Why do Chinese students outperform Indians?Author: Arindam ChaudhuriWebsite: http://www.deccanchronicle.com/tabloid/education/why-do-chinese-students-outperform-indians-416

A handful of weeks back, in the ACER PISA test — the OECD’s annual global assessment of students’ skills (for South and South East Asia) — India came second from the bottom defeating Kyrgyzstan while China topped the list. This acts as the final nail in the coffin of India’s dented education system.In spite of arrays of pan-Indian educational programs, India still has not been able to make education inclusive for all. On the contrary, China since the last four decades has been rolling out ambitious plans to revamp their education system.The current Chinese education system extends from the guidelines that Premier Zhou Enlai gave in 1974; guidelines that are popularly known as sì gè xiàn dài huà or the ‘four modernisations’. And what are these? The education system in China revolves around agriculture, industry, technology and defense — that, as per the Chinese, are pivotal for the country’s development.

China today has installed key schools meant for highly academically inclined students. China has adopted a policy of providing nine-year compulsory education to all with a special emphasis on vocational training and higher education.Contrast this with India, where a high-school student is unable to solve a basic mathematical problem or frame a sentence on his own.Moreover, Indian rural schools are mired with problems of infrastructure and above all suffer largely from the curse of teachers’ absenteeism. On an average, more than 30 per cent of teachers are found absent in rural schools.China’s focus on vocational education is also unique. In 2007, China allocated 14 billion yuan to be spent on vocational schools over the span of four years.Vocational education in China, unlike India, is not just confined to manufacturing but encompasses sectors like information technology, tourism and medicine.The government has also introduced projects like the State Project 211, State Project 895 and State Project 111, where special importance is given to top top 100 higher education institutes to enhance the quality of their graduates.Back in 2003, China invited foreign universities to set up campuses; India passed a similar bill seven years later. Foreign universities have elevated the level of education to fantastic levels. Consequently, China is doing exceedingly well in global rankings of late!Even in 2009, when the Paris based OECD, representing 34 countries, released its programme for International Student Assessment, the Shanghai region outperformed everyone else to be the top performer in all academic categories! According to OECD, China’s success is more because of its special emphasis on elite schools (key schools) where one is expected to shine par excellence.In 2003, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) ranking showed that there were 23 Chinese universities amongst 35 featured in total. The top three Chinese universities that entered the top 200 worldwide university ranking included National Taiwan University, Chinese University of Hong Kong and Tsinghua University.There are more on the list of the top 500, including institutes likes Beihang University (formerly known as Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics) and Beijing Normal University, which entered the ranking for the first time.In comparison, India produced a big blank sheet! Not only does India not figure anywhere in ARWU, but it is also invisible in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and QS World University Rankings. India is way behind China in terms of even the number of universities.There are 545 universities in India compared to 2,236 in China. Even in medical colleges, there are about 630 colleges in China compared to 251 in India.The total enrollment in Indian universities is only 4.7 million compared to 11 million in China. The situation was similar some years back too when, in 2004-05, India churned out 464,743 engineering graduates while China produced 600,000 for the same year.According to National Alliance for the Fundamental Right to Education (NAFRE), in about 600,000 Indian villages, the education imparted is only basic, literacy instruction by semi educated (often not even that) teachers! Aping China, India did set up numerous vocational schools.Yet, even now, India has only 5,100 ITIs and 1,745 polytechnics (mostly dysfunctional) compared to China’s 500,000 VETs (Vocational Education and Training institutions).

Clearly, not only is India far behind in the number of quality institutions, but India is decades behind in framing the right kind of policies.China is turning its population into this huge advantage, while we are ruining this massive possibility. Given the burgeoning population that we have, it is an imperative to educate everyone — or else the dividends would soon turn into a liability, if they’ve not already turned into one!