IAP NEWS UPDATEOctober 1st – November 9th, 2012

Publication: Asia SocietyTitle: Equity in Education: How Great Cities Approach ItWebsite: http://asiasociety.org/education/learning-world/equity-education-how-great-cities-approach-it

The highest-performing education systems are those that combine quality with equity. In these systems, the vast majority of students have the opportunity to attain high levels of skills, regardless of their own personal and socioeconomic circumstances. Yet even in the highest-performing systems, a significant number of students fail to achieve a minimum level of education.

The long-term costs of educational failure are high both for individuals and societies. In every country, children of wealthier and better-educated parents do better in school than children of poorer or less-educated parents, but studies by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows that the highest-performing systems reduce the impact of socioeconomic status on educational achievement, creating societies that are open to talent from any source.

Low-performing systems, on the other hand, follow policies and practices that tend to magnify the effects of socioeconomic status. As a result, a segment of the population lacks the skills needed to function productively, driving up health, welfare, and crime costs and weakening social cohesion. In the United States, for example, the large inequalities in educational attainment, including high school dropout rates, cost the society an estimated three trillion dollars, the equivalent of a permanent recession.

Every city in the Global Schools Education Network (GCEN) is working to provide greater equity in its education system, some with more success than others. At the inaugural GCEN Symposium, Andreas Schleicher, Deputy Director of Education at OECD, led off the discussion of equity and quality by reviewing a number of OECD studies that synthesize research and best practices from around the world on these issues.

He emphasized that high-performing systems:

invest and intervene early in children’s learning provide effective support to low-performing and disadvantaged schools eliminate system-level obstacles that can hinder equity

Invest Significantly in Education

Students’ performance on PISA assessments of reading, math, and science at age fifteen is a strong predictor of participation in post-secondary education, which itself leads to better employment prospects, higher lifetime earnings, and greater social and economic contributions to the community. The benefits of effective investments in schooling clearly outweigh the costs. But it is not just a question of more resources—the systems with the highest expenditures are not necessarily the systems with the highest performance—but of more effective use of resources. High-performing systems invest significantly in education through upper secondary school.

Provide Effective Support to Low-Performing Students

Schools serving high concentrations of disadvantaged students often lack the internal capacity to improve, as school leaders, teachers, and the overall classroom and local environments frequently fail to offer a high-quality learning experience. But research from many parts of the world shows that a range of practices at the school level can significantly improve performance in schools serving disadvantaged students. City systems ought to consider the following points:

Attracting strong school leaders, then training and supporting them through mentoring and peer networks are proven key factors in launching a school’s transformation.

Strong school leaders are also essential to developing safe school climates and learning environments, with high expectations and a sense of connectedness between teachers and students.

Attracting, supporting, and retaining high-quality teachers is often difficult in these schools, but is critical to improving learning outcomes for disadvantaged students.

Employing research-based and diversified pedagogical strategies will help schools address the wide variety of learning needs.

Linking schools with parents to increase their engagement, and connecting schools with community organizations, can provide a range of social, medical, and learning supports.

Strong System-level Policies that Promote Equity

These policies include eliminating grade repetition and reforming school structure to postpone tracking until upper secondary school. Both grade repetition and early tracking have been shown to increase inequity and the influence of socioeconomic background on student achievement. Basically, whenever a classroom or school has the ability to hand a lower-achieving student to someone else, it leads to increased inequity. Equity-oriented systems also target additional resources toward the education of lower-income students, such as additional supports for schools with large numbers of disadvantaged students or higher per-pupil allocations for low-income

students. Investments in early childhood education also demonstrate long-term educational benefits, so many systems are expanding their investments in these programs. Allowing parents greater choice of schools is a growing trend, but such mechanisms must be well-designed and carefully managed to avoid creating additional inequities. Finally, to ensure completion of upper secondary education, upper secondary pathways should be designed to emphasize more work-oriented skills. These programs must be equivalent in quality to the traditional academic pathways in order to keep students in school and lead them to post-secondary education and training opportunities.

All of the cities participating in the Global Schools Education Network have put major efforts into promoting equity, and they discussed their successes and continuing challenges. Below are some examples:

Shanghai is the leading educational province in China, and has pioneered reforms in curriculum, assessment, and equity that are being emulated elsewhere in the country. The enormous social transformations in China which have led millions of families to migrate to cities created huge disparities between the quality of schools in central Shanghai and those in the suburbs or outlying areas where migrant families live. For the past ten years, the Shanghai Education Commission has focused on bringing up the bottom-tier schools through a collaborative strategy: Principals and teachers from high-performing schools work with weaker schools on improving management, school culture, and teaching quality. The approaches have included principals running multiple schools; pairing of schools; clustering schools to share teaching resources; and commissioned administration, through which high-performing schools receive funds for a two-year period to improve the performance of weaker schools. In addition, Shanghai has well-developed mechanisms for sharing best practices across schools, such as the teaching and research network through which senior instructors develop and disseminate practice improvements across the city. After a decade, the weaker schools have improved significantly, a development that contributed to Shanghai’s strong performance on PISA in 2009. The city’s current major challenge is a fundamental shift away from the traditional, didactic knowledge transmission education system, driven by public examinations, to a practice that nurtures students’ talents, interests, and creativity.

Toronto began a major education reform in 2004. It focused on increasing mastery of literacy and numeracy in elementary school, reducing the dropout rate from secondary school, reducing the number of low-performing schools, and increasing public confidence in schools. The fundamental approach was to build capacity in schools. Elementary teachers received extensive professional development on key instructional approaches in literacy and numeracy, with literacy coaches employed in many schools. At the secondary level, student success officers and school teams used data to identify potential dropouts and developed individualized educational and support mechanisms to keep the struggling students in school, including the development of special “skills” majors. The city also worked to strengthen school leadership, devising two years of mentoring for new principals; clear learning, development, and evaluation plans; and succession and talent-development plans so that momentum was not lost when principals left. As a result of all these

measures, the reforms increased the proportion of students achieving the sixth-grade standard from fifty-four percent in 2004 to sixty-eight percent by 2010, and had increased high school graduation rates from sixty-eight percent in 2004 to seventy-nine percent in 2009. The reforms also reduced the number of low-performing schools from twenty percent to less than five percent. The attrition rate of new teachers dropped by two-thirds in the same period. Despite these notable successes, achievement gaps still persist for certain groups. As Toronto seeks to transform learning for the 21st century, its key challenges include reducing these achievement gaps and making its increased cultural diversity an asset in promoting a more global outlook.

Denver has made considerable progress in raising the achievement of students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds. Setting high expectations for all students and creating a norm of successful schools has been an important culture change. More resources have been directed to lower-income students and incentives were created for teachers and principals to work in lower-income schools. Magnet schools had been used to attract middle-class families back to the city schools, but these generated new forms of inequity. Now the city works toward strong schools in every neighborhood, with larger enrollment zones to create more heterogeneous schools. Denver has also experimented with charter schools to create competition in areas where schools were weak. This has led to a reduction in the number of low-performing schools, an increase in achievement levels of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and a twelve percent increase in city-school enrollments as middle-class families return to those campuses, especially to elementary schools. Denver’s main ongoing challenges are the need for higher-quality instruction and support for English-language learners (who now constitute forty percent of the student body) and the need to get high-quality teachers into poorer schools.

Melbourne’s performance has flattened over the past decade, in contrast to the fairly high performance of Australian schools in general, and the overall upward trajectory of Asian systems. Melbourne’s education system incorporates three school sectors: government, Catholic, and independent schools. As Melbourne’s population has grown and diversified, so too have the students across these three sectors, with one quarter of all students now from a home where English is a second language. In recognition of the increasingly complex needs of Melbourne’s school communities, extended school hubs now operate across clusters of government schools. These hubs are based on local partnerships between schools, local community groups and members, and government and private sector organizations working to support students and their families’ health, wellbeing, and engagement in learning.

In the 1990s, responsibility for government schools devolved considerably to the local level. The focus of reform efforts for the past ten years across all three sectors has been building workforce capacity in schools and strong system leadership. Within the government sector, the Bastow Institute of Educational Leadership provides courses and other opportunities to develop skills that allow education leaders to work effectively with their communities, to be innovative in driving school improvement, and to support them in making evidence-based decisions. Almost six thousand current and aspiring system leaders have participated in Bastow courses since 2010. The

government system also created the Executive Class Principal (or “super principal”) position. Although few in number (around thirty at present), these “super principals” have made a significant impact. They have turned around student learning outcomes in low-performing schools and created a culture of excellence in some of Melbourne’s newest schools.

The Catholic Education Office Melbourne is also establishing a Leadership Centre to support the development of leaders and practitioners through a range of high-quality professional development programs. These include formally accredited programs and a flagship Masters of Leadership degree in partnership with Australian Catholic University. Independent Schools Victoria has a similar focus on building leadership, with a highly regarded Development Centre. The Centre provides professional learning services for teachers from early childhood to senior secondary, many of which are open to teachers in Catholic and government schools as well. Leadership development is also emphasized, with programs ranging from seminars for early years educators to programs for both new and experienced principals.

Finally, the Victorian government has made a significant investment in a new information management system, the Ultranet. Through the Ultranet, teachers can share best practices, access student information, and offer tools to help plan and deliver curriculum tasks online. Students, meanwhile, can submit work, receive feedback, and track their learning progress. Parents can get detailed and timely information to monitor and support their children’s progress.

Education in Australia is a highly contested space, with a diverse range of interested parties and stakeholders involved in policy and resourcing discussions. As Melbourne’s education system moves forward, a key challenge will be to balance the policy priorities and directions of the federal and state governments, and education community stakeholders.

Chicago, like many large American cities, faces enormous challenges. It has large numbers of low-performing students and although scores on state tests have increased, the standards are so low that little improvement has been achieved over the past ten years. The problems are compounded by demographic change, which has left some schools half-empty and others overcrowded, as well as a large looming budget deficit. The new mayor plans to lengthen the school day, raise standards, and create instructional leadership teams in each school to work with teachers to meet the standards. Chicago does have some successful and rigorous “magnet” or selective enrollment high schools; these have proven very popular and have long waiting lists of eligible students. One current strategy is to create a portfolio of many different types of schools, with each school excelling in a particular area, so that students have many good choices. To accomplish this, Chicago needs a new pipeline of outstanding school principals, since the city needs about 150 new principals each year.

Questions Remain

One of the challenges in running an effective urban system of schools is: What needs to be consistent across schools and where can there be flexibility?

Even cities that adopted many of the measures outlined in the OECD background paper are finding that the intensification of diversity makes success more difficult. The definition of equity is also evolving. Should the focus of the definition be on resources? Opportunity? Outcomes? Achieving equity is often discussed in terms of reducing or eliminating achievement gaps between groups, but is that realistic?

Another trend in most of the cities was greater choice and options for different types of schools. However, choice and decentralization can lead to greater inequities if not designed with equity in mind.

What is clear is that the highest-performing school systems in the world have a low variance rate from student to student. Providing equal access to an excellent education, according to the OECD, is the path towards better achievement for students and greater prosperity for society.

Publication: The World Innovation Summit for EducationTitle: Learning in the 21st century – Policy lessons from around the worldAuthor: Andreas SchleicherWebsite: http://www.wise-qatar.org/content/learning-21st-century-policy-lessons-around-world-andreas-schleicher/

A generation ago, teachers could expect that what they taught would last for a lifetime of their students. Today, schools need to prepare students for more rapid change than ever before, for jobs that have not yet been created, using technologies that have not yet been invented, to solve problems that we don’t yet know will arise. Schooling today needs to be about ways of thinking, involving creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making; about ways of working, including communication and collaboration; about tools for working, including the capacity to recognise and exploit the potential of new technologies; and, last but not least, about the capacity to live in a multi-faceted world as active and responsible citizens. In today’s schools, students typically learn individually and at the end of the school year, we certify their individual achievements. But the more interdependent the world becomes, the more we need great collaborators and orchestrators. For a more inclusive world, we also need people who can appreciate and build on different values, beliefs, cultures. The conventional approach in school is often to break problems down into manageable bits and pieces and then to teach students how to solve these bits and pieces. But in modern economies, we create value by synthesising different fields of knowledge, making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated, which requires being familiar with and receptive to knowledge in other fields.

To make this happen will require very different learning environments. Learning environments, that encourage student engagement; ensure that learning is collaborative; are highly attuned to students’ motivations and acutely sensitive to individual differences, use assessments that

emphasize formative feedback, and promote connections across activities and subjects, both in and out of school.

Such learning environments do, in turn, require a very different calibre of teachers. When teaching was about explaining prefabricated content, education could tolerate low teacher quality. And when teacher quality was low, governments tended to tell their teachers exactly what to do and exactly how they want it done, using prescriptive methods of administrative control and accountability. What the most effective education systems have done is to make teaching a profession of high-level knowledge workers.

But people who see themselves as candidates for the professions are not attracted by schools organized like an assembly line, with teachers working as interchangeable widgets. You therefore see a very different work organization in high performing systems, with the status, professional autonomy, and the high-quality education that go with professional work, with effective systems of teacher evaluation and with differentiated career paths for teachers.

The challenges are tough but this presentation will bring together available evidence from around the world to demonstrate that the job can be done.

Publication: Thinking in the Deep EndTitle: Why is PISA getting such a bad rap lately?Website: http://thinkinginthedeepend.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/why-is-pisa-getting-such-a-bad-rap-lately/

I have been reading a great deal of educational comment recently questioning what is described as an obsession with PISA scores. PISA is the OECD’s three year survey of educational achievement of 15 year olds in science, mathematics and reading. Let’s get one thing clear from the start.

The criticisms have more to do with us and how we are using PISA, than it has to with the PISA assessments and data themselves.

Most of the criticism of PISA seems to be coming from the USA where there is an epidemic of standardized testing that has swept across the country, causing a significant malaise in education. In the USA we are looking at PISA as if it is yet another high stakes test. Viewed this way the stakes are indeed very high, because it is the nation’s education system that is been assessed – and found wanting. In Australia there is similar criticism, perhaps because although the nation’s 15 year olds still perform well above the OECD average, their edge is slipping.

I guess it is understandable that when you see a test is not treating you well, the first thing you want to do is find fault in the test. The problem is that we are focusing on the wrong things.

Finland has been lauded internationally for some time now because of its student achievement levels on all three PISA measurements – science, mathematics and reading. I listened recently to Dr Pasi Sahlberg, a life-long educator who was traveling in Australia earlier this year. He is currently the General Director of the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation, Finland and previously he was a Senior Education Specialist with the World Bank as well as the Director of the Centre for School Development, Helsinki.

Finland, it seems has a very different attitude to PISA and, in fact, to all forms of standardized testing. PISA testing just happens to be something that they do. It is not viewed with anything like the significance that countries caught up in the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) give it. In Finland students do not take any externalized standardized tests until they have finished high school – at around 18 years of age. They do not judge the quality of their education using PISA data, but they do acknowledge that PISA data reinforces what they already knew about their education – that they had excellent teachers and successful schools.

And they knew all this without ever having resorted to widespread standardized testing.

The problem with our way of looking at PISA is that we focus on the numbers (are we above or below the OECD average?) and the ranking (who is beating us?). Our efforts then are directed towards trying to improving the score, competing with the others and moving up the ranks (the Prime Minister of Australia is determined to have Australia back in the top 5% of PISA by 2025). We start asking questions about how to tighten and standardize the curriculum, how to ensure that everyone is teaching the things that are going to be tested, how to give our students the test taking skills they will need to be successful in the tests.

But PISA is far more than ranking tables and scores. If only we would take the time to examine the data we would learn much more about how to improve our education systems. We would discover that we will achieve nothing if we continue to focus on accountability and standardizing curriculum.

We know from PISA that in the 2006 round of testing less than 10% of the variation in student performance was explained by student background in five of the seven countries with the highest mean science scores of above 530 points. PISA demonstrates that equity and performance are highly related. In Finland, equity is considered more important than excellence. Dr Sahlberg tells us that “we have systematically focused on equity and equality in our education system, and not so much on excellence and achievement like many other countries have done.”

What are we doing to ensure that all our young people have access to the same quality of education regardless of socio-economic circumstances? In Finland it is illegal to charge fees for any education program that leads to a qualification, because education is deemed to be a right for all its citizens. There are no private schools in Finland. If we only looked more closely at the PISA data we would see that equity, not accountability or curriculum, is foundational to high achievement.

In Finland it is virtually impossible for a ‘bad’ teacher to enter the profession. The demand for teacher training positions is so high that last year 2,500 people competed for 120 positions and the selection panel was able to cherry pick the best of the best. Teachers are not paid dramatically high salaries, but they are highly respected. According to Dr Sahlberg “it’s more difficult to get into primary school teacher education in Finnish universities than medicine.”

We could also learn much about student attitudes towards specific curriculum areas as well as their views on the world. For example, a majority of students reported in PISA 2006 that they were motivated to learn science, but only a minority reported interest in a career involving science. This information needs to be fleshed out if we are hoping to create a nation of innovation and creative development in the immediate future. Why is it that one significant feature of a student’s background in terms of science achievement was whether they had a parent in a science-related career? What is the significance of the fact that PISA reveals USA 15 year olds did not do well in mathematics and yet they feel very confident in their mathematical abilities?

It is disturbing to discover that there is some degree of pessimism among the students about the future of the natural environment. On average across OECD countries, only 21% of students reported that they believed the problems associated with energy shortages would improve over the next 20 years. Are we taking this into account when we review our educational priorities?

PISA is a powerful resource if we would dig more deeply and use it to do something more than hijack the ranking tables to justify a test taking industry that is capitalizing on our failure to think below the surface. In New York, Pearson Education currently has a five-year, $32 million contract to administer state tests and it creates and sells education programs seamlessly aligned with the high stakes standardized tests for students and teacher assessments they are also selling. Pearson reported revenues of approximately $9 billion in 2010. This is big business.

What a tragedy if the most tangible outcome of a comprehensive review such as the OECD’s PISA was to be the creation of a multi-billion dollar industry rather than a successfully educated generation of our nations’ children.

Publication: The University of California GuardianTitle: More Money Doesn’t Mean Better EducationAuthor: Saad AsadWebsite: http://www.ucsdguardian.org/opinion/item/26022-more-money-doesn’t-mean-better-education

When simply comparing school districts across the nation to one another, it seems that wealthy districts do the best. One might erroneously conclude that the disparity in educational achievements is simply because of limited funding in poorer districts. However, cross-national studies indicate that education isn’t a problem of limited funding, but rather how that funding is allocated within each district.

Comparing Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development countries, which are usually economically advanced, shows that educational spending was a poor predictor of student scores on the Program for International Student Assessment. New Zealand, for example, had per pupil spending below the OECD average and excelled. Poland and Estonia, on the other hand, spent far less than the U.S. and achieved comparative results on the exam.

Only 9 percent of the variation in test scores could be attributed to spending on education while factors like parents’ educational background could explain 45 percent of the variation. The PISA study found a high correlation between teacher pay and increased test scores, implying that perhaps American teachers are not adequately compensated. Finland and South Korea, for example, routinely recruit from the highly educated to be teachers. Teacher quality appears to be a far more important and cost-effective reform than simply reducing class sizes.

Rather than worrying about increasing funding, it is more important to be concerned with how it is allocated. A survey in 2010 by Stuart Yeh of the University of Minnesota found that simply increasing per-pupil spending by 10 percent was not a cost-effective way of increasing scores compared to reforms like computer-assisted instruction or cross-age tutoring, which not only increased educational achievement, but was also cheaper, since older students did not need to be paid a high wage to tutor younger students.

Another cheap reform is a method called rapid assessment, in which students are tested two to five times a week in math and reading, providing immediate feedback for teachers on where students are performing poorly.

A study in the American Educational Research Journal concluded that equality of opportunity could be more important than funding in itself. The top-scoring countries of South Korea, Finland and Hong Kong all equally funded each student. Further, each country’s educational system mixed families with different socioeconomic statuses within their schools. Issues like this are more important in the U.S., where equality of opportunity is also hindered by racial bias.

Addressing socioeconomic bias is necessary as study after study show that one’s family’s socioeconomic status is one of the biggest determinants of student achievement. Devoting the best teachers to wealthy districts may further entrench educational inequality.

Education reform is obviously a very complex issue with many studies offering different conclusions, but taxpayers clamoring for more education funding need to determine if current funding is already allocated fairly and how that future spending should be used. Prop 30, for example, is only a stop-gap measure which should remind us real reform is necessary.

One must also be wary of fueling educational inequities by blindly increasing funding without focusing on the worst-off districts. The children of the rich are not suffering in America’s education

system, but rather the most destitute whose parents cannot afford the same opportunities the rich do.

Country-Specific Education ArticlesPublication: The New Statesman (UK)Title: How Michael Gove manipulated education statisticsWebsite: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2012/11/how-michael-gove-manipulated-education-statistics

One of Michael Gove's favourite arguments for his school reforms is that Britain has plummeted down the international education league tables. In June 2011 he told Policy Exchange that the UK had fallen from "4th to 16th place in science; from 7th to 25th place in literacy; and from 8th to 28th in maths" between 2000 and 2009 in the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

But how reliable are the statistics? In this week's NS, Peter Wilby draws attention to a story that deserves more than attention than it has so far received (no national paper has reported on it). Last month, in response to a letter from David Miliband, Andrew Dilnot, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, expressed "concern" about the Department for Education's unqualified use of the figures. He noted that the OECD's 2009 report for the UK included the following "important caveat":

“Trend comparisons, which are a feature of the PISA 2009 reporting are not reported here because for the United Kingdom it is only possible to compare 2006 and 2009 data. As the PISA 2000 and PISA 2003 samples did not meet the PISA response-rate standards, no trend comparisons are possible for these years.”

In other words, Gove should not be comparing results from 2000 with those from 2009. Dilnot wrote: "While I understand that some users of these data would like to make comparisons between the first PISA study in 2000 and the most recent in 2009, the weaknesses relating to the response-rate standard in earlier studies should not be ignored."

He concluded: "These uncertainties and weaknesses are not just a technical footnote; they are themselves an important part of the evidence, and affect interpretation and meaning. League tables and the presentation of international rankings can be statistically problematic, and require clear and careful commentary alongside them."

The statistics chief also noted a review published by the Institute for Education which concluded that "problems with identifying change over time" meant the apparent decline in secondary school pupils' performance should not be treated as a "statistically robust result". The Department for Education is yet to respond.

This isn't the only recent instance of the coalition playing fast and loose with statistics. David Cameron is fond of boasting that "one million" new private sector jobs have been created since the coalition came to power, but, as I've noted before, what he doesn't mention is that 196,000 of these were simply reclassified from the public sector.

After complaining for years about Gordon Brown's manipulation of economic statistics, the coalition came to power promising a new era of transparency. But Gove and Cameron's behaviour suggests it's not prepared to practise what it preached.

Publication: The Nation (Thailand)Title: Key maths, Science test results due out soonWebsite: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/national/Key-maths-Science-test-results-due-out-soon-30192784.html

The results of the world's famous international maths and science test are going to be heard again at year-end - and academics are questioning if Thailand will seriously utilise the results to analyse flaws in science and maths education to make changes and improvement, or if the country will just acknowledge the results but not undertake any measures by relevant agencies afterward.

The latest results of Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) will be announced in December. First conducted in 1995, TIMSS reports every four years on the mathematics and science achievement of fourth and eighth grade students worldwide. TIMSS 2011 is the fifth in the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)'s series of international assessments of student achievement dedicated to improving teaching and learning in mathematics and science. Findings from the survey are used to inform education policy-makers and to improve teaching.

Following the previous results of TIMSS, other countries have already made some changes to their education policies and science and maths teaching and learning, especially Germany.

The country has reacted to what they called "the TIMSS Shock" and made major changes in education after a weak profile of competence of its Grade 8 students in TIMSS 1995. Now, Germany's attempt has paid off as German students have performed better in international tests, according to Eckhard Klieme, a professor of education at the German Institute of International Educational Research.

He and two other representatives from Hong Kong and Botswana presented how each country has utilised TIMSS results at the 53rd IEA General Assembly Meeting hosted recently by Office of the Education Council (OEC) in Phuket.

Thai students' achievements have shown continuous declines over the past decade since Thailand joined TIMSS. Thai students' scores were 525 for science and 522 for mathematics in 1995. The

scores dropped to 482 (science) and 467 (maths) in 1999. Even in 2007, the scores also dropped to 471 (science) and 441 (math). Meanwhile, TIMSS average scores were about 500 or a little more or less than 500.

"We have not seen concrete projects and policies on addressing the declines in the international tests from the Education Ministry," Chulalongkorn University (CU)'s Faculty of Education Dean, Prof Sirichai Kanjanawasee told The Nation in a separate event.

"Thailand is passive in terms of reacting to the decreasing results but other countries or territories, including Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan have seriously had experts analyse their TIMSS results and improved their science and maths education until their students can make obvious progress.

NOT ENOUGH ANALYSIS DONE HERE

"Thailand has not done deep enough analysis on its own beyond what has been analysed by TIMSS. So, it has not found what exactly affects students' learning in maths and science and there are no concrete projects and policies started to solve the problem," he said.

Sirichai said he had analysed IEA's Second International Mathematics Study dozens of years ago. He offered that he could help the ministry to do multilevel analysis using his analysis expertise with assistance from CU researchers. Based on information delivered by TIMSS, this kind of analysis would review different factors including the environment at schools, in classes, etc, that affects students' learning and achievements.

"I hope that after December, the month that we will acknowledge the latest TIMSS results together with people in other countries, Thai educational administrators will be alert to the results and start to react. The Office of the Basic Education Commission and the Institute for Promotion of Teaching Science and Technology will conduct deeper analysis that will create impact on teaching and policies. [But] we, researchers from Chula are pleased to help," Sirichai said.

So, what can Thailand learn from other countries' practices?

Klieme said German policy reactions to the TIMSS Shock were more control and more support for schools, teachers and students for standards.

"We always thought students doing well and we had good training but in fact deprivations," he added.

He said national standards had been established since 2009 for monitoring and school evaluation. It had used school inspectors and a national indicator-based report. Certification had been based on

statewide exit exams. The country had participated regularly in national and international surveys. Then Germany implemented new pedagogical initiatives, focused on maths and science.

According to Prof Frederick KS Leung, director of Education and Development for Research Integrity at the University of Hong Kong, the mathematics 2001 curriculum change was partly based on a study done utilising TIMSS results.

"Our science curriculum has put too much emphasis on the learning of details and has overlooked the learning of principles. We might not have become aware of these shortcomings in our curriculum if we have not participated in the TIMSS studies," Leung said, quoting a book.

"Education is a complex endeavour - we cannot expect the TIMSS results to produce answers for all our national problems in education," he said.

"TIMSS is meant for individual countries to find out the truth about their maths and science education and seek improvement in their educational practices," Leung said, adding that Hong Kong had given books to teachers to learn from TIMSS.

Dr Serara Moahi, executive secretary of Botswana's Examination Council, said Botswana responded to TIMSS 2003 recommendations by reviewing its 2007 curriculum and proposed adjustments, then related adjustments were made in the 2010 junior secondary curriculum. It had done "Strengthening of Mathematics and Science in Secondary Education" teacher support programme, so they have been taught strategies for teaching learners with diverse styles.

She said the TIMSS 2003 report also showed that Botswana has not performed well in both subjects.

Publication: The Times of IndiaTitle: The PISA shockerAuthor: Dev LahiriWebsite: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-10-09/edit-page/34324055_1_progressive-schools-india-environment

India's poor performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests (India ranked 71 out of 73 nations) sparked a raging controversy about the adequacy of our education system. The fact is that in India we are still, by and large, trapped in the paradigm of teaching "content". All over the world (including China), the shift has been towards teaching "skills", that are necessary for making a truly global 21st century citizen.

What are these skills? They are, first and foremost, the ability to ask questions. Unless a child develops her innate curiosity, she will be a misfit in the new-age work environment. In India, except for the most progressive schools (and how many of those exist?), questioning is seriously

discouraged. This is partly the result of cultural conditioning (asking questions of elders is considered disrespectful), partly because of the extraordinarily large number of students in classes, and largely because the teachers don't know the answers!

Educationists the world over are realising that those who will successfully negotiate the world of work in the new scenario will be independent thinkers and learners. The ability to research, reference, analyse and draw your own conclusions is the fulcrum of the new pedagogy. But this model depends on one critical component: a teacher who has complete command of the subject, and a vision, which extends far beyond the confines of that subject. How many such teachers are there in India? Equally importantly, does our obsession with board results and entrance exam results, allow for such a pedagogy?

The new global order also demands that children learn how to "collaborate" as team players. After all, they will be in a work environment where they will be working perhaps on projects with global partners thousands of miles away. Technology is a great enabler. But in India we glorify individualism and run down teamwork. That is why we have pictures of "toppers" in the media. True, the CBSE has tried to rectify matters by introducing project-based learning, but we know the sad truth behind classroom projects in India. In most cases they are cut and paste jobs, almost invariably it is mummy who ends up doing them!

The sports field is a great place to teach the virtues of teamwork. But how many of our schools have them? And even where they do, sport especially after class 10 is considered a waste of precious time. Tuitions for various exams take priority.

In the new global environment, the most successful citizens will be those with a deep and abiding respect for cultural pluralism. How many schools, even homes foster these values? Leave alone appreciate international cultures. It dismays me as an educator to see parents and teachers still steeped in old prejudices of caste, religion, region and gender. Our schools, totally focussed on 'teaching for the test' have no time to impart values. The prejudices faced by people from the northeast, as well as those from Africa is no accident.

The PISA tests do really reflect India's standing in the international academic community. And that's because of a disconnect between what we're doing and what the new order demands. India's great strength so far has been that we have given our children, by far and large, a thorough grounding in the 'three R's'. Which is why we are very good when it comes to conventional testing (and that is not to be scoffed at either), but fall apart in tests like PISA which look for a different set of skills. But the time has come to build on this platform and launch ourselves onto the next stage in preparing our children for the brave, new world. Otherwise we may not find ourselves on the PISA list at all!