IAP NEWS UPDATEOctober 14th – 21st 2011

Publication: OECD educationtodayTitle: What’s in children's school bags?Author: Marilyn AchironWebsite: http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.com/2011/10/whats-in-childrens-school-bags.htmlSurvey: PISA

The textbook in your or your child’s backpack: who decided it was the best one to use? And does it matter to your or your child’s success in school if that decision is taken by your school or by your government? The latest edition of PISA in Focus looks into how those issues relate to learning outcomes.

For example, school systems that grant individual schools autonomy in defining curricula, which can include determining which courses are offered, the content of those courses and the textbooks used to teach that material, tend to show better student performance overall, even after accounting for national income. Data from PISA 2009 show that the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the partner economy Macao-China grant their schools the greatest autonomy in these matters, while schools in Greece, Turkey and the partner countries Jordan and Tunisia have the least autonomy in these matters.

Within countries, though, the relationship isn’t as clear-cut, as school systems may grant individual schools more or less autonomy for a wide variety of reasons. So just because a school might have the responsibility of creating its own curriculum and choosing its own textbooks does not automatically mean that its students will perform better on PISA reading tests than students in a school that doesn’t.

A closer look at PISA results reveals another interesting twist in the school autonomy-student performance tale: while there is no clear relationship between autonomy in resource allocation (how a school raises and spends its money) and performance, there is a positive, albeit weak, relationship between the two in those school systems where most schools post student achievement data publicly. In these instances, it’s the combination of the school system’s accountability policies (in this case, having schools publicly disclose information about student performance) and school autonomy that is associated with slightly better student performance. Some 37% of students across OECD countries attend schools whose principals reported that they make achievement data available to the public; in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the partner countries Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, more than 80% of students attend schools that do so.

So while the analyses of PISA results can’t offer a simple equation, like school autonomy + accountability = better student outcomes, they can suggest the ways in which schools are governed, and the policies they put in practice, that are most strongly associated

with better student performance. In effect, that textbook in your or your child’s backpack embodies a set of policies that could weigh a student down or help him or her soar.

Publication: OECD InsightsTitle: Chinese students learn from PISAWebsite: http://oecdinsights.org/2011/10/19/chinese-students-learn-from-pisa/Survey: PISA

Today’s post comes from Rachel Chen, Jessica Na and Darren Yang, three students at Peking University High School’s International Division, which recently hosted a visit by the head of the OECD’s PISA programme, Andreas Schleicher.

Following Shanghai’s success in PISA last year, the student-assessment programme became much better known in China, and many journalists now want to know more about it. To answer some of their questions, Andreas Schleicher, the head of PISA, recently visited the International Division of Peking University High School and held a press conference.

First, however, Mr. Schleicher arrived at the kitchen of our International Division and had breakfast with some of us students. We were all excited about his visit and got up early to wait for him. Mr. Schleicher was a tall and amiable man. He was curious about our experiences as students here, so he asked us a lot of questions such as “How did you choose your courses?” and “What do you do in your free time?”. We were so absorbed in the conversation that we barely ate.

After breakfast, Mr. Schleicher attended the conference, where he showed he had a lot of thoughts on education. We were really impressed by two points he made.

The first was that as the world develops, getting knowledge becomes easier. So, the ability we should foster is not only how to collect knowledge, but how to select knowledge that is true and useful to us and apply it to solve problems. For instance, nowadays, most students know how to use computers and collect knowledge on the Internet; they can use it to get the answer to a math question if they want. However, students may find different answers on the Internet, and they need to think about which one is the right one. Most students can do that, but not so many can really use the math knowledge they’ve got to solve real-life problems.

The second point is that learning should be life-long. In other words, school is just the beginning of learning. Nowadays, a lot of people stop learning once they leave school, which is a sad thing to say. Educators can change this by motivating students instead of forcing them to learn, because only students who are motivated can keep learning in their lives. For example, if a teacher shows students how enjoyable reading is, some students will become interested in reading and will read more by themselves. Eventually it will become a life-long habit.

Mr. Schleicher thought China’s education didn’t do well on motivating its students, but he did think that the serious attitude of China’s government toward education is laudable. Though there are still some problems with China’ education system, he is glad to see the effort that China’s government had put in to solving the problems.

Mr. Schleicher’s visit made us think more on education. We feel lucky to study in a school where the teachers motivate and encourage us, and where the resources for learning are abundant. We hope we will be able to go on learning all the way through our lives and be successful.

Publication: The Wall Street JournalTitle: The Steve Jobs Model for Education ReformAuthor: Rupert MurdochWebsite: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203914304576631100415237430.html

These days everyone is for education reform. The question is which approach is best. I favor the Steve Jobs model.

In 1984 Steve introduced the Mac with a Super Bowl ad. It ran only once. It ran for only one minute. And it shows a female athlete being chased by the helmeted police of some totalitarian regime.

At the climax, the woman rushes up to a large screen where Big Brother is giving a speech. Just as he announces, "We shall prevail," she hurls her hammer through the screen.

If you ask me what we need to do in education, I would point you to that ad.

At the top end, our public schools are producing fewer and fewer graduates who have the skills necessary for the world's best jobs. At the bottom, each year more than a million Americans—that's 7,000 every school day—are dropping out of high school. In the middle, too many American children float from grade to grade in schools that never challenge them to reach their full potential.

This is unjust, unsustainable and un-American. And it is especially galling because we have the technology to change it.

If you read the front pages of the New York Times, they will tell you that technology's promise has not yet been realized in terms of student performance. My answer is, of course not. If we simply attached computers to leeches, medicine wouldn't be any better today than it was in the 19th century either.

You don't get change by plugging in computers to schools designed for the industrial age. You get it by deploying technology that rewrites the rules of the game.

Our children are growing up in Steve Jobs's world. They are eager to learn and quick to embrace new technology. Outside the classroom they take technology for granted—in what they read, in how they listen to music, in how they shop.

The minute they step back into their classrooms, it's like going back in time. The top-down, one-size-fits-all approach frustrates the ones who could do more advanced work. And it leaves further and further behind those who need extra help to keep up.

Teachers are likewise stunted. Some excel at lecturing. Some are better at giving personal attention. With the right structure, they would work together like a football team. With the existing structure, they are treated like interchangeable cogs.

The point I'm making isn't about Apple. It's about our colossal failure of imagination. The education industry bears a good part of the blame here. It continues to sell its tired wares into a failing status quo. It settles for mediocre charter schools. And its answer seems to be throwing more money at the problem.

Three decades ago, the Department of Education released a report noting that if an unfriendly foreign power had imposed our mediocre education system on us, "we might well have viewed it as an act of war." In the three decades since, per-pupil spending on K-12 education has doubled—while achievement scores have been flat.

That's where technology comes in. Just as the iPod compelled the music industry to accommodate its customers, we can use technology to force the education system to meet the needs of the individual student.

For example, say I was trying to teach a 10-year-old about Bernoulli's principle. According to this principle, when speed is high, pressure is low. Sounds dry and abstract.

But what if I could bring this lesson alive by linking it to the soccer star Roberto Carlos—showing students a video clip that illustrates how his famous curved shot is an example of Bernoulli's principle in action. Then suppose I followed up with an engineer from Boeing—who explained why this same principle is critical in aviation and introduced an app that could help students master the concept through playing a game. Finally, assessment tools would give teachers instant feedback about how well their students had mastered the material.

Better doesn't have to be more expensive, either. For example, Georgia state legislators now spend $40 million a year on textbooks. They are considering iPads to save money and boost performance. Unlike a textbook—which is outdated the moment it is printed—digital texts can be updated.

Textbooks aren't the only area for savings. Rocketship charter schools in San Jose, Calif., use a model that combines traditional classroom learning with tutor-led small groups and individualized instruction through online technology. So far the mix has brought higher performance with lower costs—savings that can be used to pay teachers more, hire tutors, and so on.

Let's be clear: Technology is never going to replace teachers. What technology can do is give teachers closer, more human and more rewarding interactions with their students. It can give children lesson plans tailored to their pace and needs. And it can give school districts a way to improve performance in the classroom while saving their taxpayers money.

Everything we need to do is possible now. But the investments the private sector needs to make will not happen until we have a clear answer to a basic question: What is the core body of knowledge our children need to know?

I don't pretend to be an expert on academic standards. But as a business leader, I do know something about how common standards unlock investment and unleash innovation. For example, once we established standards for MP3 and Wi-Fi, innovators had every incentive to invest their brains and capital in building the very best products compatible with those standards.

We are now seeing the same thing happening in education. Over the last few years, leaders and educators in more than 40 states have come together to reach agreement on what their students should know and be able to do in math and English—and by what grades.

They have come together because they have taken a look around the world. They know that the student in, say, San Francisco is not just competing against his classmate—or even against the kid from St. Louis. He or she is competing with his peers in Shanghai, Lima and Prague.

Steve Jobs knew all about competitive markets. He once likened our school system to the old phone monopoly. "I remember," he said in a 1995 interview, "seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell Logo on it and it said 'We don't care. We don't have to.' And that's what a monopoly is. That's what IBM was in their day. And that's certainly what the public school system is. They don't have to care."

We have to care. In this new century, good is not good enough. Put simply, we must approach education the way Steve Jobs approached every industry he touched. To be willing to blow up what doesn't work or gets in the way. And to make our bet that if we can engage a child's imagination, there's no limit to what he or she can learn.

Publication: The New York TimesTitle: Occupy the ClassroomAuthor: Nicholas KristofWebsite: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/opinion/occupy-the-classroom.html

Occupy Wall Street is shining a useful spotlight on one of America’s central challenges, the inequality that leaves the richest 1 percent of Americans with a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.

Most of the proposed remedies involve changes in taxes and regulations, and they would help. But the single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.

Huh? That will seem naïve and bizarre to many who chafe at inequities and who think the first step is to throw a few bankers into prison. But although part of the problem is billionaires being taxed at lower rates than those with more modest incomes, a bigger source of structural inequity is that many young people never get the skills to compete. They’re just left behind.

“This is where inequality starts,” said Kathleen McCartney, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as she showed me a chart demonstrating that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students. Those gaps then widen further in school.

“The reason early education is important is that you build a foundation for school success,” she added. “And success breeds success.”

One common thread, whether I’m reporting on poverty in New York City or in Sierra Leone, is that a good education tends to be the most reliable escalator out of poverty. Another common thread: whether in America or Africa, disadvantaged kids often don’t get a chance to board that escalator.

Maybe it seems absurd to propose expansion of early childhood education at a time when budgets are being slashed. Yet James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, has shown that investments in early childhood education pay for themselves. Indeed, he argues that they pay a return of 7 percent or more — better than many investments on Wall Street.

“Schooling after the second grade plays only a minor role in creating or reducing gaps,” Heckman argues in an important article this year in American Educator. “It is imperative to change the way we look at education. We should invest in the foundation of school readiness from birth to age 5.”

One of the most studied initiatives in this area was the Perry Preschool program, which worked with disadvantaged black children in Michigan in the 1960s. Compared with a control group, children who went through the Perry program were 22 percent more likely to finish high school and were arrested less than half as often for felonies. They were half as likely to receive public assistance and three times as likely to own their own homes.

We don’t want to get too excited with these statistics, or those of the equally studied Abecedarian Project in North Carolina. The program was tiny, and many antipoverty initiatives work wonderfully when they’re experiments but founder when scaled up. Still, new research suggests that early childhood education can work even in the real world at scale.

Take Head Start, which serves more than 900,000 low-income children a year. There are flaws in Head Start, and researchers have found that while it improved test results, those

gains were fleeting. As a result, Head Start seemed to confer no lasting benefits, and it has been widely criticized as a failure.

Not so fast.

One of the Harvard scholars I interviewed, David Deming, compared the outcomes of children who were in Head Start with their siblings who did not participate. Professor Deming found that critics were right that the Head Start advantage in test scores faded quickly. But, in other areas, perhaps more important ones, he found that Head Start had a significant long-term impact: the former Head Start participants are significantly less likely than siblings to repeat grades, to be diagnosed with a learning disability, or to suffer the kind of poor health associated with poverty. Head Start alumni were more likely than their siblings to graduate from high school and attend college.

Professor Deming found that in these life outcomes, Head Start had about 80 percent of the impact of the Perry program — a stunning achievement.

Something similar seems to be true of the large-scale prekindergarten program in Boston. Hirokazu Yoshikawa and Christina Weiland, both of Harvard, found that it erased the Latino-white testing gap in kindergarten and sharply reduced the black-white gap.

President Obama often talked in his campaign about early childhood education, and he probably agrees with everything I’ve said. But the issue has slipped away and off the agenda.

That’s sad because the question isn’t whether we can afford early childhood education, but whether we can afford not to provide it. We can pay for prisons or we can pay, less, for early childhood education to help build a fairer and more equitable nation.

Country-Specific Education ArticlesPublication: OECD ObserverTitle: Education: Bridging the classroom divideWebsite: http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/3525/Education:_Bridging_the_classroom_divide.htmlSurvey: PISA

Canadian education enjoys an excellent reputation at home and abroad, thanks to strong performances in such renowned surveys as OECD PISA, which focuses on 15-year-olds. There are several reasons for this success, and as experts from the OECD and Canada explain, reforms that focus on equity and integration all help. But there are challenges too.

Social policymakers worry about gaps. Gaps in income distribution, job opportunities and education are warning signs of a fissure opening up in society. One would think that with one of the highest immigrant populations in OECD countries Canadians would be worried

about such gaps, especially in education, where immigrant children in many countries struggle, often in vain, to get a foothold. Not a bit.

In the 2009 OECD Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA), an evaluation of 15-year-old pupils in 65 countries, including the OECD countries, Canada ranked among the top ten performers in reading, mathematics and science. If such results could be attributed to a high number of academic overachievers, they would still be remarkable, but the fact that all pupils–from the highest to the lowest scorers–contributed to the results highlights the equity of the Canadian educational system, where the gap between the highest and lowest scores was one of the narrowest in any OECD country.

Andreas Schleicher, who is special advisor on education policy to the OECD Secretary General and one of the driving forces behind PISA, attributes part of this success to the way Canada handled educational reforms. “The interesting story is how the successful provinces were able to get the main stakeholders on board, teachers and their unions included, and how they got professionals, not bureaucrats, to implement the reforms on the frontline. Significant efforts were devoted to winning over teachers, schools and unions to its vision of reform.”

Canada got top marks not only in equity, but integration as well. Immigrant children in Canada, as elsewhere, tend to struggle during the first five years of their arrival. This is unsurprising, as children have to adapt to a new environment and master new languages. But in Canada, after five years, they shed their chrysalis. Results from the first PISA survey, administered in 2000, show that children who had lived in Canada for less than five years scored 20 points below the OECD average of 478, whereas those who had lived there for more than five years, scored 521. In light of PISA 2000, it was found that a gain or loss of 34 reading points by Canadian pupils was the equivalent of a gain or loss of one year of education.

Why the top marks? According to Andrew Parkin, Director General of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC), the Canadian educational system (or rather, systems) “makes it easier for immigrants to find their place” in society. Many schools offer adaptation classes, where immigrant children are introduced to French and English, and provinces and territories vigorously encourage immigration.

In 2010, Canada welcomed the highest number of immigrants since it became a founding member of the OECD 50 years ago: over 280,000. It also threw open the gates to temporary residents, including some 182,000 foreign students, 28,000 more than five years ago. They now make up 8% of the student body, compared to 4% in 1992. This is no accident. Unlike some countries, Canada is unabashedly wooing foreign students, to stimulate innovation and bolster the economy. According to a government-commissioned study, foreign students enrich the Canadian economy by CAN$6.5 billion. The government is keen to make the prospect of studying in Canada inviting, and so has created the Canadian Experience Class, in which eligible foreign students can apply for permanent residence. Mr Parkin also notes that, in 2010, premiers from all of Canada’s provinces and territories called for renewed action to attract greater numbers of international students.

Immigration can be a prickly subject for politicians in some countries, who either offer a blustery populist rhetoric, blaming high unemployment on immigrants, or, more reasonably, invoke the opportunities for growth its provides. Immigrants may indeed be seeking jobs, or fleeing political instability, or simply trying to rejoin their families. Mr Parkin notes that the profiles of immigrants in Canada differ from those in the US, for example. Whereas most immigrants to the US are economic immigrants from Latin America, immigrants to Canada are generally well-educated and skilled. The majority (52.7% in 2010) come from Asian countries such as China and Korea, where hard work and academic excellence are strongly encouraged by parents and educators: pupils from both countries topped the OECD PISA poll, for instance.

Socio-economic background can be a major determinant to academic success. Pupils from poor families or single-parent households tend to perform less well in school. The ability of a child to overcome these barriers is known as “resilience.” Canadian children are particularly tough, ranking 9th with 40% of pupils considered “resilient” compared to the OECD average of 31%.

Success is not due solely to pupils’ determination or parental support. Mr Parkin credits Canada’s success in part to the professionalism of Canadian teachers. And government works to be sure that teachers can fulfill their vocation. The freedom granted to teachers extends to pupils. Unlike some OECD countries, Canada has no policy of “streaming,” by which a child is shepherded down a particular academic track early on, sometimes as early as the age of 11.

Academic flexibility continues into tertiary education, what Mr Parkin calls Canada’s “second chance” system. Unlike countries such as the UK, where pupils who drop out of school may languish in unemployment for years, many Canadian drop-outs find jobs. After a few years of working, they decide to study again. Many opt for a local college, which does not require relocating to a big city, and where they can learn a particular skill in a shorter period of time. This brief pause between secondary and post-secondary education may be one reason why foreign undergraduates are generally younger than their Canadian cohorts.

The 2009 OECD PISA survey was administered to between 5,000 and 10,000 pupils aged 15, from an average of 150 schools from each country. Wanting a more precise assessment of pupils in each of its ten provinces, Canada extended the PISA study to 23,000 students from 10,000 schools.

“If you take Ontario,” says Mr Schleicher, “the province that advanced most, you see how they pursued strategies directly focused on improving the act of teaching. They paid careful and detailed attention to implementation, and gave teachers the opportunity to practice new ideas and learn from their colleagues.”

But the findings were not all good news. According to Mr. Parkin, one out of ten Canadian pupils falls below the acceptable reading standard, and girls do significantly better than boys in reading (though the gap is narrowing).

Canadian pupils taught in settings where English or French predominated as a minority language fared less well than those where English or French was the dominant language, the PISA surveys showed. Aboriginal Canadians, who Mr Parkin says account for up to 15% of the population in some provinces such as Manitoba and Saskatchewan, lag behind and are more likely to quit school before graduating. This wide-ranging PISA assessment will help the government to target policies aimed at improving the performance of these pupils.

Even in those areas where Canada tops the class, Mr Parkin warns against complacency. “While Canada continues to demonstrate strong performance in PISA, many other countries have made significant gains. Canada’s education ministers know that we cannot rest on our laurels. We need to redouble our efforts to ensure that our students remain in the top tier.”

Immigrant students may give Canada that edge. It is a truly multicultural country, with one of the highest foreign-born populations in the OECD area. There is less a sense of being an outsider when close to 20% of Canadians are foreign born. “Canadian identity,” says Mr Parkin, “is an identity built on diversity.”