We link geospatial data on 3G coverage over time with 2.3 million student-level PISA records from 82 countries. PISA urbanicity data + pop. density data + 3G coverage shapefiles = within-country variation in 3G coverage over time. Here’s how this linkage looks in Czech Repub. pic.twitter.com/5RCqNfj414 — Sam Stemper (@samstemper) December 19, 2023
The German PISA results are nothing short of a disaster. pic.twitter.com/mqmKPCTiYP — Christian Odendahl (@COdendahl) December 5, 2023
By Dale Chu The latest PISA results dropped earlier today and, perhaps to no one’s surprise, they weren’t good. U.S. students saw a 13-point drop in math, which was “among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics” for the U.S., according to the OECD. This morning’s headlines summarize the bad news: “U.S. students’ math scores plunge … Continue reading The Biden administration’s unseriousness on PISA
OECD, via a kind reader: OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examines what students know in reading, mathematics and science, and what they can do with what they know. It provides the most comprehensive and rigorous international assessment of student learning outcomes to date. Results from PISA indicate the quality and equity of learning … Continue reading PISA 2018 Results (Volume VI)
PISA, via a kind email: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to school closures across the world and forced teachers and students in many countries to adapt quickly to teaching and learning online. But a new OECD PISA report reveals wide disparities both between and within countries in the availability of technology in schools and of … Continue reading New OECD PISA report reveals challenge of online learning for many students and schools
The Economist: When Estonia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 it took the chance to reshape the country’s education system. Mailis Reps, the current education minister, says officials and politicians looked everywhere—from America to the Netherlands—for inspiration. But they kept coming back to their Nordic neighbours. As Ms Reps recalls, the concluding argument … Continue reading PISA results can lead policymakers astray
Yi-Jhen Wu, Claus H. Carstensen & Jihyun Lee: This study examined learning strategy use in mathematics among East Asian students in East Asian educational systems. By employing latent class analysis on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 data, we found four classes of learning strategy types, namely memorization with metacognitive strategies (17.49%), metacognitive … Continue reading A new perspective on memorization practices among East Asian students based on PISA 2012
Mark Schneider: In a recent commentary in Ed Week, I discussed two emerging problems in PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). I identified OECD’s insufficient attention to research and development (driven in part by its pursuit of “innovative” topics) and the too-short three-year testing … Continue reading PISA Is a Unique Resource for Testing Educational Attainment of 15-Year-Olds in 78 Countries. Adding 40 More Would Be a Mistake
Andreas Schleicher: OECD PISA. “The kind of things that are easy to teach are now easy to automate or outsource”.
The Economist: But Estonia has also taken a deliberately inclusive approach, argues Mart Laidmets, a senior official at its ministry of education. It tries to avoid at all costs having pupils repeat years of school. Holding pupils back can help. But too often it is used as an excuse not to teach difficult kids. It … Continue reading What the world can learn from the latest PISA test results
Steve Sailer: Here are the overall 2015 PISA scores (averaging the Science, Reading, and Math scores equally), with color coding to put the various American scores (red bars) in perspective. Keep in mind that some countries didn’t do a good job of rounding up everybody who was supposed to take the test, which probably serves … Continue reading 2015 PISA Mean Scores in Perspective
Andreas Schleicher: Pisa tests, an international standard for comparing education systems around the world, could include a new measurement of global skills in the next round of tests in 2018. The OECD, which runs the tests in maths, reading and science, is considering adding another test which would look at how well pupils can navigate … Continue reading Pisa tests to include ‘global skills’ and cultural awareness
John Morgan: England will not take part in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s project to measure learning outcomes of graduates around the world, delivering a blow to the plan. The OECD had described the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project, seen as a potential university-level equivalent of the organisation’s Pisa tests in … Continue reading England will not take part in OECD’s ‘Pisa for universities’
Sean Coughlan: There will be a much wider sample of Chinese pupils taking part in the next round of the international Pisa tests. Shanghai took part in the most recent tests and had the highest results. But there were claims that the city was not representative of schools in other parts of China. The Organisation … Continue reading Pisa tests to include many more Chinese pupils
Like children headed home with their report cards, the nations of the globe recently received grades on the educational achievement of their students via the test known as the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. Reactions ranged from celebration to resignation to recrimination, depending upon the results.
In the United States, France and Great Britain, educators and political leaders bemoaned another disappointing showing despite their enviable wealth. They looked to East Asia and Eastern Europe and sought to understand how poorer countries in these regions could achieve so much more with fewer resources.
In Germany, educators took a measure of satisfaction that they had arrested an alarming decline, though they were far from declaring victory. In Poland, where leaders congratulated themselves for a breakout performance, the impressive results reinforced a controversial set of reforms.
The unleashing of the latest PISA scores occasioned a familiar debate over the merits of reducing the quality of schooling to a data point. Even the man who coordinates PISA, Andreas Schleicher, cautions that the numbers can be taken too far.
“Any assessment is a partial reflection of what matters,” he told The WorldPost. “Math, science and literacy are the foundation for most of the other things, but they’re not everything.”
The data was provided to The WorldPost by Pablo Zoido, an analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the group behind PISA. It shows that students’ wealth does not necessarily make them more competitive on an international scale. In the United States, for example, the poorest kids scored around a 433 out of 700 on the math portion of PISA, while the wealthiest ones netted about a 547. The lower score comes in just below the OECD average for the bottom decile (436), but the higher score also comes in below the OECD average for the top decile (554).
“At the top of the distribution, our performance is surprisingly bad given our top decile is among the wealthiest in the world,” said Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Education who reviewed the data.
Elaine Weiss and Dr. Thomas W. Payzant:
Every three years, American policymakers eagerly anticipate the release of scores for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). While any single test, no matter how strong, can explain only a limited amount about our education system, PISA provides some unique insights, testing students’ ability to apply knowledge and skills both in and out of school. It is taken only by 15-year-olds, making it a decent proxy for the “college-and-career readiness” that is the focus of current debates.
The 2013 headline is basically that the United States falls right in the middle of the pack, as it has for several decades. The U.S. Department of Education and its allies used those rankings to argue that U.S. schools are “stagnating” and to advance specific reforms it says will fix them. However, average scores may obscure and confuse more than they inform. Indeed, scores from individual states that have their own PISA rankings offer more policy-relevant insight than overall U.S. rankings. This makes sense — U.S. education looks more like a diverse patchwork than a unified system. Public investments in schools, and in students and their families, vary greatly across states, as do other policies that may boost or depress scores. Luckily, this year, three states received individual PISA rankings — as if they were independent countries. This can help us connect the dots between those disparities and scores.
Massachusetts is the good news story. If it were its own country, it would rank sixth in reading of 65 countries and economies included, behind only Singapore, Japan, Korea, and the Chinese regions of Shanghai and Hong Kong. Its students rank just above Finland and Canada, some of the world’s best readers. Though its math scores are slightly lower, Massachusetts keeps company with Belgium and Germany and is only slightly behind Finland and Canada, ranking 16 of 65. In science, Massachusetts ranks 11th, ahead of Canada and Germany. Connecticut, the second of three states with its own scores, falls just below Massachusetts, ranking 9th in reading, 18th in math, and 17th in science.
In October 2013, I posted an essay, “PISA’s China Problem,” that called on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to fully disclose its arrangement with China regarding Shanghai’s participation in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The latest PISA scores were to be released in December, offering an excellent opportunity for the OECD to dispel the mystery surrounding Shanghai’s 2009 involvement with PISA. I noted that Shanghai, the wealthiest, most educated province in China, was the only mainland province officially participating in PISA 2009 and PISA 2012. Other data from rural areas of China had been talked about by PISA officials over the years, but never released to the public domain. I called on PISA to release those data.
When the latest PISA scores came out in December, nothing had changed. I followed up with a second essay. I again urged full transparency. I also challenged PISA’s portrayal of Shanghai as a “high equity” school system. An extensive literature–including excellent journalism and both qualitative and quantitative scholarship–documents the cruel effects of the hukou system on migrants in Shanghai. Hukou is an internal registration system in China that limits rural migrants’ access to urban public services, in particular, to schools. These migrants are Chinese citizens, mind you, not immigrants from other countries. They have simply moved from rural areas to China’s big cities, or, because the hukou is inherited, they were born in one of China’s big cities but because of their family’s rural hukou, have become second generation migrants in the eyes of the state.
Students in 2012 were more likely than their counterparts in 2003 to have attended at least one year of pre-primary education.
While more 15-old students reported to have enrolled in pre-primary education during the period, many of the students who reported that they had not attended pre-primary school are disadvantaged – the students who could benefit most from pre-primary education.
If offered a choice of schools for their child, parents are more likely to consider such criteria as “a safe school environment” and “a school’s good reputation” more important than “high academic achievement of students in the school”.
The results from a global exam that evaluates students’ reading, science and math skills are in and, once again, Chinese students appear to be reigning supreme while American students continued to underperform.
But before you shake your head ruefully and scoff at the decline of Western-style education, take a look at how the data is organized.
The OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams are held every three years. Coming first and third respectively in the 2012 exams are the Chinese cities of Shanghai and Hong Kong.
However, China is uniquely not listed as a country in the rankings — unlike the U.S., Russia, Germany, Australia and other nations judged on the basis of their country-wide performances. Instead, China only shares Shanghai’s score with PISA. (Hong Kong, a Special Autonomous Region of China, sends its own data.)
PISA 2012 is the programme’s 5th survey. It assessed the competencies of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science (with a focus on mathematics) in 65 countries and economies.
Around 510 000 students between the ages of 15 years 3 months and 16 years 2 months participated in the assessment, representing about 28 million 15-year-olds globally.
The students took a paper-based test that lasted 2 hours. The tests were a mixture of open-ended and multiple-choice questions that were organised in groups based on a passage setting out a real-life situation. A total of about 390 minutes of test items were covered. Students took different combinations of different tests. They and their school principals also answered questionnaires to provide information about the students’ backgrounds, schools and learning experiences and about the broader school system and learning environment.
Among the 34 OECD countries, the United States performed below average in mathematics in 2012 and is ranked 26th…Performance in reading and science are both close to the OECD average. The United States ranks 17 in reading, (range of ranks: 14 to 20) and 21 in science (range of ranks: 17 to 25). There has been no significant change in these performances over time.
Mathematics scores for the top-performer, Shanghai-China, indicate a performance that is the equivalent of over two years of formal schooling ahead of those observed in Massachusetts, itself a strong-performing U.S. state.
While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance. For example, the Slovak Republic, which spends around USD 53 000 per student, performs at the same level as the United States, which spends over USD 115 000 per student.
Just over one in four U.S. students do not reach the PISA baseline Level 2 of mathematics proficiency – a higher-than-OECD average proportion and one that hasn’t changed since 2003. At the opposite end of the proficiency scale, the U.S. has a below-average share of top performers.
Students in the United States have particular weaknesses in performing mathematics tasks with higher cognitive demands, such as taking real-world situations, translating them into mathematical terms, and interpreting mathematical aspects in real-world problems. An alignment study between the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and PISA suggests that a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains also in PISA.
While these results always make news, this year there is an added tempest in the teapot of the education policy world: The OECD and the Obama administration worked in advance with a selected group of advocacy organizations to launch a media campaign called PISA Day. Which organizations? The College Board, ACT, America Achieves, and the Business Roundtable–all key architects of the Common Core, the new national curriculum standards whose increased rigor and standardized tests have led to a much-publicized protest movement among some parents, teachers, and kids. Groups that support the Core have an interest in calling attention to low American test scores, which today they will use to argue that the Core is the solution not only to our academic woes, but also to reviving the American economy. Happy PISA Day!
But the truth is that the lessons of PISA for our school reform movement are not as simple as they are often made out to be. PISA results aren’t just about K-12 test scores and curricula–they are also about academic ability tracking, income inequality, health care, child care, and how schools are organized as workplaces for adults.
Not much has changed since 2000, when the U.S. scored along the OECD average in every subject: This year, the U.S. scores below average in math and ranks 17th among the 34 OECD countries. It scores close to the OECD average in science and reading and ranks 21st in science and 17th in reading.
Here are some other takeaways from the report:
America Is Struggling at Math
The U.S. scored below the PISA math mean and ranks 26th out of the 34 OECD countries. The U.S. math score is not statistically different than the following countries: Norway, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Russian Federation, Slovak Republic, Lithuania, Sweden, and Hungary.
Do American Schools Need to Change? Depends What You Compare Them To
On average, 13 percent of students scored at the highest or second highest level on the PISA test, making them “top performers.” Fifty-five percent of students in Shanghai-China were considered top performers, while only nine percent of American students were.
For the last few years, many U.S. educators and policy makers have looked to Finland, noting its high test scores and laser-like focus on attracting and retaining the best teachers. Although Finland still posts high scores, they have slid in the past few years.
Poland, on the other hand, has seen sharp improvement. The only European country to have avoided the recession, Poland undertook a host of education overhauls in 1999, including delaying by one year the system that places students into academic or vocational tracks, and crafting better systems to identify struggling students and get them help.
“Poland launched a massive set of reforms and, while we cannot say for sure they caused the improvement, they certainly are…a sort of plausible explanation,” said Andreas Schleicher, deputy director for education and skills at the OECD.
In Massachusetts, educators and policy makers credit the good showing, in part, to a 1993 effort that boosted spending and ushered in rigorous standards and achievement tests that students have to pass to graduate.
Related: www.wisconsin2.org
Taksin Nuoret: Ever since December 2001, when the results of the first PISA survey were made public, the Finnish educational system has received a lot of international attention. Foreign delegations are flocking to Finland, in the hope of discovering Finland’s secrets. Finland is also trying to take advantage of its PISA success by exporting its … Continue reading (2013 version) Why does Finnish give better PISA results?
How do families live these days? OECD’s comprehensive world education ranking report, PISA 2009, was published in December of 2010. All participants of the test (fifteen-year-old pupils) completed a questionnaire about their living situation at home. ZEIT ONLINE analyzed and visualized this data to provide you with a unique way of comparing standards of living in different countries. Click on any icon to see further details.
My Facebook feed today has lots of links to this article. The upshot: a new Pew study showing that Americans think that US 15 year olds rank “near the bottom” on international science tests, whereas the truth is that they “rank in the middle among developed countries.”
I guess “the middle” covers a lot of terrain, but the way I look at the data, this assertion doesn’t hold.
The international comparison in question is the 2009 PISA. Here are the rankings. (Click for larger image)
Related: www.wisconsin2.org.
“America’s Woeful Public Schools: TIMSS Sheds Light on the Need for Systemic Reform”[1]
“Competitors Still Beat U.S. in Tests”[2]
“U.S. students continue to trail Asian students in math, reading, science”[3]
These are a few of the thousands of headlines generated by the release of the 2011 TIMSS and PIRLS results today. Although the results are hardly surprising or news worthy, judging from the headlines, we can expect another global wave of handwringing, soul searching, and calls for reform. But before we do, we should ask how meaningful these scores and rankings are.
“Numbers don’t lie,” many may say but what truth do they tell? Look at the following numbers:
Valerie Strauss has more.
Zeit Online, via a kind Richard Askey email:
How do families live these days? OECD’s comprehensive world education ranking report, PISA 2009, was published in December of 2010. All participants of the test (fifteen-year-old pupils) completed a questionnaire about their living situation at home. ZEIT ONLINE analyzed and visualized this data to provide you with a unique way of comparing standards of living in different countries. Click on any icon to see further details.
That is a request from J. and here is one recent story, with much more at the link:
A global study of learning standards in 74 countries has ranked India all but at the bottom, sounding a wake-up call for the country’s education system. China came out on top.
On this question, you can read a short Steve Sailer post, with comments attached. Here are my (contrasting) observations:
1. A big chunk of India is still at the margin where malnutrition and malaria and other negatives matter for IQ. Indian poverty is the most brutal I have seen, anywhere, including my two trips to sub-Saharan Africa or in my five trips to Haiti. I don’t know if Pisa is testing those particular individuals, but it still doesn’t bode well for the broader distribution, if only through parental effects.
Gary W. Phillips & Tao Jiang via a Dan McGrath email:
This study describes how the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was used for internationally benchmarking state performance standards. The process is accomplished in two steps. First, PISA items are embedded in the administration of the state assessment and calibrated on the state scale. The international item calibrations are then used to link the state scale to the PISA scale through common item linking. The second step is to use the statistical linking as part of the state standard setting process to help standard setting panelists determine how high their state standards need to be in order to be internationally competitive. This process was carried out in Delaware, Hawaii, and Oregon, and results are reported here for two of the states: Hawaii and Delaware.
Key words: Equating, linking, item response theory, international benchmarking.
Introduction
In 2010, the American Institutes for Research obtained permission from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to use secure items from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for purposes of linking state assessments within the United States to the PISA scale. The OECD provided a representative sample of 30 secure PISA items in Reading, Mathematics, and Science. The PISA items covered the 2006 and 2009 PISA assessment cycles. In addition to the PISA items, the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), which is the current vender for the OECD contracted to conduct PISA, provided the international item parameters and their standard errors, as well as the linear transformations needed to link the state assessments to the PISA scale. The administration, security, and scoring of the PISA items were carried out by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) based on a License Agreement between AIR and the OECD and monitored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
Review Wisconsin’s position vs Minnesota, Massachusetts and Singapore, here.
The Shanghai math (+1 SD) and science (+.75 SD) scores are almost a full SD above the OECD average of 500 (SD = 100). The top 10 percent of Shanghai math students are all above the 99th percentile for the US. See earlier post for links to Rindermann’s work relating school achievement tests like TIMSS and PISA to national IQ estimates, and see here for earlier SD estimates using 2006 PISA data. (Finland has an anomalously low SD in the earlier data. A quick look at the 2009 data shows the following math SDs: Finland 82, USA 91, Korea 89, Japan 94, Germany 98, Shanghai 103, Singapore 104.)
Although Shanghai and Beijing are the richest cities in China, incomes are still quite low compared to the US. Average income in Shanghai is about $10k USD per annum, even PPP adjusted this is about $20k. People live very modestly by the standards of developed countries.
As noted in the comments, there are other places in China that score *higher* than Shanghai on college entrance exams or in math and science competitions. So while Shanghai is probably above the average in China, it isn’t as exceptional as is perhaps implied in the Times article.
Taiwan has been moving to an American-style, less test-centric, educational system in the last decade. Educators and government officials (according to local media reports in the last 12 hours) are very concerned about the “low scores” achieved in the most recent PISA 🙂
To see how individual states or ethnicities in the US score on PISA, see here and here.
NYTimes: … PISA scores are on a scale, with 500 as the average. Two-thirds of students in participating countries score between 400 and 600. On the math test last year, students in Shanghai scored 600, in Singapore 562, in Germany 513, and in the United States 487.
In reading, Shanghai students scored 556, ahead of second-place Korea with 539. The United States scored 500 and came in 17th, putting it on par with students in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and several other countries.
In science, Shanghai students scored 575. In second place was Finland, where the average score was 554. The United States scored 502 — in 23rd place — with a performance indistinguishable from Poland, Ireland, Norway, France and several other countries.
The testing in Shanghai was carried out by an international contractor, working with Chinese authorities, and overseen by the Australian Council for Educational Research, a nonprofit testing group, said Andreas Schleicher, who directs the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s international educational testing program.
Mark Schneider, a commissioner of the Department of Education’s research arm in the George W. Bush administration, who returned from an educational research visit to China on Friday, said he had been skeptical about some PISA results in the past. But Mr. Schneider said he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable.
Pisa tests 15-year-old students in reading, maths and science. More than 400,000 students from 57 countries and regions took part in 2006 when Hong Kong students came second in science and third in maths and reading. This year, 72 countries and regions will participate. The test takes place from next month until May.
On Monday, the HKCISA appealed to schools to take part after not enough signed up for the test, saying they were too busy dealing with education reforms. The bureau brushed aside the centre’s concern the next day, calling it a “false alarm” and saying there was “no question of Hong Kong not participating”.
But Professor Ho said the message was wrong. The government failed to “understand the actual situation” and sent out “a wrong message” to the public by misjudging the sampling requirement.
“It was very irresponsible to make such a comment,” she said.
Professor Ho also expressed a concern that schools might be pressured by the administration to take part in the test.
“If Hong Kong is lacking students and falls out of Pisa’s international rankings, the government will have to take up the responsibility,” Professor Ho warned.
She said she had been working on Pisa for 10 years and did not want to see the hard work jeopardised. This year’s test was particularly significant because it was the first time Macau, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore would be compared internationally at the same time.
Education Week U.S. Students Fall Short in Math and Science Teenagers in a majority of industrialized nations taking part in a leading international exam showed greater scientific understanding than students in the United States—and they far surpassed their American peers in mathematics, in results that seem likely to add to recent consternation over U.S. students’ … Continue reading 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)
Christopher Brunet Some of these scandals are from a few months ago, some are from this week. 1: Northwestern Cancels Former Trustee I am partial to boosting fellow Substack writers, so I am starting with this one about Northwestern.. 2: Northwestern pimps out cheerleaders (allegedly) I am putting this second because it is also about … Continue reading 35 More Academic Scandals
Philip Greenspun: So the poor kids are now likely to have both intensified poverty and intensified ignorance as factors in shortening their lives (plus the Biden-era flood of migrants, who are correlated with unemployment and incarceration for the low-skilled native-born). The NYT journalists and editors don’t mention what happened in the one state where school closure … Continue reading “Which is the same as killing them, by COVID standards, since people with less education”
The Economist: When the pisa worldwide educational comparisons came out late in 2023, most countries fell to wondering how to do better. In Catalonia the results were seen through the lenses of nationalism and language—as everything is. Spain had lost ground since the last time the tests were done, in 2018. But students in Catalonia lost … Continue reading The simmering row over Spanish-language teaching in Catalan schools
Oof. International PISA test scores came out. Wisconsin folks, America ranks 34th in mathematics, nearly below the OECD average! (We are 9th in reading, phew) A phenomenally wealthy nation ought to score higher, or we won't stay wealthy.@DaleKooyenga @DrJillUnderly @CJSzafir pic.twitter.com/f5FW0bv35w — Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) December 5, 2023
PISA HOT TAKE: 15yo U.S. students' reading scores are back to pre-Pandemic levels while their math scores plunged. Countries that improved in math had "shorter school closures during the pandemic & fewer impediments to remote learning" @DeAngelisCorey https://t.co/TvjWKAdNa0 — Patrick Wolf (@P_Diddy_Wolf) December 5, 2023
Joseph Pisani: The exercises are part of a new effort in the nation’s largest school district to teach teenagers how to relate to older Americans. The youngsters are watching videos of their elders doing yoga, hanging out with them and learning how to talk to them without using the old-age labels baby boomers hate. (Goodbye, … Continue reading Teens Learn to Talk to Baby Boomers
Robert Rudolf & Dirk Bethmann Using PISA 2018 data from nearly half a million 15-year-olds across 72 middle- and high-income countries, this study investigates the relationship between economic development and adolescent subjective well-being. Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction. The negative nexus stands in stark contrast to the … Continue reading Why are adolescents so unhappy?
Robert Rudolf & Dirk Bethmann Using PISA 2018 data from nearly half a million 15-year-olds across 72 middle- and high-income countries, this study investigates the relationship between economic development and adolescent subjective well-being. Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction. The negative nexus stands in stark contrast to the … Continue reading Why are adolescents so unhappy?
Ben Sixsmith: Britain has had minimal economic growth for years. Poland has long been enjoying some of the highest economic growth in Europe. It even emerged from the pandemic better off than other European nations with, as Paweł Bukowski and Wojtek Paczos wrote for the LSE, “a relatively lax approach to economic lockdown and a bit of sheer luck”. … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Economic growth and tax base
Steve Hsu Previously I have estimated that PRC is outproducing the US in top STEM talent by a factor as large as 10x. In a decade or two the size of their highly skilled STEM workforce (e.g., top engineers, AI researchers, biotech scientists, …) could be 10x as large as that of the US and comparable to the … Continue reading SAT score distributions in Michigan
Gijsbert Stoet David C. Geary: We investigated sex differences in 473,260 adolescents’ aspirations to work in things-oriented (e.g., mechanic), people-oriented (e.g., nurse), and STEM (e.g., mathematician) careers across 80 countries and economic regions using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyzed student career aspirations in combination with student achievement in mathematics, reading, … Continue reading Sex Differences in Adolescents’ Occupational Aspirations: Variations Across Time and Place
Evita Duffy: Right now in China, 195 million students K-12 are learning in-person in Chinese public schools. Meanwhile, millions of American public school students are learning in a failed remote system that can’t even keep track of thousands of students who haven’t shown up for class all year. In 2018, 15-year-olds in dozens of countries … Continue reading 195 Million Chinese Students Are In School. Why Aren’t Our Kids?
NBER: Patience and risk-taking – two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making – are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and risk-taking (negative) together account for two-thirds … Continue reading Culture and Student Achievement: The Intertwined Roles of Patience and Risk-Taking
Shannon Watkins: When it comes to math performance, the United States has a pitiful record. Each year, about 1 million students enroll in college algebra and about 50 percent of those students fail to earn a “C” or better. And according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. considerably underperforms in high school … Continue reading Do the Math…or Not
Corey Keysor: Spending is the guiding principle for how most people make sense of education policy. We have very high expectations for what our public schools need to offer and, on top of that, we frequently assume that reform means more spending. This spiral has led to the United States spending more than almost any … Continue reading Why Conventional Wisdom on Education Reform is Wrong (a primer)
Erin Richards: American students struggle in math. The latest results of an international exam given to teenagers ranked the USA ninth in reading and 31st in math literacy out of 79 countries and economies. America has a smaller-than-average share of top-performing math students, and scores have essentially been flat for two decades. One likely reason: U.S. high schools teach math differently than … Continue reading US students lag other countries in math. The reason probably lies in how schools teach it
Mark Seidenberg: Lucy Calkins has written a manifesto entitled “No One Gets To Own The Term ‘Science Of Reading’”. I am a scientist who studies reading. Her document is not about the science that I know; it is about Lucy Calkins. Ms. Calkins is a prolific pedagogical entrepreneur who has published numerous curricula and supporting … Continue reading This is why we don’t have better readers: Response to Lucy Calkins
Jenny Anderson: In the US, 13.5% of 15-year-olds can distinguish between fact and opinion when trying to interpret a complex reading task. In the UK, it’s just 11.5%. In the US, 13.5% of 15-year-olds can distinguish between fact and opinion when trying to interpret a complex reading task. In the UK, it’s just 11.5%. Those … Continue reading Only 9% of 15-year-olds can tell the difference between fact and opinion
Dana Goldstein: The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe. And the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening. … Continue reading ‘It Just Isn’t Working’: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Efforts
Dalmeet Singh Chawla: In a move likely to attract criticism, a peer-reviewed journal has agreed to publish an Italian physicist’s highly contested analysis of publications, which concludes that female physicists don’t face more career obstacles than their male colleagues. The journal says it will also simultaneously publish critiques of the paper, which one member of … Continue reading In decision certain to draw fire, journal will publish heavily criticized paper on gender differences in physics
Thomas Breda and Clotilde Napp : Women remain strongly underrepresented in math-related fields. This phenomenon is problematic because it contributes to gender inequalities in the labor market and can reflect a loss of talent. The current state of the art is that students’ abilities are not able to explain gender differences in educational and career … Continue reading Girls’ comparative advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in math-related fields
The Economist: The reforms had little time to work. Just 171,000 teachers—less than 10% of the total—were hired on merit. A further 36,000 head teachers and supervisors were promoted on ability rather than loyalty to union bosses. But even this may leave a mark. A study published this year by the Development Bank of Latin … Continue reading Andrés Manuel López Obrador seeks to expel merit from Mexico’s schools
Michael Crawford: Among the 29 countries and economies of the East Asia and Pacific region, one finds some of the world’s most successful education systems. Seven out of the top 10 highest average scorers on internationally comparable tests such as PISA and TIMSS are from the region, with Japan, Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Hong … Continue reading To unlock student potential in East Asia Pacific, be demanding and supportive of teachers
osi.bg: The Northwestern European countries have the highest potential for resilience to the impact of fake news due to the quality of education, free media and high trust among people. At the other extreme are the Balkan countries, which would be more vulnerable to the negative influence of fake news and the “post-truth” phenomenon mainly … Continue reading Media Literacy Index 2018: Common sense wanted (reading would seem to be required
Mckinsey: To understand what matters in student achievement, we applied analytics to data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). These reports take on a few of the most active debates: Do mindsets matter? If so, to what extent? What teaching practices work best? … Continue reading How to improve student educational outcomes
Betsy DeVos: To a casual observer, a classroom today looks scarcely different than what one looked like when I entered the public policy debate thirty years ago…The vast majority of learning environments have remained the same since the industrial revolution, because they were made in its image. Think of your own experience: sit down; don’t … Continue reading Common Core is dead at U.S. Department of Education
Jill Barshay: The United States may be known for its rugged individualism. But it turns out American teens are, surprisingly, much better at group collaboration than at individual academic work. That’s according to a new, unusual version of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tested collaborative problem-solving skills among 15-year-olds in more … Continue reading U.S. ranks No. 13 in new collaborative problem-solving test
Sarabeth Berman: The village had such a large, congested school because, in surrounding villages, the schools had been closed. For two decades, the number of children in the countryside had been dropping because of the one-child policy and urban migration, so the government had shuttered empty schools and created overstuffed campuses like the one at … Continue reading Sarabeth Berman reviews Little Soldiers by Lenora Chu
John Hart: Finnish education is rarely out of the news, whether it’s outstanding Pisa results, those same results slipping, the dropping of traditional subjects, not dropping subjects, or what makes Finnish teachers special. I worked in England for two years as a teacher before moving to Finland eight years ago. My colleagues in the UK … Continue reading The big lesson from the world’s best school system? Trust your teachers
Sean Coughlan: When there are debates about the world’s top performing education systems, the names that usually get mentioned are the Asian powerhouses such as Singapore and South Korea or the Nordic know-alls, such as Finland or Norway. But with much less recognition, Canada has climbed into the top tier of international rankings. In the … Continue reading How Canada became an education superpower
OECD: The framework illustrated in this document represents a new, ambitious and still experimental approach to global competence which the OECD has developed in consultation with the international community of experts and which could provide a starting point for the PISA 2018 assessment. In particular, its emphasis on attitudes and values is novel in comparative … Continue reading Global competency for an inclusive world
Chester E. Finn: While ersatz “credit recovery” and grade inflation devalue the high school diploma by boosting graduation rates even as NAEP, PISA, PARCC, SAT, and sundry other measures show that no true gains are being made in student achievement, forces are at work to do essentially the same thing to the college diploma. Observe … Continue reading The collapse of academic standards
Imogen West-Knights In the auditorium of Beijing Bayi School, on a cold morning thick with smog, props are broken, lines unlearnt and the mechanical curtain has blown a fuse. In four hours, my cast of 22 Chinese 14-year-olds, who have never acted before, will perform Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to an audience of 1,500 … Continue reading Why are schools in China looking west for lessons in creativity?
Who likes talking about what you’re doing wrong? Pretty much nobody, and that has certainly applied to educators and education institutions for many years, both locally and nationally. Everyone has opinions on what should be changed; few are willing to look in the mirror. But schools are one of the best examples of places where … Continue reading A refreshing look in the mirror for MPS
Laura Isensee In the latest round of global test results, the United States remained in the middle of the pack. But one Houston school stood out and highlighted how the United States did the best out of all developed countries to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged kids and their more affluent peers. The test … Continue reading Why One Houston High School Stands Out In Global Test Results
Amanda Ripley Here’s what the models show: Generally speaking, the smartest countries tend to be those that have acted to make teaching more prestigious and selective; directed more resources to their neediest children; enrolled most children in high-quality preschools; helped schools establish cultures of constant improvement; and applied rigorous, consistent standards across all classrooms. Of … Continue reading What America Can Learn About Smart Schools in Other Countries
Luigi Guiso, Ferdinando Monte, Paola Sapienza, Luigi Zingales: results, we classified countries according to several measures of gender equality. (i) The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index (GGI) (10) reflects economic and political The existence (1), degree (2), and origin (3, 4) of a gender gap (difference between girls’ and boys’ scores) in mathematics are … Continue reading Culture, Gender, and Math
The Economist: motivated people into teaching is a struggle in many countries. Low pay is often blamed, especially when it is combined with long working hours. The difficulties of teacher recruitment, one argument goes, is why pupils in some countries do so poorly in school. But data from the OECD, a club of mostly rich … Continue reading Do shorter hours or higher wages make better teachers?
Dave Baskerville (7 April 2016) Mr. Ed Hughes, Member, MMSD Board 4/7/16 Ed, I finally got around to reading your “Eight Lessons Learned” article in the 3/9/16 edition of CT. Interesting/thanks. As you know from our previous discussions, we have similar thinking on some of the MMSD challenges, not on others. For the sake of … Continue reading Responding to Ed Hughes
Eduardo Porter: “There is no way you can blame socioeconomic status for the performance of the United States,” said Andreas Schleicher, the O.E.C.D.’s top educational expert, who runs the organization’s PISA tests. “When you look at all dimensions of social background, the United States does not suffer a particular disadvantage.” Mr. Schleicher criticized the analysis … Continue reading “There is no way you can blame socioeconomic status for the performance of the United States”
Chester Finn & Brandon Wright: A great problem in U.S. education is that gifted students are rarely pushed to achieve their full potential. It is no secret that American students overall lag their international peers. Among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose students took the PISA exams in 2012, … Continue reading The Bright Students Left Behind
The Economist: Each year 122,000 pupils—17% of the total—leave school with no high-school diploma. Last year the French army evaluated national levels of reading and comprehension during a compulsory day of military and civic service for 17-year-olds. It found that one in ten attendees could not understand basic French. Such difficulties are concentrated in the … Continue reading French education High flyers and sad failures
Kevin Donnelly: Seventy teachers from the UK were sent to Shanghai to study classroom methods to investigate why Chinese students perform so well. Upon their return, the teachers reported that much of China’s success came from teaching methods the UK has been moving away from for the past 40 years. The Chinese favour a “chalk … Continue reading A group of teachers went to China and realized that the West is instructing students wrong
Kabir Chibber: Finland already has one of the best school education systems. It always ranks near the top in mathematics, reading, and science in the prestigious PISA rankings (the 2012 list, pdf) by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Teachers in other countries flock to its schools to learn from a country that is … Continue reading Goodbye, math and history: Finland wants to abandon teaching subjects at school
Joe Yeado: While at the gym last week, I overheard two fathers discussing the homework their elementary and middle school children were bringing home. The general feeling was that the homework was too hard and that students were being asked to do complex tasks in earlier grades than when the dads were kids. They lamented … Continue reading Higher Academic Achievement May Require Higher Standards
OECD Pisa: Equipping citizens with the skills necessary to achieve their full potential, participate in an increasingly interconnected global economy, and ultimately convert better jobs into better lives is a central preoccupation of policy makers around the world. Results from the OECD’s recent Survey of Adult Skills show that highly skilled adults are twice as … Continue reading What Makes a School Successful?
Grant Wiggins: An old lament. Here’s what bugs me. Many of us made this argument 25 years ago. The limited value of secret one-shot standardized tests as feedback has been known for decades. They may be acceptable as low-stake audits; they are wretched as feedback mechanisms and as high-stakes audits. Why don’t audits work when … Continue reading Commentary on standardized Tests
The Economist SOCIAL mobility, or the lack of it, gnaws at the consciences of governments. Better opportunities for those born without the local equivalent of a silver spoon in the mouth is a common electoral promise. Some recent data suggest it is hard to deliver. The OECD’s latest “Education at a Glance” report compares how … Continue reading How kids compare against their parents’ level of schooling
Hechinger Report By any measure, Poland has made remarkable education progress since the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the most recent 2012 international tests of 15-year-olds, known as PISA tests, Poland ranked 9th in reading and 14th in math among all 65 countries and sub-regions that took the test. It used to be on … Continue reading What U.S. schools can learn from Poland
The Oklahoman: STUDENT achievement has surged dramatically in several countries around the world, surpassing the United States. Journalist Amanda Ripley convincingly suggests those nations’ experiences should inform education policy in Oklahoma. In writing “The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way,” Ripley reviewed other nations’ school systems and interviewed foreign-exchange students. … Continue reading Education successes offer template for Oklahoma
Rebecca Ratcliffe: England’s “unimaginative” exam system is little changed from Victorian times and fails to prepare young people for modern working life, Eton’s headmaster has said. Tony Little said there was a risk that “misleading” test scores may become more important than education itself, and warned against a narrow focus on topping rankings. “There is … Continue reading Eton headmaster: England’s exam system unimaginative and outdated
Roberto Ferdman: It isn’t easy to be a disadvantaged high school student anywhere, but the U.S. education system appears to be particularly unkind to its less privileged youth. Poor students have a tougher time overcoming their socioeconomic odds in the U.S. than in Canada, France, Russia, and 33 other countries, according to a new global … Continue reading It’s harder to be a poor student in the U.S. than in Russia
Ray Fisman: very three years, Americans wring their hands over the state of our schools compared with those in other countries. The occasion is the triennial release of global scholastic achievement rankings based on exams administered by the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests students in 65 countries in math, science, and … Continue reading Commentary on School Choice in Sweden
Michelle Hackman: When it comes to financial literacy around the world, American teens are middling. The United States may fuel the world’s largest economy and operate its most robust financial system. But compared to the financial prowess of teenagers in 17 other countries, U.S. teens come off downright mediocre. That’s according to a new study … Continue reading American Teens Achieve Mediocrity In Financial Literacy, Local math & reading background
Kevin Carey: Americans have a split vision of education. Conventional wisdom has long held that our K-12 schools are mediocre or worse, while our colleges and universities are world class. While policy wonks hotly debate K-12 reform ideas like vouchers and the Common Core state standards, higher education is largely left to its own devices. … Continue reading Americans think we have the world’s best colleges. We Don’t
John Fallon: And if the “doubling” part may seem a little ambitious, remember this. If every class in every school in every country that participates in PISA could get even close to the highest performing comparable ones, you would comfortably achieve that goal of doubling learning outcomes. This is the challenge: how can we help … Continue reading The five trillion dollar question
Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson and Ludger Woessmann: “The big picture of U.S. performance on the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is straightforward and stark: It is a picture of educational stagnation…. Fifteen-year olds in the U.S. today are average in science and reading literacy, and below average in mathematics, compared to … Continue reading U.S. Students from Educated Families Lag in International Tests
Grant Birmingham: Jinjing Liu, a 15-year-old ninth-grader at Meilong Intermediate in central Shanghai—and part of the best education system in the world’s most populous country—is ticking off her normal class schedule: “Physics, chemistry, math, Chinese, English, Chinese literature, geography…the usual stuff,” she says in impeccable English. That’s not Jinjing’s school day schedule; that’s her workload … Continue reading Lessons From the World’s Best Public School
Fareed Zakaria: The United States has high levels of education and a large percentage of its workers in adult learning and training programs, and it spends lots of money on all these activities. And yet, it does worse than many countries with few advantages and resources. (And no, it isn’t just because of immigrants. About … Continue reading America’s educational failings
Alan Borsuk: Patricia Deklotz, superintendent of the Kettle Moraine School District, said her district, west of Milwaukee, is generally high performing. But, Deklotz asked, if they talk a lot about getting students ready for the global economy, are they really doing it? PISA is a way to find out. “It raises the bar from comparing … Continue reading Why 14 Wisconsin high schools take international standardized test
Playbook International Student Assessment (PISA) 1MB PDF.
Ian Johnson: In December, China stunned the world when the most widely used international education assessment revealed that Shanghai’s schools now outperform those of any other country—not only in math and science but also in reading. Some education experts have attributed these results to recent reforms undertaken by the Chinese government. Jiang Xueqin has been … Continue reading Solving China’s Schools: An Interview with Jiang Xueqin
The Hechinger Report: Here’s a modest test result to bolster the argument of those who say the American educational system isn’t so terrible. On a new creative problem-solving test taken by students in 44 countries and regions, U.S. 15-year-olds scored above the international average and rank at number 18 in the world. That’s much better … Continue reading US students rank better internationally on new problem solving test than they do on conventional math and reading exams
Chinese pupils are once again at the top of international education rankings. Recent further in-depth analysis of results from the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, have now shown that it’s not just pupils from Shanghai and Beijing coming top of the class. Children from rural areas and disadvantaged environments of China also outperformed peers in other countries.
UK education secretary Liz Truss is leading a visit to China with a group of teachers to observe why. But she should be mindful of copying a system that is being questioned by some Chinese researchers for the stress it puts on children.
Chinese pupils spend more time in school than British children. School days are longer and holidays are shorter. On average, under the current system, the length of the secondary school year is 245 days. Chinese pupils get around four weeks off in winter, and seven weeks in summer, including weekends and all kinds of traditional festivals. That’s a total of 175 days off, 37 days fewer than UK pupils.
Pisa stands for Programme for International Student Assessment. But judging from the reaction to the OECD rankings of educational attainment, it may as well mean Parental Index of Social Anxiety.
The latest analysis of the global league table showed that the 15-year-old children of Chinese janitors and street-sweepers were better at maths than the offspring of many other countries’ professionals and managers. The news added fuel to this week’s visit to Shanghai by a UK education minister, bent on finding the secret of local children’s success and replicating it at home.
But British concerns were reflected around the world, with telling local variants. Spain’s El Confidencial highlighted that Madrid’s teenagers were outperforming Catalonia’s. Corriere della Sera wondered why, against the grain of other countries, the children of Italian managers beat those of professionals, who have higher educational attainment. (If you will inherit the family law firm or accounting practice, you get lazy, suggested one OECD researcher).
IF THE world’s education systems have a common focus, it is to turn out school-leavers who are proficient in mathematics. Governments are impressed by evidence from the World Bank and others that better maths results raises GDP and incomes. That, together with the soul-searching provoked by the cross-country PISA comparisons of 15-year-olds’ mathematical attainment produced by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, is prompting educators in many places to look afresh at what maths to teach, and how to teach it.
Those countries languishing in the league tables fret about how to catch up without turning students off the subject with boring drill. Top performers, most of them Asian (see chart), fear that their focus on technical proficiency does not translate into an enthusiasm for maths after leaving school. And everyone worries about how to prepare pupils for a jobs market that will reward creative thinking ever more highly.
Maths education has been a battlefield before: the American “math wars” of the 1980s pitted traditionalists, who emphasised fluency in pen-and-paper calculations, against reformers led by the country’s biggest teaching lobby, who put real-world problem-solving, often with the help of calculators, at the centre of the curriculum. A backlash followed as parents and academics worried that the “new math” left pupils ill-prepared for university courses in mathematics and the sciences. But as many countries have since found, training pupils to ace exams is not the same as equipping them to use their hard-won knowledge in work and life.
Students in Shanghai have the highest results in international Pisa tests. But what is the state of education for China’s rural poor, far away from the showcase cities? Andreas Schleicher, who runs the Pisa tests, went to find out.
About 1,900 miles south west of Shanghai is Qiao Tou Lian He elementary school.
It’s an hour’s drive from the town of Tengchong, which might seem a small distance in comparison, but most of the school’s children have never made it to Tengchong.
Providing an education for children in such sparsely-populated rural areas is one of China’s major challenges.
While the economic and social development of these rural regions has been remarkable, China’s coastal cities are racing ahead at an even faster pace.
The children of cleaners in Asian cities such as Shanghai and Singapore are better at maths than the offspring of doctors and lawyers in the US and UK, according to an analysis of the global Pisa test rankings published on Tuesday.
The international league table, first released by the OECD in December, had shown 15-year-olds in Shanghai to be top in maths, while the UK languished in 26th place and the US in 36th.
But fresh scrutiny has revealed that the state-educated children of British professionals are on average a whole school year behind the children of “elementary” workers in Shanghai in maths ability, and around three months behind the same group in Singapore. The gap is even wider between US professionals and Asian cleaners or caterers.
Gabriel Sahlgren and Julian Le Grand:
Put a child of a cleaner from Shanghai or Singapore up against a scion of the western elite in a standardised test and guess who will come out top? According to the latest research, the western kids will trail their Asian counterparts by the equivalent of a whole school year.
This prompted another bout of anxiety of a kind that has become increasingly common since 2001, when the global Pisa survey of educational attainment was first published. Parents once drew comfort from steady improvements in school-leaving grades in places such as the UK. Confronted with evidence of how their children’s accomplishments compared to those of students in faraway places, many westerners have taken fright.
Next week Elizabeth Truss, a British education minister, will lead a fact-finding mission to Shanghai to try to find out what the schools there are doing right. Yet in their rush to copy the winning formula of high-performing countries in east Asia, politicians risk drawing the wrong conclusions. Schools in Shanghai are very different from those in Ms Truss’s constituency in southwest Norfolk. But not all of those differences play a role in Shanghai’s superior performance. Some are irrelevant. Some may even be harmful. And some will be idiosyncratic features of the school she happens to visit, rather than representative of the system. It is easy to point out how a good school differs from a bad one, and conclude that you have found the secret to high achievement – but it is also lazy, unscientific and wrong.
