A comment on education test results

Reference: "Education: The race is not always to the richest"
The Economist, December 6th 2007.

The latest report from the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment compares the reading, mathematical and scientific progress of 400,000 15-year-olds in the 30 OECD countries and 27 others, covering 87% of the world economy. Its predecessors in 2000 and 2003 focused on reading and maths respectively. This time science took center stage.

At the top are some old stars: Finland as usual did best for all-round excellence, followed by South Korea (which did best in reading) and Hong Kong; Canada and Taiwan were strong but slightly patchier, followed by Australia and Japan. At the bottom, Mexico, still the weakest performer in the OECD, showed gains in maths; Chile did best in Latin America.

There is bad news for the United States: average performance was poor by world standards. Its schools serve strong students only moderately well, and do downright poorly with the large numbers of weak students. A quarter of 15-year-olds do not even reach basic levels of scientific competence (against an OECD average of a fifth). According to Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research, Americans are only now realising the scale of the task they face. Some individual states would welcome a separate assessment.

One of the problems with this kind of comparison is that countries vary greatly in size.

The best results from education in the United States seem to come from a few Northeastern states. Thus the Smartest States Awards identifies Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and Maine as the best performing states. Another reference judges the states with the best educational outputs are: Maine, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Iowa and Minnesota. How would Connecticut compare with Finland? How would the schools in the Northeast compare with Scandanavia.

Of course a part of the reason that the United States doesn't do better is that native Americans, blacks and Hispanics don't benefit as much from our educational system as do whites. That fact is demonstrated by dropout rates. I don't know whether that is due to discrimination against the students themselves, or to the low incomes more typical in families in these ethnic groups, or to the cultural legacy of discrimination against these groups in the past, or (more likely) a combination of all these factors.

The article asserts:

Letting schools run themselves seems to boost a country's position in this high-stakes international tournament: giving school principals the power to control budgets, set incentives and decide whom to hire and how much to pay them. Publishing school results helps, too. More important than either, though, are high-quality teachers: a common factor among all the best performers is that teachers are drawn from the top ranks of graduates.

It occurs to me that these factors may depend fundamentally on the importance that the society places on education. A society that values education would seem likely to make careers in education attractive to people, such as by offering good salaries and prestige to teachers and principals. With good, high prestige people, communities can give them freedom to organize their work and do their jobs!