The Leaning Tower of Education

I love reports of international comparisons. UNESCO does one every few years ranking countries for how good an environment they offer to bring up children. The best reports don’t just give league tables but offer clues on how to improve. Backed by real data, these are often compelling.

Sadly, political debate in many countries tosses away the opportunities that such reports offer. This is especially true in Britain, where anything foreign is viewed with some distaste and distrust. The print media doesn’t even notice some excellent reports, and pays scant regard to others.

I accept that politicians are sometimes in a bit of a bind. It is their job to promote their own party, and if league tables give embarrassing results they are hardly likely to trumpet them. Even politicians in opposition seem to stray quiet, which is rather sad, perhaps because it is all too rare that they have policies to deal with deep-seated issues. In many countries, there almost seems to be a conspiracy of politicians from all establishment parties to avoid some topics for real debate. In those circumstances, the media has a job to do to force this into the open, a job they often fail to do.

A glorious exception, of course, is The Economist, which has the advantage of taking an international viewpoint rather than a parochial one. After finishing this blog, I’ll start indulging myself in my favourite reading of the whole year, the Economist Christmas double issue.

This month, a report was issued comparing educational attainment among fifteen year-olds in different countries. This has been produced each three years since 2000 by PISA, a body with nothing to do with leaning towers but is affiliated to the OECD.

True to form, I was first alerted to the report by an excellent article in The Economist. On this occasion there was also some passing mention in the British press, for the refreshing reason that the coalition government appear to be taking its findings seriously, and shaping its policies on the generally accepted good practices emerging. Let us hope they are just as open when the next report comes out in three years time, as it is braver to highlight an inevitable mixed bag of results having been in power for a while than it is to use poor results to blame the recently ousted government.

I went online to find the PISA output. While there were some executive summaries, overall I found it rather hard going. Overall, I found a sense of caution, both in a statistical sense with a lot of caveats about significance and a lot of tables of definition, and also in a political sense with care about drawing conclusions. But what were excellent were a series of case studies of individual countries who had found some success.

It is sort of obvious the education matters, and also that it is a good leading indicator of success. Leading indicators are always gold dust, whatever the field. Most striking in the rankings is the strong performance of participating Asian nations. South Korea is at or the near the top consistently, but the Shanghai region of China, taking part in the survey for the first time in 2009, was highest in all categories. It is no surprise that well governed Asian counties march ahead relentless economically, and this suggests no let up in that trend.

Some European countries, notably Finland, are perennial strong performers, while rich nations such as the USA, Germany, France and the UK do average or worse, something of a scandal given the financial resources available. Poland and Portugal have progressed since the last report. Gratifying in this report is the march of progress in many Latin American nations, led by Chile. PISA will be thrilled that policy makers in many places have been noting good practice, applying it and benefitting rather quickly. That is true international progress.

The UK, true to form, did not have much comparable data, since their participation before 2006 was somehow not compliant (I could not find an explanation of why not). Typical UK – joining late and not following the rules. However, what data there was is very interesting. The UK does quite well in Science, and moderately in reading and mathematics. Over the last three years there was a small decline, though this was similar to many European rankings and could just be explained by developing nations catching up.

There were some statistics ranking the constituent parts of the UK. When I was growing up, I remember Scotland and Northern Ireland always scoring ahead of England and Wales. Well, Scotland seems to have lost that lead before 2006, though not to have got any worse relatively since. What has happened since 2006 is a relative decline in Wales, which now ranks well below the other three nations.

Which leads to the question, why? To their credit, Welsh assembly politicians showed some shame and urgency about the results, yet their remedies didn’t seem to amount to much more than chucking money at the problem. What is clear from PISA is a relatively poor correlation between money spent and results achieved.

The Economist had a theory. The Welsh assembly voted sometime in the mid noughties to remove league tables for schools in Wales. I vaguely recall the Scots doing that too, rather earlier. League tables have flaws, most notably that you can game them by focusing on the narrow definitions of success within their rules. There is evidence to me in some of the PISA success case studies that some countries have simply gone after the PISA defined metrics, and therefore it is possible that the progress is not so sustainable or general as made out. Nonetheless, perhaps the Economist is on to something. Competition works, and league tables certainly create some pressure and competition. Teaching unions hate them, but for reasons which I always find teacher centric rather than child centric.

PISA refrain from general advice about league tables, perhaps because of the political caution mentioned above. Their general advice seems to be to focus policy – on core curriculum areas, or on failing schools, social classes or regions. They also recommend well qualified and carefully recruited teachers. That makes sense, though I sense there is a lot more in all their pages of tables than that. What about parenting? As parents, and national citizens, we should care about this.

What I care about now is Christmas celebration, and some quiet time with the Economist. I hope you find what you care for over the holidays and in 2011.