Going beyond education policies – how can PISA help turn policy into practice?

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

How Do We Stack Up? Using OECD'S PISA to Drive Progress in U.S. Education from EdPolicy Leaders Online.

How are policy makers in the United States using data to help districts maximise their impact? And, what tools do districts need to work together in order to build stronger communities?  The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in the United States has transferred a great deal of autonomy to states and districts. These local authorities are now responsible for transforming state and federal policies into strategies and practices that guide teaching and learning in the classroom. This allocated autonomy creates opportunities for states and districts to collaborate, but also adds an element of the unknown, since most decisions used to be taken at the federal level. Data are crucial to understanding the effect policies have on education systems at a local level. But, collecting the right kind of data can be challenging. 

The OECD’s triennial report on the state of education, the Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA), can be a good starting point. Tracking trends over time, PISA allows policy makers to link data on student learning outcomes with data on students’ backgrounds and attitudes towards learning and on key factors that shape their learning, in and outside of school. PISA examines the relationships with low performance, what makes schools successful, including autonomy and accountability, and teacher-student collaboration.

A new online course developed by EdPolicy Leaders online aims to unlock PISA to reveal what is possible in education for US policy makers and education leaders. We hope it will enable educators to leverage the experience of the world’s leading school systems to improve policies and practice.

Understanding PISA results is a first step towards defining ways in which PISA data can be used to identify strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. education system. What then follows is creative thinking about what education leaders, schools, teachers, parents and students themselves can do to support policy actions that ensure every student is equipped with the skills necessary to achieve their full potential and participate in an increasingly interconnected global economy.

There is no single combination of policies and practices that will work for everyone, everywhere. PISA’s unique contribution to the education debate is that it shows policy makers and education leaders what’s possible and shares evidence of the best policies and practices across the globe.

For the next round of PISA in 2018, the OECD will take the assessment a step further and work with member countries to build a new framework which goes beyond testing students on their cognitive abilities. PISA will also examine if schools are helping students develop trust and respect, and are preparing them to be able to collaborate with others of different cultural origins.


Links:
PISA online course: How Do We Stack Up? Using OECD'S PISA to Drive Progress in U.S. Education
PISA 2012 Key Findings
PISA 2015 Assessment and Analytical Framework
OECD proposal for a framework to assess Global Competence in PISA 2018

Time, working and learning

by Viktoria Kis
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Seven years is the right length for apprenticeships – thought Queen Elizabeth I of England as she lifted her feather to sign the Statute of Apprentices in 1563. Seven years would ensure that everyone benefits: apprentices would receive good training and masters would gain from their apprentices’ labour – although it must be admitted that back then, many apprentices died before finishing their training or ran away from masters who starved them.

Today policy makers, employer and employee representatives have different considerations in mind, but the dynamics of costs and benefits matter just as much. Those dynamics need to be built into the design of apprenticeships and other work-based learning to make it attractive to both employers and learners. A new OECD study funded by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, entitled Work, train, win: Work-based learning design and management for productivity gains casts a spotlight on these issues.

At the beginning of work-based learning programmes employers make an investment. This pays off later on when, after receiving high quality training, skilled trainees achieve higher productivity and contribute to production. That final period when trainees are more productive than they cost is essential, as it helps employers recoup their initial costs. But if it is too long, then trainees will find it unattractive. Of course, not all occupations are the same. For example an apprentice in retail can quickly become productive so a work-based learning scheme for this occupation should be shorter, while a person training to be an industrial mechanic typically needs more time to become competent at their job and longer duration would be appropriate.

What exactly trainees do while in the workplace also affects the balance of costs and benefits for both parties. A restaurant benefits both when an apprentice cook peels potatoes (unskilled work) and when they bake a soufflé (skilled work), but gains no immediate benefits when the would-be cook is doing practice exercises that are non-productive, even though they are developing their skills. The good news is that there is often room to build learning into productive work, in ways that benefit the firms and are neutral for the trainees. For example, after observing their supervisor a trainee might practice the skill either through simulations or by doing real work. They improve their skills either way, but doing real work also generates benefits for the firm. Indeed research found that German firms with apprentices reduced the share of non-productive activities by half between 2000 and 2007, and increased the share of productive work – and they did that while maintaining training quality.

The scope for learning through productive work does vary across occupations. An apprentice cook can have a go at their first beurre blanc on day one, but a would-be electrician must undertake substantial training before touching the wires. But whenever possible, learning should take place as part of productive activities and rigorous assessments at the end of the scheme can verify that learning has taken place – if an apprentice electrician is able to correctly install a branch circuit in front of an examiner, there will be no doubt about it.

Putting this into practice requires management capacity within firms, so that they can allocate trainees and supervisors to tasks that meet the twin goals of learning and production. In countries and sectors with a tradition of work-based learning firms have much tacit knowledge (as many employers used to be apprentices themselves) and there is a surrounding infrastructure, such as training for trainers and instructional resources. Developing the infrastructure and enhancing firms’ ability to manage work-based learning is a big job, but well worth the effort and not just for those involved in a work-based learning scheme. Keeping a workplace up-to-date means dealing with new machines, materials and software, so firms that know how to support learning while getting on with productive activities will have a competitive edge.

When Queen Elizabeth I put down her feather, the law she signed remained in place for 250 years. Today policy and practice regarding work-based learning changes much more rapidly – but the main challenge of getting the design of work-based learning schemes right remains just as important as it was in her day.

Links:
OECD Education Working Paper: Work, train, win: work-based learning design and management for productivity gains, by Viktoria Kis
Find out more about Work-based learning
Photo credit: Vector freehand linear monochrome drawing of ancient pen and inkwell @Shutterstock

Latvia is determined to build on its progress in education

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

In the 2012 PISA test, urban students in Latvia outperformed rural students by the equivalent of more than a year of schooling – half a year more than the average performance difference between these two groups of students across OECD countries. According to a new OECD report, Education in Latvia, giving equal access to a quality education, for students of all ages, must be a priority.

Latvia has made remarkable progress in improving its education system since independence in 1991. Children now start their education at a young age – younger than in many OECD countries – and many continue into tertiary education. Student performance has also improved significantly since 2000, to the point that Latvian students scored near the OECD average in the 2012 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Will Latvia be able to continue this positive trend? Yes, but only if the country raises its teaching standards and ensures that all of its students can succeed. For example, the low salary and flat pay scale for Latvian teachers and academic staff stand at odds with the government’s ambition to improve teachers’ motivation and professional capacity. But guided by an earlier OECD report, Teacher Remuneration in Latvia: An OECD Perspective, Latvia is piloting a remuneration system as part of a new school-funding model. The aim is to make teachers’ pay competitive with that of other professions. To accomplish this aim, however, Latvian students and teachers will have to accept larger classes and higher student–to-teacher ratios. According to Education at a Glance 2015, in 2013 there was one teacher for every 9 students in Latvia, compared to an OECD average of 13 students per teacher.

Improving the country’s education-information system and its use of research to inform its education reform agenda should also be a priority. In recent years, vocational and tertiary education have benefited greatly from a series of research reports that prompted reforms to improve the quality and (labour market) relevance of education. Such efforts should be expanded to other levels of education.

Latvia’s public expenditure on education and per-student funding at all levels are lower than those in many OECD countries. The country will therefore need to make tough choices in spending if it is to obtain the best value for money. And in the longer run, Latvia should find ways to give education the priority in public policy and spending that it deserves. If Latvia would raise student learning outcomes by a further 25 points on the PISA scale, that could add almost 170 billion US$ to the Latvian economy over the lifetime of today’s school students. So the value of improved schooling will dwarf any conceivable cost of improvement.

Links:
Reviews of National Policies for Education: Education in Latvia
Teacher remuneration in Latvia: An OECD Perspective
Education Country Profile Latvia

Chart source: PISA 2012 Results: Ready to Learn: Students' Engagement, Drive and Self-Beliefs (Volume III)

Career education that works

by Anthony Mann
Director of Policy and Research, Education and Employers Taskforce

The benefits of employers engaging with education has long been reported and promoted within policy circles. The UK’s Department for Education, for example, has recently produced guidance for schools stating the need for student learning from the world of work within careers provision. Internationally, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has reported the benefits associated with employer involvement in education. (See, for example: Learning for Jobs).

Despite international interest surrounding the topic, research has failed to keep pace with policy instincts that career education will benefit young people going into the labour market. In a new article, published in the peer-reviewed, international Journal of Education and Work, Elnaz Kashefpakdel and Chris Percy offer new insights into the relationship between career talks with outside people experienced whilst in school and later earnings. They draw upon the limited work that already exists in the area - particularly that of Mann and Percy (2014), which surveyed 1,000 young adults aged 19-24 recalling their school days and found a significant wage premium linked to the degree of exposure young people had with school-mediated employer engagement activities.

This new work analyses data from the British Cohort Study (BCS70), which tracks 17,000 individuals throughout their lives. It provides a rich and reliable set of measurements including socio-economic factors which could potentially affect income, i.e. parental social class, academic ability, home learning environment and demographics. Through statistical analysis, it is possible to take account of such factors in assessing the impact of specific interventions in determining economic outcomes.

The BCS survey offers an interesting data set for analysis related to career interventions due to the timing of its questioning in 1986, when respondents were teenagers. During the 1980s in the UK, government was rolling out the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI). The Initiative aimed to help prepare young people for entry into the labour market and served to drive greater activity within schools. The nature of the Initiative often meant that young people were obliged to attend career talks and related sessions, though these activities varied considerably across schools and local authorities.

Data was collected during 1986 regarding young people’s opinions of any careers talks they encountered and was compared to their earnings aged 26, using statistical analysis techniques. Results revealed that, on average, for each career talk with someone from outside of the school experienced at age 14-15 young people benefited from a 0.8% wage premium when they were 26. These findings are statistically significant at 5%, meaning that there is a 95% certainty this correlation did not occur by chance. This relationship was not found for those aged 15-16, which implies that career talks had a greater value for the younger cohort.

Analysis also found a statistically significant relationship between student perceptions of the career talks that they experienced and later earnings. Students who found career talks to be ‘very helpful’ at age 14-15 were compared with those who found careers talks ‘not at all helpful/not very helpful’. Findings demonstrated that for students aged 14-15 who found career talks ‘very helpful’ witnessed a 1.6% increase in earnings per career talk they attended. This also proved significant for young people aged 15-16; with a smaller affect size, they benefited from a 0.9% earnings boost.

These findings provide a clear relationship between the number of career talks attended, and their helpfulness, and relative earnings at age 26. This provides a solid evidence-base for increasing the volume and quality of career talks with outside speakers in education.  Findings revealed that the impact of careers talks were more pronounced for the younger age group, 14-15, than they were for the elder group, 15-16. The authors argue that at the older age group young people may be more focused on examinations, while the younger group may have been more likely to be receptive to career talks due to the year group being more of an explorative period. Thus, perhaps the most desirable age group to deliver career talks to is 14-15 year-olds.

The authors hypothesis that it is difficult to gain new knowledge and skills, known as human capital, through such short duration episodes of engagement with the labour market. However, they could gain access to new, useful and trusted information and networks while interacting with professionals in an episodic manner. It is in this realm of social and cultural capital accumulation that enables young people to gain resources of meaning from the activities, such as career talks. Additionally, the findings are in line with the argument that through the repeated encounters with people from outside schools, young people are able to find helpful information about pathways to their career ambitions.

To read more about the study, visit the website of the Education and Employers Research.
Photo Credit: Careers bulb word cloud, business concept @Shutterstock

Who pays for universities: taxpayers or students?

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

There are few issues in education that raise as much political and ideological controversy as tuition fees for higher education. Across many countries a broad consensus has developed that public education in the age of compulsory schooling should be free of charge. Even Adam Smith considered free public education for the young as a central obligation of the state, for which the cost should be shared through taxes. But the question of how to distribute the financial cost of education beyond the age of compulsory schooling – for early childhood education, adult education and training and/or, especially, higher education – has kindled heated debates in recent years, particularly as national budgets shrink and the cost of high-quality education balloons.

Education at a Glance has documented the shift towards greater private funding of higher education in many countries over the past years. The rationale for this shift is the continuously high and even increasing financial returns that a higher education degree generates over a lifetime. Higher education could thus be considered a private investment for which individuals should bear most of the cost. Funding higher education with taxpayers’ money risks a reverse redistribution of social wealth from the poor to the rich, thus aggravating, rather than reducing, social inequality. The state’s responsibility is to design a framework for equitable and transparent funding regimes that also ensures access for students from poorer families through financial support systems of grants and scholarships. These arguments have convinced increasing numbers of governments to shift the burden of financing higher education to students and families.

Yet some countries maintain a welfare state-oriented social contract for higher education, where the cost of universities, like the cost of other social, cultural and educational services, is paid through progressive taxation. The private financial return on a higher education degree is largely skimmed off, through high and progressive income taxes, to become a high public return on the state’s investment. Open access and high enrolment rates prevent the system from working to the advantage of only a small part of the population. However, this model only works in a political system where high income taxes to support general social and educational services are widely accepted.

These divergent views are reflected in the huge differences in the amount that students and families have to pay for a year of university education. The most recent Education Indicators in Focus provides new data on tuition fees. The chart above presents the average annual tuition fees in a range of countries with comparable data. The chart clearly shows that the private cost of higher education, in the form of tuition fees, differs widely among countries. Obviously, within each country tuition fees for individual institutions can also vary; but the national average gives a good idea of the general approach and political preferences of a country.

On the top are countries where the cost is highly privatised; on the bottom are countries where higher education is funded through taxation, hence with no or limited tuition fees. The group on the top includes liberal market economies in the English-speaking world and Asian market economies, but also emerging economies with expanding higher education systems, such as Colombia. The group on the bottom is mainly composed of Nordic welfare states and some transition economies. In the middle section are countries that adhere to a mixture of both ideological positions.

Each model has strengths and weaknesses, not to mention technical challenges. Countries where the cost is privatised need to develop fair and transparent ways to set tuition fees. For example, tuition could be related to field of study and, ultimately, future earnings. These countries also need to determine conditions for loan systems and their income-contingent and means-tested repayment schemes. And above all, they need to secure equitable access to higher education through student support and financial aid schemes. If these policy conditions are met, these systems seem to be able to secure sustainable funding for universities.

Countries with a welfare-state model of funding higher education see participation in higher education as a right to which all capable students are entitled. The high long-term social and economic public returns – generally much higher than the direct costs for the state – ensure that the upfront investments in higher education pay themselves back in higher incomes taxes and lower social security expenses. The main challenge for such countries is to assume the fiscal consequences. Shrinking state budgets and growing resistance to high levels of taxation in such countries might result in dwindling funding for higher education – and for university-based research and innovation that fuels the knowledge economy.

But the most serious risks are for the countries in the middle section of the chart, those that don’t seem to be able to make a clear policy choice.  They might combine the risks of the two models but without enjoying their benefits, leading to a deadlock on both the public and the private side of the funding mix. In these countries, universities pay the price of political indecisiveness.

Ideologies always claim absolute validity of their arguments. Yet in policy making the challenge is to find the smartest approach that yields the best outcomes the most efficiently. What 21st-century knowledge economies need is a system of higher education that generates globally competitive research and innovation and provides high-quality education that is accessible to all talented students. This doesn’t come cheap, and countries have to assume the cost, whether through public and/or private funding. But the long-term price of underfunding higher education is much higher than the short-term cost to both taxpayers and students. An inability to make a clear policy choice seems to be the costliest (non-)choice of all.

Links:
How much do tertiary students pay and what public support do they receive? Education Indicators in Focus, issue No. 41, by Eric Charbonnier
Combien les étudiants paient-ils et de quelles aides publiques bénéficient-ils ? Les indicateurs de l'éducation à la loupe, issue No. 41 (French Version)
Education at a Glance 2015: OECD Indicators
Chart source: OECD (2015), Education at a Glance 2015: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris, http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eag-2015-en, Table B5.1.

Going grey, staying skilled

by Marco Paccagnella
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills, OECD

The population is “greying” in most advanced countries as well as in some developing countries. Many governments are struggling to address the challenges resulting from this demographic transition, from rising costs of healthcare, to worries about the sustainability of pension systems.

Increased life expectancy represents one of the great achievements of modern societies: living longer and better has been a dream of past generations. At the same time, it implies changes to many aspects of life. To finance retirement incomes and aged care, many governments have reformed their pension provisions and are asking individuals to work longer for less-generous pensions and to contribute more to the costs of care. When such reforms are passed during times of sluggish economic growth and rising unemployment, they tend to create discontent not only among older workers (who may long to retire), but also among younger adults, who may feel that delaying the retirement of older workers reduces their opportunities. At the same time, older workers may feel threatened by the increasingly rapid pace of technological change, and fear that they will not be able to find a new job, should they be laid off in a highly competitive labour market.

Managing these issues is extremely complex, given the interests involved and the interaction between different areas of social and economic policy. Yet, there is little doubt that skills development will play a central role in solving the puzzle. A big question is whether, and to what extent, skills decline with age. Is it true that older workers are less skilled, and therefore less productive than younger workers? If that’s the case, how can we make sure that people maintain a sufficiently high level of skills proficiency over an increasingly long horizon?

New evidence from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills and examined in the most recent issue of Adult Skills in Focus is extremely relevant to this debate. It provides an accurate picture of the cognitive skills of adults in a wide range of countries, and links such skills to important economic and non-economic outcomes, such as employment, wages, and health status.

The data suggest that proficiency in skills such as literacy and numeracy declines with age, although slowly, and not much. More important, there is considerable variation across countries in the extent and size of differences in skills proficiency related to age, suggesting that policies can play an important role in shaping the evolution of skills over a lifetime. Yet while skills decline with age, wages and employment rates typically do not. This could suggest that older workers are overpaid, given their productivity. If that were the case, older workers would be justified in fearing they are more likely to be dismissed, and that they would have a hard time finding a new job if they were. But productivity is a complex concept, and the cognitive skills measured in the Survey of Adult Skills constitute only a fraction of the skills portfolio that employers reward. With experience, workers are likely to develop an entire range of other skills that are much more difficult to measure than literacy or numeracy, but that are equally, if not more, valuable to employers.

This is not to downplay the importance of cognitive skills. The data also show that proficiency in literacy influences the wages and likelihood of employment among older workers more than it does among younger workers.

What can be actually done to sustain the skills of people as they age? As usual, prevention is better than cure. Improving the quality of education, i.e. ensuring that people leave formal education with the highest possible level of literacy and numeracy proficiency, is likely to yield large benefits, more than simply increasing the time spent in education. Starting working life with high skills increases the chances of entering the virtuous circle in which skills provide access to the opportunities, such as good jobs and training that further develop skills.

Training is clearly important, but targeting access is probably even more important. The overall rate of participation in training appears to have little relationship to the size of differences in literacy proficiency between the young and the old. Countries with large differences in literacy proficiency between younger and older adults tend to be countries in which training is disproportionately taken up by young adults.

As other recent research show, retirement appears to accelerate the loss of cognitive skills. This suggests that policies to delay retirement may benefit the cognitive skills of existing workers, but also that policies to encourage older people to remain engaged are important for those who have left the workforce.

The bad news is that cognitive skills inevitably decline with age. The good news is that this is only part of the story. There is large scope to shape the evolution of skills over a lifetime; and cognitive skills, while important, are not the only determinant of people’s success in life.

Links:
What does age have to do with skills proficiency? Adult Skills in focus, issue No.3 by Marco Paccagnella
Quel rapport entre l’âge et les compétences?
Age, Ageing and Skills: Results from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills
Photo Credit: © OECD

How well are teachers doing in solving problems using ICT?

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

If one were to ask ministers of education what they consider to be the most important factor determining the quality of their education systems, the odds are high that they would refer to the quality of the teaching work force. The saying goes that the quality of an education system can never exceed that of its teachers. Ensuring that the most talented candidates are attracted to the teaching profession is now widely recognised to be the most effective strategy to improve education.

But how does one assess how teachers compare to the rest of the working population? We still lack reliable, robust and comparable measures of some of the essential elements of teachers’ knowledge and skills. A new tool developed by the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, known as the Innovative Teaching for Effective Learning (ITEL) assessment, focuses on teachers’ pedagogical knowledge. It will provide comparative measures of some core elements of the knowledge and skills that we expect from teachers. In the meantime, the results of the Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), provide some insights into the skills of countries’ workforces – including teachers – in key areas, such as numeracy, literacy and problem solving. These data make it possible to compare the skills of teachers with those of other college and university graduates and with the working population as a whole.

A recent OECD report, prepared for the International Summit on the Teaching Profession, held earlier this year in Berlin, found that teachers’ skills in numeracy tend to be similar to those of other tertiary-educated professionals. The Survey of Adult Skills also assessed adults’ proficiency in problem-solving in technology-rich environments. The most recent Education Indicators in Focus brief compares teachers’ ICT and problem-solving skills with those of the working population as a whole and with other tertiary-educated professionals. The chart above confirms that, as with numeracy skills, teachers’ problem-solving skills using ICT more or less match those of other tertiary-educated professionals. On average, 51% of teachers, compared to 31% of the adult population as a whole, demonstrated good problem-solving and ICT skills (proficiency was characterised as “good” when adults demonstrated a high level of problem-solving competence and at least a basic level of ICT skills). But on average, the share of other tertiary-educated professionals who demonstrated “good” ICT skills was 3 percentage points larger than that of teachers. In only four countries/subnational entities (Canada, England/Northern Ireland, Japan and Korea) did teachers outperform their tertiary-educated peers. In many other countries and subnational entities (Denmark, Estonia, Flanders [Belgium], Ireland and Poland) teachers’ problem-solving and ICT skills were significantly weaker than those of other tertiary-educated professionals.

Age could be part of the explanation. After accounting for age, teachers are 4 percentage points more likely than other tertiary-educated adults to have good problem-solving skills using ICT. This finding reinforces the conclusion, consistently noted in Education at a Glance, that policy makers need to take seriously the implications of an ageing teaching force.

When only one in two teachers – and, in several countries, even fewer – are capable of solving problems using ICT, then it is not unreasonable to question their capacity to address complex issues in their professional environment. For example, if teachers lack these skills, they cannot be expected to move away from a routine-based professional practice, controlled by bureaucratic procedures, to a much more autonomous professional culture. And the use of technology to improve teaching and learning environments will depend on teachers’ skills to use ICT creatively and to its fullest potential.

The recent sobering findings from PISA about the role of computers in improving learning outcomes might be partly attributed to a lack of excellence in ICT skills among teachers. But the age gradient in problem-solving and ICT skills is also good news: younger generations of teachers seem to be closing the skills gap. New generations of teachers who are better trained and who participate in professional development activities throughout their careers will probably be able to adopt innovative practices that are more suited to 21st-century learning environments. Governments should not blame older teachers for having poor problem-solving and ICT skills; equally, they cannot afford to miss the opportunity to fill the teaching posts left vacant by retirees with younger, more tech-savvy problem solvers.

Links:
Teachers’ ICT and problem-solving skills: Competencies and needs. Education Indicators in Focus, issue No.40, by Elian Bogers, Gabriele Marconi and Simon Normandeau.
Compétences en TIC et en résolution de problèmes : où en sont les enseignants ? Les indicateurs de l'éducation à la loupe issue No. 40 (French version)
Innovative Teaching for Effective Learning - Teacher Knowledge Survey
Teaching Excellence through Professional Learning and Policy Reform
Education at a Glance 2015: OECD Indicators
Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection
Chart source: OECD Education database, www.oecd.org/site/piaac/publicdataandanalysis.htm.