Andreas Schleicher presentation abstract

Is the sky the limit in educational performance?
1. If the percentage of students achieving high grades in examinations increases, some will claim that the education system has improved. Others will claim that the requirements for attaining the grade must have been lowered. Behind the suspicion that better results reflect lowered criteria there is usually a belief that overall performance in education cannot be raised.
2. International comparisons such as OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show, however, that some countries do much better than others, so for many there is compelling evidence that improvement is possible. The performance of 15-year-olds in key subject areas in countries such as Finland, Canada or Japan revealed that excellence in education is an attainable goal, and at reasonable cost. Equally important is that some countries show that it is possible to combine high performance levels with a socially equitable distribution of learning opportunities. In particular, the examples of Canada, Finland, Japan, Korea and Sweden underline that poor performance in school does not automatically follow from a disadvantaged socio-economic background of students. PISA Results from these countries demonstrate that the challenge of achieving a high and equitable distribution of learning outcomes can be addressed and so set ambitious goals for others. All 30 OECD countries, and more than 20 others, are using PISA to monitor their education systems. All can be provoked by aspects of the performance of others to raise their own expectations.
3. Some countries have focused first on seeking to understand their PISA results better. Denmark commissioned a review of its education policies in relation to those of Finland which so considerably outperformed it in PISA. Canada and Germany have linked national assessments to PISA to monitor domestically areas that PISA does not assess. Some assess all students, not just a sample as PISA does, in order to monitor schools as well as the system as a whole, to provide information at the level at which many of the key decisions that affect students’ learning are made.
4. Monitoring shows how things are. Comparisons with others can show whether more could be achieved. But monitoring will not, by itself, improve performance. Results from international comparisons therefore raise the question what countries can do to help students to learn better, teachers to teach better, and schools to be more effective. PISA does not show which policies or practices cause success, but it does reveal some common characteristics of students, schools and education systems that do well. For example, PISA suggests that success is associated with a positive learning environment that is oriented towards results. Students and schools working in a climate characterised by high expectations and the readiness to invest effort, the enjoyment of learning, good teacher-student relations and high teacher morale tend to achieve better results.
5. Many of the countries that perform well in PISA today have been working towards this for years, and progressively shifted education policy and practice away from the mere control over the resources, structures and content of education towards the management of learning outcomes. But they have often pursued quite different pathways towards this. For example, the highest achiever in PISA, Finland, defines targets, provides support and monitors schools but leaves the choices about means to schools. England developed centralised strategies for its initial, successful efforts to improve performance in English language and mathematics but is now seeking ways to give more freedom to teachers and schools to determine the means by which to achieve improvements.
6. Whatever approaches countries have chosen, the transition towards outcome-based education systems has often not proved easy, as education systems often remain knowledge-poor - in the sense that they face difficulties in enabling schools and teachers to share, jointly develop and implement knowledge about their work and performance. While those who run education systems usually have access to some evidence, those who deliver educational services at school often do not, or face obstacles in translating such knowledge into effective teaching practices. Some countries leave the establishment of instructional policies and practices entirely to teachers and schools. However, if combined with a knowledge-poor environment, schools and teachers in such situations have often found themselves working in isolation. Other countries have approached the issue with a high degree of prescription over educational content. However, often schools and teachers have then found themselves merely at the receiving end of implementing national curricula.
7. Some countries have begun to link prescription with advanced feedback mechanisms, thus including teachers in the process of development and school improvement, and many of the most successful PISA countries have begun to create a knowledge-rich profession in which those responsible for delivering educational services, most notably teachers and school principals, act as partners and have the authority to act, the necessary information to do so, and access to effective support systems to assist them in implementing change. A fundamental prerequisite for educational improvement is to improve the knowledge base about what works. Education is a knowledge industry in the sense that it is concerned with the transmission of knowledge but it is not a knowledge industry in the sense that its own practices are being transformed by knowledge about the efficacy of its own practices. In many other fields, people enter their professional lives expecting their practice to be transformed by research. There is, of course, a large body of research about learning but much of it is unrelated to the kind of real-life learning that is the focus of formal education. Even that which is has an insufficient impact when education continues as a cottage industry, with practitioners working in isolation and building their practice on folk wisdom about what works. Central prescription of what teachers should do will not transform teachers’ practices in the way that professional engagement in the search for evidence of what makes a difference can. Building this kind of evidence base for improved practice is a more sure way to raise performance levels than to search among the current practices of other countries, even though there are lessons to be learned there, particularly by the poorer performing countries.
8. Linking PISA results with qualitative evidence on the characteristics of some of the best performing countries can also give clues about educational improvement. A multi-lateral PISA study to this end revealed important pointers for policy: While, traditionally, learners tend receive knowledge through standardised curricula, some of the best performing PISA countries have gone a long way towards individualising learning pathways and enabling students to learn together and from each other. Furthermore, while many education systems traditionally seek to select good and poor learners early on, with good learners being permitted to continue, many of the most successful PISA countries provide open and integrated learning opportunities that meet a broad range of interests and capacities of different learners and engage constructively with a heterogeneous student body. And finally, while education systems traditionally use tests and examinations mainly to certify performance and to ration access to further learning, some of the most successful countries now use modern formative assessments that strengthen confidence in learning results by providing useful feedback to learners on how to improve.
9. Evidence of improvement in education is complex to obtain and will only slowly emerge, but without it, there will only remain impressions and prejudice.