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izz aty

OECD (2012), Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Sch... - 0 views

www.oecd.org/...50293148.pdf

OECD education equity school equality

shared by izz aty on 27 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • izz aty on 27 Nov 14
     
    OECD (2012), Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools, OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264130852-en
izz aty

Scandinavia school science slowcoach Norway gets left behind in PISA polls / News / The... - 0 views

theforeigner.no/...gets-left-behind-in-pisa-polls

scandinavian education norway OECD PISA

shared by izz aty on 17 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • “We must have higher ambitions than staying around the average level among OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries,” declared the Minister at Tuesday’s press conference in Oslo.
  • Norway is within the OECD (mean) average bracket when it comes to the sciences (494), and slightly below it in math (501). But these are still not results, “we can be satisfied with,” added Minister Isaksen.
  • The PISA 2012 survey results were slightly different when it came to Norwegian students’ reading skills. They have improved since the last time, albeit just slightly, with 503 in 2009, against 504 now – though female pupils still did better than their male peers.
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  • “I am convinced that teachers want more professional input,” declared Minister Isaksen.   “Good teachers will have the opportunity to be even better with our teacher boost,” he concluded.
  • below Finland with its 524 points, Norway also comes second amongst the Nordics. Denmark gets 496 points, while Iceland and Sweden ‘tie’ with 483. The OECD’s mean average is 496.
  • Math skill levels measured by the PISA 2012 presented a significant decline of 9 points compared to 2009 (external link) to 489.As a Nordic country, Norway also trails Finland, Denmark, and Iceland. These countries got 519, 500, and 493, respectively. Sweden got 478. Norway’s scores when it came to science subjects also dropped compared with 2009, getting 500 against 495 now (external link).
izz aty

England's Ranking in International League Tables | National Union of Teachers - NUT - 0 views

www.teachers.org.uk/...in-international-league-tables

english education education ESTEkiv state school OECD PISA social problems social phenomenon social justice england united kingdom

shared by izz aty on 17 May 14 - No Cached
  • The Sutton Trust report said that big variations in England’s education rankings in global league tables can be misleading, should be treated with caution and can obscure the true challenges facing schools.
  • apparent differences in performance between different global tables, are the result of three key factors: Different countries are included in the different tables; League tables exaggerate the importance of raw test scores; and Some countries do better on one survey than another, perhaps because the surveys test different aspects of literacy, numeracy and science.
  • Sir Peter Lampl, chair of the Sutton Trust, said:“Whatever the average ranking of English education, we need to focus on reducing social segregation which is greater in England than almost all other OECD countries
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  • We also need to improve teaching standards across the board and not focus so much on structures if we are to match those countries that consistently outperform the rest of the world – not just places like Hong Kong and Japan, but successful European education systems – and use their achievement as our benchmark
  • School systems that offer parents more school choices are less effective in raising the performance of all children
  • UK state schools outperform private schools;
  • Financial constraints limits school ‘choice’ for low income families
  • PISA 2009 had some interesting things to say on schools systems, choice and equity, finding, for example that: Comprehensive school systems produce better and more equitable results;
  • Exclusions and school transfer of pupils reduces performance.
  • Pisa is unequivocal in saying that: “The bottom line is that the quality of a school system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.”
  • The top ranked countries were Finland and South Korea where, despite huge differences, there was a shared social belief in the importance of education and its “underlying moral purpose”. These countries also had among the lowest levels of school choice and Finland had the lowest levels of school autonomy.
  • The Pearson report concluded that spending on education was important but less so than other factors. For example it said successful countries gave teachers a high status and have a ‘culture’ of education.
  • also emphasised the importance of high-quality teachers and the need to find ways to recruit the best staff – including raising teacher status, professional respect and pay.
  • OECD, PISA 2009 Results: What Makes a School Successful? – Resources, Policies and Practices (Volume IV) (OECD Publishing, 2010)
izz aty

10 questions to understanding PISA results | The EDifier - Center for Public Education - 0 views

blog.centerforpubliceducation.org/...-to-understanding-pisa-results

PISA american education OECD education

shared by izz aty on 17 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The rhetoric pertaining to the quality of our public schools is certainly going to be amplified tomorrow, with critics lamenting how the results show our public schools are in dire straits while others will argue the results are meaningless
  • an assessment of reading, math, and science literacy given every three years to 15-year-old students in public and private schools in about 65 countries.
  • international institution Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) coordinates the development and administration of PISA worldwide
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  • PISA is one of the few tools we have to compare the outcomes of high school students internationally.  PISA provides valuable information on how prepared high school students are for postsecondary success whether in the workplace, career training, or higher education.
  • PISA is designed to measure how well students can apply their knowledge to real-world situations. To measure such skills, the test items on PISA are primarily “constructed response,” meaning the test-taker has to write their answers to the questions, and there are few multiple-choice items.
  • Every industrialized country now educates all their students, including language minority, special needs and low-performing students. Every country that participates in PISA must adhere to strict sampling rules to ensure the country’s results are nationally representative of all 15-year-old students. Indeed, the decision to test secondary students at age 15 was made in part because young people at that age are still subject to compulsory schooling laws in most participating nations, which provides more assurance that PISA will capture the broadest sample.
  • OECD reports statistically significant differences in performance between nations, which is a more accurate way to look at PISA rankings than a straight listing of average scores.
  • Does PISA measure the effectiveness of public school systems? Not completely, for three reasons: 1) PISA results are representative of the performance of all 15-year-olds in participating countries including those  attending private schools; 2) PISA makes no attempt to isolate schools from outside factors such as poverty or high proportions of non-native language speakers that may have an impact on  performance —such factors are important to include in the mix when evaluating the effectiveness of each country’s schools; and 3) No single measure can incorporate every outcome we expect from our public schools
  • look at how much time other countries give teachers for professional development, how much they pay their teachers, how much time teachers spend in the classroom, how much flexibility exists at the local level, how special needs students are taught, and how much time students spend in school.
  • see PISA results as an opportunity to assess if best practices in teaching and learning in other countries can also work for secondary schools here in the U.S.
  • just because a high-performing or high-gaining country does something does not mean it will work in U.S. schools.
  • Many analysts observe that poverty has a greater impact on student performance in the U.S. than elsewhere. For one thing, the U.S. has the highest child poverty rates among industrialized countries. For another, students in the U.S. who live in poverty tend to have less access to resources that research consistently shows impact student achievement, including highly effective teachers, access to rigorous curriculum, and high quality pre-k programs.
izz aty

Center on International Education Benchmarking » Finland Overview - 0 views

www.ncee.org/...finland-overview

finnish special ed finnish education education finland scandinavian education nordic nordic special ed

shared by izz aty on 17 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Right after the Second World War, Finland was largely a land of woodcutters and agriculturalists.  Finland’s education system and student achievement at that time were unremarkable.
  • In the early 1990s, Finland was forced to completely re-think its economic strategy. An overheated economy combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a major trading partner, to produce a precipitous decline in GDP and an unemployment rate of 20%, higher than in the Great Depression.  Following this cataclysm, Finland applied for entrance into the European Union and began to move away from its traditional export strategies.
  • The government decided to funnel resources into the development of the telecommunications sector, hoping to reinvent Finland as a global telecommunications capital.
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  • By 2003, 22 of every 1000 Finnish workers were involved in the research and development sector, a figure almost three times higher than the OECD average, and more than four times higher than in Finland in 1991.   The Finnish economy had undergone a major transformation.
  • The education system was able to respond to the workforce needs created by the events of the early 90s because of a series of extensive reforms that had begun in 1972, which had changed the face of teaching and learning in Finland.
  • began with creation of a unified comprehensive education structure and national curriculum guidelines.
  • Accompanying the restructuring of schools was a restructuring of teacher education, with responsibility for teacher training moving to Finland’s universities, where Finland’s other most valued professional had long been trained. Other measures were also aimed at improving the quality of the Finnish teaching force. 
  • The Finnish story is not unlike that of Singapore, in that eventual success was the result of a long, slow and rather steady process, not the result of a single development, policy, program or administration.  Each step in the development of the modern Finnish education system built sensibly on those that went before.
  • These reforms and others, described in more detail in other sections on Finland on this site, made Finland’s economic survival in the 1990s possible.
  • if there is a key to the success of the Finnish system, it is the quality of their teachers and the trust that the Finnish people have vested in them.  Some would argue that this, in some sense, makes the Finnish case irrelevant to the decisions to be made by other countries, because they lack the culture in which such a high value is placed on teachers and teaching. 
  • when one examines the specific policies that the Finns have adopted with respect to the recruitment, selection, training, supervision and support of teachers, and the way in which the intense focus on teacher quality is matched to the Finnish approach to accountability, curriculum, instruction and school management, then one begins to see that teacher quality in Finland is not the result of an unmatchable culture, but rather of a specific highly integrated system of policies and structures that other nations can emulate to produce a culture that is no less supportive of teachers and no less likely to result in superior student performance.
  • USEFUL LINKS Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture The Finnish National Board of Education thisisFINLAND: Education & Research Articles World Education Services Education Links – Finland The CIA World Factbook: Finland
  • Every four years, the government prepares a development plan for education and research, using that plan as a vehicle to make sure that the Finnish system is constantly adapting to the changing needs, including the economic needs, of the country.
  • Though Finland’s population is very homogenous (more than 98% are descended from Finnish stock), that is changing and the Finns know that their education system will have to change to adapt to these changing demographics.
  • Lower-skilled work is also being exported to other parts of Europe and a greater proportion of Finnish jobs will require ever-more-sophisticated skills, another factor that is accounted for in Finnish education planning.
  • The government’s stated priorities going forward include reducing class sizes, enhancing remediation and special needs teaching, improving teachers’ working conditions, establishing new opportunities for teachers to develop their professional skills, and overhauling adult education and training
  • it took decades for the Finns to build the system whose fruits they are now enjoying.
  • OECD. (2014). Education at a Glance 2014 – Country Note: Finland.
  • Finnish National Board of Education. (2012). International comparisons of some features of the Finnish education and training system 2011.
  • Ministry of Education and Culture, Finland. (2012). Education and Research 2011-2016: A development plan.
  • OECD. (2011). “The Children Must Play: What the U.S. Could Learn from Finland” in The New Republic. (PDF)
  • Abrams, S. (2011). “Finland: Slow and Steady Reform for Consistently High Results,” in Strong Performers, Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons from PISA for the United States. (PDF)
  • The World Bank. (2006). Policy Development and Reform Principles of Basic and Secondary Education in Finland since 1968. Education Working Paper Series. (PDF)
izz aty

Where In The World You Can Find The Best Schools - And The Happiest Kids - 0 views

www.buzzfeed.com/...d-the-best-schools-and-the-hap

education school schooling OECD research development youth children international survey society ioe happiness emotions young people

shared by izz aty on 19 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • izz aty on 19 Jan 14
     
    "The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's triennial international survey compared test scores from 65 countries. Happiness was ranked based on the percentage of students who agreed or disagreed with the statement "I feel happy at school." Test scores were ranked based on the combined individual rankings of the students' math, reading, and science scores."
izz aty

The Nordic countries: The next supermodel | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...rdic-countries-next-supermodel

nordic scandinavian sweden denmark norway finland

shared by izz aty on 17 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The Nordics cluster at the top of league tables of everything from economic competitiveness to social health to happiness.
  • lucky timing: the Nordics cleverly managed to have their debt crisis in the 1990s
  • Development theorists have taken to calling successful modernisation “getting to Denmark”
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  • In the 1970s and 1980s the Nordics were indeed tax-and-spend countries.
  • To politicians around the world—especially in the debt-ridden West—they offer a blueprint of how to reform the public sector, making the state far more efficient and responsive.
  • They have avoided both southern Europe’s economic sclerosis and America’s extreme inequality.
  • But tax-and-spend did not work: Sweden fell from being the fourth-richest country in the world in 1970 to the 14th in 1993.
  • Government’s share of GDP in Sweden, which has dropped by around 18 percentage points, is lower than France’s and could soon be lower than Britain’s. Taxes have been cut: the corporate rate is 22%, far lower than America’s. The Nordics have focused on balancing the books. While Mr Obama and Congress dither over entitlement reform, Sweden has reformed its pension system (see Free exchange). Its budget deficit is 0.3% of GDP; America’s is 7%.
  • Nordics have been similarly pragmatic. So long as public services work, they do not mind who provides them
  • The performance of all schools and hospitals is measured. Governments are forced to operate in the harsh light of day: Sweden gives everyone access to official records. Politicians are vilified if they get off their bicycles and into official limousines. The home of Skype and Spotify is also a leader in e-government: you can pay your taxes with an SMS message
  • Denmark and Norway allow private firms to run public hospitals. Sweden has a universal system of school vouchers, with private for-profit schools competing with public schools. Denmark also has vouchers—but ones that you can top up.
  • the Nordics also offer something for the progressive left by proving that it is possible to combine competitive capitalism with a large state: they employ 30% of their workforce in the public sector, compared with an OECD average of 15%
  • They are stout free-traders who resist the temptation to intervene even to protect iconic companies: Sweden let Saab go bankrupt and Volvo is now owned by China’s Geely. But they also focus on the long term—most obviously through Norway’s $600 billion sovereign-wealth fund—and they look for ways to temper capitalism’s harsher effects.
  • Denmark, for instance, has a system of “flexicurity” that makes it easier for employers to sack people but provides support and training for the unemployed, and Finland organises venture-capital networks.
  • Public spending as a proportion of GDP in these countries is still higher than this newspaper would like, or indeed than will be sustainable.
  • All Western politicians claim to promote transparency and technology. The Nordics can do so with more justification than most.
  • Their levels of taxation still encourage entrepreneurs to move abroad
  • Too many people—especially immigrants—live off benefits
  • pressures that have forced their governments to cut spending, such as growing global competition, will force more change. The Nordics are bloated compared with Singapore, and they have not focused enough on means-testing benefits
  • Nordics are part of the answer. They also show that EU countries can be genuine economic successes. And as the Asians introduce welfare states they too will look to the Nordics: Norway is a particular focus of the Chinese
  • You can inject market mechanisms into the welfare state to sharpen its performance. You can put entitlement programmes on sound foundations to avoid beggaring future generations. But you need to be willing to root out corruption and vested interests.
  • A Swede pays tax more willingly than a Californian because he gets decent schools and free health care
  • The main lesson to learn from the Nordics is not ideological but practica
  • you must be ready to abandon tired orthodoxies of the left and right and forage for good ideas across the political spectrum
  • izz aty on 17 Nov 14
     
    SMALLISH countries are often in the vanguard when it comes to reforming government. In the 1980s Britain was out in the lead, thanks to Thatcherism and privatisation. Tiny Singapore has long been a role model for many reformers. Now the Nordic countries are likely to assume a similar role.
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