Put PISA Tests in Perspective

The latest test results of Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), administered by The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), are out and for the alarmists of America, the sky continues its free fall. Indifferent parents, incompetent teachers and irresponsible students collude within a toxic culture that values entertainment over education by several orders of magnitude. Is it any wonder, they ask, that our teens fare so poorly compared to their international peers in math, science and reading? End of discussion.

It is time to put an end to the alarmist, some would say nihilistic, reactions to PISA tests, or for that matter, to any standardized tests.

But first, the facts.

Source: www.yahoo.com

PISA tests are given every 3 years. The latest results reflect the test given in 2012 to 65 countries - 34 OECD countries and 31 partner countries. A total of 510,000 students, mostly 15-year-olds, participated. American teens ranked 26^th in math, 21^st in science and 17^th in reading among 34 developed countries. Specifically, out of a possible 600 points, American student scored 481 in math, 497 in science and 498 in reading.

In all categories, students from the Chinese region of Shanghai topped the list, followed by Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, South Korea, Macau, Japan, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

There is no denying that American students have never done well compared to their top-performing peers in PISA tests. But how strongly does the PISA results correlate with a nation’s future, with its creativity and innovation?

Statistically it is possible to show some type of correlation between any two sets of numerical data. The correlation may be weak, medium or strong. It may also be bogus or genuine.

In the case of standardized tests, particularly at the international level, the correlation surely reveals something but not to the extent that our grim pseudo-analyst-pundits claim. PISA tests are not all multiple-choice, fact-driven exams. They include questions that require free-form answers and the ability to apply word problems to real-world situations. 

From that perspective, the poor showing of our teens is troubling. They have fallen short and will continue to fall short academically unless they take ownership of their learning. However, help is on the way in the form of student-centered Common Core Curriculum (CCC), which all the states, except Virginia, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas and Alaska, have adopted. The curriculum focuses on critical thinking, reasoning and problem-solving skills and starts from the 2014-2015 academic year.

We will, of course, have to wait for several years before the results of CCC are in but there is no doubt that it represents a step in the right direction for America’s K-12, and by extension, community college, students.

But we must be wary of seeing too much in the results of standardized tests even after students have had several years of experience with CCC. We must be cautious in drawing sweeping lessons from any test. Creativity and innovation occur at the confluence of myriad factors that include culture, freedom, ability to challenge authority, and dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Besides, top-performing Asian countries are known for teaching to the test and for their extensive programs of after-school tutoring. Very high scores in a test like PISA may simply mean that the students have mastered the art (or science) of acing the test, nothing more and nothing less. Their goal is not to become independent thinkers but to become excellent test takers. A Hong Kong educator puts it bluntly: “This after-school education is my world. I am one of the thousands of tutors helping Hong Kong students achieve high test scores. To me, the recent test results were no surprise: Of course East Asian kids test well. They are tested every day, even when they are sick. Our children sit for lengthy, rigorous and confusing examinations, starting at age 6. Weekends, summers and holiday breaks are golden opportunities to catch up on some R&R — review and revision, that is. But the thing about testing is that it creates excellent followers, not leaders. Doing well on tests requires constant test prep. Granted, when it comes to buckling down and cramming for hours on end, Asians kids will beat their U.S. counterparts to a pulp. But give them a task that is not testable or not directly related to school, ask them to do something not for their college application but for themselves, and they’ll draw a blank.”

Americana kids reading this cannot afford to feel smug. (We must also not ignore the fact that many of them are taught to the test as well.) They need to recognize that a creative and fulfilling life demands the kind of rigor and aptitude they have generally failed to show so far.


At the same time, Americans must also realize that teachers are at the heart of our K-12 system. Unless teachers are accorded the respect they deserve in our society (as they are in Finland, Singapore and other top-performing nations), with salaries consistent with their calling (meaning that their salaries be on a par with what lawyers, doctors, engineers and entertainers earn), we will only be paying lip service to improving the dismal showings of our teens while the alarmists continue their perennial lament of threatening clouds darkening our nation's future.

The Finnish Frame of Mind

The Finnish public education system is the envy of the world. In the triennial PISA tests administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Finnish students regularly place at or near the top in science, math and reading. In contrast, American teens usually finish near the middle (grade C) among students from 57 countries.

What can explain this in a country about the size of Montana and with a population of less than 6 million? Perhaps Finns start school early to get a head-start on their peers from around the world. Maybe they are “homeworkaholics” whose ideas of fun are to dissect frogs, master long division and study the classics for clues to character building. Or perhaps parents relentlessly drive their children to succeed in school, because failure would make them pariahs for life.

Actually the opposite is true, as several reports, including this recent one in the Wall Street Journal (link may require subscription), reveal. Finns don’t start school until age 7, a year later than most U.S. first-graders. Homework is light, rarely more than a half-hour a night, far less than what the average kid in the U.S. has to contend with. Finnish parents hardly get excited about how their kids are doing in school. They rely on the system to do its job, and if a student is falling behind, why then, it is the school that has to step up to the plate, not them.

Finnish students are certainly not lacking in the fun department. As Ellen Gamerman reports in the WSJ, the youth dye their hair, waste hours online, surf Google for answers and listen to rap and heavy metal. They are as passionate about extracting maximum excitement from after-school hours as their U.S. counterparts.

But surely something has to account for why, by the ninth grade, Finns are way ahead in math, science and reading, on track to becoming “among the world’s most productive workers.”

The reasons are as prosaic as they come. Finns place premium value on teacher training. Would-be teachers must hold masters' degrees and have to compete hard for the privilege of teaching. Over 40 candidates may compete for a single position. Teachers are rewarded more with freedom to pursue their creative ideas than with higher salaries.

Once in the system, teachers can rely on mentors to hone their craft. Gamerman quotes an OECD educator in defining the traits of Finnish teachers: “In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs.”

Finnish educators also believe in ensuring that all students have a solid grasp of the basics before moving on to higher grades. There are rigorous programs in place for helping lagging kids to catch up and they almost always work. The emphasis is more on preventing students from falling through the cracks than on special programs for the gifted. A school principal observed, "We don't have oil or other riches. Knowledge is the thing Finnish people have.” And they make the most of it.

There are lots of no’s in the Finnish education system: No fancy pedagogical theories, no honor societies, no off-beat classes with exotic names, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and little or no standardized testing. However, there are plenty of hands-on science and a lot of questioning, critical thinking and extra playtime.

It is probably unfair to compare Finland with the U.S. After all, Finnish educators work with a near-homogeneous, relatively small student population. Failures can be quickly detected and corrective actions urgently applied. American teens, on the other hand, are far more diverse in aptitude and ethnicity and pose formidable challenges to attaining a minimum level of proficiency. More important, American teachers, on the average, are nowhere near as well-trained as their Scandinavian counterparts and do not enjoy comparable status in society.

There is also the negative effect of politics in many American schools that causes many gifted educators to give up on the teaching profession.

The Finnish educational system has its flaws. The demands of a global economy and the need for innovation are causing some educators to question whether what has succeeded so far can continue to hold in their country. Opinions are being increasingly heard that “Finland needs to fast-track its brightest students the way the U.S. does, with gifted programs aimed at producing more go-getters.” A principal complains that “parents also are getting pushier about special attention for their children.”

The occasional serpent in paradise sometimes rears its head too: an 18-year-old shot eight people inside his high school in southern Finland last November before turning the gun on himself.

Still, the Finnish back-to-basics approach to high school education, with a no-frills curriculum, a love of reading and a culture that promotes self-reliance early, constitute a timeless prescription for success. Educational fads will come and go but these old-fashioned ideas and values will endure.

P.S. Here is an excellent source of information about the Finnish School System.

I thank Tom Hanson, Editor of OpenEducation.Net, for making me aware of his organization and the good work it is doing.

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Wanted: Teachers Who Can Make a Difference

Educational reports vary widely in the steps they recommend to improve or overhaul a nation’s school system. One common thread that runs through them, however, is the need for quality teachers in classrooms. While everyone recognizes the central role of teachers in raising the level of K-12 education in America, how to train, attract and retain teachers who can teach, motivate and inspire remain elusive.

A recent report by McKinsey & Co offers evidence that simply by increasing teacher salary and reducing class sizes will not improve student performance. Yet in the United States, Britain and several other Western countries, these are often the only “remedies” applied, with predictably depressing results year after year.

The McKinsey report was based on a study of twenty-five of the world’s school systems, including ten of the top performers. The data came from Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) directed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an organization of thirty countries that accept the principles of representative democracy and free market economy.

“We examined what these high-performing school systems have in common and what tools they use to improve student outcome,” states the report. “The experience of the top schools suggests that three things matter most: 1) getting the right people to become teachers, 2) developing them into effective instructors and, 3) ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child.”

These are not exactly breakthrough insights but where the report turns conventional wisdom on its head is the “how” part. How do you get the best teachers? How do you get the best out of teachers? And how do you take corrective actions when students fall behind?

As the Economist pointed out in a commentary on the report, you get the best teachers by hiring the best. In Finland (one of the top performing countries), teachers must have a master’s degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, and Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30% (also top performing countries). Do they do it with more money? No, these countries do not pay teachers more than average salaries. What’s the secret, then? Toughen the selection process for teacher training and only hire numbers to match vacancies. Once employed, as in Singapore and Finland where teaching is regarded as a high-status profession, teachers are more or less guaranteed a job for life if they continue to perform well.

Teaching is a high-status profession in these countries because it is competitive and training is well-funded because there are relatively few qualified candidates. In Singapore, new teachers get 100 hours of training a year. Seniors teachers monitor their progress and help them with their professional development. In Finland and Japan, groups of teachers visit each others’ classrooms to offer constructive criticism and plan lessons together. Every week, Finnish teachers get an afternoon off for this purpose.

The result is that there is a continuity of best practices and enlightened, self-correcting teaching methodologies that nourish the school systems in countries like Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. As one educator put it, “when a brilliant American teacher retires, almost all of the lesson plans and practices that she has developed also retire. When a Japanese teacher retires, she leaves a legacy.”

Yet all the best practices and institutional support cannot guarantee that things will not go wrong. Inevitably they do, and this is again where top performers differentiate themselves from the bottom dwellers. When students and schools show symptoms of failing (defined not by results of standardized tests but deeper and more meaningful educational needs and aspirations), these countries intervene early and often. They have more special-education teachers per student than in lagging countries. In any given year in Finland, for instance, 30% of students get one-on-one remedial lessons. In Singapore, there are extra classes for the bottom 20% of students and teachers are expected to stay after hours to help them come up to speed and excel.

“The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers,” states the McKinsey report. Educators and concerned Americans have echoed the sentiment again and again. Educational spending in America, by way of school funding, school administration, teacher salary, standardized testing, federal policies such as the No Child Left Behind, and an endless array of other panaceas, has almost doubled since 1980. Class sizes have never been smaller. Everything has been tried and retried, yet the only constant in the equation, as the Economist wryly notes, is the poor outcome.

That is not to say there aren’t success stories. Some private organizations in the United States are flourishing and point the way toward progress. One such is Teach for America (TFA). Founded in 1990, TFA has stringent requirements for recruiting young teachers (the rejection rate of applicants is over 80 percent!) from the nation’s top schools to teach in inner-city schools and low income areas. Applicants are driven by a fierce sense of service and a desire to end the nation’s educational inequity. It is telling that for rejected TFA applicants, second career choices include top law and business schools and high-paying Wall Street jobs. Currently TFA has over 4,400 teachers working with almost 400,000 students. By any definition, TFA’s success continues to be astounding.

Another is the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). Brainchild of two TFA alumni, KIPP began in 1994 and now has about 60 charter schools nationwide serving 14,000 kids. More than 80% of KIPP students are low income and 95% are black or Latino, yet they regularly outperform their public school counterparts in math and reading tests. Like TFA, KIPP selects its teachers carefully and trains them rigorously before allowing them to practice their profession.

Both TFA and KIPP are transforming not just students but entire communities by promoting the values of hard work, good behavior, discipline, transparency and accountability. The McKinsey report states that “Across the globe – whether it is Canada in North America, Finland in Europe or Japan and Korea in Asia – some education systems demonstrate that excellence in education is an attainable goal and at reasonable cost. They also show that the challenge of achieving a high and socially equitable distribution of learning outcomes can be successfully addressed and that excellence can be achieved throughout the education systems, with very few students and schools left behind.”

If TFA and KIPP can achieve the kind of excellence that the report lauds, there is no reason why such schools cannot be replicated on a mass scale and why America’s public school system cannot also be among the top-performing school systems in the world.