Activity 5. Andreas Schleicher: Use data to build better schools

The world has gone through major changes in the last decades. One of those changes is the way in which the world perceives and values education. In the past, the goal of education was standardization and compliance, but today the ability to be inventive, have critical thinking and be able to apply knowledge to solve problems is valued above everything else.

Yet, in many countries, education system performance hasn’t changed. One clear example of this is the US education system. In the 60s it was rated number 1 in the amount of population that completed high school, but in the 90s it was rated number 13. This wasn’t because their standards had fallen, but because they improved so much faster elsewhere. Nonetheless, we can find other cases such as Korea, that went from one of the lowest education performers to one of the best in about the same amount of time.

This framework leaves us with one main question: how do you improve an education system to achieve high-performance?

First of all, we need a reliable scale to measure the current education system level. PISA, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, offers this scale. They realized that the amount of time students spent in school or the degree they acquired wasn’t reliable, because that didn’t mean that students had better skills, jobs or lives. Thus, they decided to measure the way in which students around the world can apply their knowledge. They also measure equity, or how much do the different social backgrounds change the opportunities that students have.

When the result came out, many countries were shocked. Countries that believed they had a great education system found out that in truth it was below average and that they had large socio-economic disparities that prevented a great part of the population to acquire high-levels of education.

However, PISA also showed which countries were having really high performance and what they were doing right. First of all, they showed that money wasn’t the secret: countries that spent more money on education don’t necessarily have better results. Yet, there were other factors that high-performing education systems share such as the high value they place on education, the belief that all children are capable of success, the embrace and employment of different pedagogical practices, a clear set of ambitious standards, and the focus on the quality of the teachers, as well as their recruitment, selection, training and growth.

A caveat to be considered here is that even though PISA publishes these results, they don’t tell countries what they should be doing. They are aware that economic, social, cultural and political contexts vary from countries to countries and that they influence the education system. Yet, they do believe that countries should invest in the resources that make the most difference to improve the education system.

Finally, above all, the lesson that should be learned after looking at PISA’s finding is that improvement is possible, and it doesn’t require a lot of money. What countries and, more specifically, educators and policymakers should do is challenge paradigms that make them believe that poor quality of education is ingrained in the culture, the economy or the population, and instead change policies and practices that lead to a high performance, successful education system.