Notes from the 2007 SETDA Education Forum…
What it takes to compete: Seeing U.S. education through the prism of international comparisons
Prof. Andreas Schleicher
Head, Indicators and Analysis Division
OECD Directorate for Education
Finland gets 9 applicants for every teaching post because it is considered a profession worth working inJobs in lower skill sectors, and indeed entire sectors of the workplace, are disappearingIn the 1960s, the U.S. was first in the world re: percentage of persons with high school or equivalent qualifications (ages 25 to 64). Today it is 13th. Within two generations, the educational landscape has changed dramatically.College-level graduation rates: U.S. international rank dropped from 2nd to 15th between 1995 and 2005By 2015, China will have twice the number of college graduates as the U.S. and EU combinedPISA – international assessment of what students know and can do – covers 87% of world economy – how well can students extrapolate from what they have learned to novel situationsU.S. fell below the OECD average when it came to the performance of 15-year-olds to extrapolate and apply in mathematics (dozens of countries were ahead of U.S.)Levy and Murnane have analyzed demand for skills between 1960 and 2002Demand for routine manual skills has declinedDemand for nonroutine manual skills has declined steeplyDemand for routine cognitive skills (that are easy to teach, easy to test, easy to break into small pieces) has declined steeplyDemand for nonroutine analytic skills has increased sharplyDemand for nonroutine interactive skills has increased sharplyPercentage of students at Levels 5 or 6 on PISA has an almost linear relationship to the number of researchers per thousand peopleMoney explains about 1/3 of cross-country variation in mathematics performance – U.S. and Italy have expensive education systems but get lower payoff than other countries that spend less but differentlyBest-performing educational systems have both high challenge and strong support systemsLow challenge and weak support = poor performance and stagnationHigh challenge and weak support = conflict, demoralizationHigh challenge and strong support = systemic improvementBest-performing educational systems have high ambitions, teacher access to best practice and strong professional development, intelligent accountability and intervention in inverse proportion to success, devolved responsibility so the school is the center of action, integrated educational opportunities, movement from prescribed forms of teaching and assessment toward personalized learningOnly 12% of variation is across schools: the overall system predicts most of math performance“Knowledge poor” profession and national prescription = uninformed prescription, implementation of curricula = U.S.“Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.”A perfect storm
Michael Flanagan, Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Michigan
“Can we agree that our kids aren’t going to work in a verb conjugation factory?”Michigan is facing a perfect storm: changing global workforce needs combined with declining ability of automobile factory workers to make a decent living (or even a living at all since jobs are being exported)Many, many educators said “those kids can’t do Algebra 2”Trying to move Michigan from teaching to learningRequirement for students to take one online course before graduation is an attempt to jump start the situation, turn pedagogy in another directionNo longer automatically accrediting teacher education institutions every 5 years; now leaning on universities to change their preparation practicesShowed the video of Paul Potts to emphasize that there is hidden talent in everyone and that we can bring that out if we choose
