Nations, not schools

In a column last week, Raul Pangalangan rightly scoffs at what he calls the fetish of global university rankings, especially when the rankings are based on rather subjective criteria like “review by graduate recruiters.”

What we should pay attention to are studies where tests are administered to students in several countries.  An example is the Trends in International Mathematics and Science (TIMS), administered to 4th and 8th Grade students.  The Philippines participated in several rounds, and did rather poorly.

It seems we did not participate in the 2011 round, which involved 64 countries.  Neither have we participated in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, involving 4th Graders.  The latest round was also conducted this year with 48 countries.

Still another important international study is the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), in which the Philippines has never participated in and which I wanted to focus on for today’s column.  Sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Pisa looks at the performance of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics and science, with each round giving special emphasis to one of the three areas.  The latest study, conducted in 2009, emphasized reading and was conducted in 65 “countries and economies.”

The Pisa people rightly recognized that there are important variations even within countries.  For China, they had separate scores for Hongkong-China, Shanghai-China and Macau-China.  Taiwan participated as Chinese-Taipei.

The Pisa reports for 2009 came out in several volumes, each with many important insights and recommendations that our local educators should be reading.  Even if the Philippines did not participate, we stand to learn from the study in many ways.

Lessons

First, the tests were themselves masterpieces.  I know it’s hard to think of exams as a work of art but good teachers know that a good exam has to be crafted in a way that allows teachers to find out not just what students are learning but also how they’re learning.  Good exams also tell us about how good, or bad the teaching is.

To be more concrete, Pisa’s reading tests expanded the concept of literacy beyond merely reading and writing.  The materials given to the students to read were in the local language, and were diverse.  For example, one of the test materials involved mobile phone safety.  Another one was a simple notice for blood donation.

There were seven levels of proficiency.  Level 2 for example simply meant the ability “to participate effectively and productively in life” by “locating basic information and making comparisons and contrasts.”  Level 5, on the other hand, meant being able to critically evaluate the information, and to “build hypotheses on specialized knowledge.”

The matter of test design is so important.  We all know how, in universities, students know which teachers recycle their exams from one year to another.  So they join organizations which have exam banks or files of previous exams.  Review classes for board exams operate on the same principle.  The Pisa tests are revised each round, and are so complicated in their design there’s no way to anticipate what will come out.

The second area for the Philippines to learn comes with the way results are processed and presented.  What’s most striking, picked up by mass media throughout the world, were the frontrunners: Shanghai-China, South Korea, Finland and Hong Kong-China.  They beat Japan, Germany, the United States and many other developed countries.

The Pisa report goes on to analyze why some countries did so well and why others did poorly.  Here is their most important conclusion: “Naturally, GDP per capita influences educational success, but this only explains 6 percent of the differences in average student performance. The other 94 percent reflect the potential for public policy to make a difference.”

Put another way, China and South Korea, which are only “middle-income” countries, have been able to outperform “richer” countries.

The study also compares performance between 2000 and 2009, noting that these top performers did not do as well in the earlier round but initiated many educational reforms that seem now to be making a difference.  Shanghai, for example, has moved away from an old elite model of concentrating resources to develop a few bright students, to making sure that there is universal access to education, especially for children of parents who migrated into the big city from rural areas.

The Pisa reports also emphasized an analysis of inequities or gaps in the scores, pointing out that “the most impressive outcome of world-class education systems is perhaps that they deliver high-quality learning consistently across the entire education system.”  That is what I meant by the need to look at nations, rather than just individual schools.

One very striking finding in relation to inequity: girls outperformed boys in every participating country for both reading and mathematics.

Culture

A last cluster of insights I wanted to bring up relates to my work as an anthropologist.  Yes, I did notice as many of you did that three of the four topnotchers here had Confucian cultures, which supposedly value education … and discipline.  Could this Confucian approach be the key to better educational systems?

I’d go slow there.  The Confucian approach emphasized rote learning, lots of memory work, which does have some usefulness as we know from Kumon math drills.  But if we’re after analytical skills and surviving in the world, which Pisa is looking at, we need much more.

It’s intriguing, for example, that Hongk Kong is now using a high school curriculum that has “learning areas” rather than subjects, to include Math, Science and Technology, English, Chinese, Social Science and Humanities and something called Applied Learning, the latter involving service learning, exposure to work sites and even overseas exposure.  Students who want to go on to university have to take “Liberal Studies,” where they analyze current events and non-textbook based materials. This program started only in 2009 and will be evaluated in 2012, something we Filipinos should also be anticipating.

The preface to the report should also challenge us to think of what we mean by “valuing education.”  Here are some of their intriguing questions about what it means to have value education:

“How do they (countries) pay teachers compared to the way they pay other highly skilled workers? How are education credentials weighed against other qualifications when people are being considered for jobs?  How much attention do the media pay to schools and schooling?”

The question that I thought to be most provocative was this: “Would you want your child to be a teacher?”