Abstract
In 2001, Canadians were shocked to learn that we had one of the best-performing education systems in the world. Not only was our average performance high — based on the results of the first PISA (the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (www.pisa.oecd.org) — but the gap between high- and low-performing students was smaller in Canada than in most other countries. That result was confirmed in three further PISA administrations, including the one being released this month.
Canadian educators were surprised, if pleased, to hear this news because we had always thought that our education system was pretty average, particularly compared to education in Europe. In 2001, I was at a Berlin conference about PISA at which the German federal education minister talked about how Germany, which had very bad results in PISA, needed to learn from Canada how to do better. Since Canadians had been visiting and studying German education for years, this was rather an amazing turnaround.
The interest in PISA is symptomatic of a growing interest in internationalism in education policy. In addition to PISA, TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science) and PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study; both at timssandpirls.bc.edu) have been influential.
In general, countries and education systems around the world are paying more attention to one another's policies and outcomes, whether through visits of delegations or through multinational events and conferences. Finland, as the top-performing country in the first three rounds of PISA, has been inundated with visitors trying to learn how they have managed to do so well. Private companies, such as Cisco and McKinsey, are issuing reports on the quality of education around the world. Even the United States is now actively interested in learning from other countries.
Ontario hosted an international event in Toronto in September, called “Building Blocks for Education,” to explore how to create productive change across entire education systems. It brought together educators from Ontario, several other Canadian provinces (including several Canadian ministers of education), and education leaders from Singapore, Finland, Australia, Norway, the United States, and elsewhere. Speakers included Andreas Schleicher, who runs PISA for the OECD; Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty; U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan; and Singapore Education Minister Ng Eng Hen. (Material on the event, including presentations and webcasts, is available at www.ontario.ca/bb4e.) The conference sold out in weeks, showing the high level of interest.
There are, to be sure, skeptics and critics of these international comparisons. Some critics fear this will lead to a homogeneous-world approach to education policy that doesn't give adequate attention to each country's unique history, culture, and people. Their concerns are rooted in experiences with international institutions that imposed economic policies that had devastating consequences in some poor countries.
Importing Policies
One does have to be cautious about importing policies from other countries. In a paper some years ago (Levin 1998), I compared the spread of policy ideas to the spread of diseases, in the sense that there is the same combination of the contagious element, the context in which it spreads, and the characteristics of any particular host that make it more or less likely to be “infected.” Some ideas in education spread more widely and more quickly than others, whether across provinces or countries. For example, 20 years after their inception, charter schools now exist in most, but not all, states in the United States. But only one Canadian province — Alberta — has charter schools, and then only a handful.
The objection to looking at education policy internationally would seem to be less about borrowing policies from other places than about the specific policies to be adopted, because many critics are themselves advocates of policies that they believe should be applied everywhere. Clearly, there are things to be learned from the experience of other countries. One of the most important is that high levels of inequality, such as exist in most English-speaking countries, need not be the inevitable price of high levels of achievement. Finland, Japan, Korea, and Canada have education systems in which, unlike in the United States or England, most students do quite well and relatively few are left far behind. This is a crucial piece of policy knowledge.
A second interesting comparison shows that it's possible to make very rapid progress in education. Of course, “very rapid” doesn't mean turning around a large system in one or two years. But, as the Singapore minister reminded us, his country went from 56% of 12-year-olds achieving reading competence in 1980 to 96% in 1995. Similarly, Korea moved in 30 years — a single generation — from a country with low levels of educational attainment to one with the highest in the world.
Other important lessons are emerging from international comparisons. Tracking and streaming of students is strongly associated with poorer overall performance. The old idea of a separate stream for “vocational” students has clearly been shown to be a bad idea. Poland recently made dramatic improvements in its secondary school results over five years, largely by dramatically reducing streaming in its schools. Similarly, holding large numbers of students back, or “failing” them, is quite strongly associated with poorer overall performance, especially compared with the model in Finland and other places that gives priority to helping all students maintain a reasonable pace of advancement in skills and knowledge. In general, international comparisons tell us, consistent with much research in psychology, that approaches that rely on failure and punishment are much less effective than approaches that use positive engagement, support, and motivation — whether for individual students, schools, or entire systems.
Not all the methods of any country can or should be emulated in others. Singapore has a small and highly centralized system. Finland has a very strong social safety net and a relatively homogeneous population (though this is changing). In Korea and Japan, many students are involved in intensive out-of-school tutoring with high stress levels. Even high-performing countries are internally critical of their own performance and looking for ways to help even more students be successful. What they all have in common is instructive — a deep commitment to an education that helps all students succeed, a relentless determination to foster continued improvement, and a high level of respect for professional educators. These are indeed lessons that can be applied in every school and school system.