Pak Tee Ng (Singapore): Teach Less, Learn More

Here are 5 points that stand out for me:

1. Focusing on PISA scores, or scores on any other test, is not the same as focusing on student learning in the classroom. Too often, a focus on standardized testing can actually have a harmful affect on teaching and learning.

2. Education is an investment -- not an expenditure. Cutting education is like a farmer who sells his top soil.

3. Teachers don't need surveillance -- they need support. You don't improve the education system by firing individual bad teachers -- you improve the education system by creating good teachers and then trust them to do their job.

4. Teach Less -- Learn More. Pasi Sahlberg writes about Finland and Gary Stager writes about the Maker Movement. Pak Tee Ng reminds us that, "more of the same teaching is not the way to inspire better learning." Efforts to "teacher-proof" education via standardization is not the solution, it's the problem. 

5. You say you want this, so why are you doing that? Unfortunately, myths are often more satisfying to us than the truth - in education we are satisfyingly distracted by a great many myths. If we are to improve school, we have to allow it to change. And if we want to make the right change, we need to be evidence and research based.

Too much time in school an economic waste

This was written by Zander Sherman who is the author of The Curiosity of School.

by Zander Sherman

Last week, as Alberta’s students headed back to school, some were probably wishing they’d had a longer summer holiday.

Easily overshadowed by other issues, the question of our academic calendar and its number of vacation days has long troubled educators. Those who say we should spend more time in school often suggest cutting into the summer break, when kids were once needed to help hay the fields. Because we no longer live in farming times, the tradition is irrelevant. If such reasoning is meant to sustain an argument, it might be pointed out that what we call school today was also invented during the same timeframe—and no one is arguing the irrelevance of it.

While it still eludes Alberta, all-day kindergarten has been adopted to Ontario’s educational legislation, with similar initiatives gaining momentum in other parts of the world. In the US, extended learning has become a central tenet of the charter school movement. In the UK, politicians are campaigning on a proposal that would legally force public schools to provide 45 hours of education a week for 45 weeks. Lengthening school days and cutting holidays is said to be “the perfect election promise.”

Proponents argue that their plan would create more “successful” students. To find out whether this is true, let us first agree that “educational success” is the reason we go to school. Sadly, the phrase “educational success” has come to be defined by a third party. The OECD is a global economic organization that administers PISA, the standardized test taken by all 15-year-olds. Because of the correlation between PISA results and a nation’s gross domestic product, PISA is academia’s raison d’être: If students do well on the test, it means their country is doing well financially. (This is why governments obsess over test results. They indicate a country's rank on the global stage.)

If educational success is the reason we go to school, it will be surprising to many that more time in school does not necessarily lead to it. While there is correlation between PISA outcomes and GDP, there is little correlation between PISA outcomes and the number of hours we spend in school. Consider, for instance, how Canada spends roughly the same number of hours in a classroom as the US, but as a whole does a lot better on PISA than they do. China and Japan spend about the same amount of time in school and come out at or near the top, while India also spends approximately the same number of hours in school and comes out at or near the bottom.

Clearly, instructional time does not lead to better PISA outcomes.

If more classroom hours have little to do with educational success, what does? School’s terrible secret is that students’ “success” is determined long before they enter a classroom. Wealth is the single greatest predictor of academic grades, and therefore of students’ future earning potential. This is true in many ways. Wealthy families have more resources, and can afford private tutors and expensive test prep courses. Wealthy parents have more time to spend with their children, and so engage them more. Poor families view post-secondary education as unattainable. Poor parents are often under chronic stress, which in turn affects their children.

If more time in school doesn’t equal educational success, it only makes sense that we should spend less time in it. It is a principle of economics after all that where there is no benefit to a proposal, it is wasteful to continue using it. The province of Alberta’s education budget is $7 billion per annum. Exams, snow days, and PD days notwithstanding, Albertans spend about 190 days in school. That’s about $37 million a day. For cost reasons alone, school days are precious and not to be wasted. (And that doesn’t include other reasons to avoid over-schooling such as student stress, teacher attrition rates, and the growing number of pediatricians who say that the school day begins too early in the morning—all problems that could be avoided with a shorter school year.)

To those who would shorten our summer holiday, let this be among the first lessons of the year: It doesn’t matter how many hours you spend behind a desk, merely how rich you are. There can be no denying that over-schooling is an economic waste. With that in mind, more vacation hours would solve the problem of spending too much time in school.

Alberta Superintendents support Inspiring Education and Curriculum Redesign

This was written by Dr. Larry Jacobs who is the President of the College of Alberta School Superintendents (CASS). This first appeared as a press release from CASS in support of Alberta's Inspiring Education and curriculum redesign.

by Dr. Larry Jacobs

My name is Larry Jacobs and I am proud to serve as the President of the College of Alberta Superintendents (CASS) for 2013/14. CASS represents the system education leaders (Superintendents, Directors) for public, separate, Francophone and charter school jurisdictions in Alberta.

I appreciate the opportunity to comment on a topic in education that is being discussed in our province; curriculum redesign and specifically the Alberta math curriculum. We are fortunate in Alberta to have an education system which ranks among the top in the world. It is common for officials from around the world to visit Alberta to learn about our K-12 system. With that in mind, CASS understands that to rest on our laurels of what we have achieved in the past will not serve our students of today and the future.

One specific example that demonstrates the need to consider change has to do with the Alberta math curriculum which is generating much conversation in recent weeks. It is important to understand that many of the jurisdictions which scored above Alberta in the 2012 international math assessments implemented changes to their math curriculum ten or more years ago; the same changes that Alberta more recently has implemented within the current curriculum. 

It is also important to understand that the changes taking place in education in Alberta are a direct result of the unprecedented public input during the Inspiring Education in-person and on-line consultations with parents, students, educators and community members in 2008 and 2009. Of tremendous significance is that 63% of participants in the consultations indicated that Alberta’s education system required informed transformation while an additional 28% felt that the education system in our province required a complete overhaul. Less than one per-cent of the participants felt Alberta’s education system required no change moving forward. 

While we must consider change in order to maintain our status as one of the top education systems in the world, I want to acknowledge that the successes we have realized in education in our province are the result of the commitment by generations of students striving to excel and who are supported by their parents, their dedicated teachers and principals, and by every other person in the school jurisdictions and community that contributes to the growth and development of each child. In January of this year CASS hosted a delegation of educators from across the United States and they continuously commented on the collaborative nature of all partners in education in Alberta. 

I doubt many would disagree that many aspects of our world, including how people learn, have changed and will continue to change dramatically in the years ahead. To address these changes it is essential that Albert’s curriculum, often cited as a cornerstone of our strong education system, must undergo continuous review and revision in order to serve students of today and tomorrow. CASS supports the curriculum redesign process being undertaken by Alberta Education. Curriculum development has always been a collaboration involving Alberta Education, school jurisdictions and Alberta’s outstanding teachers and has been based on informed, researched practice. 

Curriculum redesign will enable school jurisdictions and teachers to be involved at the outset of what will be a more timely review and development cycle to ensure future curriculum is engaging, relevant and inspiring for students, who should be and must be the centre of what happens in our schools. Most importantly, curriculum redesign will ensure equity of opportunity for every single child in Alberta, a key pillar of the Inspiring Education framework that is guiding change in education in our province. 

One component of Alberta’s curriculum, math, has been the subject of much commentary recently following the release of the results of the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA is a world-wide assessment of 15 year old students conducted every three years. While the 2012 PISA math results do show that there has been a slight decline in achievement by Alberta students (approximately 2.5% over twelve years), I offer the following for consideration: 

a. Alberta has a higher percentage of students complete the PISA assessment than most if not all jurisdictions; 

b. Alberta ensures that students of all academic levels complete the PISA assessment; more so than many other jurisdictions; 

c. the 2012 results show Alberta students performed well above average in math as compared to other jurisdictions; 

d. PISA categorizes six level of math skills, and 96% of Alberta students reached or surpassed the first level which measures basic math skills; 

e. only 4.5% of Alberta’s students achieved level six of the PISA category, which measures advanced mathematical thinking; 

f. the current Alberta math curriculum does not ‘abandon’ the basic skills of math but does also address how students can better apply basic concepts to complex situations; 

g. as mentioned previously, many of the jurisdictions which scored above Alberta in the 2012 PISA math assessment implemented changes to their math curriculum ten or more years ago; the same changes that Alberta has implemented within the current curriculum; 

h. the students who wrote the 2012 PISA assessment studied math under the previous curriculum; 

i. some of the jurisdictions whose students scored above Alberta in math see students receive tutoring in math for two hours per week and also see students doing math homework for 14 hours per week. We must ask ourselves, do we want this for our children? 

To conclude, I repeat that CASS is supportive of the curriculum redesign that is taking place in Alberta. To borrow the words of Ken Chapman who recently spoke at a CASS event, all education partners in Alberta are working together so that parents can be assured their children, who are our students, can not only be the best IN the world, but be prepared to be the best FOR the world. 

"Old" and "New" math

There's a lot of talk about "new" math and "old" math.

If I had to distill the math wars down to a simple idea, I would probably say that constructivist (new) math calls for an increase emphasis on understanding while simultaneously calling for a decrease emphasis on direct instruction of facts and algorithms.

The math wars get heated when critics come to see these changes to mean an elimination of basic skills and precise answers.

I would like to address three frequently asked questions about constructivist math:

Math hasn't changed and neither have kids, so why are we changing how we teach math?

Maybe math and children haven't changed, but our understanding for how children learn math is more sophisticated than generations ago.

Memorization is important and it is a very real product of learning, but memorization is not the primary purpose. Memorization is something that happens because children learn and understand mathematics first.

In math there is one right answer. Doesn't this new math just confuse kids and convince them to hate it?

Let's not pretend that traditional math instruction didn't confuse and turn a lot of students off of math. When adults think back on their schooling, it's easy to succumb to something called Nostesia which is a hallucinogenic mixture of 50% nostalgia and 50% amnesia which distorts rational thinking.

I remember dividing fractions. I was told to flip the second fraction and then multiply. It was a trick that enabled me to get high scores on tests. To this day, I have absolutely no idea why I flip the second fraction and multiply. This felt like magic when it should have been math.

If we want to confuse and turn students off math, I can think of no better strategy than to make math a ventriloquist act where children are merely told the most efficient ways of getting the right answer. When students are simply told the most efficient way of getting the answer, they get in the habit of looking to the adult or the book instead of thinking things through.

Canada's ranking on international tests like PISA are dropping. Doesn't this mean we should go back to basics and traditional math?

Since 2009, Alberta has dropped from 9th to 10th place in world rankings. A 2 per cent drop in our raw scores on math over two years has led to hysteria. The sky is not falling. It's also important to note that the children who wrote the 2012 PISA test had "old" math for their first seven years of school and only 3 years of "new" math.

My point is not to indict "new" or "old" math. There are many variables that may be responsible for the score changes. One factor is class sizes are growing. Since 2009, Alberta has added 41,000 new students and only 106 teachers.

Too many people confuse causation and correlation in an attempt to draw convenient conclusions that they simply can't prove. No one can prove that the change in PISA scores were because of teacher instruction. For example, we know that the strongest predictor of student performance on achievement tests is socio-economic status.

By idolizing PISA rankings, we risk chasing after Asian countries who achieve high scores with very different priorities and questionable means. PISA envy can lead us to aspire to be more like top-ranking Asian education systems even though those same Asian countries are desperate to reform their schools to look more like ours.

The math wars, like all wars, are ultimately destructive. Let's keep in mind that too many of us merely endured math or flat out hated it. Either way, it's safe to say that not enough of us loved it.

And we aren't going to get more children to love math by pretending that school already doesn't have enough lectures, direct instruction, worksheets, textbooks, tests and memorization.

This is a shorter version of a longer post that I wrote on the math wars here.

Jeff Johnson nails it

The math wars have returned and Alberta is at the epi-centre.

Critics are trying to blame Alberta's Inspiring Education and curriculum redesign for Alberta's 2% reduction in our raw score on math over a period of three years.

I am often the first in line to critique Jeff Johnson's handling of Education in Alberta, but I am also prepared to give him credit when credit is due. Jeff Johnson does a masterful job of explaining the nuances of PISA and Alberta's math curriculum.

It's 6 minutes long. Check it out.



Check out this petition that is in support of Alberta's math curriculum that focuses on understanding. 

Does size matter?

This was written by John Scammell who taught high school math for 18 years before becoming a high school math consultant. He blogs here and tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by John Scammell

Defining my terms:

A columnist is someone who writes for publication in a series, creating an article that usually offers commentary and opinions.

A journalist collects, writes, and distributes news and other information, while refraining from bias.

An Edmonton Journal columnist, one who could never be accused of even partially refraining from bias, has been arguing that class size reduction efforts in Alberta have been a waste of money. He cites research and even quotes the head of PISA(sounding dangerously like a journalist), but then conveniently leaves out relevant details that would contradict his argument (he is, after all, a columnist).

Some high performing countries (according to PISA) have larger class sizes than we do. The obvious conclusion is that we should increase class sizes, right? Not so fast, Mr. Biased Columnist. It’s only a logical conclusion if you ignore other all the other factors at play.

Currently, the norm in high schools in Alberta is to have teachers teach 7 out of 8 blocks. That means each semester I see four unique classes of around 35 students, for a total of 140 students per semester. I get an 80 minute preparation period every other day. Because of the already large class sizes, I spend most of my preparation time creating and grading assessments. Very little of my preparation time is spent on actually thinking about how to teach my material better.

Mr. Biased Columnist points out that places like Finland, Korea, Singapore (among others) have class sizes that are larger than in Alberta, and still perform better on PISA (this is fact). What he deliberately neglects to tell us (Logical fallacy of Omission – Stacking the Deck) though, is that teachers in those countries spend far less time in front of students than we do in North America. From the Singapore Ministry of Education:

The workload of our teachers varies across the year, depending on whether it is peak or non-peak periods. Over the entire year, our teachers teach, on average, about 15 hours per week. To deliver classroom teaching effectively, teachers also spend approximately twice as much time on teaching-related duties such as preparing for lessons, providing remediation for weaker students, setting and marking of homework and examinations.

They spend double their assigned time on teaching related duties compared to time spent teaching. I spend 1/8 of my assigned time on teaching related duties compared to time spent teaching.

Singapore has secondary classes in the neighbourhood of 40 students, but based on what I read above, they would only see two of those a day. That’s a total of 80 students per semester, which is far fewer than we see each semester in Alberta. In addition, the Ministry of Education in Singapore indicates:

Some schools also deploy two teachers in a class of 40 students—one teacher brings the class through the curriculum, while the other teacher assists specific students who may have difficulty understanding the materials being covered.

Wow! Singapore teachers actually have less marking to do than I do, more time built into their schedules to collaborate with colleagues and plan good lessons, AND they get to team-teach in large classes? It’s a model I’d be willing and eager to explore. Are they hiring in Singapore?

Mr. Biased Columnist suggests that good teachers will do well no matter how many students we give them. I agree. Under our current conditions, however, they will likely burn out from all the marking and management problems that large classes can bring. We don’t want to burn out our good teachers, do we? One third of new teachers in Alberta burn out within 5 years. Let’s revisit Singapore.

The annual resignation rate for teachers has remained low at around 3% over the past five years. In our exit interviews and surveys, workload has not been cited as a major reason for leaving the Education Service. Nonetheless, we will continue to monitor the workload of teachers through internal employee feedback channels to ensure that workload is maintained within reasonable levels.

Singapore has bigger classes, fewer teaching hours, more collaborative time built into their day and retains 97% of their teachers. Does class size matter? Not nearly as much as teacher collaboration built into the school day.

On a completely different vein, I do need to point out that in my travels across Alberta, I already see classrooms that were built to hold 25 students jam-packed with 40 desks. I don’t know how we can physically put more bodies into those classrooms. Are we going to build a bunch of new schools with large lecture theatres?

Some Resources I Used:

Singapore Ministry of Education
Singapore Parliament Class Size
PISA Key Findings 2012
Comparing the US to Finland and Singapore
Teacher Workload and Pay – Various Countries

New challenges, new thinking, new math

This was written by Jonathan Teghtmeyer who is with the Alberta Teachers` Association. Jonathan tweets here. This post first appeared on the Alberta Teachers` Association website.

by Jonathan Teghtmeyer

I’m a self-confessed math geek and proud of it!

In Grade 4, Mark and I would challenge each other to solve long division questions that stretched across the entire blackboard. In junior high and high school, when we were allowed to use calculators for math, I’d often forget or lose mine. Rather than borrow a calculator from a classmate, I got into the habit of doing arithmetic calculations by hand. When I was in high school, in the years before graphing calculators were mandatory, I begged my father to buy me one of the $100+ behemoths. When he refused, I used my hockey referee money to purchase one.

I understand, appreciate and value the importance of strong computation skills in mathematics. Yet at the same time, I’m dismayed by growing calls for a back-to-basics revolution in math instruction, simply because of Canada’s backslide in one international test.

Alberta physician and parent Dr. Nhung Tran-Davies has launched a petition calling on the minister of education to abandon immediately the “new math” curriculum and to embrace the basics “so that our children can be empowered by mastering the fundamentals of mathematics.”

Let’s be clear: no crisis exists. In 2000, Alberta’s raw score in math on PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) was 550 and placed third in the world; in 2012, it was 518. We’re still statistically tied for 10th best in the world; a 6 per cent decline over 12 years is a reason to take notice, but it isn’t a disaster.

Countries that bettered Canada’s students on PISA tests have a culture of rigid and regimental skill-and-drill instruction in large schoolhouse factories; when students leave school for the day, many head straight to large-scale tutoring boot camps. We shouldn’t be surprised or concerned, therefore, that these countries outperform us on simplistic international standardized tests that aren’t designed to measure the outcomes that we desire for our education system.

I recognize the frustration that Dr. Tran-Davies must be experiencing as a parent when she sees children being taught new and unfamiliar mathematical operations with which to compute and reason. Many students will have difficulty with mathematics and will inevitably ask their parents for help. Parents likely find these new techniques and algorithms daunting and wonder why we don’t teach math the old-fashioned way.

It’s not that the old ways aren’t taught; it’s that they are included as one of many strategies that can be used. The emphasis today is on the idea that it’s more important that students understand what information they are gleaning from an operation and how to apply the right operation in a situation than simply arriving at the right answer.

This approach makes sense to me. In my time as an academic high school math teacher, I had students who could perform an algorithm and obtain the right answer to a clear question, but they struggled to explain what that answer was telling them. Similarly, they struggled with determining which algorithm to use or how to apply it when faced with a new problem-solving situation.

The new challenge facing many is the plethora of innovative tools students have at their disposal for answering questions (spreadsheets, the Internet and powerful calculators). Students are adept at using various tools to find the information they need and applying that knowledge.

Our public education system needs, therefore, to set its sights higher on the ladder of Bloom’s taxonomy. Number sense and numeracy are more important than number operations and computation. Don’t get me wrong—as I said earlier, I understand how fluency in mental math and strong fundamentals support good mathematical thinking, but we need to find a balance, and it seems the new curriculum provides that.

Standardized tests like PISA focus only on narrow assessments that measure what an international economic organization wants our school systems to achieve. Let’s push back and focus on what we want our own public education system to achieve. I want students who think critically, work collaboratively and solve meaningful problems. To achieve that, they need tools that allow them to think about problems in a variety of unique ways.

Mathematics scores are only part of the story

This was written by the Alberta Teachers' Association and first appeared here.

by the Alberta Teachers' Association

Achievement in mathematics for Canadian students is declining according to a report that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released in December on the results of the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA is a two-hour, paper-based standardized test that attempts to assess the competencies of 15-year-olds in 65 countries with respect to reading, mathematics and science. Randomly selected students take various combinations of tests, and school principals (with input from students) supply information about participants’ backgrounds, learning experiences and the broader education system and learning environment.

Governments around the world frequently use PISA results to “weigh and measure” the performance of their education systems. Ministers of education in Canada also use the data to benchmark their school systems over time.

How did Canada and Alberta do?

The 2012 report ranked Canada 13th in mathematics, 11th in science and 8th in reading, although each result placed Canada within a cluster of countries whose marks were not statistically different. The Council of Ministers of Education, Canada released a parallel report showing that Alberta is at the national average for mathematics and reading and above average for science. The report also shows that, if Alberta were ranked as a nation, it would be tied statistically for 10th place in mathematics and 4th place in science. The results demonstrate a decline for Alberta, which has traditionally placed near the top of the international scales.

Canada’s continued high ranking has not stopped the local and national media from expressing anxiety about the mathematics scores and speculating on possible reasons for the decline. Alberta’s raw score in mathematics has declined by 6 per cent over the past 12 years, but performance has deteriorated slightly over all OECD countries during the same period. Among high-performing countries, only Macao-China, Poland and Germany have improved their mathematics scores over the past four PISA cycles.

Is there good news for Canada?

Besides continuing to be one of the top-ranked countries in the OECD in all three subjects, Canada is one of a handful of countries that combine high levels of performance with equity in educational opportunities for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds. In the report, OECD observes that students from countries in which wealth in more equitably distributed tend to perform better in mathematics Inequity in educational opportunities can produce differences in student performance that amount to as much as seven years of schooling.

The report also singles Canada out for having teachers who promote the development of complex problem-solving skills (see infographic page 3). A significant majority of Canadian students stated that their teachers present problems for which there is no immediately obvious solution and that require extensive thought.

What’s happening internationally?

It is worth noting that the education systems that ranked highest on the 2012 PISA results—Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei and Korea—are extremely test-centric and math focused. For that reason, they traditionally perform well on international standardized tests, especially in mathematics.

The reason that some countries improved in the 2012 PISA rankings may have to do with the test’s new-found ability to measure the impact of private tutoring on students’ performance. Some of the highest-ranking countries on the 2012 PISA are estimated to spend between $1,000 and $9,000 USD on private tutoring per student.

The Brooking’s Institute reports that, in top-ranked Shanghai, parents spend an average of $1,000 annually on English and mathematics tutors and that, during the high school years, the amount jumps to $5,000. In fifth-ranked Korea, 74 per cent of students received private after-school instruction in academies called hagwons. Parents spent an average cost of $2,600 per student per year on the academies. Private tutoring is also quite popular in Singapore and Japan. A recent article in Business Weekfeatured a discussion with a Japanese mother who sent her 11-year-old son to a Juku for four hours a night, four days a week, to prepare him for his junior high entrance exams. The cost of this tutoring was $9,200 per year.

According to a study by the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), one-third of Canadian parents have hired a private tutor or tutoring company for their child. In most cases, the students involved were already average or high achievers.

Implications for the future

Focusing on external rankings based on standardized tests may draw attention to students whose performance is marginal and increase the demand for private tutoring. The CCL study suggests that, during the 1990s, the number of private tutoring companies in major Canadian cities grew by between 200 and 500 per cent. Digital tutoring and adaptive learning systems are playing an increasingly dominant role in the tutoring industry in North America. In 2013, Dreambox Learning Inc., a technology company based in the United States, claimed that its intelligent adaptive learning system was as effective as human tutoring in accelerating math teaching and learning. For countries attempting to achieve excellence through equity, tutoring—because it is available only to the more affluent—may actually exacerbate disparities.

Recommendations for Canada

The PISA report includes recommendations for countries like Canada in which mathematics performance is only weakly related to socioeconomic status and in which socioeconomic groups tend to perform at nearly the same level. The report recommends that such countries should strive to improve performance across the board by changing their curricula and instructional systems and by improving the quality of their teachers. This recommendation is likely behind Education Minister Jeff Johnson’s response to the 2012 PISA. The report suggests that teaching quality can be improved “by requiring more qualifications to earn a teaching licence, providing incentives for high-achieving students to enter the profession, increasing salaries to make the profession more attractive and to retain more teachers, and/or offering incentives for teachers to engage in in-service teacher-training programmes.”

Started in 2000, PISA is administered every three years. The subject of focus in each cycle rotates among reading, mathematics and science. PISA 2012, the fifth iteration of the testing program, focused on mathematics. Approximately 2,500 Alberta students from 100 schools took the tests.

Here's what I learned from PISA

While it's true that this 5 minute video is about American education, there are key points that we all need to pay attention to.

Some highlights:

• Privatizing education, high stakes testing, merit pay, union busting, closing schools and firing teachers are not new ideas. These are some of the failed strategies that some countries like the US have been implementing for decades.

• The rankings provided by PISA are low hanging fruit. The real lessons are found from researching how each nation achieved their results. According to PISA, Finland and Asian countries are high achievers, but they became high achievers by focusing very different priorities.

• Before we rush to be more like high scoring Asian countries, we need to carefully examine how Asian countries achieved their scores. PISA envy can lead to an acute case of Be Careful What You Wish For.

• Some countries like the US have never performed well on international tests.

• The nature of ranking and sorting means that a country could drop in the rankings not because their schools are getting worse, but because other country's schools are getting better. Focusing on "who is beating who" is not the same thing as focusing on educating children.

• Poverty's effect on educational equity matters. Standardized test scores are strongly influenced by socio-economics. 

• When we control for poverty, affluent students in the US often actually outperform affluent students from other countries. At the same time, students living in poverty in the US perform similarily to students living in poverty in other countries. The problem for the US is that so many children live in poverty (1 in 4) which pulls their national average down on international tests like PISA.

• Predictable, sustainable and equitable funding for public education matters.

• High performing countries place more resources into disadvantaged students.

• High performing countries pay teachers very well and refuse to villainize and blame teachers.

• High performing countries provide teachers with time away from teaching students so that they can learn how to become better teachers. 

• High performing countries tend to have strong teacher unions and governments that nurture a constructive relationship with teachers and their union.

• High performing countries see education reform not as something done to students, parents and teachers but with them and by them collaboratively.

The Pitfall of PISA Envy

Whether it be business, education or life in general, it often makes sense to figure out what you want to do and what you do not want to do. It's also a good idea to figure out how you are going to assess your success.

This is good, but I would like to add one more step.

I think it's also important to decide how you will not assess what you've done. I think Maya Angelou provided us with a wonderful example of this when she said:

Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take but by the moments that take your breath away.

In one sentence, Angelou helps us to see what we should be doing (living), while simultaneously showing us how we should and should not measure the quality of our lives.

For the last decade, Finland has been the model nation for education systems around the world. Finland should be applauded for resisting the urge to invest in the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) and instead pursuing alternative policies. Perhaps most notably, standardized tests are almost completely absent from Finnish schools.

And yet, world attention has been focused on Finland mostly because of their high scores on PISA's standardized tests. 

See the contradiction?

PISA's 2012 rankings show Finland has been replaced at the top with a handful of Asian countries (and a city). By idolizing the rankings, people might drop Finland like a hot-potato to chase after Asian countries who achieve their high scores with very different priorities and questionable means.

Recognizing people or nations for doing the right thing for the wrong reasons can be misleading and ultimately unsustainable. PISA's rankings on their own are useless. The real lessons from PISA are found from researching how each nation achieved their results and then assessing their methods via ethical criteria that is independent of their results. (Things go very wrong when we allow education policy to be driven by circular logic: define effective nations as those who raise test scores, then use test score gains to determine effective nations.)

We need to recognize Finland for doing the right things with their schools for the right reasons, but that means we need to move beyond reducing learning to standardized test scores and PISA rankings. Until then, we run the risk of chasing high performing nations that score well and rank high with methods that are less than enviable.

Assessing the quality of education by how many questions we answer correctly is kind of like judging a life by the number of breaths we take -- both are clear, simple and wrong.

Shameful infographic from StudentsFirst

Here is a shameful infographic from StudentsFirst.

This is the kind of shallow and superficial rhetoric that encourages people to focus on competitive ranking while ignoring the real lessons of PISA.

I find it sadly ironic that organizations like StudentsFirst use PISA to advance an agenda of privatizing education, high stakes testing, merit pay, union busting, closing schools and firing teachers when in fact PISA shows us that not one of these strategies is supported by evidence.

Organizations like StudentsFirst need to keep people frantically distracted with a kind of hysteria and fetishization of international test scores so they can dupe us into their cancerous education policies. Desperate people can be convinced to make desperate decisions. Infographics like this are nothing more than fear mongering that distracts people with clawing over each other so we can chant "We are number umpteenth!"

While Canada has been able to avoid some of these fruitless distractions, it's disappointing to see John Manley, CEO and president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, get duped into thinking the sky is falling. "This is on the scale of a national emergency,"this ridiculous response from Manley is eerily similar to some of the hysteria Americans have exhibited when they compared America's low PISA scores with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Organizations like StudentsFirst only get away with spreading the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) if people limit their knowledge of PISA to infographics like this. The real lessons are found from researching how each nation achieved their results. According to PISA, Finland and Asian countries are high achievers, but they became high achievers by focusing on very different priorities. While you will see StudentsFirst make their own infographics like the one above, you will never see them share PISA reports with titles like Excellence Through Equity: Giving Every Student the Chance to Succeed.

I hope we can all look past shallow and superficial infographics like this one from StudentsFirst and fear mongering from John Manley so that we can find the real lessons of PISA. I'm not saying its going to be easy, but it's going to be worth it.

Looking for the real lessons of PISA. Start with this video:

Reading the PISA Tea Leaves: Who is responsible for Finland's Decline and the Asian Magic

This was written by Yong Zhao who is Presidential Chair, Associate Dean Global and Online Education, College of Education at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Catching Up or Leading the Way and World Class Learners. He blogs here and tweets here. This post first appeared here.

by Yong Zhao

“Finland Fell from the Tip of PISA,” says the headline of a story in the largest subscription newspaperHelsingin Sanomat in Finland, according to Google Translate (I think it should be
Finland Falls from the Top of PISA). I don’t know Finnish but thanks to Google Translate, I was able to understand most of the story. The gist is that Finland has fallen from the top in the current round of PISA.

This is big news, with significant implications not only for the Finns but also for the rest of the world that has been looking at Finland as the model education system since 2001 when Finland was number one in the first round of PISA. Although results of the 2012 PISA won’t be officially unveiled until 10am GMT, December 3rd.the leaked story, published on November 30th, has already sent the Finns and others to speculate the causes of Finland’s decline. “The reasons are seen in the teachers’ continuing education in poor and outdated teaching methods and technology,” writes the Helsingin Sanomat story (courtesy of Google Translate).

While the Finns are right to be concerned about their education, it would be a huge mistake to believe that their education has gotten worse. Finland’s slip in the PISA ranking has little to do with what Finland has or has not done. It has been pushed down by others. In other words, Finland’s education quality as measured by the PISA may have not changed at all and remains strong, but the introduction of other education systems that are even better at taking tests has made Finland appear worse than it really is. In 2000 and 2003 when Finland was number one, only two East Asian education systems were included: Korea and Japan. In 2009, there were seven from Eastern Asia: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Macao. Six out of the seven ranked top 10 in math, five in science and five in reading and Shanghai took number away from Finland. I have not seen the 2012 results yet and will miss the big moment on my way back to the U.S. from Hong Kong, but I can guess, as the Helsingin Sanomat already suggested, the East Asian education systems did very well again, squeezing further Finland down the league table.

An even bigger mistake is to assume that the Asian systems have made significant improvement and surpassed Finland. The Asian systems have always done extremely well in international tests, especially in math. The top scoring education systems in another major international assessment, the TIMSS, have always been Eastern Asian since 1995: Singapore, S. Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan. Mainland China has yet to participate in TIMSS.

The 2009 PISA results have already begun to shift the world’s attention away from Finland to Shanghai. I fear that the 2012 PISA will complete that shift and make Shanghai and other East Asian education systems THE model of education because the magic potion that East Asian success in international tests is very poisonous.

The recipe for the East Asian success is actually not that magical. It includes all the elements that have been identified as the symptoms of the GERM (Global Education Reform Movement) by the great Finnish education scholar Pasi Sahlberg: Competition, Standardization, Frequent Testing, and Privatization. In East Asian high PISA performing systems, these ingredients are more effectively combined and carried out to an extreme to result in entire societies devoted to ensure that their youngsters become excellent test takers.

While the East Asian systems may enjoy being at the top of international tests, they are not happy at all with the outcomes of their education. They have recognized the damages of their education for a long time and have taken actions to reform their systems. Recently, the Chinese government again issued orders to lesson student academic burden by reducing standardized tests and written homework in primary schools. The Singaporeans have been working reforming its curriculum and examination systems. The Koreans are working on implementing a “free semester” for the secondary students. Eastern Asian parents are willing and working hard to spend their life’s savings finding spots outside these “best” education systems. Thus international schools, schools that follow the less successful Western education model, have been in high demand and continue to grow in East Asia. Tens of thousands of Chinese and Korean parents send their children to study in Australia, the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. It is no exaggeration to say that that the majority of the parents in China would send their children to an American school instead of keeping them in the “best performing” Chinese system, if they had the choice.

The East Asian education systems may have a lot to offer to those who want a compliant and homogenous test takers. For those who are looking for true high quality education, Finland would still be a better place. But for an education that can truly cultivate creative, entrepreneurial and globally competent citizens needed in the 21st century, you will have to invent it. Global benchmarking can only give you the best of the past. For the best of the future, you will have do the invention yourself.

(May append later. Gotta run to the airport)

Braving the Media Storm of PISA 2012

You can't talk about education without tripping over PISA. On December 3, the 2012 PISA results will be released, and there will be a considerable amount of media attention and drooling. This was written by Tim Walker who is an American teaching in Finland. Tim has an insightful blog titled Taught by Finland. Tim tweets here. You can find this post on Tim's blog here.

By Tim Walker

There's a storm brewing. In less than 24 hours, the latest PISA results from the 2012 data will be revealed on Tuesday, December 3, 2013 at 10:00 AM (GMT).

Undoubtedly, there will be lots of must-read stories swirling around. Many tales of winners and losers. With certainty, Finland will get its fair share of heat.

On Saturday, Helsingin Sanomat, a well-respected Finnish newspaper, reported that Finland dropped from the Top 10 in math from PISA 2012, noting that Estonia’s 15-year-olds outperformed Finland’s.

Updated: 2:20 PM (GMT), Monday, December 2, 2013

Over the next few days, I will be compiling a list of recent, important articles (concerning the results of PISA 2012) on this page. I'm looking for information that helps us navigate the tricky waters of international test scores, giving us lots of food for thought. Please share other PISA-related articles as I will be regularly adding to this list in the days ahead:

“PISA’S China Problem” – The Brookings Institution

“’PISA Day’ – An Ideological and Hyperventilated Exercise” – The Economic Policy Institute

“The Fetishization of International Test Scores” – Washington Post

“Don’t Let PISA League Tables Dictate Schooling” – The Guardian

‘”Prepare Pupils in England for International Tests’” – BBC News

PISA, Power and Policy

PISA scores will be released December 3. Anyone who uses PISA scores or rankings to make decisions or judgements should read PISA, Power, and Policy: the emergence of global educational governance. From the flap:

Over the past ten years the PISA assessment has risen to strategic prominence in the international education policy discourse. Sponsored, organized and administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), PISA seems well on its way to being institutionalized as the main engine in the global accountability regime.

The goal of this book is to problematize this development and PISA as an institution-building force in global education. It scrutinizes the role of PISA in the emerging regime of global educational governance and questions the presumption that the quality of a nation’s school system can be evaluated through a standardized assessment that is insensitive to the world’s vast cultural and institutional diversity. The book raises the question of whether PISA’s dominance in the global educational discourse runs the risk of engendering an unprecedented process of worldwide educational standardization for the sake of hitching schools more tightly to the bandwagon of economic efficiency, while sacrificing their role to prepare students for independent thinking and civic participation.

The problem is poverty

Take three and a half minutes and watch this...




The question isn't whether public education can be improved -- rather, it's how can it be improved. But before we implement a solution, we need to be clear about the real problems that are plaguing public education and, more generally, society.

The problem with Public Education is not low test scores. Poverty is the single largest problem that plagues most education systems.

In his post What the U.S can't learn from Finland, Pasi Sahlberg writes:

First of all, although Finland can show the United States what equal opportunity looks like, Americans cannot achieve equity without first implementing fundamental changes in their school system. The following three issues require particular attention.

• Funding of schools:
Finnish schools are funded based on a formula guaranteeing equal allocation of resources to each school regardless of location or wealth of its community.

• Well-being of children:
All children in Finland have, by law, access to childcare, comprehensive health care, and pre-school in their own communities. Every school must have a welfare team to advance child happiness in school.

• Education as a human right:
All education from preschool to university is free of charge for anybody living in Finland. This makes higher education affordable and accessible for all.

As long as these conditions don’t exist, the Finnish equality-based model bears little relevance in the United States.

Linda Darling-Hammond writes in the Nation:

Inequality has an enormous influence on US performance. White and Asian students score just above the average for the European OECD nations in each subject area, but African-American and Hispanic students score so much lower that the national average plummets to the bottom tier. The United States is also among the nations where socioeconomic background most affects student outcomes. This is because of greater income inequality and because the United States spends much more educating affluent children than poor children, with wealthy suburbs often spending twice what central cities do, and three times what poor rural areas can afford. 

Alfie Kohn on the Majority Report puts it this way:

Talking about American education is like talking about the quality of American air. It depends where you are standing. The rich areas of this country do very, very well in comparison to people in any other part of the globe -- assuming you want to use test scores as your criteria. The reason we have problems on those rankings is mostly because the U.S has more poor children than almost any other industrial country. And in the poorer areas, the kids are in desperate trouble... The issues of inequity of a gap cannot be defined in terms of a gap in test scores, because when you try and correct that by pushing up the test scores in the inner cities, you make their education worse because the tests measure what matters least.

Even when we choose to use narrow measurements like the scores on international tests like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it's important to recognize the effects poverty have on a country's ranking. Scores and rankings for countries like the United States are deceiving. When you include all students, the United States doesn't score well because 1 in 4 American children live in poverty.

If we are not careful, we risk misinterpreting the data. Instead of waging war on poverty, we end up waging war on teachers and schools. The shadow industries that have been stalking public education for a very long time need the public as an accomplice. Profiteers like Joel Klein and Organization's like Michelle Rhee's Students First are:

promoting an agenda that many educators see as de-legitimizing the teaching profession; making standardized tests a holy grail of assessing students, teachers and schools, allowing private foundations to set the education agenda; and inviting for-profit companies to come into the public sector with programs that are designed primarily to make money for investors, not help kids.

You'll notice that the likes of Michelle Rhee and her minions at Students First never mention poverty.

As long as we continue to misidentify the problem as low scores on standardized tests, and ignore the real problem of poverty, we will continue to apply solutions that actually make the problem worse. It's important to note that the United States has never done well on these international tests so to claim they are some how falling behind in the test score race is a lie.

People who say poverty is no excuse are making excuses about doing nothing about poverty. Children never choose to live in poverty, but we can choose to provide all children with a more equitable education system.

If we want to make school and the world a better place for our children, we need to be better informed. And to get you started, here are but a few people and organizations you should familiarize yourself with in order to stay properly informed:
Diane Ravitch blog - twitter
Yong Zhao blog - twitter
Deborah Meier blog - twitter
Susan Ohanian blog - twitter
Stephen Krashen website - twitter
Alfie Kohn website - twitter
Valerie Strauss blog
Anthony Cody blog - twitter
Pasi Sahlberg blog - twitter
Will Richardson blog - twitter
Phil McRae website - twitter
Carol Burris twitter
Paul Thomas blog - twitter
Gary Stager blog - twitter
Fairtest website - twitter
Schools Matter blog
Alberta Teachers' Association website - twitter

The American Contradiction

In the United States corporate reformers, also known as educational deformers, have created an American Contradiction:

Use PISA scores to show that public education in the United States is failing but then implement market-based reforms that are almost entirely contradictory to the reforms and policies found in high achieving countries.

 For more on this American Contradiction, I suggest you take a look at Marc Tucker's Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.


NOTE: After reading John Spencer's comment on this post, I changed this post from "the American Paradox" to "the American Contradiction". I agree with John, it better describes what is going on.

Paradoxes of the Finland Phenomenon

Have you noticed there's a lot of hullabaloo about Finland's education system lately? I've been paying attention to what the Finns have been doing for a couple years now,  but it is only after reading an essay by Sam Abrams and hearing him subsequently elaborate in a talk in Banff that I've thought to pay attention to Finland's neighbour Norway.

Norway and Finland have some similarities. They are neighbouring countries that each take up about 350 000 square kilometres with populations around 5 million and about 10 percent foreign born in Norway and 4 percent in Finland. A notable difference, however, is that Norway has a significantly higher Gross Domestic Product.

Norway has oil. Finland has trees. 

Since the 1970s, Norway has focused intensely on developing their oil and gas resources which have risen to 45% of their total exports and 20% of their GDP. These efforts have provided Norway with bragging rights over being the fifth largest oil exporter and third largest gas exporter in the world.

Meanwhile, Finland in 1971 realized that their natural resources, largely timber, weren't going to cut it. They needed to modernize their economy and to do it they were going to have to improve their schools. In other words, they were going to have to focus intensely on developing their children's brains.

To do this, Finland focused on reducing class size, improving formative assessment practices, increasing teacher pay & notoriety, and requiring all teachers to complete a master's program. Finnish teachers use a relatively concise national curriculum to guide them in creating curriculum and assessment at the local level, and very little time, effort and resources are wasted with standardized testing; in fact, the only time a Finnish student would ever be required to write a standardized exam is if a high school senior planned on attending university (National Matriculation Examination). Finland has worked worked meticulously to ensure equity and opportunity thus reducing the number of Finnish children who live in poverty to 1 in 25 (1 in 5 for US and 1 in 10 for Alberta, Canada) .

Today, Finland's education system is considered to be one of the best in the world.

Conversely, despite Norway's similar demographics, their education reforms have followed a very different path than Finland's:

• Their class sizes tend to be larger
• They struggle to find enough qualified teachers
• Rather than focusing on better trained teachers, Norway has thrown millions of dollars at a teacher preparation program similar to Teach for America called Teach First Norway where teachers get mere weeks of training.
• They implemented a national standardized testing system of accountability
• They have placed more time, effort and resources on summative assessment such as testsandgrades.
• Based on PISA scores, Norway's education system falls somewhere around mediocre.

So why is comparing and contrasting Finland and Norway important?

Upon hearing about the progress Finland has had with their education system, many policy-makers in other countries may be inclined to point towards the Finns smaller, more homogenous population as the primary reason for their successes in the classroom. That Norway and Finland can share such similarities in population and yet differ with their education systems may be enough proof that policy choices, rather than demographics, can play a potentially larger role in a nation's educational success.

In Alberta, Canada, we have dedicated a considerable amount of time, effort and resources on becoming the world's second largest exporter and fourth largest producer of natural gas while simultaneously helping Canada become the seventh largest producer of oil, just three spots ahead of Norway. While debating whether this is something Alberta or Norway should be proud of or not may make for an interesting discussion, such a dialogue is not the purpose of this post.

Instead, I wish to look forward with this:

The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.

Before you slough off the quote above as some green peace propaganda, keep in mind that the author of these words were Sheikh Zaki Yamani who served as Saudi Arabia's second Oil Minister from 1962-1986.

The ultimate point here is not to debate environmentalism, but to acknowledge that the world is changing and so must our education system in order to prepare our children for a future we can not predict.

This is not up for debate.

Regions like Norway and Alberta run the risk of being blinded by what some have coined a "resource curse" or a paradox of plenty. A dependency on oil and gas can leave us grossly susceptible to excessive revenue volatility -- things are glorious in the booms but down-right scary in the busts. It's not unheard of to hear during these busts calls to balance the budget on the back of cutting spending on education, which ends up being the equivalent to a farmer selling the top-soil to pay the bills.

While regions like Alberta and Norway can afford to pay less time, effort and resources on their education systems, Finland's lack of resources has forced them to invest "laser-like" attention on nurturing theirs. The good news is that if Finland can do this with less, the abundance of wealth in regions like Norway and Alberta can be used to do the same.

So if Finland's successes in the classroom are less about their inherent Finnish characteristics and more about their policies, then it might be advantageous to identify how the Finnish differ from conventional education reforms.

Pasi Sahlberg is a leading educator from Finland and former senior adviser in Finland's Ministry of Education who writes and speaks about what the world can learn from Finland. The chart below contrasts what Sahlberg coins as The Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) with alternative policies that Finland has successfully enrolled:

In his post On a Road to nowhere, Sahlberg explains:

Pasi Sahlberg 

English education policies rely on more choice, tougher competition, intensified standardised testing and stronger school accountability. These are the key elements of the policies that were dominant in the United States, New Zealand, Japan and parts of Canada and Australia a decade or so ago. Available PISA data reveals the impact of these education policies on students’ learning between 2000 and 2009. The overall learning trend in all these countries is consistently declining. That is a road to nowhere. 

Many governments are taking note of the 2009 PISA results, but they are rather selective in reporting of the education systems that are doing well in PISA. Finland has been one of the few consistently high performing systems in PISA’s 10-year history. Significantly, Finland has not employed any of the market-based educational reform ideas in the ways that they have been incorporated into the education policies of many other nations, including the United States and England.

Finland's successful pursuit of policies driven by diversity, trust, respect, professionalism, equity, responsibility and collaboration refute every aspect of reforms that focus on choice, competition, accountability and testing that are being expanded in countries around the world.

In short, it's time to put ideology aside and focus intensely on the paradoxes of the Finland phenomenon.

** Corrections: An important citation to Sam Abrams was added in the first paragraph and Finland's foreign born rate was corrected from reading 10% to 4%.