SETDA - What it takes to compete

The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

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 in

Jobs in lower skill sectors, and indeed entire sectors of the workplace, are disappearing

In 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 2005

By 2015, China will have twice the number of college graduates as the U.S. and EU combined

PISA – 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 situations

U.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 2002

Demand for routine manual skills has declined

Demand for nonroutine manual skills has declined steeply

Demand for routine cognitive skills (that are easy to teach, easy to test, easy to break into small pieces) has declined steeply

Demand for nonroutine analytic skills has increased sharply

Demand for nonroutine interactive skills has increased sharply

Percentage of students at Levels 5 or 6 on PISA has an almost linear relationship to the number of researchers per thousand people

Money 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 differently

Best-performing educational systems have both high challenge and strong support systems

Low challenge and weak support = poor performance and stagnation

High challenge and weak support = conflict, demoralization

High challenge and strong support = systemic improvement

Best-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 learning

Only 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 learning

Requirement for students to take one online course before graduation is an attempt to jump start the situation, turn pedagogy in another direction

No longer automatically accrediting teacher education institutions every 5 years; now leaning on universities to change their preparation practices

Showed the video of Paul Potts to emphasize that there is hidden talent in everyone and that we can bring that out if we choose

The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.