Reflections on Education in My Country- PISA and TIMSS Reports

Prompt: What conclusions do you draw about how education in your country is doing when compared to the rest of the world?  What in the readings surprises you?  Worries you?  Angers or inspires you? 

What follows are my reflections after reading portions of the PISA and TIMSS reports as well as other data from the World Bank.

First let me say that the thought of looking at data always puts me into a cold sweat.  Give me an anecdote, a narrative, a picture, an interpretive dance and I am all set.  Data, charts and spreadsheets make my knees wobble and head spin.  But somehow I managed to take a look at PISA (Volume IV: What Makes a School Successful), play around with the World Bank Data, read the TIMMS executive summary, and generate an interesting facebook dialogue with the Infographic picture.

I should also point out that at the word “test” my guard immediately went up: “Standardized tests, what do they know? Surely they have cultural biases, surely they are flawed, surely this data can’t really be trusted”.  With just a brief reading about the PISA test, I liked what I saw in terms of the tasks using applied knowledge and problem solving.  I don’t know enough about standardized tests to comment on the quality of either the PISA or the TIMSS, but decided to let go of my skepticism and just look at the data for what it was.

What inspired me was PISA’s assertion that the most successful schools are in fact finding high academic achievement despite disparity in resources[1].   

While a family’s socioeconomic status and the resources available to schools still correlate with achievement levels, I was surprised to see that in many schools and in many countries around the world there is high achievement being attained with few resources.  From page 3:

“The education systems that have been able to secure strong and equitable learning outcomes, and to mobilise rapid improvements, show others what is possible to achieve. Naturally, GDP per capita influences educational success, but this only explains 6% of the differences in average student performance. The other 94% reflect the potential for public policy to make a difference. The stunning success of Shanghai-China, which tops every league table in this assessment by a clear margin, shows what can be achieved with moderate economic resources and in a diverse social context.” (ibid).

From my perspective, I saw enormous differences in achievement from my previous school (a school with 90% of students considered low SES) to my current school (with 30% of students considered low SES).  My personal experience with education in Vermont has led me to see wide gaps in achievement corresponding with the socioeconomic status of students.  I see a consistent pattern of low SES students doing worse in school and on our standardized tests that the high SES students.  My job feels so much easier and less daunting in my new school with only 30% low SES students.  The TIMSS report confirmed my personal experience, (page 13 of the executive summary), showing that students with “Many Resources” scoring an average of 119 points higher in 4^th grade and 115 points higher in 8^th grade than students with “Few Resources”.  To summarize, while I am seeing a trend of my students with fewer resources performing at a lower achievement level, I am inspired by the PISA results that show that a student’s socioeconomic status does not seal their fate.  The idea that SES accounts for only 6% of the differences in student performance shines a spotlight on the inequities of education here in Vermont and the US.  Equal access and high expectations for all can go a long way in closing that achievement gap. 

Another trend I found that made me feel angry and frustrated (also related to family resources) was the importance of early education and preprimary school.  Both the PISA and the TIMSS showed that students with access to preprimary school performed better at all the grade levels tested.  Quality preprimary school is connected with so many other facets of a healthy society. Since becoming a working mother, the extreme shortage and high cost of quality day care and preschool has become a passionate issue for me.  Not only is this a barrier to women becoming productive members of the work force, but quality of preprimary care and education sets children up for success for the rest of their student careers.  I get frustrated when I read about countries like France that offer universal, high quality, and low or no cost daycare and preschool.  This is a huge shortcoming in the United States.  Not only is it hard to even find a spot for your child due to well documented shortages of available spots, but when parents are able to find a spot it is usually at a high financial cost.  These financial barriers to quality preprimary education are already setting up the achievement gap for the “haves” and the “have nots” in our society. 

There is so much more to talk about, but I will end with one other trend that I found interesting.  The PISA report talked quite a bit about teacher autonomy.  Schools that moved away from a bureaucratic “top-down” approached and gave teachers more autonomy and control in their classrooms tended to be more successful.  “There are the 60 million teachers!” I thought to myself while reading. Important to note that teachers with autonomy AND a clear accountability system were showed greater student successes.  Teachers with autonomy and little accountability did not show a trend for success. Also interesting that job satisfaction and teacher pay corresponded to high success, but smaller class size did not. I am not sure how other US educators feel, but I do have high autonomy with high accountability in my school.  This is a strength my school system!

Lastly, a data question for the data-minded folks out there! I see on the infographic that the US outspends everybody.  BUT when looking in the World Bank database, they present spending per pupil as a % of GDP per capita.  When you look at spending per pupil as a % of GDP per capita, there are countries (Sweden was one) that outspend the US at both the primary and secondary level. What does that mean? What does  % of GDP per capita really mean?

From the PISA report (ibid): "Success will go to those individuals and countries that are swift to adapt, slow to complain and open to change." I do not this the US yet fits that description, but I am hopeful for my home state of Vermont.

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[1] OECD (2010), PISA 2009 Results: What Makes a School Successful? – Resources, Policies and Practices (Volume IV)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264091559-en

The Case for Comparative Education

A letter to my colleagues, convincing them (and you!) to care about the field of Comparative Education.

The Case for Comparative Education at MUHS

Dear Colleagues,

Here we are, nestled in the fertile farming basin between the ancient sea of lake Champlain and the worn and rounded Green Mountains.  As you look out your window, you may see green trees, the bountiful Otter Creek, the rolling hills and the mountains beyond.  You may see Middlebury College on the hill.  We see farmland, agriculture, academia and privilege all in one sweeping view.

As I look out our windows to the world beyond, I wonder what kind of world we are sending our students out into.  Have we prepared them for success outside the classroom walls? Have we equipped them with the skills necessary to thrive in our modern, shrinking, increasingly interdependent and globalized world?

The world our students face today is vastly different from the one we faced upon graduating from high school.  We’ve all probably read ad nauseam about technology, globalization, and ways in which our world is quickly evolving.  But the question remains for us as educators: How do we prepare students for a world that is so rapidly changing? How do we equip them for jobs in fields that have yet to be created? To solve problems that don’t even exist yet?  When local economies and environmental changes have a global ripple, how do we prepare students to work with others around the world to collaborate on problems with a global scale?  Global and local are connected like never before.  Although we may want to retreat to the comfort of our mountain ringed basin, we can no longer simply live in isolation from global forces.

For these reasons, the core of 21^st Century teaching has to be rooted in a global mindset.  As we work through the days of lesson planning, grading, paper pushing and “covering” material, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.  We want to help our students meet our daily lesson objectives and we want to prepare them for the next year of schooling and eventually for college.  But when we take a critical look at our new interconnected reality, we see the limitations and shortcomings of a uniquely local perspective.  Our mission as educators can no longer be simply to prepare students for college or for the work force.  It must be to prepare our students to be active and responsible global citizens of the 21^st century.  Beyond the 21^st century skills our school has identified as important and asked your department to work with, we must also examine how our instruction addresses larger global issues and makes the world outside our borders relevant for our students.

Beyond covering material and reaching objectives, we must inspire a passion for learning for life.  We must equip students with the self-knowledge and self-awareness to collaborate with others on some of the biggest and most complex problems our world has ever faced.  As we as educators look for ways to better prepare our students for the new global reality, the field of “comparative education” can help inform our practice. Comparative education is a field that examines education around the world and the purpose and role of education in societies.  Comparative education can help us broaden our perspectives, draw from others’ successes, and analyze our own educational practices and systems.  In addition, as we as teachers look beyond our borders in meaningful ways to solve new problems and inform our practice, we are modeling the 21^st Century skills we need to pass on to our students.  Comparative education can lead to a more global minded, engaging, relevant and rigorous 21^st Century classroom.

As I look out my window, I still see our local community that is so close to my heart.  I see the local culture that helps me understand and identify with my students, build relationships, and engage them.  But I also see a more global perspective now too.  I know that my job is more than just to prepare students for that college up on the hill.  As we rethink our mission as educators to include a more global purpose, we are better equipped to serve a new generation of students entering a new and increasingly interdependent world.

Learning: The Treasure Within

My initial thoughts after reading this: http://www.unesco.org/delors/delors_e.pdf

The Treasure Within

There is a lot to say about this piece of writing, it is hard to pick a focus.  First let me say that I really enjoyed Delors’ artistic prose, which at times read more like a traditional Taoist text than a commission’s report on education (references to “self-knowledge” and “inner meditation”). 

First I have to say how ALL of his major points and recommendations hit close to home.  When colleagues asked me about this course, I would shrug and say, “Well, it probably has more to do with my work in Haiti than my work here at the high school, but I am sure it will relate”.  I couldn’t have been more wrong!  As Delors walked through the commission’s principals, findings and recommendations I found myself relating everything to my context at Middlebury High School.  I had to remind mysef that this was a report on global education, and not a report just about Vermont.  The tensions, the need to inspire learning for life, and need to allow adolescents multiple pathways, the need for equity, the need for community involvement, the role of policy makers, the mass enrollment in and focus on higher education, and more. 

But if I have to choose one thing to focus on, it has to be the major wake up call to refocus on the bigger “global picture” of learning.  In my current context I tend to get so insular in my thinking: “I need to teach these students this grammar, this vocabulary” or maybe even, “I need to prepare these students for college”.  But my role and aim as an educator is truly so much bigger than that.  I need to prepare these students to be responsible and active citizens of a global community.  My aim shouldn’t (just) be to assign grades and prepare students for an AP test or college, but to INSPIRE a PASSION for learning for life.  Delors’ words about creating understanding between cultures and knowledge of the world’s cultures really struck a chord with me as a language teacher.  Indeed, our field of learning languages and cultures, too often overlooked as an “extra” in my society, plays an essential role in education for a better world or “necessary utopia” as Delors puts it.  This is, after all, why I got into language teaching in the first place.

To summarize, the take home point for me was to be more global in my thinking about my role as a secondary educator.  Comparative education as a larger field is helping me to rethink my basic aims as an educator in the larger context of an interconnected and interdependent 21^st Century global village.

#JHUglobaled

60 Million Teachers

My thoughts and reactions to this article:  http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic648757.files/WhereAre60MillionTeachers_Reimers1996pp469-492.pdf

After being swept away by Delors’ poetic descriptions of necessary utopia, this piece painted a more harsh and bleak portrait of the plights of teachers around the world.  Most of the main points in the article we reiterations of things we as educators talk about all the time, in particular the need for better teacher training and preparation.  At first glance, this article seemed to be a lot of the "same old thing".

For me, I have two initial reactions.  The first is that it is time for teachers themselves to stand up and be involved in the discussion.  I realize that this comes from a privileged outlook: I live in a place and time where I can speak my mind and have the luxury of time to be involved in such efforts.  Still, in my own context I find that many of us as passive complainers (and rightly so, many of us are so overloaded we don’t have time for much else!).  But if we want a better future for ourselves as educators, we need to be proactive in forging that reality for ourselves.  More educators need to BE policy makers (not just involved in dialogues with them), and more of us (myself included) need to more involved and proactive about getting our voices heard.  The future we desire is ours for the making, and we need not wait for the folks “in charge” to come to us.  I know this point of view has received lots of criticism because teachers’ jobs are hard enough without adding this to our plates.  But I still maintain that we are our own best advocates and that (successful!) change and reform ultimately rest in our own hands. 

Secondly, I feel like these changes all need to take place within a larger cultural and social shift.  The article addresses this in a nice way when it says, “A society can only have an education system as good as it can imagine it” (p 483).  When education becomes a priority for a society, I think many of the problems teachers face find solutions.  How do we inspire the next generation of teachers, as well as place the necessary focus and attention on the importance of education and teaching?  How do we promote the cultural shift that places greater value on education?  I do not know the answer to these questions. But I do think that we, the educators and administrators in the field, need to play a larger role and take more responsibility in this area.

#JHUglobaled

Par Ma Fenetre

From my window...I see green sports fields, freshly painted for the Varsity girl's lacrosse game. I see the Otter Creek that founded this mill town, green fields and trees beyond.  Farther, I see the buildings of Middlebury College.  I see wealth, and privilege, and academia.

That college on the hill is working its way into my classroom in new ways lately. Sure, I've always taught professor's kids and attended interesting events up there.  But you see, I teach French and Spanish to high school students. I teach world languages in the shadow of one of the most renowned language learning schools in my country.  Recently, Middlebury college secured a rather large grant to work with high school language teachers here at my school, but without consulting with any high school teachers before applying for the grant.  It is just a given that high school teachers would want to learn from these experts, right? Even though their context and experience is very different from mine, they are good at what they do, so I must have something to learn from them.

And yet, when I look up at that college on the hill, I am reminded of myself. I recently started working with a small non-profit in Haiti. We are a handful of educators working with a tuition free school in Port-au-Prince, primarily providing professional development to teachers, but also helping with school supplies, furniture, infrastructure, and most recently a kitchen and school lunch program.  As I work in Haiti, I hear story after story of people with the best of intentions who end up hurting, not helping. This idea haunts me.  Am I really doing any good? Is my work empowering and sustainable or parasitic and fleeting?  How can my work as a teacher impact real development? Am I any different from the Middlebury professors who assume I need their expertise without even asking what my needs are?

For the record, I am really excited about the grant and really excited to collaborate with my colleagues up on the hill.  But as I look out my window at the college, I struggle to stake my claim and find my voice as an expert in my field.  I am reminded to proceed in a spirit of collaboration with all my students and colleagues.

#JHUglobaled