IAP NEWS UPDATENovember 10th – December 14th, 2012

Publication: The Huffington PostTitle: How do U.S. Students Compare with their Peers around the World?Author: Sec. Arne DuncanWebsite: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arne-duncan/how-do-us-students-compar_b_2279307.html

New international assessments of student performance in reading, math, and science provide both encouraging news about American students' progress and some sobering cautionary notes.

The encouraging news is that U.S. fourth grade students have made significant progress in reading and mathematics in the last five years. In fact, our fourth graders now rank among the world's leaders in reading literacy, and U.S. student achievement in math is now only surpassed, on average, in four countries.

Unfortunately, these signs of real progress are counterbalanced by the fact that learning gains in fourth grade are not being sustained through eighth grade--where mathematics and science achievement failed to measurably improve between 2007 and 2011.

Still, the progress of fourth graders is especially noteworthy because we see it on rigorous, internationally-benchmarked assessments that students take without any special test preparation, the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study).

And unlike previous PISA assessments--the other major international assessment, which U.S. 15-year olds take--nine U.S. states voluntarily participated in TIMSS in 2011. For the first time, policymakers and parents now have data to gauge how academic performance in a significant subset of states compares with the U.S. as a whole, and with international competitors.

In 2006, the last time the PIRLS reading assessments were administered, a slew of countries and regions equaled or surpassed U.S. fourth graders in reading. Students in Hungary, Italy, Sweden, and the Canadian province of Alberta had higher levels of literacy than U.S. students.

Yet five years later, U.S. students are out-performing students in all of those nations and provinces. Education systems where students were on a par with U.S. fourth graders in reading literacy in 2006--Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Quebec region of Canada--have all been surpassed in the last five years by U.S. students.

Just as encouraging, students in highly-diverse states like Florida, Massachusetts, and North Carolina excelled internationally in a number of subject areas, suggesting that demography is not destiny in America's schools.

State and local policy turn out to matter a great deal--and can have a powerful influence in advancing or slowing educational progress. It is state and local leaders and educators who are providing the commitment, courage, collaboration, and capacity at the state and local level to accelerate achievement. It's no surprise that Florida, Massachusetts, and North Carolina all won competitive Race to the Top grants from the federal government.

Finally, the new TIMSS and PIRLS results put to rest, once and for all, the myth that America's schools cannot be among the world's top-performing school systems. In fact, eighth graders in Massachusetts performed below only one country in the world in science, Singapore.

In Florida, the math skills of students are on a par with those of their Finnish peers, who have a record of being among the top-performing students in the world. And the reading skills of Florida's fourth-graders are on a par with those of the top-performing education systems in the world, too, including Finland and Singapore.

For all of the good news, the new TIMSS and PIRLS assessments also underscore the urgency of accelerating achievement in middle school and the pressing need to close large and persistent achievement gaps.

To take one example, in 2011, white eighth graders scored 83 points higher in science on TIMSS than black students and 60 points higher than Hispanic students.

To put those numbers in perspective, white eighth graders in the U.S. did about as well in science as Finland's and Japan's students, and were only surpassed by students in Singapore, Chinese Taipei, and Korea.

By contrast, Hispanic eight graders' science scores were on a par with students from Norway and Kazakhstan. And black eighth graders' science scores were roughly equivalent to those of students from Iran, Romania, and the United Arab Emirates.

If education is to fulfill its essential role in America as the great equalizer, big achievement gaps and opportunity gaps must close--and all students must receive a world-class education that genuinely prepares them for colleges and careers in the 21st century. In America, educational opportunity cannot depend on the color of your skin, your zip code, or the size of your bank account.

Given the vital role that science, technology, engineering, and math play in stimulating innovation and economic growth, it is particularly troubling that eighth-grade science achievement has barely

budged in the U.S. since 2007. Students in Singapore and Korea are far more likely today to perform at advanced levels in science than U.S. students.

In a knowledge-based economy, education is the new key to individual success and national prosperity. The results of the TIMSS and PIRLS assessments show both that our students are on the path to progress--and that we still have a long journey to go before all of America's children get an excellent education.

Publication: Education WeekTitle: U.S. Math, Science Achievement Exceeds World AverageAuthor: Erik W. RobelenWebsite: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/12/11/15timss.h32.html

The math and science achievement of U.S. students continues to surpass the global average for nations taking part in a prominent assessment, results issued Tuesday show, but several East Asian countries and jurisdictions far outpace the United States, especially in mathematics.

The most striking contrast comes in the 8th grade, where nearly half of all students tested in South Korea, Singapore, and Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) reached the “advanced” level in math, compared with only 7 percent of American test-takers, according to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, for 2011.

“One obvious stark takeaway of some concern in a global environment is the huge gap that the Asian countries have achieved in mathematics,” said Ina V.S. Mullis, the co-executive director of the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College. “This is a gap that has its roots in 1995 [when TIMSS was first administered], and the gap has not narrowed over the years. And in some cases, such as [South] Korea, it’s even widening.”

The Russian Federation, Quebec, Hong Kong, and Japan also outscored the United States by statistically significant margins in grade 8 math.

In fact, Russia surpassed the United States in that category for the first time, thanks to an improvement in its score compared with four years earlier, while the U.S. average stayed about the same as in 2007.

In one notable twist that’s likely to spark debate, Finland, which drew international attention and acclaim two years ago based on its strong results on a different global assessment, did not produce the same standout results in math on TIMSS. Its 4th and 8th grade math scores were about the same as those of the United States, and several U.S. states participating in the exam—including Massachusetts and Minnesota—posted higher scores.

In all, 63 countries and 14 regional jurisdictions (including some individual U.S. states) participated in TIMSS 2011, which takes place every four years. Also today, new data from a high-profile global assessment of literacy was released. This report, Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, or PIRLS, is focused on 4th graders.

With results available for 4th and 8th grade math and science, U.S. students have improved by a statistically significant margin in just one category, 4th grade math, since 2007. The average score in the category rose by 12 points, to 541, on the TIMSS scale. (Scores are reported on a scale from 0 to 1,000. A score of 500 was the average for participating nations and education jurisdictions, excluding a small number of “benchmarking systems” whose scores were not factored into the average, such as the individual U.S. states that took part.)

The United States trailed seven nations and jurisdictions in 4th grade math: Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Northern Ireland, and Flemish Belgium. Among the more than 40 entities that the United States outpaced in the subject were Germany, Ireland, Hungary, and Australia.

As for science, some of the same countries topped the United States at both grade levels, including South Korea, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, and Russia. In both grades 4 and 8, Finland outscored the United States; Slovenia also eclipsed the United States in grade 8.

TIMSS vs. PISA

The TIMSS data contrast to some extent with the high-profile results issued two years ago from PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment. On PISA, which tests 15-year-olds, U.S. students trailed the global average of participating students in math, though the nation for the first time reached the international average in science.

Experts note that several factors may help explain differences in the U.S. performance on PISA, including the pool of countries taking part. Although the participants overlap significantly, they are not identical. The international averages for PISA are based on a set of industrialized nations from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (though some other countries participate); the TIMSS average includes a number of less developed nations on the lower end of the achievement scale, such as Morocco, Yemen, and Indonesia, that help push the average downward.

“The OECD countries are for the most part our chief economic partners and our competitors,” Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said during a conference call Monday with reporters. “They tend to be wealthier nations.” The TIMSS average includes “fewer of our wealthiest competitors, ... and is a more diverse group of countries,” he said.

Another difference is that PISA is a test explicitly for 15-year-olds, while TIMSS tests 4th and 8th graders, Mr. Buckley noted.

Finally, the assessments themselves are very different.

“TIMSS and PIRLS are curriculum-based assessments,” said Michael O. Martin, the co-executive director of the International Study Center at Boston College. “They try to assess what is being taught in schools. ... PISA has a more skills-based approach, [focused on] transitions to the work world.”The ‘Finnish Miracle’?

Nine U.S. states opted to provide large enough samples of students so that they could be directly compared with participating nations on TIMSS, though only Florida and North Carolina did so in grade 4. The biggest standout was Massachusetts, which was especially strong in science, with an average score of 567. The only nation to score higher was Singapore, while South Korea and Taiwan were not measurably different. A full one-quarter of Massachusetts students reached the advanced level. (In Singapore, the figure was 33 percent.)

In addition, Minnesota, with an 8th grade science score of 553, was outperformed only by Singapore and Taiwan.

Mr. Buckley of the education statistics center, a branch of the U.S. Department of Education, praised the strong performance of such states. He suggested that U.S. policymakers looking around the world for lessons on creating a strong education system may want to take a look closer to home first.

“It’s not necessary to travel halfway around the world to see this,” he said.

At the same time, he cautioned that even Massachusetts falls short of a few global peers when looking particularly at getting more math students to the advanced level.

“There clearly is some room for improvement, even among our higher-performing systems,” Mr. Buckley said.

Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said in an email that the new results call for some rethinking of what he calls the “Finnish miracle story.”

“If Finland were a state taking the 8th grade NAEP, it would probably score in the middle of the pack,” he said, in a reference to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. He said that four of the U.S. states that participated in the 8th grade TIMSS—Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Indiana—posted scores that were higher than Finland’s by statistically significant margins in math, while three more had results that were about the same.

“Finland’s exaggerated reputation is based on its performance on PISA, an assessment that matches up well with its way of teaching math (applying math to solve ‘real world’ problems),” he wrote. “In contrast, TIMSS tries to assess how well students have learned the curriculum taught in schools.”

At the same time, Finland made a stronger showing than the United States in 4th and 8th grade science on TIMSS. In the 8th grade, for instance, Finland scored 552, compared with 525 for the United States. Measured another way, 53 percent of Finnish 8th graders reached either the “high” or the “advanced” level, the top two categories, compared with 40 percent of their peers in the United States.

Even so, Finland’s performance fell short of the results for the top-performing East Asian countries. It also was lower than Massachusetts’ score of 567.

For his part, Mr. Buckley said, “I’ve always been a little puzzled” by the high level of attention trained on Finland.

“Finland captured the world’s attention for a variety of reasons,” he said, “but as these results show, there are other places to look for case studies.”

Measuring Student Engagement

With the 2011 report, TIMSS includes a number of new indicators to better help put student achievement in context. They include children’s learning experiences prior to school attendance, the extent of students’ engagement in math and science lessons, and their experiences with bullying.

“One thing we’ve worked on is [getting] better indicators of what goes on in classrooms,” Mr. Martin of the International Study Center said. “We’ve sharpened our focus on student engagement. [One] measure is based on asking students how engaged they feel in their classroom. That makes a very nice scale that relates to achievement.”

Another new scale, he said, is based on asking teachers what they do to engage students.

In a finding that may come as little surprise, students across nations seem to lose some enthusiasm for math as they get older. Nearly half (48 percent) of 4th graders said they “like learning mathematics,” but that slipped to one-quarter (26 percent) by the time they hit 8th grade. And at both levels, that attitude has a correlation with test scores. That is, the less students like math, the lower their achievement, on average.

Another troubling indicator is that, across the globe, students report a drop in engagement with math lessons as they move from 4th to 8th grade. And once again, that level of engagement is correlated with a slip in average scores. The Engaged in Mathematics Lessons scale was based on responses to five questions, including “I know what my teacher expects me to do,” and “I am interested in what my teacher says.”

Meanwhile, many 4th graders around the world (69 percent) had math teachers who reported making efforts to use instructional practices intended to interest students and reinforce learning, such as posing questions to elicit reasons and explanations, and bringing interesting items to class. At the 8th grade, however, only 39 percent of students internationally reported that their teachers frequently related lessons to their daily lives, and just 18 percent said they had teachers who routinely brought interesting materials to class.

Publication: Education WeekTitle: American 4th Graders Among Top Readers in Global StudyAuthor: Catherine GewertzWebsite: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/12/11/15pirls.h32.html

The United States has gained ground against countries that are top performers in 4th grade reading, outscoring all but four in a widely watched international assessment, according to results released Tuesday.

Scores on the 2011 PIRLS, or Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, show that since 2006, the last time the exam was given, American 4th graders increased their average score by 16 points, from 540 to 556 on a 0-to-1,000-point scale, far above the PIRLS average of 500. Of the 57 participating countries and education systems, only students in Finland—taking part in PIRLS for the first time—and in Hong Kong, Russia, and Singapore scored higher than those in the United States.

For the first time, a U.S. state, Florida, took part in PIRLS, and it outperformed every country and all but one other jurisdiction that took the exam, by producing an average reading score that was 13 points higher than that of its own country: 569.

Florida joins other participants in the exam that are referred to in PIRLS documents as “education systems,” since they are parts of countries, such as the Canadian province of Ontario, and Hong Kong, an administrative region of China. Hong Kong was the only participant to outscore Florida. The state also outdid the United States as a whole in other aspects of PIRLS performance, such as the showing by its minority students.

American students’ improvement represents a different picture from the one painted by the last set of results. Between 2001, when PIRLS was first administered, and 2006, Russia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, which had been investing heavily in improving reading achievement, each delivered score gains of more than 30 points, while American students’ average score fell 2 points. But in the second five-year interval, U.S. students’ average score rose 16 points, compared with 9 in Singapore, 7 in Hong Kong, and 3 in Russia.

The latest PIRLS scores were released along with the results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, which track mathematics and science achievement.

In a conference call with reporters to discuss the results of both tests, Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which analyzes the U.S. results, said he saw positive signs about how the United States is progressing compared with countries.

“I tend to be quite optimistic on where the U.S. performs internationally,” he said. “We have a large and diverse set of kids to educate, and I think the results show we are doing quite well.”

In addition to the five systems that outperformed the U.S., counting Florida, seven countries had average reading scores that weren’t statistically different from those of the U.S., and 40 had scores that were lower.

Given by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, a group of research organizations, in partnership with the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College, PIRLS was administered to 325,000 students around the world last spring, including 12,726 in 370 schools in the United States. It produces an overall score in reading for each education system, as well as scores in two sub-areas: reading for literary experience, and reading to acquire and use information. Students are given passages to read, and a series of multiple-choice and short constructed-response questions to answer.

American students did better on the literary (563) than the informational (553) parts of the test, although PIRLS officials caution against comparing one to the other. The U.S. outshone more of its PIRLS competitors on the literary aspect of reading than on the informational as well. Only Florida and Finland had higher literary reading scores than the United States, but Russia, Singapore, Finland, Hong Kong, and Florida all outscored the United States on informational reading.

Analyzing the results according to achievement level, only Singapore, with 24 percent of its students reaching the “advanced” level, significantly outperformed the United States, which had 17 percent of students at that level. Students must score a 625 or higher to reach “advanced.”

At that level, students can interpret figurative language, distinguish and interpret complex information from different parts of a text, and integrate ideas across texts to interpret characters’ feelings and behaviors. Five other countries—Russia, Northern Ireland, Finland, England and Hong Kong—produced results in the “advanced” category similar to those of the United States.

Fifty-six percent of U.S. students reached the “high” category by scoring 550 or better, and 86 percent reached the “intermediate” level, which requires a score of 475. Students at that level can identify central events, plot sequences and relevant story details in a text, make straightforward inferences, and begin to make connections across parts of a text. All but two percent of U.S. students scored the 400 necessary to make it into the “low” level of achievement.

Significant achievement gaps showed across gender, wealth, and racial lines. Girls outperformed boys in the United States by 10 points, although that was a smaller gap than the average 16-point gap among participating PIRLS systems. U.S. schools where fewer than 10 percent of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunches averaged 605 points, while those where more than three-quarters qualified for such assistance averaged 520.

White, Asian, and multiracial students in the United States scored above the U.S. average, and outperformed their black and Hispanic peers, who scored below that mark.

All racial subgroups scored higher in Florida than in the United States overall. Asian students’ reading scores, for instance, averaged 604 in Florida and 588 in the United States overall. Hispanic students’ scores averaged 32 points higher, and black students 15 points higher, in Florida than in the nation overall. White and multiracial students also scored higher in Florida than did their peers nationwide.

The PIRLS scores represented a rosier picture of 4th grade reading than did the National Assessment of Educational Progress results one year ago, which showed little progress. The analysis by the NCES, the statistical branch of the U.S. Department of Education, offers some insight into why.

While both exams include about the same proportions of literary and informational text passages, NAEP includes poetry and requires students to compare two different texts, the report says. Reading passages on PIRLS are shorter than on NAEP, and are set at about one grade level lower than those on NAEP, it says.

PIRLS focuses more on assessing readers’ skills in analyzing information within the text and drawing text-based inferences, while NAEP puts more emphasis on how readers develop inferences and personal interpretations by utilizing personal knowledge or perspectives to examine and evaluate the text, the report says.

“Overall, these differences suggest that the NAEP 2011 reading assessment may be more cognitively challenging than PIRLS 2011 for U.S. 4th grade students,” the NCES report says.

Publication: Christian Science MonitorTitle: How does US compare in math, science, reading? Younger students do better.Author: Amanda PaulsonWebsite: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2012/1211/How-does-US-compare-in-math-science-reading-Younger-students-do-better

The US may not lead the world in math, science, or fourth-grade reading, but it’s not doing that badly, either.

That, at least, is one takeaway from the latest data from two big international studies released Tuesday.

Here’s another: Finland isn’t quite as perfect, at least according to these tests, as some education policy folks might have us believe.

“When you look at the US scores, those scores are solid,” says Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who also notes that there is still a lot of room for improvement, particularly on math and science. “There shouldn’t be complacency, but there also shouldn’t be alarmist rhetoric.”

Are you scientifically literate? Take our quiz.

The two tests released Tuesday, both with 2011 data, were the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which measures math and science achievement for fourth- and eighth-graders around the world, and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which measures fourth-grade reading.

Quickly distilling the results to a simple ranking – or looking at how the US moved in the rankings from the last TIMSS test, given in 2007 – is complicated. Not only are there varying grade and subject levels, but a number of educational “systems” participate in the test, including several US states and places like Hong Kong that don’t quite achieve “nation” status – and the list of participating countries is a little different each time.

That said, in some cases, the US stacked up fairly well against other countries and educational systems, particularly on PIRLS, where the US average score of 556 was significantly higher than the international average, set at 500.

The US scored lower in the reading study than did five educational systems (Hong Kong, the state of Florida, the Russian Federation, Finland, and Singapore), was statistically equal to seven others, and was higher than 40.

More striking (particularly given that in US measurements, reading scores have been harder to improve than math scores), the US average improved an impressive 16 points from the last time the test was given in 2006. And in terms of the percentages of students scoring at or above the most “advanced” reading benchmark score, only two systems – Singapore and Florida – were ahead of the United States.

In the TIMSS math and science scores, the results for the US were more mixed. The US average score increased by a measurable amount in fourth-grade math, but remained statistically unchanged in fourth-grade science and eighth-grade math and science.

The US average was higher than the international average in all subjects, but, as with the domestic report card scores, students’ performance seemed to fall with older students.

Eight education systems (including the state of North Carolina) scored better than the US in fourth-grade math, while by eighth grade, 11 outscored the US (including Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Indiana).

In science, the US fell even more rapidly: Just six education systems outscored the US in fourth grade, and by eighth grade, 12 had higher average scores.

“What we see in our national assessment is improvement among our youngest kids,” notes Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which released the data. “But when you start looking at our older students, you see less improvement over time.” Those results, he says, are mirrored here, as well as in the other major international comparison, PISA, which tests 15-year-olds, and on which the US tends to fare more poorly than on TIMSS.

"These new international comparisons underscore the urgency of accelerating achievement in secondary school and the need to close large and persistent achievement gaps," US Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement. "Learning gains in fourth grade are not being sustained in eighth grade."

As has been the case in past years, several Asian countries and systems, in particular, shine in math.

In fourth-grade math, for instance, 43 percent of Singapore students, and 39 percent of Korean students, reached the highest “advanced” benchmark – compared with just 13 percent of US students.

"A number of nations are out-educating us today in the STEM disciplines," noted Secretary Duncan. "And if we as a nation don’t turn that around, those nations will soon be out-competing us in a knowledge-based, global economy."

What’s also notable is who isn’t among the very top scorers – most notably, Finland.

Based largely on its strong showing in the PISA (for Programme for International Student Achievement) scores, Finland has become a focal point for a number of education experts, who believe the US should use its system as a model.

But in the TIMSS data – especially on math – Finland wasn’t all that different from the US.

“Finland’s scores in math are statistically a dead heat” with the US, “which shows you how fragile that reputation, which is exaggerated, is,” says Mr. Loveless – who notes that Finland’s eighth-grade math scores have actually declined since Finland last took TIMSS, in 1999.

On PISA, for instance, Korea outscored Finland in eighth-grade math by just five points, but on TIMSS, it was 99 points higher. (The two tests use the same scale.)

The explanation, in large part, lies in the difference between the two tests, both of which have their advocates. PISA, which surveys 15-year-olds (regardless of the grade they are in), tries to measure how well students can apply knowledge. TIMSS tries to measure students’ knowledge.

Loveless (a TIMSS advocate) believes that TIMSS is the better measure of what schools around the world are doing – but more important, he notes, the differences between the two tests point to the pitfalls of basing too much in any single measure, or to cherry pick only certain data.

“The truth is that really the US does mediocre on math and science, and does quite well on PIRLS [reading], but we have a lot of room for improvement,” he says.

The 2011 TIMSS data also offer some insight into states: nine states participated at the eighth-grade level, and Florida and North Carolina also participated at the fourth-grade level. (Only Florida participated in the PIRLS fourth-grade reading.)

And some of those states did well, outperforming the US average.

At the eighth-grade level, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Indiana scored above the US average in math, and Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Colorado scored above the US average in science. (California and Alabama scored below the US average in both tests, and several other states weren’t measurably different.)

In eighth-grade science, only Singapore had a higher percentage of students reaching the “advanced” benchmark than the state of Massachusetts.

“For the US overall, our average performance is pretty respectable,” says Mr. Buckley. “But it’s interesting to see that among those states that volunteer [to take part in the test] we have some states performing among the highest systems in the world."

Duncan, in his assessment, was even more pointed, saying the strong showing of highly diverse states like Florida, Massachusetts, and North Carolina shows that "demography is not destiny in our schools."

Publication: The Washington PostTitle: U.S. students continue to trail Asian students in math, reading, scienceAuthors: Lyndsey Layton and Emma BrownWebsite: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/us-students-continue-to-trail-asian-students-in-math-reading-science/2012/12/10/4c95be68-40b9-11e2-ae43-cf491b837f7b_story.html

Students across the United States have made some gains but continue to lag behind many of their Asian counterparts in reading, math and science, according to the results of two international tests released Tuesday.

U.S. fourth-graders’ math and reading scores improved since the last time students took the tests several years ago, while eighth-graders remained stable in math and science. Americans outperformed the international average in all three subjects but remained far behind students in such places as Singapore and Hong Kong, especially in math and science.

Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said the results leave him “optimistic” about the United States’ performance, particularly given that many higher-performing nations do not deal with the same wide range of student and family income, backgrounds and language ability.

“We have a large and diverse population of kids to educate, and I think these results show that we’re doing pretty well,” Buckley told reporters Monday.

Still, the results are likely to fuel concerns among U.S. business leaders, policymakers and many educators, who worry that the country will not be able to compete globally if U.S. students cannot keep up academically with their peers around the world.

In fourth-grade math, for example, students in Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Northern Ireland and the Flemish region of Belgium outperformed U.S. students. Finland, England and Russia also posted higher average scores, but the differences were statistically insignificant.

In eighth-grade science, children in Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Finland, Slovenia, Russia and Hong Kong beat U.S. students.

The results were drawn from the 2011 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, known as PIRLS, and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, referred to as TIMSS.

The literacy test, which fourth-graders take every five years, was administered to a representative sample of public- and private-school students in 53 countries, states and regions. The math test is taken every four years by fourth- and eighth-graders in more than 55 countries, states and regions.

A handful of U.S. states volunteered to give the tests to their students and be graded as if they were countries, to see how their students perform compared with international benchmarks. Virginia, Maryland and the District were not among those states.

Florida, the only state that volunteered to take the reading exam, emerged as a leading scorer on that test among all countries and states that administered it. Only students in Hong Kong scored higher, but the difference was not significant.

Buckley said the results demonstrate that Florida is “capable of performing as well as or better than some of the countries and other education systems that are regarded as international leaders.”

But skeptics say Florida’s unusually strong performance is an illusion.

Boston College professor Walter Haney said Florida’s scores are misleading because, since 2004, Florida has held back third-grade students who are not reading on grade level, preventing them from advancing to the fourth grade, when the test is administered. As a result, test-takers in Florida do not include students who are struggling with reading, Haney said.

In the 2010-2011 school year, the fourth grade in Florida had 4 percent fewer students than the third grade from the previous year, Haney said. That meant a significant number of weak readers were held back and weren’t among the fourth-graders who took the test. Students who are held back are more likely to drop out of school, Haney said.

“It’s really a tragedy in the making,” he said. “When kids are flunked, if they’re over-age by the time they hit high school, 65 to 90 percent will drop out. It’s not a sound educational strategy. It doesn’t increase achievement and dramatically increases the possibility they will drop out.”

Several states that took the test independently scored higher than the U.S. average in eighth-grade math, including North Carolina, Indiana, Massachusetts and Minnesota. North Carolina also outscored the U.S. average in fourth-grade math. Massachusetts, Minnesota and Colorado exceeded the U.S. average in eighth-grade science.

Even those high performers have much ground to gain on international leaders. In Singapore, for example, 40 percent of eighth-grade students scored high enough in science to be deemed “advanced.” In Massachusetts, about one-quarter of students reached that mark.

The U.S. results showed discrepancies among student groups, mirroring gaps that exist in many measures of academic achievement.

White, Asian and multiracial students scored higher than the U.S. average on the reading test, for example, while black and Hispanic students scored lower than the U.S. average. Meanwhile, students from schools with low poverty rates posted better average scores than students from high-poverty schools.

The international exams also showed, across countries and subjects, that students who have teachers with at least a decade of experience performed better, as did students who had teachers with high levels of career satisfaction.

Publication: The New York TimesTitle: U.S. Students Still Lag Globally in Math and Science, Tests ShowAuthor: Motoko RichWebsite: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/education/us-students-still-lag-globally-in-math-and-science-tests-show.html

Fourth- and eighth-grade students in the United States continue to lag behind students in several East Asian countries and some European nations in math and science, although American fourth graders are closer to the top performers in reading, according to test results released on Tuesday.

Fretting about how American schools compare with those in other countries has become a regular pastime in education circles. Results from two new reports, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, are likely to fuel further debate.

South Korea and Singapore led the international rankings in math and fourth-grade science, while Singapore and Taiwan had the top-performing students in eighth-grade science. The United States ranked 11th in fourth-grade math, 9th in eighth-grade math, 7th in fourth-grade science and 10th in eighth-grade science.

Although the average scores among American students were not significantly lower than the top performers, several nations far outstripped the United States in the proportion of students who scored at the highest levels on the math and science tests.

In the United States, only 7 percent of students reached the advanced level in eighth-grade math, while 48 percent of eighth graders in Singapore and 47 percent of eighth graders in South Korea reached the advanced level. As those with superior math and science skills increasingly thrive in a global economy, the lag among American students could be a cause for concern.

“Clearly, we have some room to improve, particularly at the number of advanced students we have compared to the world,” said Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education

Statistics at the Education Department, which administers and analyzes the results of the tests in the United States.

The tests, which are designed by the International Study Center at Boston College in collaboration with government education officials and academic researchers in participating countries, are administered to a random selection of demographically representative students across the world.

Fourth graders in 57 countries or education systems took the math and science tests, while 56 countries or education systems administered the tests to eighth graders. (Education systems include American states or regions like Hong Kong in China or Northern Ireland in Britain.) In reading, 53 countries and education systems participated.

Hong Kong and Russia had the highest average test scores in fourth-grade reading, with American students ranking sixth. Students in Florida, one of the states to break out results separately, achieved a higher average score than students in the nation over all.

Students in Finland, which is often held up as a model education system for its teacher preparation and its relative absence of high-stakes testing, outperformed American students on all the exams. But students in countries with intense testing cultures also exceeded American students. “Some of the high-performing math and science countries have extremely rigorous testing regimes,” Mr. Buckley said.

The test designers included questionnaires for parents about preparation before formal schooling. Ina V. S. Mullis, an executive director of the International Study Center, said that students whose parents reported singing or playing number games as well as reading aloud with their children early in life scored higher on their fourth-grade tests than those whose parents who did not report such activities. Similarly, students who had attended preschool performed better.

“What’s remarkable is that in all the countries, this concept of an early start is there over and over again,” said Michael O. Martin, the other executive director of the center. “You can get the early childhood experience in a variety of ways, but it’s important you get it.”

Publication: BBC NewsTitle: Asians top of school tables - England in maths top 10Author: Sean CoughlanWebsite: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20664752

Asian countries have taken top places in global school rankings for maths, science and reading, with England and Northern Ireland among high performers.

US academics have produced international comparisons in key subjects - using tests taken in 2011 by 900,000 pupils in over 60 countries.

It shows that Northern Ireland is Europe's top performing education system for primary maths.

England has slipped in science, but is top 10 for primary and secondary maths.

The top places in this global education league table have been taken by Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. Finland is among the highest placed European countries.

Such comparisons have become increasingly influential - measuring pupils against the standards of international competitor countries.

Globalisation in the jobs market and the economy has seen education ministers wanting to benchmark pupils' achievement against current international rivals.

Such international rankings have also highlighted the educational strength underpinning the emerging economic powers in Asia.

These latest rankings bring together two major studies - the four-yearly Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the five-yearly Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS).

They reveal the continuing pattern of domination by a group of Asian education systems - South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong (such international comparisons include regional school systems as well as countries).

Science falls

But the study, compiled by researchers at Boston College in the US, shows that England and Northern Ireland are performing strongly in the following group of European education systems.

In maths, the study says England has been one of the most improved between 1995 and 2011. England remains in the global top 10 for maths - in 9th for primary and 10th for secondary.

England has slipped in primary science tests, taken by 600,000 10 year olds - down to 15th place from 7th place in the last tests in 2007. There was also a dip for secondary science, taken by 14 year olds, down from 5th to 9th place.

In the literacy tests, taken by a sample of 325,000 primary school pupils, there was progress for England - up from 15th to 11th.

A spokesman for Education Secretary Michael Gove said: "These tests reflect progress between 2006 and 2011 and were taken only a year after the election.

"So to the limited extent the results reflect the effect of political leadership, Labour deserves the praise for the small improvement in reading and the blame for the stagnation in maths and the decline in science. The tests say nothing, good or bad, about what we have done."

Labour's education spokesman, Stephen Twigg, said: "These results show schools in England are some of the best in Europe - thanks to the hard work of teachers and pupils. The Labour government's reforms saw reading results improve thanks to better teaching, smaller class sizes and Labour's National Literacy Strategy.

"However, we need to understand why East Asian countries out perform us in key skills - particularly science and maths."

Mr Twigg also highlighted the lower achievement for Sweden in reading - linking it to the free schools inspired by the Swedish education system.

There was a particularly strong performance for Northern Ireland - in 6th place for primary maths, which meant it was the highest ranking European school system.

Northern Ireland, taking part in these tests for the first time, is in 5th place for primary reading - in a top group alongside such education superpowers such as Finland and Hong Kong.

In terms of the proportion of pupils reaching the highest ability levels, Northern Ireland was even more successful, in 3rd place.

'Safe and orderly’

The maths study also ranked the "safe and orderly" levels of schools - and found Northern Ireland was at the top, with England in 14th place.

There was also a ranking of bullying for the primary maths study - with England having one of the worst records in Europe, in 30th place in terms of students' views of the levels of bullying.

Scotland and Wales did not take part in these rankings.

Such results show long-term trends, overlapping between different governments and education ministers. In England, the tests were taken under the current coalition government, but the pupils would have studied under the reforms of the previous Labour government.

Researchers say the factors linked to success are a supportive home background and schools which have good discipline and experienced and well-motivated teachers. They also mention negative social factors, such as too many older pupils having learning impaired by a lack of adequate sleep.

The maths study examined the availability of resources at home - such as books - with pupils in South Korea, Norway, Sweden and the US being the best equipped. Indonesia and Ghana had the least learning materials at home.

There is a broad pattern repeated across these tables, with a cluster of Asian, Pacific Rim, countries at the top, European and western countries in the upper and middle ranks, with countries in North Africa and the Middle East in the lower ranks.

Report author and Boston College professor, Michael Martin, said that the success of the top-performing countries reflects the long-term investment - and shows the way for other developing countries to follow.

"Education is a multi-generational enterprise," he said.

"One thing you can learn from these is what's possible. That comes as a shock sometimes, what students in other countries can actually do and the gap sometimes between what your students are achieving and what students in other countries are achieving," said Prof Martin.

There are other international rankings - but these also show a similar picture at the top of the table, with education systems such as South Korea, Hong Kong, Finland and England among the highest performers.

In global league tables assembled by Pearson last month, Finland and South Korea were top, with England in 6th place.

The less expected success of the TIMSS and PIRLS rankings will be the high performance of Russia, which has a place in all their top 10s.

Another prominent international ranking, the PISA tests run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, has shown a strong performance for Chinese education systems, including Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Publication: Bloomberg NewsTitle: U.S. Schoolchildren Lag Asian Peers on Academic TestsAuthor: John HechingerWebsite: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-11/u-s-schoolchildren-lag-asian-peers-on-academic-tests.html

U.S. schoolchildren trailed Asian peers on one of the largest international tests of math, science and reading, highlighting a challenge to American competiveness.

Eight countries or regions including South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong outscored the U.S. in eighth-grade math, while nine did in science, according to the 2011 test, called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. On a reading exam, the U.S. lagged behind five. Some U.S. states such as Florida and Massachusetts bucked the trend, shining in some subjects.

The latest international results will add to complaints from business and political leaders that the U.S. workforce is losing its edge. While U.S. eighth-graders have shown no meaningful improvement in math and science since 2007, Asian counterparts have generally been ramping up their performance, said Ina V. S. Mullis, an education professor at Boston College, which administers the tests.

“The dramatically superior achievement of the Asian countries is rather breathtaking,” Mullis, co-director of the exams, said in a telephone interview. “Closing the gap is really tough and probably isn’t going to happen anytime soon.”

The underperformance of U.S. students on international tests helped inspire a 10-year effort to hold schools accountable for improving performance under President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law through state standardized reading and math testing.

Florida Shines

Saying the law’s reliance on testing has led to a dumbing down of education, President Barack Obama has excused two-thirds of U.S. states from No Child Left Behind’s main rules after they pledged to turn around low-performing schools and tie teacher evaluations to student achievement.

On the latest round of international tests, nine U.S. states sought to have results broken out separately.

In fourth-grade reading, where the U.S. has improved its performance since the last test was given, Florida had among the best scores, performing at the same level as top-achieving Hong Kong, Russia, Finland and Singapore. In the late 1990s, Florida was near the bottom of the pack in fourth-grade U.S. reading scores. The state was the only one in the U.S. to break out its reading results.

Jeb Bush, governor of Florida from 1999 through 2007, instituted a program that targeted kindergarten through third- grade reading, requiring more academic training in kindergarten, “reading coaches” to help tailor instruction and a policy of holding back third-graders with the weakest skills.

Jeb Bush

The international test validated the state’s approach, said Mary Laura Bragg, who ran Bush’s initiative and is now policy director for Foundation for Excellence in Education, a Tallahassee, Florida-based education advocacy group founded by Bush.

Bush’s successors Charlie Crist and Rick Scott have built on the program, adding such measures as a three-times-a-year online assessment to catch readers who are falling behind, said Mary Jane Tappen, a deputy chancellor at the Florida Division of Public Schools.

“This is a result of a decade of very hard work,” Tappen said in a telephone interview.

In eighth-grade science, only Singapore had a higher average score than Massachusetts. The state, which has long had chart-topping performance, developed new assessments and standards in the 1990s.

63 Countries

The international math and science tests have been given every four years since 1995. In the 2011 round, more than 600,000 children in 63 countries took the math and science exam, which measured achievement in fourth and eighth-grades. About 300,000 students in 49 countries sat for the fourth-grade reading test, called Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, given every five years since 2001.

In math, the test covers commonly taught subjects such as geometry and algebra. In science, it covers biology, chemistry and physics. In reading, top-performing students show they can understand and interpret stories and articles of 800 to 1,000 words.

Students performing well on the latest exams tended to start early on the subject and go to well-financed schools with highly trained and satisfied teachers working in orderly environments, researchers found. The children of parents with higher levels of education performed better, as well.

Reaching Advanced

The tests’ results are reported on a 0 to 1,000-point scale, with 500 representing the international average the first year the test was given.

In math, U.S. eighth-graders on average scored 509 in 2011, up one point from 2007 and 17 points since 1995. Top-performing Korea averaged 613, up 32 points since 1995.

The difference between some country’s scores wasn’t enough to be statistically significant, researchers said. On that basis, U.S. eighth-grade math scores were worse than six countries or

regions including Singapore and Japan and no different from seven, such as Israel, Finland and England.

Asian countries outshined the U.S. in answering the toughest questions.

Almost half of eighth-graders in Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea showed they could reach the “advanced” level in math, meaning they could relate fractions, decimals and percents to each other; understand algebra; and solve simple probability problems. In the U.S., 7 percent met that standard.

“That is a pretty stark difference,” said Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. “The highest-performing countries are in a whole different league.”

Publication: The Huffington PostTitle: International Tests Show East Asian Students Outperform World As U.S. Holds SteadyAuthor: Joy ResmovitsWebsite: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/11/international-tests-show-_n_2273134.html

The U.S. performed above average on international standardized tests in elementary and middle school math, science and reading, according to reports released Tuesday. But experts said the rankings, along with similar exams that test students at later ages, show a fundamental problem in America's education system: students tend to perform worse as they age.

"When we start looking at our older students, we see less improvement over time," said Jack Buckley, who leads the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics. That trend holds true across several exams.

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's PIRLS and TIMSS 2011 exams, released Tuesday, measure reading in fourth grade, and math and reading at fourth grade and eighth grade respectively. Across the board, East Asian countries occupied the upper ranks in the comparison of more than 60 world education systems, far outperforming the U.S.. Because the tests measure different groups of students from year to year, the results are best used as snapshots of performance relative to other countries at one point in time. Overall, the U.S. ranked sixth in fourth-grade reading, ninth in fourth-grade math, 12th in eighth-grade math, seventh in fourth-grade science and 13th in eighth-grade science.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called the U.S. scores encouraging, but described older students' performance as "unacceptable."

"These new international comparisons underscore the urgency of accelerating achievement in secondary school and the need to close large and persistent achievement gaps," Duncan said.

"Learning gains in fourth grade are not being sustained in eighth grade, where mathematics and science achievement failed to measurably improve." He said he was particularly troubled by the stagnation in eighth grade science.

In reading, American fourth graders scored 556, above the international average. The U.S. ranked sixth in reading, with five education systems -- including Florida -- performing better. The U.S. was one of only six countries to increase at all four tested benchmarks over 10 years.

In fourth grade math, the U.S. scored 541 -- higher than the international average of 500. That was 23 points more than the U.S. score in 1995, and 12 points higher than in 2007. Eight education systems -- including Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, Japan, Northern Ireland, Flemish Belgium and the U.S. state of North Carolina -- had significantly higher scores at that level.

In eighth grade math, the U.S. performed only nine points above the international average, netting a 509, and was outperformed by 11 education systems. But the gap between the tier of top-performing countries like Korea and Singapore over the U.S. was more than 100 points. The 2011 score for U.S. students was 17 points higher than in 1995, and no higher than in 2007.

American fourth graders on average scored 544 in science, higher than the international average of 500, ranking in the top 10 of all participating systems. Six nations, including Korea, Singapore and Finland, had higher averages. U.S. fourth graders in 2011 performed no higher than fourth graders in 1995 and 2007.

In eighth grade, U.S. average science scores came in at 525, higher than the international average of 500. Twelve systems, including Singapore, Chinese Taipei and the state of Massachusetts, scored higher. The 2011 U.S. score represents an increase of 12 points since 1995, and no increase since 2007.

The scores come after much hand-wringing on the part of the school reform movement, which has used international rankings to claim that America's school system needs a serious overhaul if it wants future generations to compete in a global economy. Over the summer, StudentsFirst, the group run by former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, raised eyebrows with Olympics-themed advertisements that portrayed U.S. students as flabby, failed educational Olympians that don't measure up. The ads based that portrayal on America's rankings on the PISA, another international exam that tests students at age 15, whose most recent administration found that out of 34 countries, the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math.

The TIMSS results are more favorable. "We feel positive about the results of the United States," said Ina V.S. Mullis, executive director of the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College. "It looks like we've been making steady progress since 1995. We've been increasing results for all students, which is pretty difficult."

But America's poorest students aren't doing as well. "Our most impoverished students lose ground," said Claus von Zastrow, the chief operating officer Change the Equation, a Washington-based group that advocates for math and science education. "They were holding even with the international average in some grade levels, fourth grade, but in eighth grade, they've dropped below. It means they're getting less competitive as they're going through the school system and that's a tragic story."

That story might explain some of the dramatic differences between America's performance on TIMSS and PISA. "My interpretation is it's really sort of success in the early years, but less value gets added as students grow older," Andreas Schleicher, who administers the PISA exam for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, told The Huffington Post. "Every year of schooling adds less value."

It's unclear why that may be. Schleicher hypothesized that some strategies the U.S. has for education, such as "a prescriptive program of teaching," work better in earlier grades. "As you move to later years of schooling, you require more student engagement," he said. As a counter-example, he pointed to Finland, whose students do not fare quite as well in the earlier years as they do in high school. The backwards learning curve in the U.S., he said, matters because "the earnings gap between the lower-skilled and the better-skilled is widening."

The reports also looked at the context of these scores, and found high correlations between students in homes that play math and reading games with advanced fourth grade achievement. It also found that students who report being bullied score lower, and reaffirmed that students from poorer backgrounds do not perform as well as peers.

Publication: The Huffington PostTitle: U.S. Education Is Getting Left BehindAuthor: Andreas SchliecherWebsite: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andreas-schleicher/us-education_b_2268873.html

The U.S. is now the only country in the industrialised world in which the generation entering the workforce does not have higher college attainment levels than the generation about to leave the workforce. In part, that is of course due to the traditionally high levels of college attainment in the U.S. It is simply much harder to move the frontier than to catch up with it. But it is also clear that an increasing number of countries have approached and surpassed U.S. graduation levels and others are bound to follow over the coming years. In 1995, the U.S. ranked second after New Zealand in terms of college graduation among 19 countries with comparable data. In 2010, it ranked 13th among 25 countries with comparable data. While the college graduation rate in the U.S. grew from 33 percent to 38 percent over this period, on average across OECD countries it virtually doubled, from 20 percent to 39 percent.

What is more troubling is that the odds of attaining a college degree are clearly stacked up against disadvantaged Americans. Of course, the U.S. is not alone in this. In every OECD country, the odds that a 20-34 year-old attends higher education increase with the educational attainment level of his or her parents. However, in the U.S. this relationship is far more pronounced than in many other countries. Only 29 percent of the children of parents without a high school degree obtain a college degree, compared with a OECD average of 44 percent. These odds are below every other OECD country except Canada and New Zealand. By contrast, the odds that a young person in the U.S. will be in higher education if his or her parents have a college degree are 158 percent.

The increasing impact of advanced skills on people's life chances -- whether it is employment, earnings or social participation, makes it a priority to do better in providing all talented students, regardless of their background, with access to advanced education.

Rising levels of tuition, already the highest in the industrialised world by a large margin, can make it harder for disadvantaged students to obtain a tertiary degree. Of course, social inequities in access to college education that result from a high financial burden on households need to be balanced against inequities that would have been the result of limited growth because of financial and capacity constraints. That may also explain why OECD data show no cross-country relationship between the level of tuition countries charge and the participation of disadvantaged youth in tertiary education.

But one reason why some countries do well with providing equitable college access despite charging high levels of tuition is that they provide universal and income-contingent loan systems for students. The loans reduce the liquidity constraints faced by individuals at the time of study while the income-contingent nature of the loans system addresses the risk and uncertainty faced by individuals (insurance against inability to repay) and improve the progressiveness of the overall system (lower public subsidy for graduates with higher private returns). In these systems the repayments of graduates correspond to a proportion of their earnings and low earners make low or no repayments and graduates with low lifetime earnings end up not repaying their loans in full. But even the best loan system is often not sufficient.

There is ample evidence that youth from low-income families or from families with poorly educated parents, but also youth who just don't have good information on the benefits of tertiary education, underestimate the net benefits of tertiary education. That is why many countries now complement their loan schemes with means-tested grants or tuition waivers for vulnerable groups. In some cases, these grants address the full extent the financial barriers students face in accessing tertiary education, by raising both the loan entitlement and the student grant to levels adequate to cover tuition and living costs.

Surely, those loan and grant systems cost money. But the costs are just a tiny fraction of the added fiscal income due to better educated individuals paying higher taxes.

But there is something else the U.S. needs to become better at if it wants to improve equitable access to college: The impact of students' social background on their learning outcomes at age 15, as measured by PISA in 2000, explained 37 percent of the between-country variation in the proportion of students from families with low levels of education who were enrolled in higher education in 2009. In other words, where countries do not succeed to moderate the impact of social background on success in school, they are unlikely to address the equity challenge in tertiary education. That is a much tougher policy challenge than figuring out the financing of higher education. But the outcomes from PISA show that it can be addressed. Whether it is Finland in Europe, Canada in North America or Japan or Korea in Asia, these countries achieve strong learning outcomes not just overall but also for their most disadvantaged students. The data also show that rapid improvement is possible. A major overhaul of Poland's school system helped to dramatically reduce performance variability among schools, turn around the lowest performing schools and raise overall performance by more than half a school year. Portugal was able to consolidate its fragmented school system and improve both overall performance and equity. And so did Chile, Germany and Hungary.

Those comparisons show what is possible in education. They take away excuses from those who are complacent. And they help to set meaningful targets in terms of measurable goals achieved by the world's educational leaders.

Publication: The Times Educational SupplementTitle: Dissemination or contamination?Author: William StewartWebsite: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6309501

The globalisation of education policy is happening, like it or not. But opinions vary widely about whether it is a benefit or an affliction.

On the floor above Sir Michael Barber’s office is a white Portland stone balcony that offers one of the most impressive views in London.

Sitting just underneath the capital’s biggest clock face, with the Thames below, it allows you to take in Britain’s great centres of power with a quick turn of the head - from the financial muscle of Canary Wharf and the City in the east, to the Houses of Parliament in the west.

During the Second World War this was where Winston Churchill used to stand and watch Luftwaffe aircraft following the river to drop their bombs on London. At that time, it was briefly commandeered as the Ministry of Supply; today, the magnificent 1930s Art Deco slab that is Shell Mex House is at the centre of another empire - an empire of education.

And Barber, the former history teacher standing in Churchill’s place, is at the heart of what some view as a new global battle for Anglo-Saxon values and the future of the world’s schools.

This week, yet another batch of results from assessments of pupils’ numeracy and literacy was released.

There is nothing unusual about that in today’s hyper-accountable education system of targets, tests and tables. But Tuesday’s results are published only every four or five years. They are not national but global, and come from schools in more than 60 countries, spread across six continents.

These are measures of effectiveness that could influence the development of entire nations. They can convey the kind of worldwide education superstar status that is currently enjoyed by Finland. Alternatively, they can ruin politicians’ careers, trash pet projects and prompt prolonged bouts of national soul-searching.

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (Timss) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) may not be as famous as the Programme for International Student Assessment - better known as Pisa - but they are part of the same movement that, in the space of a decade, has transformed the way countries across the world draw up their education policies.

Andreas Schleicher, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) official who runs Pisa, remembers how education was seen by the world’s power brokers in the mid 1990s, before such international comparative studies existed. “You had a meeting of about 30 education ministers sitting around the table and everyone would tell you ‘We have got the best education system in the world,’” he recalls. “If you have a meeting of ministers today, it will always start with ‘We have seen in Finland this and this’, and ‘How did you actually do that?’ It has really changed the debate. It has globalised the field of education. I think it has been very important.”

Many people, not least our own education secretary Michael Gove, see this revolution as an undeniably good thing. They view the studies as providing valuable information about what actually works in education - evidence that policymakers would be negligent to ignore.

But others have serious reservations. These critics have concocted an acronym for what they see as an “illness” that is damaging schools around the world. They call it the Global Education Reform Movement - Germ.

Resistance is mounting to this “disease” among concerned educationalists from as far afield as Finland, New Zealand and Scotland. They are alarmed that its symptoms of competition, choice and constant measurements of teacher and pupil performance are leading to a homogenised, Americanised or anglicised global schools system that ignores many of the most important things in education. They argue that it has narrowed curricula, brought in an excess of testing and is making pupils’ lives a pressurised hell.

“It is like an epidemic that spreads and infects education systems through a virus,” according to Pasi Sahlberg, the Finnish education official who coined the acronym Germ. “It travels with pundits, media and politicians. Education systems borrow policies from others and get infected. As a consequence, schools get ill, teachers don’t feel well and kids learn less.”

Barber, unsurprisingly, disagrees. His story - how a former trade union official rose from fighting street politics for the Labour Party to advising Tony Blair in Downing Street and then became a knight of the realm, consulted by world leaders and sought after by a Conservative education secretary - is the story of how schools policy went global.

Born in 1955, Barber read history at Oxford and went on to teach the subject at secondary schools in Watford and Zimbabwe. After returning to England, he worked in the education department of the NUT, the most militant of teaching unions in the 1980s era of classroom strife and strikes.

During this period he joined the infamously “loony Left” Hackney Labour Party in East London and even unsuccessfully fought the 1987 general election.

But it wasn’t until the mid 1990s that he really came into a position of power. By then he had risen to become the NUT’s head of education and left for Keele University. In his role as an academic he was drafted in to help write New Labour’s first education policy.

The programme he drew up with David Blunkett, the former shadow education secretary, was to become one of the most analysed and pored-over packages of reform in the history of world education.

It provided the meat behind Blair’s famous 1997 “education, education, education” election pledge and interestingly, considering Barber’s later conclusions, included an infant class size limit.

At its centre were the numeracy and literacy strategies - top-down, target-driven and massively prescriptive, and widely judged a success.

For Sahlberg at least, these strategies - together with the 1980s Conservative testing and table reforms they were built on - represented the birth of Germ. But the surveys that were to spread the movement had barely begun.

“When I was originally in the Department (for Education and Employment), when some international benchmarking came out, basically what we did was worry about where it would appear in the media,” Barber remembers. “If we were good, we wanted to be on the front page and we ended up on page 17. If we were bad, we wanted to be on page 17 and ended up on the front page. And then we forgot about it until next time.”

Assessment sparks change

He says the “big change” came with the first Pisa evaluation, conducted in 2000 and published in 2001.

It made comparatively good reading for those in UK education. But in Germany - which found itself much lower down the table than it expected - the impact was seismic and even led to the invention of a new noun, “Pisa- shock”.

“The results were devastating,” says Schleicher, remembering the effect on his own country. “But without the public concern that Pisa generated, probably very little would have happened.

“The financial investment of the government, the willingness of teaching unions to take a much more reasoned stance to reform, the interests of parents - all this has been instrumental in the remarkable improvements that have been achieved in Germany.”

Schleicher says the response to the Pisa results improved the average progress of German pupils by the equivalent of half a school year.

Since then, Pisa has only got bigger and more influential. Barber has seen official reaction to such surveys moving from worrying about media coverage, through responding to disappointing performance, to a new phase - “a continuous dialogue among education ministers around the world”.

And it is in this third phase that his own international influence has really taken off. In 2005, after a spell advising Blair on “delivery” in Number 10, he joined the global consultancy McKinsey (unofficial motto: “Everything can be measured and what gets measured gets managed”).

The report he published for the firm in 2007, How the World’s Best- Performing School Systems Come Out on Top, used Pisa’s measurements to identify the “top 10” education systems and then analysed what had put them there.

With hindsight, its headline finding that “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers” seems obvious. But at the time it was a wake-up call for countries that had invested billions in expensive policies such as reducing class sizes and achieved at best partial success. Why? Because they overlooked the importance of having good-quality teachers. The coalition government has made that principle central to its education policy and it is not alone.

Last year, Barber left McKinsey to become chief education adviser at Pearson, which uses Churchill’s old wartime stomping ground as its head office and brands itself as “the world’s leading education company”.

With its services - from school improvement and textbook publishing, to exams, testing and curriculum development - provided in more than 70 countries, it is no empty boast.

But it is this integration of the private corporate world with public education that is part of what Germ’s critics find so concerning.

“This process where education policies and ideas are lent and borrowed from the business world is often motivated by national hegemony and economic profit, rather than by moral goals of human development,” Sahlberg has written.

Earlier this year, Barber revealed that during his time in Downing Street, between 2001 and 2005, he had tried to persuade Blair to allow state schools to be run at a profit. But his current role involves much more high-flown ideas about schools than mere profit.

In the third of his trilogy of reports on global education, published recently by Pearson, he argues that to allow “humanity to succeed in the next half century” the world’s education systems must do more than simply impart knowledge. They must help pupils to gain “21st-century skills”, such as leadership and collaboration.

To date, Barber has advised more than 40 of the world’s governments on education and delivery. As far as he is concerned, the globalisation of education policy is “definitely a good thing”.

“This is when you get into the evidence,” he argues. “If you have got strong evidence that something works and then you choose not to do it, what is the ethical basis for that?

“It would be really surprising and actually quite bizarre in an education field to argue that not researching something and not learning about it is a better way to go than learning about it.”

Schleicher also struggles to see any downside to Pisa and its ilk. “It has shown what is possible in education,” he tells TES. “It has taken excuses away from those who are complacent.”

So is this supposedly neo-liberal conspiracy to turn schools into money- making ventures for global business actually about nothing more than finding out what works?

It is Barber who pinpoints one of the more obvious problems with international comparisons. “None of it prevents a government reaching a crass conclusion on the basis of wanting to be like Finland or Singapore,” he acknowledges.

Sahlberg believes that is exactly what is happening. But he does not see it as just an irritating side-effect; to him it is a major concern.

“A good, concrete example is in the Gulf states - the (United Arab) Emirates, for example - where they are purchasing national curriculum documents and entire systems from other parts of the world,” he says. “Abu Dhabi is using the New South Wales curriculum because they want to be sure it is world class.”

But why would that necessarily be a bad thing? Because, Sahlberg says, “these are completely different environments with different traditions”.

New South Wales has “done a very good job” with its curriculum, he says, but only because it was “designed for their schools and their teachers and their thinking”. Abu Dhabi, he insists, cannot rely on having the same kind of teachers as those working in Sydney schools in order to make the system work in the Gulf.

Sahlberg argues that his native country - Pisa star Finland - is often part of the same syndrome. Education tourists who want to import the Finnish system wholesale have to be warned that it will not necessarily work in a different culture without some of the best, most highly trained teachers in the world.

And he thinks there is an increasing risk of this kind of misunderstanding as Pisa expands to include more countries outside the OECD.

There are some systems that “aren’t ready for this kind of OECD comparison” and “have a long way to go before the conditions are right”, he argues, citing Tunisia, Azerbaijan and Qatar as examples.

“These countries have a completely different type of tradition than, for example, Scandinavian countries. It is difficult to believe that they would ever be able to get anything feasible out of this (Pisa) information,” Sahlberg says.

The crude, simplistic appropriation of other countries’ ideas went on long before international education surveys emerged, Barber counters, describing it as an “inevitable risk”. But there seems little doubt that surveys such as Pisa have increased both the risk and the temptation for misguided quick fixes by clearly pinpointing the “top performers” that other countries may feel obliged to emulate.

Dismal and dangerous

For Stephen Heppell, who views Barber’s reports as “dismal”, the use of the data to rank countries in this way is “dangerous”.

“You take the top five Pisa nations and say ‘Here are the top five world problems’ and ask whether those nations have anything to offer in solving those problems, and there is a desperate mismatch,” the Bournemouth University-based education technology guru has said.

Heppell argues that the Pisa figures are a “deeply flawed” way of comparing systems, and points to seemingly contradictory results from the 2007 Timss report, which suggested that UK pupils were top in Europe at that time.

Schleicher asserts that the two surveys are complementary and measure different things. But the fact remains that they are used to compile worldwide school league tables and are therefore likely to create the perverse incentives associated with any high-stakes performance measure.

And Schleicher admits that one of the most obvious drawbacks has already manifested itself. “Some countries have tried to game the system,” he tells TES. “We had people in Germany, Switzerland, Spain, where (governments) thought ‘OK, we now know what Pisa is, so we should give our students more Pisa-type tests.’

“In the case of Germany, it was some state (governments) that produced booklets to familiarise students with Pisa.”

Schleicher says this is firmly in the past: “We haven’t seen anything like that in the past five or six years.” But he seems unaware of a story that broke in Wales earlier this year.

The Principality is currently going through its own Pisa-shock, having been ranked below the rest of the UK at 30th out of 67 for science, 38th for reading and 40th for maths in the 2009 assessments.

In March this year, it emerged that the Welsh government had published a teachers’ guide on how to incorporate Pisa into lessons. The news prompted immediate accusations that it was trying to prep pupils and “game” the tests, with unions concerned that it would lead to a narrowed curriculum geared solely towards Pisa.

But having been told about the teachers’ guide by TES, Schleicher cautions that if the aim is to win Wales a competitive advantage then it is unlikely to succeed.

“It is a good thing to familiarise students with the nature of the task and we encourage that,” he says. “But the idea that you can train performance or you can shortcut good instruction - I don’t think there is any way to do that.

“Focus your efforts on good, high-quality instruction, that is what the best-performing systems show you.”

But a quick route to a higher place in the tables is exactly what Wales is looking for. Education minister Leighton Andrews has set a target of reaching the top 20 by 2015 and has come up with a 20-point action plan to achieve it.

Schleicher’s insistence that “I don’t think the ranking has that much importance” seems to fly in the face of how Pisa is really viewed.

Justification for reforms

Gove has used England’s apparent slip down the Pisa table between 2000 and 2009 as the main justification for his reforms, ignoring the fact that the 2000 data are, in Schleicher’s words, “a little bit dodgy”.

It is this fascination with headline rankings that particularly worries Sahlberg.

“Policymakers almost always only look at the rank their own country has in maths, science and reading,” he observes. “The US is obsessed by this, you always hear that they are 12th in maths, 15th in reading and 27th in science.

“Pisa has so much more information - for example, on equity and equality - but people are not using this.”

He, like the teaching unions that are sceptical about the Welsh Pisa action plan, believes the obsession is “leading to a narrowing of the concept of education”. Sahlberg again points to the US, saying “there are states now where they don’t require physical education any more”.

It is a criticism that Schleicher initially appears to accept: “You can say of course that Pisa doesn’t measure geography, doesn’t mention art. There are important gaps in the knowledge base and I think that is something that Pisa will progressively resolve.”

But he goes on to completely reject any suggestion that the focus on literacy and numeracy - “critical for the success of young people” - detracts from other subjects. “I don’t accept that,” he says. “I don’t see that kind of conflict.”

Another essential, but less understood, point about Pisa - which helps to explain why quick fixes are unlikely to work - is that it is not designed as a measure of school effectiveness.

“There are many different forms of a student’s work - school is one, (but) it can be private tutoring, it can be learning reading outside school with parents - and we should look at this holistically,” says Schleicher. “What you want is a child that is highly competent.”

So if Pisa is measuring what is going on in homes as well as school then can it be a fair judge of the school system?

“I agree with the criticism that you can’t say that the school system is entirely responsible for Pisa results,” he admits.

But that, patently, is not how Gove, or Andrews in Wales, or many other schools ministers around the world view such surveys.

And it is that kind of misunderstanding or generalisation that goes to the heart of the problems that Sahlberg has with the international comparisons.

It is not the data that are produced by the likes of Pisa that are the problem, but the way in which they are used. And in that respect his frustrations are shared by Schleicher, who rails against the idea that you can “copy and paste” another education system, and Barber, who admits that “you can overdo the weight you put on Pisa”.

In truth, the trio, who continually bump into each other at international conferences, have more in common than you might expect. Sahlberg may campaign against Germ but he is not against Pisa, Timss or Pirls. And he may be against an overly market- and competition-orientated approach to education but he is not against the global sharing of good ideas and practice.

He would like to see the kind of “trust-based” system that operates in Finland gain wider currency as an alternative to the Anglo-Saxon model.

In reality, the debate is not about the globalisation of education policy at all. It is too late for that, as shown by the air miles run up by the likes of Heppell, Schleicher, Sahlberg and Barber as they promote their takes on school reform.

For education, globalisation is already here. Now, the battle is about ideology.

Publication: The New York TimesTitle: Comparing the Success of Nations in SchoolingAuthor: Andreas SchleicherWebsite: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/world/europe/12iht-educlede12.html

In the world of international education, what Andreas Schleicher thinks matters.

As a special adviser to the secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, he has the attention of policy makers in the world’s wealthiest countries.

As a leading figure behind the O.E.C.D.’s annual review, “Education at a Glance,” and its Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests the literacy, mathematical competence and scientific knowledge of 15-year-olds around the world, he has changed the way countries think about what goes on in their classrooms.

Q. How did you come to be a specialist in education?

A. My background is in physics. When I entered the O.E.C.D., it was still a foreign world to measure education. We put out “Education at a Glance” and then PISA in the year 2000 and that really received a strong recognition by governments — to look at the outcomes.

Q. Presumably not everyone was pleased?

A. No. But I think everyone accepted it. Nobody’s pleased with every number. But PISA didn’t get contested in a way that people would have done with many other types of comparisons. That was the idea: to build a bulletproof instrument for evaluating education.

What our work has done — it has limited the room for political arbitrariness. Education is a field which has been quite dominated by ideologies, from the classroom to public policy. And I think this work, first of all, it shows what’s possible. You can look at lots of countries who achieve what you don’t achieve. It has taken away excuses from those who are complacent.

Q. So you can say: “We know this is possible.”

A. I think you can go one step further. You can ask yourself: “What is it that makes systems more successful than my own? What have they done differently?” You can use the world as a laboratory. If you think about free schools in England, well, look at what happened to free schools in Sweden.

Education is a very inward-looking business. Schools don’t have a natural tendency to look at other schools; teachers are in isolation in the classroom. And education systems have no tradition to learn from each other.

Q. Did some countries refuse to engage with PISA at first?

A. Yeah. A lot. But within one year, everybody turned around. First the dynamic was: “It can’t be done.” Also, the project was eight times as expensive as our whole budget for education. But the moment people saw scientifically this can be done, the dynamics changed. We’ve now got 74 countries — every major economy is part of this. China and India are still patchy for various reasons, but they are making progress, too.

When we opened it to non-O.E.C.D. countries, many industrialized countries said, “Why do we want to work with these countries?” They had this idea the world was neatly divided into rich and well-educated countries and poor and badly educated ones. And then suddenly they see a lot of the world’s best-performing systems are not the rich ones. They are outside the O.E.C.D., like Singapore or Hong Kong.

Q. What were the biggest surprises?

A. How much variability in performance there is — how big the gap really is in the world. But the more important finding for us was that quality and equity didn’t seem to be opposing policy objectives.

Some people argue, if you want to achieve excellence you have to accept a lot of inequality. Other people say, if you focus on equity, you’ll end up with mediocrity. What our comparisons have shown is that success is about achieving excellence — maybe not for all, but for many. And that it is an achievable goal. That’s something that education theory didn’t proclaim. Nor did we assume that would be the outcome. But it has been a very clear finding from PISA.

For example, the impact of social background on learning outcomes was not inevitable. You have countries that are very, very good at moderating the impact of social background.

Q. The United States is not one of them?

A. Much of the professional literature comes from the English-speaking world. So it was particularly that part of the world that was most struck by the fact that in Finland there is only a 5 percent performance variation among schools. Every school succeeds.

Q. Without one succeeding at the expense of another?

A. Exactly. Another issue which I found really interesting: When we think about market mechanisms in education, we think about managing consumer demand. It’s all about school choice.

And then you look at Shanghai, which also believes in market mechanisms, but has a totally different strategy. They operate on the supply side. What Shanghai has done is create incentives to attract the most talented teachers into the most challenging classrooms. And to get the best principals into the toughest schools. It’s the same kind of philosophy, based on market mechanisms. But they turned the problem on its head and achieved a remarkable improvement in educational outcomes.

Or think about accountability. We in the West think: “I test your students. If the results are poor, something terrible happens. If the results are good, then I give you more money.” Now look at Finland. Their accountability system is a lot stronger. But it works laterally. It doesn’t work vertically.

Q. What does that mean?

A. In Finland, or in Japan, you work with your fellow teachers, you work with your fellow schools, to build peer accountability into the system.

In Japan, teachers work together to prepare lesson plans. They implement the lessons and then they evaluate the lessons together, and that actually creates a very strong sense of accountability. And actually it’s a lot tougher on you as a teacher. If every teacher in your school knows what you are doing well and what you are not doing well, this is much tougher than just having to explain some test results.

In one case, you have an industrial model in mind, where it’s about compliance and standardization.

Q. You also have an industrial atmosphere — antagonistic relationships and unions.

A. That’s the consequence. I always say every education system gets the unions it deserves. The nature of the relationship between government and unions is an outcome of the work organization to a large extent.

Q. Do Finland and Japan have strong teachers’ unions?

A. Absolutely. But they have unions that are unions of a profession, not unions of an industrial worker. That’s a bit condescending, but a profession owns its professional standards.

Q. That seems so different from the approach in Britain and the United States.

A. My biggest worry with their approach to education — which is very common in Europe — is that, in the past, you could assume that what students learn was going to last for their lifetime, so you could focus much of teaching on routine cognitive skills. In a knowledge economy, rote learning is becoming irrelevant. What counts are ways of thinking, ways of learning, tools for working. This is where you really need great teachers. No education system can be better than its teachers.

Q. I want to ask about a result of yours on class size.

A. This is counterintuitive, because if you don’t see what quality is, you measure it on things like class size. And it’s clear that if everything else is equal, a smaller class is better than a larger class.

But that’s not the right question. The right question is: If you have one dollar extra to spend, do I put it into a smaller class, a better teacher, more learning time? And what our research very clearly shows is that if you have to make a choice between a great teacher and a small class, choose the great teacher.

State-Specific TIMSS/PIRLS Articles

Publication: Education WeekTitle: U.S. States Fare Well on Global Tests, But Not at 'Advanced' TierAuthor: Andrew UjifusaWebsite: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/state_edwatch/2012/12/U.S._states_fare_well_on_global tests_but_not_at_'advanced'_level.html

International test results in reading, math, and science show individual U.S. states performed relatively well, but they had a very small share of top-flight students compared with those of high-performing countries.

In this year's reports from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, states were broken out as individual "education systems" that can be compared with other international results, although not all of the same states had their performances broken out on all the tests.

In 2011, PIRLS was administered to 4th graders, and TIMSS was administered to both 4th and 8th graders. PIRLS was first administered in 2001, and in 2011, 53 "education systems" participated (including entire countries' public school systems, but also specific school systems within countries, like Hong Kong or Flemish Belgian schools.) TIMSS was first administered in 1995, and in 2011, 57 countries or "education systems" participated in the 4th grade tests, and 56 countries participated in the 8th grade tests. However, for TIMSS in 2007, the only states to be broken out as separate systems were Massachusetts and Minnesota, and that number increased significantly in 2011 as you will see.

Florida came up a big winner on PIRLS, in terms of average scores (more on that in a bit). On TIMSS, Massachusetts, mirroring its strong performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, did very well in both science and math, compared with the United States and other high-performing countries and education systems. However, the good news largely evaporates when you look at the percentages of students that scored "advanced," "high," "intermediate," or "low" on the tests, the formal benchmark names for performance levels. In terms of the share of students scoring at the top level, or advanced, other high-performing countries leave many U.S. states eating dust.

For the PIRLS test administered to 4th grade students in 2011, results from Florida's public schools are included in comparisons between international education systems because it was counted as a

separate "national" education system. So Florida's results are compared with U.S. results as a whole throughout the report released by NCES. It's worth noting that those U.S. results do include the same Florida results, so to a certain extent, Florida's isolated score is being compared against itself.

Anyway, Florida has reason to be pleased with how it stacks up internationally in terms of its average score. Its public education system earned an average PIRLS score of 569, which was well above the U.S. national average of 556. The other four "nations" to top the U.S. average were Hong Kong (the highest-scoring with a 571 average), followed by Russia (568), Finland (568), and Singapore (567).

During education policy and achievement discussions, all those education systems, except perhaps Russia's, come up frequently when people point to countries that outperform American students or could serve as helpful policy role models. So to the extent one takes stock in international assessments like PIRLS, Florida has to be pleased that all by itself it can go punch-for-punch with traditional academic powerhouses like Hong Kong, which of course isn't strictly a "nation" itself. (China as an entire nation did not participate in PIRLS or TIMSS.)

What about those various achievement levels? In this case, Florida's students stack up pretty well. In Singapore, 24 percent of students were deemed "advanced," compared with 22 percent in Florida. No other country or education system had better than 19 percent of its students scoring advanced. So by this measure as well, the Sunshine State can put on a happy face.

Now let's look at TIMSS in math and science. This test has more breadth, both because it measures 4th graders and 8th graders, and also because more states agreed to be broken out as individual "education systems" in order to be compared with other countries. (As with PIRLS, some countries like China did not participate as an entire nation.) Florida and North Carolina acted as individual education systems in the 4th grade, and Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and North Carolina acted as such in the 8th grade.

The TIMSS math breakdown runs as follows:

• North Carolina (554) beat the U.S. average score (541) in 4th grade math (which in turn was higher than the average TIMSS score). The state's education system was among 12 internationally that beat the U.S. average. But again, remember that the scores from the Tar Heel State are part of that U.S. average. In addition, Singapore's 4th graders, the world's top performers, on average did far better (606) than North Carolina's. Florida technically achieved a higher score (545) than the U.S. average, but it was considered not "measurably different" from the U.S. average.

• In 8th grade math, Massachusetts (561), Minnesota (545), North Carolina (537), and Indiana (522) all had higher average scores than the United States (509). Massachusetts on its own had a higher score than all but five education systems (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), with South Korea (613) coming out on top. Colorado (518), Connecticut (518), and Florida (513) also

achieved technically higher scores than the U.S. average, but again, these were considered not "measurably different" from the U.S. average. California (493) and Alabama (466) were below average U.S. performance.

• Now for those achievement levels, which spell trouble. On the 4th grade test, 43 percent of Singapore's students scored advanced, compared with a mere 16 percent of North Carolina's students and 14 percent of Florida's. In the 8th grade, it's no better: 49 percent of Taiwan's students scored advanced, compared with 19 percent in Massachusetts and 14 percent in North Carolina.

• One important discovery from the mathematics statistics is that from 4th to 8th grade, average U.S. performance in math declined by 32 points. North Carolina's score dropped by 17 points, while Florida's dropped by 32 points. (During the 2007 TIMSS administration, there was a similar 21-point drop for all U.S. students from 4th to 8th grade, from 529 to 508.)

Now for the TIMSS science breakdown:

• In 4th grade, neither of the two states broken out separately can claim special bragging rights on the world stage. The U.S. average score was 544, and although Florida (545) technically scored higher, again, TIMSS doesn't consider that measurably different from the U.S. as a whole. North Carolina was well behind the United States (528). South Korea led the pack (587) followed by Singapore (583).

• In 8th grade, by contrast, a few states earned bragging rights. Compared with the average U.S. score of 525, Massachusetts (567), Minnesota (553), and Colorado (542) all did better. So did Indiana, North Carolina, Connecticut, and Florida, but their scores weren't considered measurably different from the U.S. score. Only Singapore (590) outperformed Massachusetts flying solo as a state.

• Once again, other countries have a much bigger share of top-shelf students in science. In the 4th grade, Singapore, in second place among average overall scores, had 33 percent of advanced students (the highest share), compared with just 14 percent in Florida and 12 percent in North Carolina. In the 8th grade, Singapore once again had the biggest share of top-flight students (40 percent), leaving the best state, Massachusetts (24 percent), and second-best-state, Minnesota (16 percent), well behind.

• As in math, U.S. performance dropped from 4th grade to 8th grade, in the case of science by 19 points. Florida's score dropped by 15 points between the two grades, while North Carolina's slipped by 6 points. As you can see from the 4th and 8th grade results for Singapore, drops between the grades aren't automatic.

From a state perspective, here's a phenomenon that will likely surprise virtually no one: huge gaps in scores based on students' socioeconomic status. Let's take Connecticut in 8th grade science on

TIMSS as an example. In the student group where less than 10 percent of students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, students' average score was 581, 49 points better than the state's overall average score. By contrast, in the student group where 75 percent or more of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, the average score was 420, a whopping 112 points below the state's overall average. So in purely statistical terms, being relatively poor had a bigger impact on students' scores than did being relatively rich, at least compared with the state average.

Publication: The Boston GlobeTitle: Mass. pupils near the top in math and scienceAuthor: James VaznisWebsite: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/12/11/mass-garners-high-marks-key-international-exam/oR1K54pAj9GbMNK6MT0LzM/story.html

Massachusetts eighth-graders outperformed most countries on a highly regarded international math and science exam, according to results being released Tuesday, offering fresh evidence that the state’s educational system rivals academically powerful nations around the globe.

In the science part of the test, only Singapore outscored Massachusetts eighth-graders. In math, Massachusetts trailed only South Korea, Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, and Japan; 63 countries took the test.

The impressive showing on the Trends in International Math and Science Study, more commonly known as TIMSS, bodes well for Massachusetts as it tries to build a larger and more sophisticated workforce in the sciences and emerging technologies. The goal is to enable the state to compete more aggressively on the global stage to attract businesses.

“We’ve known for quite a while that the best education in the [United States] has been happening in Massachusetts, but the TIMSS results show that our students are getting some of the best education in the world,” said Mitchell Chester, the state’s commissioner for elementary and secondary education.

“Our students are competitive at rates comparable to top-performing states in the world.”

Last year, about 600,000 fourth- and eighth-graders took the exam, which has been given every four years since 1995. Some sections of a country, such as Massachusetts, participated in the exam on their own.

In Massachusetts, 2,000 eighth-graders from 56 randomly selected schools across the state took the exam, the cost of which was covered by the National Center for Education Statistics. (Massachusetts fourth-graders did not participate because of budget constraints.)

Massachusetts not only outperformed the United States as a whole, but also all of the other states that took part as independent entities: Minnesota, North Carolina, Indiana, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, California, and Alabama.

“I am tremendously proud of our students for once again performing as global leaders in math and science,” said Governor Patrick. “Our record of leadership in student achievement isn’t by accident – it’s because we have chosen to invest deeply in education, knowing that our students will determine the future success of our economy and our Commonwealth.”

The exam, considered the largest assessment of international student performance in math and science, was developed by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement in Amsterdam and is overseen by the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College.

Eighth-graders in Massachusetts have been taking the TIMSS on and off since 1999, and their scores have been climbing. The state performed strongly in 2007 as well, most notably with fourth-graders scoring second to Singapore in science.

In science, eighth-graders earned an average of 567 points last year, 11 points higher than in 2007. Similarly in math, eighth-graders earned an average of 561 last year, up from 547 in 2007.

TIMSS results are reported on a scale from 0 to 1,000.

In both subjects, Massachusetts scored notably higher than the United States as a whole and saw larger score increases. The US scored 525 in science, up from 520 in 2007, and it scored 509 in math, up from 508 in 2007.

US Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the results for the United States provide some encouraging news about US students.

“It is also rewarding to see that students in highly diverse states like Florida, Massachusetts, and North Carolina excelled internationally in a number of subject areas, showing that demography is not destiny in our schools,” Duncan said in a statement. “State and local policy matters and can have a powerful influence in advancing or slowing educational progress.”

But he said the results also came with some “sobering cautionary notes.”

“Given the vital role that science, technology, engineering, and math play in stimulating innovation and economic growth, it is particularly troubling that eighth-grade science achievement [in the United States] is stagnant and that students in Singapore and Korea are far more likely to perform at advanced levels in science than US students.”

The increases for Massachusetts demonstrates how the state continues to increase academic rigor and expectations for its students, Chester said.

For instance, state officials made passing an MCAS science exam in high school a graduation requirement, starting with the class of 2010, a change that has caused even middle schools to overhaul their science programs to build a stronger foundation in the subject.

But Massachusetts still has a long way to go in science to catch up with Singapore, where scores last year on the TIMSS rise to 590, a 23-point increase.

“It’s hard to catch a moving target,” said Ina V.S. Mullis, an executive director of the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center. “But Massachusetts is doing very well. I think people of Massachusetts can feel good about their world standing.”

Being comparable to Singapore is “quite the achievement,” said Michael O. Martin, the other executive director of the center, who chalked up some of the state’s success to having a challenging curriculums in math and science.

The results for Massachusetts mirror strong performance on several national exams, such as the SATs, in math and science.

In spite of this success, surveys from the College Board, which administers the SAT, have shown that Massachusetts students are less likely to pursue careers in math and sciences than their peers nationwide.

That dichotomy has prompted the state to spend millions of dollars to revamp science and math instruction so it is more relevant to students’ lives and to try to entice students into those fields through mentoring, internships, and tours of local companies.

The TIMSS, which also surveys teachers and students about their educational experiences, paints a picture of a state that places a premium on high achievement and academic rigor.

Massachusetts has one of the most educated teaching forces in the world: 88 percent of science teachers have completed postgraduate degrees, and 75 percent of math teachers have received those credentials, more than three times the international average and notably higher than the US average of 62 percent.

Many Massachusetts students also leave school each day for homes that have among the highest percentage of educational resources: books, an Internet connection, and private bedrooms that can reduce distraction from study.

Students here have higher expectations for themselves than their peers in most other countries. For instance, 85 percent of Massachusetts students expect to receive a university degree.

“Our teaching force is top notch, and we have set high expectations for student learning in Massachusetts,” Chester said. “That is part of our formula for success.”

Publication: Colorado Springs GazetteTitle: Colorado 8th graders beat international science, math scoresAuthor: Kristina IodiceWebsite: http://www.gazette.com/articles/colorado-148387-international-national.html

Colorado eighth-graders can more than hold their own against peers across the nation and the world, the Colorado Department of Education reported Tuesday.

Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) results released from the National Center for Education Statistics show Colorado students performed above international and national averages in science and above international and with national counterparts in mathematics.

There’s room to improve, however. The average math scores of Korea, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong and Japan, as well as Massachusetts were significantly higher than Colorado’s average scores for both science and mathematics.

Although a little surprised that Colorado students did so well, the strong performance is a reflection of classrooms that increasingly focus on science and math, said Dave Khaliqi, director of the UCCS Center for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education.

“Teachers are provided with more opportunities and they are taking advantage of those,” he said.

Some things take time to show results, but there has been an increased focus on math, science and related subjects in the last five to eight years, Khaliqi said.

“There’s a big push for STEM-focused schools and programs,” he said. “There’s a range of things happening.”

Districts are contributing more to the efforts of teachers, he said. Regular assessments beyond standardized testing have held schools accountable for results.

“I see it continuing and maybe expanding into other focus areas,” Khaliqi said.

The state was one of 16 systems that had higher percentages of eighth-graders reaching the Advanced TIMSS international math and science benchmarks than the U.S.

TIMSS isn’t the only test to show that things are working. The far more extensive National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has shown that Colorado students have steadily improved in math and science, Khaliqi said.

More positive change is expected as the next generation of national standards are put into place, he said.

Overview

The 2011 TIMSS was given to eighth graders in 38 countries and 18 education systems, including Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota and North Carolina. National Center for Education Statistics under the U.S. Department of Education covered costs for all states except Florida.

In Colorado, students in 53 schools were tested. Details are not released to protect the integrity of the results.

The next TIMSS is scheduled for 2015, although Colorado’s participation is not yet decided.

A look at numbers

Colorado was one of 16 systems that had higher percentages of eighth-graders reaching the Advanced TIMMS international math and science benchmarks than the U.S.

• Science — Colorado’s average score of 542 is in the top third of all those tested and above the U.S. average of 525. Thirty-nine of the countries and education systems scored lower than Colorado, and six scored higher.

• Math — Colorado’s average score of 518 topped the international average of 500 and the U.S. average of 509. Colorado topped 36 countries and education systems in math scores, and scored lower than 10.

Publication: Orlando SentinelTitle: Florida students wow the world with 'outstanding' reading-test resultsAuthor: Leslie PostalWebsite: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/education/os-florida-international-tests-20121211,0,2475508.story

Florida students posted "outstanding" scores on a fourth-grade international reading test and more average marks on math and science exams, according to data released today.

The results highlighted Florida's success in improving early reading skills — as well as the need for more work among older students and in the fields of math and science, experts said.

Florida took part in the two international tests for the first time in 2011 and is participating in a third this year. It used its federal Race to the Top grant to pay for the testing, which state educators say provides important benchmark information on how Florida students perform compared with youngsters in more than 50 other countries.

On the reading exam, Florida's fourth-graders were second in the world and above the national average in the United States, which was ranked seventh. The Sunshine State bested both Finland and Singapore, typically top performers on international tests.

The data is "just outstanding," said Mary Jane Tappen, a deputy chancellor at the Florida Department of Education. "We are absolutely thrilled. It is the measure of the hard work we have been doing over the past decade," she said.

Hong Kong was the only place to outperform Florida on the reading test. "Second in the world. To be able to use those words is ... wow," she added.

Students in other states took the test and were included in the country's overall performance. But no other state besides Florida participated as a separate educational system in the Progress in International Literacy Study, which measures fourth-grade reading skills. Nearly 20 states took part in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, which assesses knowledge of children in grades four and eight.

On the math and science tests, Florida's fourth- and eighth-graders scored at the national average, while the nation improved on some exams compared with those given in the 1990s.

Florida was behind some top-performing states such as Massachusetts in both math and science, but, like the nation, it was ahead of some European countries while trailing the high-flying Asian ones such as South Korea. In Florida, for example, 14 percent of eighth-graders scored at the "advanced" level in science, compared with 24 percent in Massachusetts and 40 percent in Singapore.

The test results showed that Florida's push for better reading instruction should be duplicated in science, said Gerry Meisels, a chemistry professor and director of the Coalition for Science Literacy at the University of South Florida.

"You want to compete internationally?" Meisels said. "You're going to have to invest and get the work force ready. We have not seen that in Florida," he said.

Despite lots of discussion about a need for improved education in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), "We don't really have a large-scale, systematic approach except in reading."

A push for better science education, he added, needs to focus on helping teachers become better science instructors.

"That's where the rubber meets the road, where the teacher meets the student. … We have to help kids learn better," he added.

Florida's reading improvement effort has been multi-pronged but included money spent on training teachers, hiring reading coaches and improving reading instruction starting in kindergarten.

The reading test results mirror those of the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which also showed Florida's fourth-graders ahead of the nation in reading. That test, dubbed the "nation's report card," is considered the best state-to-state comparison of student achievement.

"I think they do reflect the fact that, as a state, Florida made a major commitment to improving reading proficiency in the early grades," said Martin West, an assistant professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, of the latest results.

That progress "has translated into success in the international stage," West said.

But now Florida needs to focus more on older students, where improving reading instruction and students skills is not as simple, he said.

National vocabulary test results released last week also showed Florida's fourth-graders ahead of the nation but its eighth-graders at about the U.S. average and its 12th-graders below it.

Florida is not alone in needing to focus more on reading in higher grades and on math and science education — both are national issues, West said.

The international tests are given to a demographically representative sampling of students in participating states or countries, so there are no scores for school districts or schools.

Florida also took part in the Program for International Student Assessment, which tests reading, math and science skills of 15-year-olds. Those results are to be released later.

Publication: Mobile Press-RegisterTitle: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan praises Alabama for international testingAuthor: Rena Havner PhilipsWebsite: http://blog.al.com/live/2012/12/post_297.html

Though Alabama’s performance on an international math and science test was below the national average, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent out an email today praising the state for participating.

“I applaud Alabama’s leaders for wanting to know how Alabama students stack up against their peers in other nations,” Duncan said in an email to the Press-Register and al.com.

“Now that the results are in, I hope Alabama school leaders and educators will use them to close achievement gaps and strengthen the math and science instruction that is so vital to innovation and economic growth,” he wrote.

For the first time ever, Alabama participated in the TIMSS, or Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. So did seven other states: California, Connecticut, Colorado, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota and North Carolina.

The U.S. Department of Education asked Alabama to join the 2011 study to represent this region. Results were released today.

“The results from TIMSS show that states like Florida and North Carolina are successfully building high-performing education systems,” Duncan wrote, “and I believe Alabama can do the same.”

In math, the United States was among the top 24 countries that participated in the TIMSS. But Alabama scored lower than the U.S. average.

Eighteen countries performed better than Alabama, 19 worse, and several were about the same.

Science followed a similar trend.

Michael Sibley, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Education, said the results weren’t surprising.

“We know that we have work to do and, if anything, this actually makes a pretty good case for the Alabama College and Career Readiness standards,” he said, which is what Alabama is calling the Common Core Standards.

Alabama is one of 45 states to adopt the Common Core, which means students here will be expected to learn the same materials as students in their same grade in California, Massachusetts, and elsewhere.

That means more rigorous academics are being taught in math this school year, and will be taught in language arts next year.

Some have criticized the Common Core, saying it’s a federally mandated curriculum. But, according to the state, the standards were developed by groups of state school superintendents and governors and included input from teachers and the public.

“What the standards do,” Sibley said, “is even the playing field in terms of the level of rigor so that going forward, we can expect that Alabama scores in science and math will increase.”

Through the TIMSS study, Sibley said, Alabama has a baseline to compare itself internationally. That's important in a global economy.

“Sure, we understand clearly that Alabama has been outpaced by some, but not all, other states in the country," Sibley said. "It’s our goal to get on par with the best that the other states have to offer.”

Publication: San Jose Mercury NewsTitle: In international comparisons, California eighth-graders score in the middle in science and mathAuthor: Sharon NoguchiWebsite: http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_22170728/international-comparisons-california-eighth-graders-score-middle-science

In international comparisons among about 50 countries and states, California eighth-graders scored right in the middle in math and science but lower than the U.S. average.

Despite their ranking, California's students tested just below the "high" level on both subjects, according to 2011 data analyzed by the National Center for Education Statistics from a sampling of students.

California participated as a state only in the eighth-grade math and science tests, administered last year for the first time since 2007.

In math, California students scored 493 on a 1-to-1,000 scale that sets the average at 500. The state did better than 27 other countries and states and worse than 22 others. California's scores were similar to those of England, Australia, Lithuania, Italy, Kazakhstan, New Zealand and Sweden.

"These results should both provide a wake-up call of the need to raise student achievement in our nation's most-populated state and a road map for boosting learning," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a prepared statement. "Unlike a number of demographically diverse U.S. states ... California's schools are not yet among the world's top-performing education systems." But, he added, he believes the state will improve.

Broken down by ethnicity, California Asians scored 555, which would have placed them sixth among countries and states tests; Latinos scored 470.

Amid the relatively poor showing, there were spots of achievement. Five percent of the state's eighth-graders reached or exceeded the "advanced" level, set at 625, compared with the international median of only 3 percent of students tested.

In science, California eighth-graders scored 499, just barely below the international average of 500. The state's eighth-graders outscored peers in 24 places, and scored below 26 others. Scores were similar in Alabama, Italy, Kazakhstan, Norway and Ukraine.

In both exams, East Asian countries and Russia scored at the top.

Only nine U.S. states were sampled separately from the nation on the eighth-grade tests, part of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.

Among those states that did participate separately in eighth-grade math, four -- Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina and Indiana -- scored above the U.S. average, which was above the international average.

In eighth-grade science, the United States scored 525, well above the international average.

The TIMSS survey and another one, the Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study, also assessed fourth-grade reading, math and science. California, however, was not tested separately on those tests.

In fourth-grade reading, the United States scored higher than the international average and also improved over 2006, the last time that test was administered.

In fourth-grade science, U.S. scores changed little since 2007, the last time the math and science test was given.

Among the results of those exams:

Fourth-grade reading: Florida was among the top five education systems, along with Hong Kong, Russia, Finland and Singapore.

Fourth-grade math: North Carolina placed seventh, after Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taipei, Japan and Northern Ireland.

Fourth-grade science: The United States placed seventh, on par with three other education systems and below Korea, Singapore, Finland, Japan, Russia and Taipei.

The eighth-grade tests were based on a sampling of 11,864 students in 501 schools in the United States. The California results were taken from a sample of 2,898 students in 82 schools.

Publication: The Charlotte ObserverTitle: N.C. students score big win on international math, science testsAuthor: Jane StancillWebsite: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/12/11/3720842/nc-students-score-big-win-on-international.html

A new report puts North Carolina students in the top ranks in math performance on tests that measure U.S. students and international competitors.

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study is an international comparative study of student achievement. The 2011 results, released Tuesday by the National Center for Education Statistics, had North Carolina educators crowing.

The findings

• North Carolina was the only participating U.S. state and one of only eight education systems worldwide in which fourth-grade math students outscored the test average and the U.S. national average. The other systems were Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, Japan, Northern Ireland, and Flemish Belgium.

• At the eighth-grade level, North Carolina was among only 11 states and countries to score higher than both the test average and the national average. Indiana, Massachusetts and Minnesota were the other states to reach that success.

• The science results were not quite as glowing. The North Carolina scores among fourth- and eighth-grade students exceeded the test average but not the U.S. national average. Other states that posted similar science results were Florida in fourth grade and eighth grade, and Indiana and Connecticut in eighth grade. States in which eighth-graders scored better than the U.S. average in science were Colorado, Massachusetts and Minnesota.

What they’re saying

June Atkinson, superintendent of public instruction, attributed the success to higher standards adopted by the State Board of Education in 2006 and deliberate effort to improve math instruction in elementary grades.

“The hard work that we started in remodeling education has begun to pay off,” she said. “Certainly the early childhood education initiative in our state has had a major impact on the improvement of our mathematics achievement. ... So it shows that we have continued to raise expectations of what our students can achieve, and we are continuing to see good results. When you think of achievement on an international scale, that’s important to North Carolina that our fourth-grade students and our eighth-grade students have done so well in mathematics.”

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a statement congratulating North Carolina.

“Students in a handful of Asian education systems still out-perform North Carolina’s students in math and science,” Duncan’s statement said. “But North Carolina’s students are doing as well as, or better than, their peers in most high-performing nations in math, and are even ahead of their counterparts in Finland. North Carolina’s school leaders and educators have shown that in a demographically-diverse state like North Carolina, poverty is not destiny in the classroom.”

More good news

Also on Tuesday, two North Carolina districts were among 16 nationally to win federal Race to the Top grants for individual school systems. The winners were the Guilford County schools, which requested $30 million, and the Iredell-Statesville schools, which requested almost $20 million. Nationally, 16 districts will share in $400 million as part of the U.S. Department of Education’s grant program meant to spur innovation and reform.