IAP NEWS UPDATEFebruary 19th – February 24th 2011

Publication: Foreign PolicyTitle: Think Again: EducationAuthor: Ben WildavskyDate: February 20th, 2011Website: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/22/think_again_educationSurvey: PISA

Relax, America. Chinese math whizzes and Indian engineers aren't stealing your kids' future.

"American Kids Are Falling Behind."

Not really. Anybody seeking signs of American decline in the early 21st century need look no further, it would seem, than the latest international educational testing results. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) -- the most-watched international measure in the field -- found that American high school students ranked 31st out of 65 economic regions in mathematics, 23rd in science, and 17th in reading. Students from the Chinese city of Shanghai, meanwhile, shot to the top of the ranking in all three categories -- and this was the first time they had taken the test.

"For me, it's a massive wake-up call," Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the Washington Post when the results were released in December. "Have we ever been satisfied as Americans being average in anything? Is that our aspiration? Our goal should be absolutely to lead the world in education." The findings drove home the sense that the United States faced, as President Barack Obama put it in his State of the Union address, a "Sputnik moment."

In fact, the U.S. education system has been having this sort of Sputnik moment since -- well, Sputnik. Six months after the 1957 Soviet satellite launch that shook the world, a Life magazine cover story warned Americans of a "crisis in education." An accompanying photo essay showed a 16-year-old boy in Chicago sitting through undemanding classes, hanging out with his girlfriend, and attending swim-team practices, while his Moscow counterpart -- an aspiring physicist -- spent six days a week conducting advanced chemistry and physics experiments and studying English and Russian literature. The lesson was clear: Education was an international competition and one in which losing carried real consequences. The fear that American kids are falling behind the competition has persisted even as the competitors have changed, the budding Muscovite rocket scientist replaced with a would-be engineer in Shanghai.

This latest showing of American 15-year-olds certainly isn't anything to brag about. But American students' performance is only cause for outright panic if you buy into the assumption that scholastic achievement is a zero-sum competition between nations, an intellectual arms race in which other countries' gain is necessarily the United States' loss. American competitive instincts notwithstanding, there is no reason for the United

States to judge itself so harshly based purely on its position in the global pecking order. So long as American schoolchildren are not moving backward in absolute terms, America's relative place in global testing tables is less important than whether the country is improving teaching and learning enough to build the human capital it needs.And by this measure, the U.S. education system, while certainly in need of significant progress, doesn't look to be failing so spectacularly. The performance of American students in science and math has actually improved modestly since the last round of this international test in 2006, rising to the developed-country average in science while remaining only slightly below average in math. U.S. reading scores, in the middle of the pack for developed countries, are more or less unchanged since the most recent comparable tests in 2003. It would probably be unrealistic to expect much speedier progress. As Stuart Kerachsky, deputy commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, put it, "The needle doesn't move very far very fast in education."

"The United States Used to Have the World's Smartest Schoolchildren."

No, it didn't. Even at the height of U.S. geopolitical dominance and economic strength, American students were never anywhere near the head of the class. In 1958, Congress responded to the Sputnik launch by passing the National Defense Education Act, which provided financial support for college students to study math, science, and foreign languages, and was accompanied by intense attention to raising standards in those subjects in American schools. But when the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967, the effort did not seem to have made much of a difference. Japan took first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom.

By the early 1970s, American students were ranking last among industrialized countries in seven of 19 tests of academic achievement and never made it to first or even second place in any of them. A decade later, "A Nation at Risk," the landmark 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, cited these and other academic failings to buttress its stark claim that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

Each new cycle of panic and self-flagellation has brought with it a fresh crop of reformers touting a new solution to U.S. scholastic woes. A 1961 book by Arthur S. Trace Jr. called What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't, for instance, suggested that American students were falling behind their Soviet peers because they weren't learning enough phonics and vocabulary. Today's anxieties are no different, with education wonks from across the policy spectrum enlisting the U.S. education system's sorry global ranking to make the case for their pet ideas. J. Michael Shaughnessy, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, argues that the latest PISA test "underscores the need for integrating reasoning and sense making in our teaching of mathematics." Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, claims that the same results "tell us … that if you don't make smart investments in teachers, respect them, or involve them in decision-making, as the top-performing countries do, students pay a price."

If Americans' ahistorical sense of their global decline prompts educators to come up with innovative new ideas, that's all to the good. But don't expect any of them to bring the country back to its educational golden age -- there wasn't one.

"Chinese Students Are Eating America's Lunch."

Only partly true. The biggest headline from the recent PISA results concerned the first-place performance of students from Shanghai, and the inevitable "the Chinese are eating our lunch" meme was hard for American commentators and policymakers to resist. "While Shanghai's appearance at the top might have been a stunner, America's mediocre showing was no surprise," declared a USA Today editorial.

China's educational prowess is real. Tiger moms are no myth -- Chinese students focus intensely on their schoolwork, with strong family support -- but these particular results don't necessarily provide compelling evidence of U.S. inferiority. Shanghai is a special case and hardly representative of China as a whole; it's a talent magnet that draws from all over China and benefits from extensive government investment in education. Scores for the United States and other countries, by contrast, reflect the performance of a geographic cross-section of teenagers. China -- a vast country whose hinterlands are poorer and less-educated than its coastal cities -- would likely see its numbers drop if it attempted a similar assessment.

What about perennial front-runners like Finland and South Korea, whose students were again top scorers? These countries undoubtedly deserve credit for high educational accomplishment. In some areas -- the importance of carefully selected, high-quality teachers, for example -- they might well provide useful lessons for the United States. But they have nothing like the steady influx of immigrants, mostly Latinos, whose children attend American public schools. And unfortunately, the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic demographics of the United States -- none of which have analogues in Finland or South Korea -- correlate closely with yawning achievement gaps in education. Non-Hispanic white and Asian pupils in the United States do about as well on these international tests as students from high-scoring countries like Canada and Japan, while Latino and black teens -- collectively more than a third of the American students tested -- score only about as well as those from Turkey and Bulgaria, respectively.

To explain is not to excuse, of course. The United States has an obligation to give all its citizens a high-quality education; tackling the U.S. achievement gap should be a moral imperative. But alarmist comparisons with other countries whose challenges are quite different from those of the United States don't help. Americans should be less worried about how their own kids compare with kids in Helsinki than how students in the Bronx measure up to their peers in Westchester County.

"The U.S. No Longer Attracts the Best and Brightest."

Wrong. While Americans have worried about their elementary and high school performance for decades, they could reliably comfort themselves with the knowledge that at least their college education system was second to none. But today, American university leaders fret that other countries are catching up in, among other things, the

market for international students, for whom the United States has long been the world's largest magnet. The numbers seem to bear this out. According to the most recent statistics, the U.S. share of foreign students fell from 24 percent in 2000 to just below 19 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, countries like Australia, Canada, and Japan saw increased market shares from their 2000 levels, though they are still far below the American numbers.

The international distribution of mobile students is clearly changing, reflecting an ever more competitive global higher-education market. But there are many more foreign students in the United States than there were a decade ago -- 149,000 more in 2008 than in 2000, a 31 percent increase. What has happened is that there are simply many more of them overall studying outside their home countries. Some 800,000 students ventured abroad in 1975; that number reached 2 million in 2000 and ballooned to 3.3 million in 2008. In other words, the United States has a smaller piece of the pie, but the pie has gotten much, much larger.

And even with its declining share, the United States still commands 9 percentage points more of the market than its nearest competitor, Britain. For international graduate study, American universities are a particularly powerful draw in fields that may directly affect the future competitiveness of a country's economy: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In disciplines such as computer science and engineering, more than six in 10 doctoral students in American programs come from foreign countries.

But that doesn't mean there's nothing to worry about. Although applications from international students to American graduate schools have recovered from their steep post-9/11 decline, the number of foreigners earning science and engineering doctorates at U.S. universities recently dropped for the first time in five years. American schools face mounting competition from universities in other countries, and the United States' less-than-welcoming visa policies may give students from overseas more incentive to go elsewhere. That's a loss for the United States, given the benefits to both its universities and its economy of attracting the best and brightest from around the world.

"American Universities Are Being Overtaken."

Not so fast. There's no question that the growing research aspirations of emerging countries have eroded the long-standing dominance of North America, the European Union, and Japan. Asia's share of the world's research and development spending grew from 27 to 32 percent from 2002 to 2007, led mostly by China, India, and South Korea, according to a 2010 UNESCO report. The traditional research leaders saw decreases during the same period. From 2002 to 2008, the U.S. proportion of articles in the Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index, the authoritative database of research publications, fell further than any other country's, from 30.9 to 27.7 percent. Meanwhile, the number of Chinese publications recorded in the same index more than doubled, as did the volume of scientific papers from Brazil, a country whose research institutions wouldn't have been on anyone's radar 20 years ago.

This shift in the geography of knowledge production is certainly noteworthy, but as with the international study market, the United States simply represents a proportionally

smaller piece of a greatly expanded pie. R&D spending worldwide massively surged in the last decade, from $790 billion to $1.1 trillion, up 45 percent. And the declining U.S. share of global research spending still represented a healthy increase in constant dollars, from $277 billion in 2002 to $373 billion in 2007. U.S. research spending as a percentage of GDP over the same period was consistent and very high by global standards. The country's R&D investments still totaled more than all Asian countries' combined.

Similarly, a declining U.S. share of the world's scientific publications may sound bad from an American point of view. But the total number of publications listed in the Thomson Reuters index surged by more than a third from 2002 to 2008. Even with a shrinking global lead, U.S. researchers published 46,000 more scientific articles in 2008 than they did six years earlier. And in any case, research discoveries don't remain within the borders of the countries where they occur -- knowledge is a public good, with little regard for national boundaries. Discoveries in one country's research institutions can be capitalized on by innovators elsewhere. Countries shouldn't be indifferent to the rise in their share of the research -- big breakthroughs can have positive economic and academic spillover effects -- but they also shouldn't fear the increase of cutting-edge discoveries elsewhere.

"The World Will Catch Up."

Maybe, but don't count on it anytime soon. And don't count on it mattering. The global academic marketplace is without doubt growing more competitive than ever. Countries from China and South Korea to Saudi Arabia have made an urgent priority of creating world-class universities or restoring the lost luster of once great institutions. And they're putting serious money into it: China is spending billions on expanding enrollment and improving its elite research institutions, while Saudi King Abdullah has funneled $10 billion into the brand-new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

But the United States doesn't have just a few elite schools, like most of its ostensible competitors; it has a deep bench of outstanding institutions. A 2008 Rand Corp. report found that nearly two-thirds of the most highly cited articles in science and technology come from the United States, and seven in 10 Nobel Prize winners are employed by American universities. And the United States spends about 2.9 percent of its GDP on postsecondary education, about twice the percentage spent by China, the European Union, and Japan in 2006.

But while the old U.S.-centric order of elite institutions is unlikely to be wholly overturned, it will gradually be shaken up in the coming decades. Asian countries in particular are making significant progress and may well produce some great universities within the next half-century, if not sooner. In China, for instance, institutions such as Tsinghua and Peking universities in Beijing and Fudan and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities in Shanghai could achieve real prominence on the world stage.

But over the long term, exactly where countries sit in the university hierarchy will be less and less relevant, as Americans' understanding of who is "us" and who is "them" gradually changes. Already, a historically unprecedented level of student and faculty

mobility has become a defining characteristic of global higher education. Cross-border scientific collaboration, as measured by the volume of publications by co-authors from different countries, has more than doubled in two decades. Countries like Singapore and Saudi Arabia are jump-starting a culture of academic excellence at their universities by forging partnerships with elite Western institutions such as Duke, MIT, Stanford, and Yale.

The notion of just how much a university really has to be connected to a particular location is being rethought, too. Western universities, from Texas A&M to the Sorbonne, have garnered much attention by creating, admittedly with mixed results, some 160 branch campuses in Asia and the Middle East, many launched in the last decade. New York University recently went one step further by opening a full-fledged liberal arts campus in Abu Dhabi, part of what NYU President John Sexton envisions as a "global network university." One day, as University of Warwick Vice Chancellor Nigel Thrift suggests, we may see outright mergers between institutions -- and perhaps ultimately the university equivalent of multinational corporations.

In this coming era of globalized education, there is little place for the Sputnik alarms of the Cold War, the Shanghai panic of today, and the inevitable sequels lurking on the horizon. The international education race worth winning is the one to develop the intellectual capacity the United States and everyone else needs to meet the formidable challenges of the 21st century -- and who gets there first won't matter as much as we once feared.

Publication: Financial TimesTitle: How poor students become top scientistsAuthor: Michael SkapinkerDate: February 21st, 2011Website: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/780b075c-3df9-11e0-99ac-00144feabdc0.html Survey: PISA

The bleak job prospects facing today’s young people will be familiar to their parents. Talk of a “lost generation” was common 30 years ago too.

My brush with unemployment in the 1980s was blessedly brief, but I recall the disappointment at the mail that brought nothing, the crawling hours of a non-working day and the longing to be among the commuters heading for the station.

I was well educated, confident and middle class. I found a job and have been in work ever since. Better times will come for many of today’s young, and the best-equipped will put worklessness behind them. Policymakers may be right when they say that employment gaps can affect wages for years, if not decades, but I suspect that the most privileged will overcome them.

In good years and bad, the young people we should worry about are those at the bottom. Their disenchantment and lack of mobility affects not just them, but the entire society, which feels that much more uncomfortable and divided.

What can be done? The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has just published a study of young people from poorer families who beat the odds academically. If we can understand how they managed to come out on top, we can devise policies for governments and employers that help others make the same journey.

How many make this transition? “In Australia, Canada, Finland, Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Portugal, close to one-half of disadvantaged students exceed an internationally comparable performance benchmark and can be considered successful from a global perspective,” the OECD says.

Disadvantaged students in the UK, Switzerland and Poland do less well, but better than those in the US and Norway, who do better than those in Mexico and Brazil.

Last December, the OECD published its 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), which focused on reading skills, and which found that students in Shanghai were the top performers, followed by those in Korea, Finland and Hong Kong.

This month’s study of young high achievers from poor families – the OECD calls them “resilient students” – draws on the 2006 Pisa study, which concentrated on scientific skills, although the OECD believes the same principles often apply to mathematics and reading.

Unlike in reading, where girls from disadvantaged families did better than boys everywhere, the difference in scientific skills was generally small. In Turkey, Greece and Jordan, girls were over-represented among high performers from poor families. In Chile, Luxembourg and the UK, boys did slightly better.

Although some studies have shown that immigrant students are more motivated, they seem to find it harder to make the leap to top scientific performance. “In many countries only a small fraction of students with an immigrant background beat the odds,” the study said. An exception was Australia, where immigrants – the largest groups are from the UK, New Zealand and China – did well.

What does make a difference to poorer students’ achievement is how much time they spend being taught. In almost every country, the OECD found that just an extra hour a week of science lessons made a substantial difference to poorer students’ performance. Correlation is not causation. The quality of those lessons no doubt matters too. But the more students are made to study science, the better they do.

How can employers, who would benefit from a wider recruitment pool, help? Donations of laboratory and scientific equipment are, of course, always welcome, but the OECD study found that physical school resources made little difference to achievement. Some students did well even in poorly equipped schools.

What distinguished high achievers from poorer backgrounds, apart from spending longer in the classroom, was their attitude. “Resilient students are more motivated to learn science, more engaged with science and have greater self-confidence in their ability to learn science. The level of self-confidence in their academic abilities is in fact one of the strongest correlates of resilience,” the OECD study said.

Can companies, particularly science-based companies, encourage those attitudes? Sending their people into schools as mentors could help, the study says. So could other forms of interaction between poorer students and those working in science companies.

Many companies offer internships and work experience. The problem, as other studies have shown, is that the best-connected often grab most of the opportunities. Where are the companies ready to declare that their internships will go to those who need them most?

Publication: The Huffington PostTitle: Art Education, the Innovation Economy and the PISA testsAuthor: John M. EgerDate: February 21st, 2011Website: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-m-eger/art-education-and-the-inn_b_825486.htmlSurvey: PISA

If creativity and innovation will be the hallmarks of the most successful communities in the 21st century we need to know the answers to the fundamental questions of what makes us creative, innovative, imaginative.

To create Innovative products and services as President Obama, as has argued rightly, we need as a Nation to organize our community to reinvent itself for the new, knowledge economy and society; prepare our citizens to take ownership of their community; and, most importantly, educate the next generation of leaders and workers to meet these global challenges.

In this effort the arts are not a frill.

Indeed , they may be the most important aspect of a 21st century education. Our schools need to focus on reinventing and renewing our citizens and our country to compete in the new global economy.

Globalization 3.0 is here.

Outsourcing jobs, and off-shoring whole divisions of companies are commonplace. We are currently suffering what economists are euphemistically calling a "jobless recovery", and our communities; and our schools are facing challenges not well understood by politicians, policy makers or parents.

Twenty years ago it was fashionable to blame foreign competition and cheap labor markets abroad for the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States, but the pain of the loss was softened by the emergence of a new services industry. Now, it is the service sector jobs that are being lost. This shift of high tech service jobs will be a permanent feature of economic life in the 21st century

To make matters worse, we are nowhere ready to capture the high ground in the new competitive environment, given the poor performance of our systems of education today.

Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch reporting on the results of the latest PISA tests -- Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) -- observed , "Our students scored in the middle of the pack! We are not No. 1! Shanghai is No. 1! We are doomed unless we overtake Shanghai!"

She argued further: "The lesson of PISA is this: Neither of the world's highest-performing nations do what our "reformers" want to do. How long will it take before our political leaders begin to listen to educators? How long will it take before they realize that their strategies have not worked anywhere? How long will it be before they stop inflicting their bad ideas on our schools, our students, our teachers, and American education?"

The New York Times also writing about the PISA tests interviewed US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who said: "We have to see this as a wake-up call...I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable, and we have to see them as a challenge to get better," he added. "The United States came in 23rd or 24th in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we're being out-educated".

The changes most policymakers and economists are talking about centers around creativity and innovation, because knowledge, broadly defined , is our salvation. We need to lead the world in new inventions and new innovative products and services.

Maybe the PISA tests do not matter. Maybe we are looking at the wrong things to measure success.

As Dana Gioia, former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts once said "America is not going to succeed through cheap labor or cheap raw materials, nor even the free flow of capital or a streamlined industrial base...to compete successfully, this country needs creativity, ingenuity, and innovation".

And he could have added, we need to stop measuring ourselves by old standards.

The hearse is at the back door of America, as we have known it.

Either we make the changes to succeed in the wake of globalization, or the world's greatest experiment in democracy fails.

Publication: BBC World Service

Title: Youth unemployment: A smouldering fuse?Author: James MelikDate: February 6th, 2011Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12356092

Abdul Tahir is in his final year at university and fully expects to get good results when he takes his exams in June.

His expectations are much lower for his future prospects, however.

Speaking at his campus in West London, he acknowledges that his chances of landing a job when he leaves university are very slim.

"There will be 200 of us leaving at the same time," he says, "and we will all be chasing after the few positions that might be available."

Looking for a job is a plight all too familiar to millions of young people around the world.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), youth unemployment has been rising dramatically and the trend is set to continue in 2011.

Experience required

The average level of youth unemployment among 15 to 24 year olds has traditionally been double that of over-25s.

It is a global phenomenon, with many countries experiencing youth unemployment figures in the region of 17-25%.

In countries such as Yemen it is even worse, with youth unemployment figures estimated to be closer to 40%.

Youth unemployment has been one of the underlying causes behind the political upheaval across North Africa, which began in the middle of December.

"Youth unemployment is a serious problem which governments must urgently tackle," says Glenda Quintini, an economist with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

It is a problem the OECD has flagged up for several years, one it feels will remain for many more years, not least as it was exacerbated by the financial crisis.

As governments slash budgets in the aftermath of the financial crisis, about 25 million people across the European Union (EU) have been made jobless.

Global prospects for jobs are bleak in these difficult times, particularly for the next generation of workers - those who are leaving education now.

Jeff Jeorres, chief executive of the employment agency Manpower, says that during the economic downturn, companies have been looking for experience when they hire people.

"Companies are looking for someone to start and be very productive from the first minute on the job," he says.

"That is a disadvantage for a youth who maybe comes with a great degree and a willingness to work," he explains. "Companies can find that without having to go to the youth workforce."

One of the perennial problems is that companies cannot afford to hire and then train young people.

This is especially difficult for manufacturers.

"While they would like to hire at that younger range, they are finding that they can get very productive experienced workers to plug the gaps a lot faster," Mr Jeorres points out.

He is fully aware that the problem is not going to be easy to solve.

"We know how many 13-year-olds are going to be working in five or six years from now and we know there is going to be a hole in the labour market," he says.

"That hole is going to be even more exaggerated because that part of the workforce is not going to have the experience required to take up the slack of retirees and the normal course of what is happening with an ageing workforce across the world."

He points to countries such as Japan, Italy and France, where there are some severe demographics where you have an ageing population and a birthrate that is not going to keep up.

More focus needed

There are forward-looking companies, in particular those that have the financial wherewithal to make sure their internship programmes and university recruitment programmes are intact and improving.

But the majority of companies are facing a challenge to offer similar schemes because of the affordability.

'A bachelor is not enough'

Studying subjects that have no direct application to commercial life, makes it more difficult for young people to find work or develop the right skills.

"We still talk to companies that say they would like the critical thinking and problem solving that comes with a noble arts degree," Manpower's Mr Jeorres says.

"At the same time, however, they are looking for more specifics."

Ms Quintini at the OECD maintains that young people should be more aware of the options open to them before continuing their academic pursuits.

"Teachers and job advisers should explain more thoroughly what is needed in the workforce," she says.

"Some young people might be better prepared if they chose a vocational course rather than a university degree," she says, "whilst others might benefit from studying a degree with a specific focus."

Her sentiments are echoed by Abdul Tahir, who will graduate with a bachelors degree in the summer.

"I know it is going to be difficult to find a job," he says, "So I will stay on at university and take a masters degree."

He intends to concentrate on one particular aspect of his chosen subject, a move he believes will give him an advantage over his peers when searching for a job.

There is the belief that a bachelor degree is not enough, that a masters degree is needed, then an internship to understand the company, and then there might be an offer of a job.

Whatever the situation, there are still more students globally than there are jobs.

Back to basics

Much of the sharpest pain is being felt in the developing economies.

In India, job creation dwindled during the financial crisis, but has since picked up after the government introduced measures to get the nation into work.

The economy is predicted to rise about 8% over the coming year, yet getting hired is not always straight forward.

India's growing population is expected to be the largest contributor to the global labour force in the fist part of this century. Some estimates show that the number of people able to work will grow by a third in the next 15 years.

The country will need those people to help fuel its growing economy, but although the supply seems secure, there are worrying areas of weakness.

Many employers complain they cannot find graduates with the right skills to fill vacancies.

"One of the problems of labour shortage in India has to do with the fact that a large part of the people in that age group are not really well trained," says Laveesh Bhandari from Indicus Analytics.

"Right now it is a three-to-five year problem in India," he says, "but we expect that to improve over the next decade as the education establishment gets its act together."

Unrealistic expectations

One important factor the country has experienced is that agriculture is no longer the defining sector in the Indian economy.

And as the service sector becomes more and more mature, the types of jobs on offer have changed.

One particular concern for Mr Bhandari is that poorly trained and educated people are graduating with degrees .

"First we have to start with the three Rs, which have not been the focus of the education system," he says

"The next critical problem has to do with the absence of vocational training, which is currently absent in the public sector-controlled universities and schools," he adds.

He also notes that young people do not have realistic expectations with regards to the workplace

"They think any degree will get them a white-collar job," he says.

Those people might be better advised to choose a vocational qualification, or to follow Abdul Tahir's example and become more focussed on one specific sector of their chosen career.

Publication: Bozeman Daily ChronicleTitle: Test scores and the economic fate of a nationAuthor: Lynne Scalia and Joseph Scalia IIIDate: February 21st, 2011Website: http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/opinions/article_ef05371e-3e0e-11e0-a8f8-001cc4c002e0.html

Survey: PISA

In December 2010, the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test results were released. Evaluating 15-year-olds from 65 countries, PISA is touted as the most comprehensive study to test and rank students internationally. As in past years, the 5,233 public and private school U.S. students tested scored in the average range.

As before, the apoplectic reaction of both pundits and government officials follows a predictable and faulty line of reasoning when looking at perceived international achievement gaps. It goes something like this: Public education is in a state of crisis. In order to avert the eventual economic ruin that will follow "middling"-range test scores, we must speed up school reform efforts and look to those who have higher scores, as models of superior educational systems.

At the alleged root of the problem are complacent educators who are not willing or able to hold high expectations of their students or deliver high-quality instruction. The putative solution to the "crisis" is to hold educators "accountable" through incentives, punishment, and mandates, such as publishing school test scores, privatizing public education, replacing the school staff in low-performing schools, and using performance-based teacher pay. So the rhetoric goes.

If low scores lead to inferior economic performance, then those nations who score higher than the U.S. on international tests should be doing better on indicators of economic success. In 2007, researcher K. Baker compared international test results since their advent in 1964, with seven indicators of national success, including economic growth, productivity, and creativity. He found that "a certain level of educational attainment, as reflected in test scores, provides a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important..." The bottom line is that, beyond this platform, it is bad policy to pursue gains in test scores, diverting resources away from other factors that are more important determinants of economic success.

On the 2009 PISA, both South Korea and Shanghai-China were two of the highest scorers. Yet they have GDP's per capita below the average measured by PISA's organizational body. The two Swiss-based organizations that rank nations on global competitiveness both rank the U.S. number one, the position it has held for a number of years. In 2008, when journalist F. Zakariya asked the Singapore Minister of Education why high scoring Singaporean students seem to fade when they became adults, the minister answered that their children lacked what he thought America excelled in - creativity, ambition, and a willingness to challenge existing knowledge - factors of course not measured by the much-valorized tests.

Author Yong Zhao, born and raised in China, in making comparisons between educational systems in European and Asian countries, notes that centralized, standardized, test-driven countries like China and Singapore are attempting to get rid of the homogenization that the U.S. is now seeking to implement. They are, in fact, looking to the U.S. to determine how to get their children to think.

It is easier to blame educators than to look at our real problems - like the effects of poverty on children and the simplistic reforms that are not working. Policy makers should be talking about the less publicized PISA findings such as: (1) Schools that compete for students through charters, tax credits or vouchers do not yield higher scores; (2) Private schools do no better than public schools once family wealth factors are considered; (3) 20 percent of U.S. performance is attributed to social inequity, far higher than in other nations - inequitable and inadequate financial resources resulting in nearly a year's lack of growth; and (4) Schools with greater autonomy score higher.

Throughout the history of schooling in the U.S., schools have been routinely charged to carry out the dominant societal and political ideologies of the day. As historian W. Reese points out, when solutions to intractable problems that originate outside of school fail - poverty, racial and social injustice - schools are looked to as the source of the problems and educational reform ensues with vigor. Until educational policy is able to look at the economic and political conditions, which are the real source of our educational problems, we are likely to continue our test-score fetishism.

Lynne Scalia is the superintendent/principal of Monforton School District. Joseph Scalia III is the director of Northern Rockies Psychoanalytic Institute.

Publication: The Sofia EchoTitle: Education for DummiesAuthor: Lyuba YordanovaDate: February 25th, 2011Website: http://www.sofiaecho.com/2011/02/25/1049914_education-for-dummiesSurvey: PISA

To assess the quality of Bulgarian education, one does not need statistics, only a quick look at internet forums populated by teenagers.

The spelling mistakes outnumber the words, the commas are a thing of the past, and sentences are not always carried out to a logical conclusion. Then again, the language of the young generation is different and an education system cannot be judged only by grammar, so perhaps statistics are necessary.

Dressed in numbers, the facts are the following – more than 40 per cent of Bulgarian ninth-graders are functionally illiterate, according to the latest report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development programme for international student assessment (PISA). In plain language, this means that Bulgaria's 15-year-olds can read and write, but not make inferences and understand forms of indirect meaning.

This is a result of the biggest failure of Bulgaria's secondary education system – its static nature and inflexibility. The main features of the sytem are outdated teaching methods, the lack of young and motivated teachers and the overly strong emphasis on the theoretic side of teaching. None of these have changed since Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007.

There are other characteristics that have not changed. Bulgaria has a high ratio of drop-outs – between 16 and 22 per cent in the 18 to 24 years of age range, the only exception being the southwest part of the country. Lifelong learning courses for adults are all but inexistent, as is investment into scientific research, and whatever results there are, they are all concentrated in the southwest, which includes the almighty capital Sofia.

For any economy that strives to catch up to more developed countries from a low starting base, it makes sense to invest more in education than the countries it is trying to catch up to. True to its traditions, however, Bulgaria is among the European countries allocating the least amount, as a share of the gross domestic product (GDP), to education – just more than three per cent, with only Greece ranked lower. This is also the explanation for the fact that Bulgaria is among the countries with the fewest employees in the innovation and technology areas.

Scientific research is awarded a modest 0.5 per cent of GDP, a far cry from the three per cent target in the EU's Europe 2020 growth strategy. Since funding is limited and cannot cover all areas, Bulgaria needs to identify priority fields to invest in, including bulding up a labour pool of qualified potential employees. There is no plan for such a strategy and the reform of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, announced to much pomp and fanfare, has recently been kicked back to starting point.

Higher education looks, statistically at least, better than secondary education. In Sofia, about 33 per cent of the population has at least one university degree, but in other parts of the country that ratio varies between 17 per cent and 20 per cent. The EU average is 24 per cent.

This study, however, does not measure the quality of the education, which would surely skew the results downward. In a report on cohesion policies, European Commission experts have calculated how a higher ratio of university graduates can increase labour productivity, incomes and general satisfaction of individual citizens. According to the report's forecasts, increasing the share of university graduates by 10 percentage points can even lead to an annual GDP increase of 0.6 per cent (not automatically, of course).

This is why the Europe 2020 strategy targets increasing the ratio of university graduates in the 30 to 34 years age range to at least 40 per cent at EU level. This cannot happen without lifelong learning courses, which allow graduates to learn new qualifications to better meet the needs of the labour market – something virtually unheard of in Bulgaria.

The good news

Bulgaria's Education Ministry is now putting the finishing touches on the new law regulating primary and secondary education, which is a real opportunity to shake things up. It is a chance to introduce full-day classes at least at the primary school level and, most importantly, to update the syllabus to include more practical exercises and developing skills, rather than dry theory. The other good news is in the same PISA study, which shows that in all study fields, including mathematics and sciences, the results have improved compared to the 2006 edition of the study and are closer to the levels recorded in 2000.