IAP NEWS UPDATEMarch 19th – March 25th 2011

Publication: University World NewsTitle: Train teachers as education researchers: OECDAuthor: Jane MarshallDate: March 20th, 2011Website: http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20110318125216338Survey: PISA

The most successful countries educationally make teaching an attractive, high status profession, and provide training for teachers to become educational innovators and researchers who have responsibility for reform. These were among findings presented last week at the International Summit on the Teaching Profession, the first of its kind, held to identify best practices for recruiting, training and supporting teachers.

The conference in New York City from 16-17 March was attended by education ministers, leaders of education unions and organisations, and teachers from countries with high-performing and rapidly improving education systems.

It was hosted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Education International, the US' National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the Council of Chief State School Officers, the Asia Society and the public broadcaster WNET.

Countries represented included Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China (Shanghai), Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Slovenia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Discussions focused on four areas - teacher recruitment and preparation; development, support and retention of teachers; teacher evaluation and compensation; and teacher engagement in education reform.

The background report Building a High-quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from around the world set the scene.

Prepared by Andreas Schleicher, head of the Indicators and Analysis Division of the OECD's directorate for education, it is based on research from PISA, the organisation's Programme for International Student Assessment, TALIS, its Teaching and Learning International Survey, and other OECD reports, and also draws on outcomes from a meeting of OECD education ministers in November 2010.

To attract high-quality recruits to teaching, research shows the education systems that perform best often aim to recruit their teachers "from the same pool from which all their top professionals are recruited", says the report.

But such people may not be attracted to schools organised in "prescriptive work environments that use bureaucratic management to direct their work", so many successful education systems are those that have been reorganised to replace such bureaucracy with "professional norms providing the status, pay, professional autonomy and high-quality professional education and responsibility that go with professional work", it says.

They also "tend to provide effective systems of social dialogue, and attractive forms of employment that balance flexibility with job security and grant sufficient authority for schools to manage and deploy their human resources", says the report.

As successful examples of systems where "vigorous intervention" has increased the attractiveness of teaching, the report cites Singapore, where "teaching talent is identified and nurtured"; England, which reversed severe teacher shortages; and Finland, where teachers and schools take on responsibility for reform.

As initial teacher training varies significantly across countries, the report says it is beyond its scope to assess policies and practices in ensuring high-quality initial teacher education. But it does identify ways adopted by high-performing countries to educate teachers to become more effective and play an active role in reform.

First, it says education systems benefit from "clear and concise profiles of what teachers are expected to know and be able to do in specific subject areas". These profiles can guide initial teacher education, teacher certification, continuing evaluation, professional development and career advancement, and help assess how effective these elements are.

Second, many countries have moved initial teacher education programmes towards "a model based less on academic preparation and more on preparing professions in school settings, with an appropriate balance between theory and practice".

In these programmes "teachers get into classrooms earlier, spend more time there and get more and better support in the process. This can include extensive course work on how to teach - with strong emphasis on using research based on state-of-the-art practice - and more than a year teaching in a designated school associated with the university, during which time the teacher is expected to develop and pilot innovative practices and undertake research on learning and teaching".

Third, the report finds "more flexible structures of initial teacher education can be effective in opening up new routes into the teaching career without compromising the rigour of traditional routes". The stages of initial training, induction and professional development should be interconnected to create a lifelong learning framework for teachers, it says.

In addition to basic training in subject-matter, pedagogy related to subjects and general pedagogical knowledge, teacher training in many successful countries is also designed to develop skills for reflective practice and on-the-job research, and emphasise teachers' capacity to diagnose student problems and find appropriate solutions.

Shanghai, in the People's Republic of China, and Finland are among places where teachers are trained as action researchers "with the ability to work out ways of ensuring that any student starting to fall behind is helped effectively", says the report.

Publication: EdNextTitle: Merit Pay InternationalAuthor: Ludger WoessmannDate: Spring 2011Website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/MeritPayPapers/Woessmann_10-11.pdfSurvey: PISA

Countries with performance pay for teachers score higher on PISA tests

American 15-year-olds continue to perform no better than at the industrial-world average in reading and science, and below that in mathematics. According to the results of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, released in December 2010 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States performed only at the international average in reading, and trailed 18 and 23 other countries in science and math, respectively. Students in China’s Shanghai province outscored everyone.

Many have identified variations in teacher quality as a key factor in international differences in student performance and have urged policies that will lift the quality of the U.S. teaching force. To that end, President Barack Obama has called for a national effort to improve the quality of classroom teaching and repeatedly indicated his support for policies that would provide financial rewards for outstanding teachers.

In a March 2009 speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, he explained,

Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement, and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools. Teachers throughout a school will benefit from guidance and support to help them improve.

In the administration’s Race to the Top initiative, the U.S. Department of Education encouraged states to devise performance pay plans for teachers in the hope that such an intervention could have a significant impact on student performance.

But is there anything in the data the OECD has accumulated to give policymakers reason to believe that merit pay works? Do the countries that pay teachers based on their performance score higher on PISA tests? Based on my new analysis, the answer is yes. A little-used survey conducted by the OECD in 2005 makes it possible to identify the developed countries participating in PISA that appear to have some kind of performance pay plan. Linking that information to a country’s test performance, one finds that students in countries with performance pay perform at higher levels in math, science, and reading. Specifically, students in countries that permit teacher salaries to be adjusted for outstanding performance score approximately one-quarter of a standard deviation higher on the international math and reading tests, and about 15 percent higher on the science test, than students in countries without performance pay. These findings are obtained after adjustments for levels of economic development across countries, student background characteristics, and features of national school systems.

I draw these conclusions cautiously, as my study is based on information on students in just 27 countries, and the available information on the extent of performance pay in a country is far from perfect. Further, the analysis is based on what researchers refer to as observational rather than experimental data, making it more difficult to make confident statements regarding causality.

It is possible that what I have observed is the opposite of what it seems: countries with high student achievement may find it easier to persuade teachers to accept pay for performance, thereby making it appear that merit pay is lifting achievement. More generally, both performance pay and higher levels of achievement could be produced by some set of factors other than all of those taken into account in the analysis. For example, performance pay could be more widely used in places where, as in Asia, cultural expectations for student performance are high, making it appear that performance pay systems are effective, when in fact both performance pay plans and student achievement are the result of underlying cultural characteristics. But even if my findings are not indisputable, I did carry out a variety of checks to see if any observable factor, such as Asian-European differences, could account

for the conclusion. Thus far, I have been unable to find any convincing evidence that the findings are incorrect. Given that, let us take a closer look at what can be learned about the impact of performance pay from PISA data.

Prior Research

Standard economic theory predicts that workers will exert more effort when monetary rewards are tied to the amount of the product they produce. Not only does performance pay stimulate individual effort on the job, it is theorized, but jobs where rewards are tied to effort attract energetic, risk-taking employees who are likely to be more productive. This latter consideration, says Stanford economist Edward Lazear, “is perhaps the most important” way in which a merit pay plan can influence worker performance. But if economists expect positive results from merit pay, many educators believe that teachers are motivated primarily by the substantive mission of the teaching profession and that they do not respond to—indeed, they may resent and resist—monetary incentives that tie salary levels to performance indicators.

To see whether the education sector is an exception to general economic theory, a number of performance pay experiments have been carried out, and in Israel and India such studies have shown positive impacts on student achievement. Experimental studies have tracked only the short-term impact of merit pay, however, and so have not identified any long-term effects that might come from changes in the kinds of people who choose to go into this line of work. Conceivably, a merit pay system could discourage entry into the profession of potentially excellent teachers reluctant to subject themselves to the requirements of a pay-for-performance scheme. Alternatively, if performance pay makes teaching more attractive to talented workers, short-term evaluations could understate its benefits.

One way to capture the long-term effects of teacher performance pay, including changes in the characteristics of those choosing to become a teacher, is to compare countries with performance pay systems to those without. This is now possible because the OECD in 2005 administered a separate survey to each of its member countries concerning the teacher compensation systems in place during the 2003–04 school year, when the 2003 PISA study was conducted. The 2003 PISA provides test score results in math, reading, and science for representative samples of 15-year-olds within each country, or nearly 200,000 students altogether. (The relative performance of countries on the PISA changed only slightly between the 2003 and 2009 tests. For example, in no subject did the scores for the United States differ significantly between 2003 and 2009.)

The PISA study is particularly useful, because it also includes information on a wide variety of family, school, and institutional factors that are likely determinants of student achievement. My analysis adjusts, at the level of the individual student, for such characteristics as the student’s gender and age, preprimary education, immigration status, household composition, parent occupation, and parent employment status. Nine measures of school resources and location are available, including class size, availability of materials, instruction time, teacher education, and size of community. Country-level variables included in the analysis were per capita GDP, teacher salary levels, average expenditure per student, external exit exams, school autonomy in budget and staffing decisions, the share of privately operated schools, and the portion of government funding for schools.

The PISA sampling procedure ensured that a representative sample of 15-year-old students was tested in each country. The student sample sizes in the OECD countries range from 3,350 students in 129 schools in Iceland to 29,983 students in 1,124 schools in Mexico. I therefore use weights when conducting my analysis so that each country contributes equally to the estimated effect of performance pay on student achievement.

Measuring Teacher Performance Pay

The measure of performance pay available from the OECD survey is less precise than one would prefer. It simply asks officials in participating countries whether the base salary for public-school teachers could be adjusted to reward teachers who had an “outstanding performance in teaching.” While the survey asked about many other forms of salary adjustments, the study protocol reports that this was the only one that “could be classified as a performance incentive.”Among the 27 OECD countries for which the necessary PISA data are also available, 12 countries reported having adjustments of teacher salaries based on outstanding performance in teaching. The form of the monetary incentive and the method for identifying outstanding performance varies across countries. For example, in Finland, according to the national labor agreement for teachers, local authorities and education providers have an opportunity to encourage individual teachers in their work by personal cash bonuses on the basis of professional proficiency and performance at work. Outstanding performance may also be measured based on the assessment of the head teacher (Portugal), assessments performed by education administrators (Turkey), or the measured learning achievements of students (Mexico). Unfortunately, the coding of the measure does not allow my analysis to consider variation in the scope, structure, and incentives of performance-related pay schemes.

As an example of the limitation of this measure, note that the United States is coded as a country where teacher salaries can be adjusted for outstanding performance in teaching on the grounds that salary adjustments are possible for achieving the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification or for increases in student achievement test scores. That policy, however, affects only a few teachers in selected parts of the country. Given such weaknesses in the survey measure, it is all the more remarkable that I was able to detect impacts on student achievement.

Main Results

As noted above, my main analysis indicates that student achievement is significantly higher in countries that make use of teacher performance pay than in countries that do not use it. On average, students in countries with performance-related pay score 24.8 percent of a standard deviation higher on the PISA math test; in reading the effect is 24.3 percent of a standard deviation; and in science it is 15.4 percent (see Figure 1). These effects are similar to the impact identified in the experimental study conducted in India and about twice as large as the one found in a similarly designed Israeli study.

Figure 2 depicts the math result graphically. The figure’s vertical axis displays the average math test scores of students in each country after adjusting for all of the control variables in the model, with the exception of the variable measuring the use of performance pay. The horizontal axis in turn shows the performance pay variable, also after adjusting for those same control variables. The solid line on the figure shows the estimated relationship between these two variables across the 27 countries included in the analysis. It shows a clear positive association between the variation in country-average test scores and the variation in teacher performance pay that cannot be attributed to the other factors included in the analysis.

A lingering concern, however, is that the analysis may be contaminated by the fact that the very cultures that introduce merit pay are those that set high expectations for student achievement. The countries represent widely different cultures, including Asian ones, where expectations for students are often much higher than in Europe and North America. The best way to account for cultural differences among the continents of the world is to control in the analysis for the average effect of living on a particular continent, a strategy known to statisticians as continental fixed effects. Figure 1 thus also shows results based on models that include a fixed effect for each of the four continents with OECD countries: Europe, North America, Oceania, and East Asia. In these models, the effects of pay for performance are shown to be even larger than the results based on comparisons across continents. In other words, the findings cannot be attributed to cultural differences among the major regions of

the world, because they are even larger when one looks only at patterns within these regions.

As a further test, I estimated the impact of performance pay for only the 21 participating European countries. Once again, the results showed even larger positive effects than those obtained for the full sample.

Other Sensitivity Tests

When findings are based on small samples, it is important to ascertain whether a conclusion is sensitive to the particular analysis being conducted. Even after conducting a preferred analysis that maximizes use of the information available and best conforms to underlying economic theory, it is important to make sure that the pattern that one has identified is not a statistical accident that readily disappears if a slightly different analysis is conducted. For this reason, I performed a variety of sensitivity tests for math achievement because the reliability of the math test across countries and cultures is usually considered higher than it is for reading or science. Remarkably, the relationship between performance pay and math achievement remained essentially unchanged, regardless of the sensitivity test that I ran.

My first sensitivity check focused on cultural differences among countries that were not captured by the continental fixed effects analysis. In this sensitivity check, I excluded two countries, Mexico and Turkey, which have particularly low levels of GDP per capita. Since it is known that the level of GDP is strongly correlated with educational performance, it may be that the inclusion of these two countries is producing misleading results. But dropping these countries hardly affects results.

The second sensitivity test excluded the level of educational attainment of the teachers, on the grounds that teacher quality might itself be affected by a country’s performance pay policies and therefore should not be used as a control variable. Excluding this variable did not materially change the results from those reported in Figure 1. In a third series of sensitivity tests, I excluded from the analysis one country at a time to make sure that the situation in no one country was driving the overall pattern of results. I found no evidence that that was happening.

The incidence of performance pay is, to some extent, clustered in two regions: Scandinavia (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden) and Eastern Europe (Czech Republic and Hungary). In a fourth set of sensitivity tests, I separately excluded the countries from these two regions from the analysis to see whether results were highly dependent on one or the other cluster. The results remained unchanged, indicating that neither of these regional clusters is solely responsible for the main result.

A fifth set of sensitivity tests was possible because I have information on other policies that lead to differential pay among teachers. Salaries may vary depending on 1) the teaching conditions and responsibilities (such as taking on management responsibilities, teaching additional classes, and teaching in particular areas or subjects), 2) teacher qualifications and training, or 3) a teacher’s family status and/or age. Since it is possible that student achievement is higher whenever pay schedules are flexible, regardless of the connection to teacher classroom effectiveness, I estimated the impact of each of these three sets of factors on math achievement. None showed a significant impact on performance, and the effect of performance pay remained large and significant, even when these other possible salary adjustments were included in the analysis.

In sum, the main results shown in Figure 1 survive a wide variety of sensitivity tests. That the results are robust to multiple model specifications provides strong evidence that performance pay helps to explain the variation in student performance on the PISA tests.

Differential Effects

With one exception (immigrants benefited less than native-born students from a performance pay regime), I found only small differences in the impact of performance pay on the math achievement of subgroups in the population. Since important differential effects were identified for only one subgroup, one cannot infer that the impact of performance pay on student math learning is concentrated on any particular group of students.

I did, however, find a surprising difference in the way in which a teacher’s education background affects math learning, depending on the presence of a pay-for-performance system. In countries with performance pay, teachers who have an advanced degree in pedagogy do not outperform those without such a degree (the only measure of a teacher’s education available in the PISA data base). However, in countries without performance pay, students learn more in math if they have a pedagogically trained teacher. Perhaps an incentive system washes out any differences that may be caused by variations in teacher training.

Conclusions

The analysis presented above represents the first evidence that, all other observable things equal, students in countries with teacher performance pay plans perform at a higher level in math, reading, and science. The differences in performance are large, ranging from 15 percent (in science) to 25 percent (in math and reading) of a standard deviation. Since one-quarter of a standard deviation is roughly a year’s worth of learning, it might reasonably be concluded that by the age of 15, students taught under a policy regime that includes a performance pay plan will learn an additional year of math and reading and over half a year more in science. However, this conclusion depends on the many assumptions underlying an analysis based on observational data.

Although these are impressive results, before drawing strong policy conclusions it is important to confirm the results through experimental or quasi-experimental studies carried out in advanced industrialized countries. Nothing in the PISA data allows us to identify crucial aspects of performance pay schemes, such as the way in which teacher performance is measured, the size of the incremental earnings received by higher-performing teachers, or very much about the level of government at which or the manner in which decisions on merit pay are made. Studies of such matters are probably better performed within countries, taking advantage of variation in policies within those countries. The study design also does not allow one to tease out the relative importance of the incentive to existing teachers of a performance pay plan as compared to the changes that may take place in teacher recruitment when compensation depends in part on merit rather than just on a standardized pay schedule. Since much more work needs to be done on all of these questions, a wit might insist that performance pay apply to scholars as well.

Publication: BBC NewsTitle: Left out of the loopAuthor: Sean CoughlanDate: March 21st, 2011Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12671197

League tables have spread across higher education like fast-growing ivy.

But there is something missing from these global rankings of institutions. An entire continent.

You can look through the lists of the top 100 universities and not find a single African institution.

There are US and European universities, plus a growing number from countries such as China and South Korea. But Africa is conspicuous by its absence.

Globalisation in universities is often wrapped in a feel-good language of international partnerships and money-spinning global networks.

It is seductively easy to get lost in the achievements of these illustrious, prize-laden institutions. But what if global competition concentrates all the power and prestige in an increasingly narrow group of mega universities? What happens if it leaves a whole continent out of the loop?

Rising numbers There are 4.5 million students in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Unesco Institute for Statistics. In terms of higher education league tables, these students are more or less invisible.

But this number represents a huge increase. In 1970 there were only 200,000 students in this vast geographical region. The proportion of young people going to university has climbed from 1% to 6%.

Within this average there are wide differences. In Malawi, only about 0.5% of young people will enter higher education, in Cameroon the level is 9%.

There are also different trends for studying overseas. In sub-Saharan Africa, the two most likely destinations are South Africa and France. North African students also go to France in large numbers.

Also running against all the international trends is that in Africa women are less likely to go to university than men, by a considerable margin. In Chad, a country bigger than the UK, France and Germany put together, only 0.6% of women enrol in higher education.

Even the rise in student numbers is double edged. A report from the World Bank says the growth in enrolments is outstripping the financial capacity of universities to provide staff and facilities. It adds to the pressure on an underfunded system.

Funding switch

Thandika Mkandawire, professor of African Development at the London School of Economics, says African universities are still trying to recover from a loss of funding that began in the 1980s, when resources were switched to primary education.

In the post-colonial eras of the 1960s and 1970s universities grew across Africa, he says. But that came to an abrupt halt. And while other parts of the world invested in higher education, African universities missed out on an entire cycle of growth.

"We need more education": Protesters in Cape Town this week demand investment in education "Once you destroy a university, it's very difficult to rebuild," he says.

It might be difficult to play catch-up after so many "lost years", but Professor Mkandawire says that a new middle class in Africa is putting the demand for better universities back on the political agenda.

There is also a growing recognition that universities are part of building a modern economy.

"Universities are places of upward social mobility," says Jo Beall, deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, the only African university to appear in the global top 200.

They are places where individuals and communities try to improve their life chances.

"There is a huge appetite for learning," she says. But there is a "heartbreaking" uphill struggle for students wanting to go to university in some poorer parts of Africa.

Lack of resources She describes visiting a central African university where the approach roads were lined by people operating photocopying machines, run on car batteries, copying 1950s text books for students.

Students might have to travel three or four hours each day to get to university. Lecture halls are so overfilled that there are security guards and gates to control the rush.

Political instability has been a barrier to overseas investment in African universities Professor Beall, who is joining the British Council this summer, says she remains optimistic about the future of African higher education.

There are universities working to become high-performing research institutions.

But there will need to be changes - including greater recognition of the importance of academics and partnerships with international universities.

The weakness of Africa's universities is not only about a lack of money, says Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College in the US.

He says there have been "multiple dysfunctions", not least of which have been political instability and corruption.

African universities have missed out on many of the trends in recent decades which have boosted universities in other parts of the world.

Missing out The lucrative market in overseas students has not brought students to Africa. Instead there has been a "brain drain" with Africa's scholars moving abroad.

University of Tunis: Unlike the global trend, there are fewer women than men in African universities US and UK universities have invested in branch campuses in Asia and the Middle East rather than Africa.

And Africa, with extremes of wealth and poverty, has lacked the type of expanding middle class that has helped to drive the growth in higher education in countries such as China and India.

As well as financial investment, he says there need to be cultural changes, such as protecting academic freedom, to create the conditions in which universities can develop.

But there is no escaping the scale of the financial gap.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has set up a faith foundation which works with a network of universities around the world, including in the US and Africa.

He points out that Yale is not just much wealthier than a university such as Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone - Yale's endowment is several times greater than the GDP of the entire country.

Ruth Turner, chief executive of the foundation, says the scale of the gap is not just about economics - it needs to be considered in moral terms.

"We all live in a globalised world. But we lack a vocabulary for an ethical way of looking at it. How do we ask is it a right thing to do?"

Economic development In a global market, the odds can seem stacked in favour of the big players. It is the corner shop against the chain store.

Coming out of the shade: Students at the University of Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa The top universities are "global institutions, they can attract the best staff, they have links with business, they extend beyond their location", said Keith Herrmann, who is working on a Commonwealth-supported project to make Uganda's universities more attractive to students in east and southern Africa.

In contrast, he says that for many universities in Africa, without such links and leverage, the "benefits of globalisation are elusive".

"Universities are vital, fundamental to getting skilled individuals, it's crucial to economic development," he says, but many African universities are missing out on the upward cycle of more investment, more research and attracting more international students.

But there are signs of hope. "There is a change, it's becoming much more open, there is less repression," said Professor Mkandawire.

He says there is a recognition that switching investment away from universities had been a mistake, which was now being reversed.

"There are islands of good performance emerging," he said. But he warned that progress was going to take many years of hard work.

Publication: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and DevelopmentTitle: Great expectations: Girls in school todayWebsite: http://oecdinsights.org/2011/03/08/great-expectations-girls-in-school-today/

For most of the 20th century, educators and policy makers despaired over girls’ underachievement in school and sought ways to overcome the social and cultural impediments to girls’ equal access to education.Results from the OECD’s most recent PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) survey, which directly involved more than half a million 15-year-olds (as proxy for some 28 million students) in 74 countries and economies (representing 90% of the world economy), show how many of those impediments have been toppled.Girls outperform boys in reading in every country that participated in the 2009 PISA survey; and in OECD countries, the average gender gap in reading proficiency represents about a year’s worth of schooling. While boys score higher in mathematics in more than half of the participating countries and economies, in 25 countries there is no difference in mathematics performance between boys and girls, and in five countries, girls have slightly higher scores in mathematics. The gender gap is narrowest in science, where in most participating countries, there is no significant difference between girls’ and boys’ performance. Across the three subjects covered by PISA, reading, mathematics and science, and across all participating countries and economies, girls are as likely to be top performers as boys.So far, so good. But before we pat ourselves on the back, let’s take note of a few other statistics:

According to the World Bank, despite important gains in girls’ enrolment in school worldwide over the past three decades, 55% of the children who are not in school–for reasons as varied as poverty, cultural practices, distance to school, and conflict–are girls.By the time those girls who are in school turn 15, their attitudes towards their futures are already well formed. When, in 2006, PISA asked 15-year-olds what they thought they might want to do when they grew up, more girls expected to work in high-status jobs than boys. Yet among those students who cited a career in science, three times as many boys as girls saw themselves as engineers or technicians or as working with computers or in physical science, while more than twice as many girls as boys saw themselves in a career in health, the life sciences or nursing—the so-called “caring” professions. And those proportions remained the same even among boys and girls who were top performers in science. In effect, by the age of 15, even those girls most skilled in science, and with great expectations for their careers, had already ruled themselves out of some of the more high-paying jobs in the field.Which leads us to another statistic: According to the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2010, women in OECD countries who hold a college degree earn only 71% of what a man with a similar education earns. In addition to differences in career choice, another reason for the discrepancy in wages could be that women often choose to work fewer hours to accommodate family responsibilities.Perhaps today’s more highly educated and ambitious girls will grow into the women who will help to dismantle some of the remaining impediments to a fully realised life.

Publication: U.S. Department of StateTitle: The United States and Brazil: An Education Partnership for the 21st CenturyDate: March 19th, 2011Website: http://www.state.gov/p/wha/rls/fs/2011/158610.htm

Presidents Obama and Rousseff share a commitment to promoting an innovative U.S.-Brazil education partnership to meet the needs of a 21st century workforce. They agreed to strengthen educational exchanges, particularly between research and higher education institutions in the Science, Technology, Environment, and Math (STEM) fields. Both presidents believe that the prosperity of a country is significantly linked to the education of its people, which is enriched by shared academic experiences in other countries.

CAPES-Fulbright Strategic Dialogue Program: Recognizing the contribution the bilateral U.S.-Brazil Fulbright Program has made in promoting higher education exchanges, the Brazilian Federal Agency for the Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education (CAPES) and the Fulbright Commission launched this initiative to deepen cooperation between scholars from research centers from both countries in areas that are mutually beneficial. More than 5,500 Americans and Brazilians have participated in the U.S.-Brazil Fulbright Program since the program began in 1957.

Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE)/CAPES: Administered by the U.S. Department of Education and the Brazilian Ministry of Education, FIPSE/CAPES provides grants for up to four years to a consortia of academic institutions in Brazil and the United States. FIPSE/CAPES fosters the

exchange of students and faculty, mutual recognition of academic credits, and shared curricular development among participating institutions.

Cooperation in Science and Technology: The United States and Brazil, through the National Science Foundation and CAPES, have agreed to develop joint activities promoting the exchange of students and scholars as well as joint research in biodiversity.

Linkages between Historically Black Colleges and Brazilian Universities: The United States and Brazil agreed to promote exchanges between U.S. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Brazilian universities, in support of the U.S.-Brazil Joint Action Plan on Racial Equality. A Brazilian delegation of university leaders will attend the annual HBCU conference in Washington, D.C., in September 2011 with the goal of exchanging ideas about how to expand education opportunities to historically marginalized groups in both countries.

Fulbright Public-Private Initiatives: Through their strong bilateral Fulbright partnership, the United States and Brazil have established Fulbright Distinguished Chairs with the following U.S. universities: Columbia University (sociology), Notre Dame (Human Rights), University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Agricultural Studies), and University of Texas at Austin (Environmental Sciences); and with the following Brazilian institutions: State of Pernambuco Foundation for Science (Oil and Gas Engineering) and, through a public-partnership, ALCOA at the Federal University of Western Pará (Environmental Sciences).

Improving Public School Education: The United States and Brazil support improvements in public school education through the U.S.-Brazil School Principals Exchange Program sponsoring exchanges of award-winning public high school principals to share best practices and experiences. The International Leaders in Education Program (ILEP), sponsored by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, provides secondary school teachers in Brazil with a semester-long academic program at an American university, coupled with an internship at a high school in the United States. The United States has also organized a number of International Visitor and Voluntary Visitor programs for Brazilian participants related to improving public education.

U.S.-Brazil Partnership on Education: In March 2010, the United States and Brazil issued a joint statement to reaffirm the U.S.-Brazil Partnership for Education, which was established through the 1997 and 2007 Memoranda of Understanding on Education. Under the Partnership, the two countries endeavor to share information and expand cooperation in areas including promoting educational excellence; promoting diversity and equal opportunity in education; assessment, indicators and accountability; professional development for teachers and administrators; vocational-technical education; second language learning (English/Portuguese); U.S. community colleges and Brazilian federal institutes; and Higher education cooperation and mobility.

Publication: The Pittsburgh Post-GazetteTitle: Why does U.S. fail in science education?

Author: Mark RothDate: March 20th, 2011Website: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11079/1133328-84.stmSurvey: PISA/NAEP

The few times that Huan Kiat Koh came home with poor grades when he was growing up in Singapore, he vividly remembers his mother's response.

"She would scold me, and then tell me to sit down and work," said Mr. Koh, a sophomore majoring in materials science at Carnegie Mellon University. "In general in Singapore, parents feel grades are very important for their kids.

"I think I read that American parents, when their kids get bad test scores, tend to be more sympathetic and worry about the kids' self-esteem," he said wryly.

That "tiger mother" approach may be one reason Singapore students consistently score at the top on international science knowledge tests, and American parents' more forgiving attitude may play some role in the less impressive U.S. scores.

In the 2007 TIMSS test, which stands for Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, students from Singapore took first or second place in all science categories. The United States ranked 11th.

Results like this have generated concern at the highest levels.

President Barack Obama has repeatedly pushed to improve science and math education in America -- most recently this month. In a speech in Arlington, Va., he complained that "the quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations."

Carol Johnson, superintendent of the Boston Public Schools, added her own concerns after a news conference on poor science test scores in urban districts last month.

"If we are truly to equip all our students to compete in the global economy, we must give them the tools to outthink and outperform their counterparts around the world, " she said.

In the midst of this hand-wringing, a larger question remains: Why do students who live in a nation that is the acknowledged world leader in scientific research lag behind other countries on science knowledge?

The answer is complicated, say experts, and involves everything from poverty, to poor training of teachers, to attitudes about learning, to the disturbing level of scientific illiteracy among American adults.

"If I were going to write the equation for improving science education in the United States, it would look like something Albert Einstein had put on the chalkboard," said Chris Mooney, co-author of the 2009 book, "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Is Threatening Our Future."

A tale of rich and poor

A major reason for poor U.S. science test scores is the huge gap between students in affluent and poor school districts, which is often reflected in racial disparities in scores.

Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics in Washington, D.C., said American student rankings look very different when white and black students' scores are considered separately.

In one of the major international tests, the European-based Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, American students as a whole scored 502 in 2009, slightly above the industrialized nation average of 500.

But if white students are considered separately, Mr. Buckley said, their score would have been 532, which would have ranked them sixth, while African-American students as a group had a score of only 435, putting them between Bulgaria and Romania.

Economic differences play a key role in that discrepancy, said Arthur Eisenkraft, a science education expert at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

"Certainly we've always known there are high correlations between poverty and how kids do in school," Mr. Eisenkraft said.

Demographics also help explain the high scores in places like Shanghai, which scored at the top of the last PISA test in science, Mr. Buckley added.

"Shanghai is a magnet for some of the best and the brightest in China," he said. "Saying that Shanghai is a representative sample of China is like saying Massachusetts is a representative sample of the United States."Big city blues

The downside of demographic effects in America is particularly noticeable in large urban school districts like Pittsburgh.

Of the 17 big-city school districts that participated in the National Assessment of Educational Progress science tests in 2009, only two -- Charlotte, N.C., and Jefferson County, Ky. (which includes Louisville) -- had more than a third of their students scoring in the proficient range. More disturbing, eight of the districts had more than half of their students scoring below the basic level, ranging from Los Angeles at 55 percent to Detroit at 74 percent.

"And basic means basic," said Alan J. Friedman, a science education consultant who spoke at a NAEP press conference convened by the National Assessment of Educational Progress in Boston last month. "If you're doing below basic in science at the eighth-grade level, you may be freezing yourself out of a whole lifetime of career options and advancement opportunities.

"It's not a pretty picture."

In Pittsburgh, which did not participate in the NAEP testing, school-by-school results in state science tests are just as disheartening.

About 61 percent of Pittsburgh's elementary students scored at the proficient level or above on the test, compared with 81 percent statewide, and it gets worse from there.

At the middle school level, only 32 percent scored at proficient or above, compared with 57 percent statewide. Even at the relatively new Pittsburgh Science & Technology Academy 6-12, only 38 percent of eighth-graders were proficient or advanced. At the high school level, the figures slumped to 20 percent for Pittsburgh and 40 percent statewide.

In three of the city's high schools -- Oliver, Peabody and Westinghouse -- fewer than 5 percent of the students reached the proficient range.

Stephen Pellathy, a science curriculum specialist for the district, acknowledged that the drop-off in science test scores from the elementary years to middle school and beyond is a major challenge.

"Why the big drop-off? I guess that's the million dollar question," he said. "It's not one where you can point to a single factor. The kinds of things we are trying to do to improve those scores is to have more time with our teachers in terms of professional development and try to hire and train better teachers."

The Pittsburgh schools also are using an "inquiry-based" curriculum, known as Full Option Science System, which emphasizes hands-on experiments and getting students to solve problems rather than memorize facts.

So far, though, the new initiatives have not shown strong results in science test scores.Talent vs. work

Part of the reason for that, Mr. Pellathy said, is a broad attitudinal problem that many American students and their parents share.

In Asian countries and other parts of the world, parents believe that doing well in science is mostly a matter of hard work. But in many American households, he said, there is a more of a belief in innate ability.

As a result, "whenever students have their first failures, they say, 'Well I'm not good at science and that's just how it is.' "

That notion -- that you either have the gift or you don't -- "is particularly damaging in science because the reality of science is you're basically always failing," said Mr. Pellathy, who has a Ph.D. in physics.

"When I was a student," he recalled, "one time I got two weeks of data out of a piece of equipment I had worked on for an entire year. So if you don't have that mindset that your failures are setting you up for your subsequent success, you won't keep going."

Besides the sheer value of hard work, it's also important to teach students how to analyze problems and figure out solutions, and not just accumulate facts, said the University of Massachusetts' Mr. Eisenkraft.

He recalled visiting an elementary school one time where the principal proudly told him that every student in the school was required to memorize the order of the planets.

"I said to him, 'I'm not going to argue with that, but when you have them learn that, don't do it during science time because it has nothing to do with science.' The science question is how do we know Venus is closer to the Sun than the Earth, or how do we know the Earth goes around the Sun?"

The NAEP test in particular has questions that ask students to do that kind of analysis, which may explain some of the poor U.S. results, especially if students are taking state tests that are more about memorizing scientific concepts.

Mr. Eisenkraft said he has seen some states where the state test scores track students' NAEP scores pretty closely, but others where "98 percent of the students are passing the state test, but only 12 percent of them are proficient on NAEP."

"The only interpretation I can make is the students are being lied to -- they're being told they're doing all right at science, and how is the child supposed to know the state is allowing him to pass a test that is not the same as other students are taking around the country?"

Two consultants who are now working with science educators in the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia schools see the same problem in Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania state science test "is a very factoid-based test," complained Donna Cleland, director of professional development for the 21st Century Center for Research & Development in Cognition & Science Instruction, which is working to apply brain science research to middle school science teaching in both cities.

On top of that, the science test scores are not used to evaluate how schools are doing under the No Child Left Behind Act -- only reading and math scores count for that assessment.

As a result, said Ms. Cleland and F. Joseph Merlino, principal investigator for the 21st Century Project, when the Pennsylvania tests are on the horizon, teachers start cutting back on science instruction in favor of reading and math.Inadequate training

Another general problem: Many teachers who lead science classes don't have much training in it, and often they haven't taken many science courses in college.

That becomes particularly critical if the content is controversial, as in teaching evolution in biology classes.

Eric Plutzer, a political science professor at Penn State University, has found that 28 percent of high school biology teachers do a good job of teaching evolution and are comfortable with the subject, while 13 percent do not believe in Darwinian evolution and often won't teach it.

That leaves a broad group of nearly 60 percent of teachers who accept the concepts of evolution but are wary of dealing with critics in their communities, Mr. Plutzer said. As a result, they often tell their students they have to teach evolution because it's part of the state standards, "but everyone is free to believe what they want."

While the opposition to evolutionary biology usually has religious roots in America, there is a broader issue that affects adults in this country -- an overall lack of scientific literacy.

Jon Miller, a University of Michigan researcher who has done surveys on this issue for years, said there are two ways to look at the statistics.

On the one hand, scientific literacy has been rising, going from 10 percent in 1988 to 28 percent in 2008, which makes America second only to Sweden.

On the other hand, he said, "we live in a democracy and when only 28 percent of the people can understand climate change, for instance, that's not enough."

It's also not enough to keep American students competitive in the job market.

"People mistakenly believe that getting a diploma will guarantee them a good job for life," Mr. Miller said. "What we know about today's economy is that sometimes a piece of paper will get you an interview, but if you don't know the information, it won't get you very far."