International News

PISA learning outcomes

Spooked by the effects of globalisation on their low-skilled citizens, rich countries have been pouring money and political energy into education. In the industrial countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), average spending on primary and secondary schooling rose by almost two-fifths in real terms between 1995 and 2004.

Oddly, this has had little measurable effect. The latest report from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows average attainment remaining largely flat. This tome, just published, compares the reading, mathematical and scientific progress of 400,000 15-year-olds in the 30 OECD countries and 27 others, covering 87 percent of the world economy. Its predecessors in 2000 and 2003 focused on reading and maths respectively. This time science took centre stage.

At the top are some old stars. Finland as usual did best for all-round excellence, followed by South Korea (which did best in reading) and Hong Kong; Canada and Taiwan were strong but slightly patchier, followed by Australia and Japan. At the bottom, Mexico, still the weakest performer in the OECD, showed gains in maths; Chile did best in Latin America.

There is bad news for the United States: average performance was poor by world standards. Its schools serve strong students only moderately well, and do downright poorly with large numbers of weak students. A quarter of 15-year-olds do not even reach basic levels of scientific competence (against an OECD average of a fifth). According to Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s head of education research, Americans are only now realising the scale of the task they face.

Letting schools run themselves seems to boost a country’s position in this high-stakes international tournament: giving school principals the power to control budgets, set incentives and decide whom to hire and how much to pay them. Publishing school results helps, too. More important than either, though, are high quality teachers: a common factor among all the best performers is that teachers are drawn from the top ranks of graduates.

And what can be done to ensure that budding scientists blossom? Give them teachers with excellent qualifications in science, spend plenty of time on the subject and engage their enthusiasm with after-school clubs, events and competitions, says the report. One does not need to understand string theory to grasp this, but doing the first two is hard. All science graduates, and physics graduates in particular, have a head start in other high-paid fields, such as financial services. And school curriculums are under constant pressure from meddlesome governments.

The last recommendation — sparking children’s interest in the subject with appealing science-based activities — comes with a caveat: a keen interest in science does not always mean being good at it. Half of all young Mexicans fail to reach basic levels of scientific literacy, but they value science more highly than their counterparts almost everywhere else. And across the world, the less students know about science, the more optimistic they are about the chances of solving the planet’s environmental problems.

New rector for top university

With some 160,000 undergraduate and 21,000 graduate students, Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM) is the largest in Latin America and among the largest in the world. It has also long had a reputation as being unmanageable. In 1999 its main campus was occupied for months by students protesting against a timid attempt to introduce fees. Nevertheless, UNAM is the only Latin American university to be ranked by Britain’s Times Higher Education Supplement among the top 200 in the world.

Recently, UNAM chose a new rector Jose Narro, a doctor who was previously head of the university’s medical school. Dr. Narro’s selection is important not just to the academy, but to Mexico. As Olga Hansberg, a member of UNAM’s board of governors, says: "What happens in the country is reflected in UNAM, and vice versa." The institution matters not just because of its size but also because it was, for years, an engine of social mobility, a place where students from provincial secondary schools could mix with the children of politicians and those of the metropolitan middle class.

UNAM owes this distinction largely to the fact that it has control over its own budget, although this comes from the federal budget. Dr. Narro was chosen by the university’s board of governors, free from the influence of the national education bureaucracy and the powerful, reactionary teachers’ union that controls primary education in Mexico.

Although Mexico’s wages remain far below those in the United States, it has been bleeding manufacturing jobs to Asia partly because it lags in innovation. Promising signs exist: Mexico recently inaugurated what aspires to be a world-class genomics research institute. And the Tecnologico, a private university based in the northern industrial city of Monterrey and specialising in engineering and technology, has planted campuses across the country.

Places to do basic research outside UNAM remain few and far between. As the pre-eminent voice in Mexican higher education, it is now Dr. Narro’s task not only to improve his own university, but to try to get others to compete with him. His primary patient is in relatively good shape; it is other patients, outside his ‘university city’, who need attention.

Power of the Harvard brand

Its students are the cream of American society. Its alumni have led in every field, from seven US presidents — including George W Bush, who graduated from the Business School — to Benazir Bhutto and Al Gore. Even its dropouts are overachievers, from Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Polaroid inventor Edwin Land to publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst and actor Matt Damon.

Harvard University stands at the top of the world — and at the top of the Times Higher’s world university rankings for the fourth year in a row. Its endowment of more than $35 billion (Rs.140,000 crore) is larger than that of any private institution outside the Vatican, and larger than the gross domestic products of well over half the countries of the world.

Harvard’s faculty have won 43 Nobel prizes and its alumni (including Al Gore) another 32. Its library is the largest of any academic institution in the world with nearly 16 million volumes.

But despite its staggering wealth, Harvard has found that staying number one is not easy. In the most influential American league table, published by the magazine US News & World Report, Harvard has slipped to second behind Princeton. It fares less well than Princeton University in the ratio of faculty to undergraduates. In fact undergraduate education is widely seen as one of Harvard’s weak spots, especially in terms of student contact with faculty and the seriousness of the curriculum. Moreover, there have of late been scandals, in-fighting, faculty defections, problems with supersized egos and a stubbornly preserved hierarchy that discourages all-important interdisciplinary collaborations.

"Harvard has just come off a really bad five-year period, in which it lost a president and had a divided campus. And no one really cares," says Richard Bradley, author of Harvard Rules: Lawrence Summers and the Struggle for the Soul of the World’s Most Powerful University, one of several books to chronicle the recent problems at the university. "The power of the brand is so strong that everybody wants to go to Harvard regardless of whether or not they’re actually getting what they’re paying for."

Even in that category — cost — Harvard has been slower than its peers to innovate in spite of its wealth. Princeton stole some of its thunder by pioneering a "no-loan" financial aid policy, replacing tuition loans with outright grants, even for qualifying international students.

Nevertheless Harvard’s brand power does not seem to have been tarnished, even after its immediate past president, Lawrence Summers, left amid the controversy he created by raising questions about the ability of women to excel in mathematics and science, resulting in a dramatic vote of no confidence by the faculty. Fittingly, he has been replaced by Drew Gilpin Faust, the first woman ever to hold that job. Harvard has also launched an initiative to increase the number of women on the faculty and to support tenure-track female and non-white academics.

Cracks in school system

In recent years, Finland (pop. 5.2 million) has been carving out an impressive international reputation for the outstanding quality of its schools system.

In 2003, the last comparative Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results placed Finland top in reading and science, and second only to Hong Kong in maths. Since then, international delegations have been beating a path to Helsinki to find out why.

In early November, British prime minister Gordon Brown praised its day-care provision and a teaching profession where Masters degrees are compulsory. But the shoot out on November 9 at Jokela high school make such issues seem trivial. When the shock and grief start to subside, the Finns will have to confront longer term problems. There are signs that many of the factors that experts both inside and outside Finland say are responsible for its schools’ success, are about to disappear.

School choice has never been much of an issue in Finland because parents have been able to rely on their local comprehensive school being a good one. But foreign ideas are once again having a big influence — this time from the UK. "We are following you," says Markku Antinluoma, a teacher from Huhtinen primary in Porvoo. "Parents are looking more and more critically at schools."

Ambitious Finnish families returning from working abroad are demanding the kind of "choice" and information about schools that they might receive in London. And the media is keen to help them. Recently Finnish newspapers for the first time, published league tables based on the teacher-assessed grades that pupils receive at the end of compulsory ‘basic’ education aged 16. The government is playing its part too. Next month the centre-right coalition, which won power in the March general election, will consider proposals for national testing throughout the compulsory school system.

Prof. Juoni Valijarvi, head of the University of Jyvaskyla’s institute for educational research, fears for the future. "Traditionally, the Finnish system has relied very much on trusting teachers and it is still like this," he says. "But if you come back in five to ten years the situation may be different."

Helja Misukka, the education ministry’s politically appointed permanent secretary, sees parental pressure as a growing feature of the system, and admits that for a minority the motivation could be having their children educated away from Finland’s small, but rapidly growing immigrant population. They include pupils with families from Russia, the Baltic states, Africa, China and Iraq, who are mainly confined to the big urban areas of this largely rural and until recently very homogenous country.

Pre-school curriculum fears

Early years campaigners are calling on the government to rethink the new curriculum for pre-school children which is due to become law in September this year. The early years Foundation Stage curriculum sets out what children are expected to do at different ages, such as pushing a rusk around their tray at eight months or doing up a zip between the ages of two and three.

But there are growing concerns that children will be pushed into formal education too early. In a letter to the Times Education Supplement (November 30), the campaigners expressed their concerns that assessing young children through observing and noting their play is now creating such copious paperwork that it interferes with workers’ ability to do their job.

The letter’s signatories include Sue Palmer, the author of Toxic Childhood, Penelope Leach, a childcare expert, Tim Brighouse, former London schools’ commissioner, and Dorothy Rowe, psychologist and author. They say the foundation stage is "fundamentally flawed" because it blends two previous curriculums — Birth to Three Matters and the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage — which had different purposes.

Comments Palmer: "Birth to Three Matters was based on developmental milestones. The Foundation stage is based on early learning goals. These, particularly the literacy ones, are extremely questionable. For example, being able to write in sentences: most five-year-olds are not able to do that. That is an aspirational goal. It is not a developmental milestone in the same way that a little child enjoying babbling is."

Dr. Richard House, senior lecturer at Roehampton University, fears that alternative philosophies, such as Steiner education which advocates formal education starting around age seven, will not be allowed under the legislation, although there will be a way of applying for exemption from the curriculum. "I think it is important that there is no one view that is regarded as the correct view of early years. Trying to centralise and control children’s development seems to be fundamentally wrong, not least because it doesn’t work," says House.

However, a department for children, schools and families spokesman says: "The early years foundation stage is a broad framework, which does not prescribe any particular teaching approach, and as such has the flexibility to accommodate a range of philosophies and practices."

Head count reduction pressure

Japan’s state-funded national universities, which have been reeling from sharp cuts in research funding, are under pressure to reduce the head count of faculty members as the government pushes for further cost cutting. The government, which is keen to promote globally competitive science and technology research that has immediate commercial benefit, has awarded strategic grants to a number of high-profile scientists and engineers at top institutions.

The government’s push for a 5 percent reduction in personnel costs in Japan’s 87 national universities will not result in immediate job losses, because the cuts will be realised through attrition over a few years. However a hiring freeze and a temporary halt to promotions have seriously undermined career prospects for young researchers — and could cause staff shortages even at well-funded research labs, say academics.

"As I can’t create new senior positions, I can’t hire more post doctorate researchers (when there is no prospect for their promotions)," says Masayoshi Esashi, who heads a cutting-edge semiconductor research team specialising in micro- sensors and mechanics at Tohoku University, 350 km north east of Tokyo.

The financially driven reform, which was launched three years ago with an annual 1 percent cut in subsidies, has hit the most vulnerable and, in some sense, the most important, part of the sector — the future generation of academics. At the same time, the education ministry’s emphasis on commercial and societal relevance has marginalised research in traditional disciplines such as history, literature and philosophy, according to academics.

"As the government faces severe fiscal deficits, instead of spreading limited resources thinly and widely, it is more effective to channel them strategically to key areas that benefit society," says Yuko Harayama, adviser to the president of Tohoku University and a member of the Council for Science and Technology Policy headed by prime minister Yasuo Fukuda.

Tokyo University’s president Hiroshi Komiyama is intent on using its endowment to strengthen his institution’s international profile by forging strategic alliances with top universities in Europe, America and Asia. He underlined his commitment this year with the announcement that Tokyo would build new accommodation for overseas scholars. Tokyo’s international component is low: figures from 2005 show that only 1.4 percent of its researchers, 11.7 percent of postgraduates and 1.6 percent of undergrads were foreign nationals.

Equally, young Japanese researchers must have job security and funding, academics say — especially if the government’s objective is to develop vibrant and globally competitive universities.

Focus shift to postgrad education

Glyn Davis, vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, admits that he is taking a considerable risk in pursuing changes that will sweep away 154 years of academic tradition. "It is a risk: all change is a risk," he told The Times Higher. "But my idea has always been that the best time to change is when you’re ahead — not when you have to, but when you can."

The changes are indeed substantial. From March 2008, Melbourne’s undergraduates will choose to study one of only six degree programmes. The university will instead focus its professional expertise on graduate students. The model offers undergraduates the chance to study broadly across a range of disciplines and then to specialise at graduate level.

By 2011, most of the university’s professional degrees will have migrated to graduate-level entry and half of all students will be postgraduates. In 2008, 13 new graduate programmes, including law, architecture, psychology and applied commerce, will be launched. Seven new graduate schools have been established, with another six to follow. The aim is for Melbourne to cherry-pick its students from the best candidates studying in Australia. Shifting the emphasis to graduate study will allow the institution to do just that, says Davis.

Like British A levels, the Australian Higher School Certificate requires students aged 16 to select a programme of study that will direct their university applications. It’s not surprising that many make a choice they later regret, says Prof. Davis.

The University of Melbourne’s model is based on the US structure, offering a general undergraduate degree followed by postgraduate professional training. It should be attractive to international students and those planning to take their skills abroad after graduation.