Urban studies

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education

To many people, the phrase “inner-city schools” is synonymous with crumbling buildings, frustrated teachers, disengaged students, truancy and violence. In some urban areas, though, city schools and the students who attend them flourish. In fact, three of the top five performers in reading in the PISA 2009 survey—Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore—are large cities. So are big cities a boon or a bane for education?

The latest edition of PISA in Focus presents new analyses suggesting that, in some countries, students in large cities—defined as those with over one million inhabitants—score on a par with their top-performing peers in PISA. For instance, students in urban areas in countries like Portugal and Israel, countries that tend to perform around the OECD average in PISA, compare favourably with students in Singapore; and the performance of students in Poland’s urban areas compares easily with that of students in Hong Kong.

But in Belgium, the United Kingdom and the United States, the performance of students in large urban areas drags down overall country scores in PISA. This might be because, in these countries, not all students can enjoy the advantages—including a rich cultural environment, more school choice and good job prospects after leaving school—that large urban centres offer. Some of these students may come from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, speak a different language at home than the one spoken at school, or have only one parent to turn to for support and assistance.

However, these new analyses of PISA data also show that an urban environment’s impact on learning is not just related to socio-economic advantage or disadvantage. Even when comparing students of similar backgrounds in OECD countries, those attending schools in urban areas in Chile, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Turkey scored more than 45 points higher—the equivalent of more than one year of formal schooling—than their peers in rural schools. In Hungary, the performance gap between the two groups of students was more than 70 score points wide.

What these analyses tell us is that in order to join the ranks of PISA best-performers, countries may have to provide targeted support to isolated rural communities to ensure that students attending schools in these areas reach their full potential, while those countries whose city-based students underperform will have to figure out how to both embrace a heterogeneous student population and enable these students to tap into the cultural and social advantages that large urban areas offer.

Links:
For more information:
on PISA: www.pisa.oecd.org
PISA in Focus: Are large cities educational assets or liabilities?
Photo credit: City student / Shutterstock

It’s a small world indeed

by Barbara Ischinger
Director for Education

Earlier this week I attended the Transforming Education Summit  in the Emirate state of Abu Dhabi. Some 15 ministers and former ministers from all regions of the world, from countries in all stages of development found—perhaps surprisingly—a lot they could agree on when it comes to education: the importance of raising the status of the teaching profession so that qualified candidates apply, the need to strike a better gender balance among teachers at all levels of education, and the need for trust in education systems—trust between governments and teachers, and trust between parents and teachers.

What this says to me is that our expertise in education policy can and should be shared more widely; and the OECD stands ready to work with non-member countries as they seek to improve their education systems. Already, 29 of the 75 countries and economies that participated in PISA in 2009-10 were recipients of Official Development Assistance. And we see that the share of public budgets devoted to education in many ODA recipient countries is equal to or above the OECD average.

What can non-member countries gain from working with the OECD? Take participation in PISA. PISA provides internationally comparable data and benchmarks for comparing the quality of national education systems. Evaluations of education policies help non-members to better understand their PISA results, identify why their students are performing they way they are, and help these countries and economies find feasible ways of addressing shortcomings. These kinds of targeted evaluations help countries to direct money to the right places.

In addition, we can conduct peer reviews of national education policies. Since 1992, more than 70 reviews have been conducted in countries in southeast Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa region, some in collaboration with the World Bank. These reviews are jointly organised by national authorities and the OECD. Policy recommendations, which can be used for planning development aid, target all areas of education systems. They tend to stimulate broad public discussion and are used by governments and multilateral organisations as reference in shaping reforms. Perhaps most important: we talk to all stakeholders—representatives from different areas and levels of education, and unions too—at the same time.

And we learn from our experiences with non-member countries too. The OECD is proposing to introduce several new indicators to measure progress towards development. These include average teacher salary as a percentage of GDP per capita, enrolment and completion rates by education level, the school-to-work transition as measured by unemployment rates by education level, measures of equity in education achievement by gender and background characteristics, and  the extent to which highly educated students emigrate out of ODA-receiving countries, what is known as brain drain.

Throughout our 50 years of working on education policy, we’ve found that good ideas come from countries large and small. In sharing those ideas, we can create better policies for better lives all around the globe.

And speaking of our small world, if you’re interested in speaking in our small world, I recommend leafing through one of the OECD’s latest books, Languages in a Global World: Learning for Better Cultural Understanding. Did you know that the world’s seven billion people speak about 6 000 languages? That there are over 30 times as many languages as there are states? This provocative book, which sweeps from history and sociology through psychology and neuroscience, to music, philosophy and ethics, makes the case with wit and irreverence that learning languages is now more crucial than ever.

Find out more about: OECD work on education in non-member economies

Photo credit: Sphere of letters / Shutterstock