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本帖最後由 Bluegene 於 13-12-9 23:53 編輯
December 8, 2013
O.E.C.D. Warns West on Education Gaps
By D. D. GUTTENPLAN
LONDON — Like a school principal handing out a clutch of C grades, Andreas Schleicher unveiled the results from the latest round of the Program for International Student Assessment tests last week.
For Britain, the United States and most of Western Europe, the results ranged from “average” to “poor.” British students, for example, scored exactly average in mathematics and slightly above average in reading and science. French students were slightly below average in science and slightly above in reading and mathematics. The United States were below average in mathematics and science but slightly above in reading.
For Asian countries, the news was much more encouraging, with students from Shanghai topping the chart by a considerable margin, but with students from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea all closely bunched at the high end.
Mr. Schleicher, the head of education at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the tests every three years to about half a million 15-year-olds in 65 countries around the world, also noted significant improvement in Vietnam. He described it as a poor country whose students outperformed peers from many wealthier nations — and did even better once differences in income were taken into account.
“On a level playing field, the British look even worse,” he said at a press conference here.
Western countries, Mr. Schleicher warned, should not to comfort themselves with the myth that Asian high performance is the result of education systems that favor memorization over creativity.
“The big success in East Asia is not a success in drilling,” he said, adding that the mathematics test required creativity and problem solving skills based on a deep understanding of mathematical concepts.
Michael Gove, the British education secretary, was quick to attribute his country’s lackluster performance to the previous Labour government, which left office in 2010. Noting that this was the first time that Britain had failed to finish in the top 20 countries in any category, Mr. Gove said in a statement that unless the country could provide children “with a school system that is one of the best in the world, we will not give them the opportunities they need to flourish and succeed.”
“That is why it is so important today that we have a unified national commitment to excellence in all our schools for all our pupils,” he added.
Tristram Hunt, the Labour Party’s spokesman on education, however, criticized Mr. Gove for allowing some schools to recruit what he said were unqualified teachers, pointing out that the highest-performing countries were those which did the most to emphasize the importance of teaching as a profession.
Referring to the Program for International Student Assessment, Mr. Hunt said in a statement: “The PISA report is a big wake-up call. Eastern dominance centers on the importance that these high-performing education systems place on the quality and status of the teaching profession as the central lever for driving up standards.”
Though most of the press coverage in Britain focused on its performance, John Jerrim, a professor at the Institute for Education, said he thought that the big news in the results was neither the continuing rise of Asia nor the relatively flat results from the United States and Europe over all but a sharp drop in the scores for Swedish schools.
“Sweden has the biggest decline of any country in the world,” Dr. Jerrim said in an interview. “They’re down 3.3 percent in mathematics, 3.1 percent in science and 2.8 percent in reading, and that continues a trend from 2009.”
Yet the American and British governments “have followed the Swedish model by opening more and more ‘free schools’ or charter schools,” he said.
His skepticism was echoed by Mr. Schleicher, the O.E.C.D. official, who said, “The data shows no relation between competition between schools and the overall performance level.”
Asked afterward what the highest-performing systems had in common, Mr. Schleicher said: “High performers pay teachers more. They are also systems with a commitment to universal achievement.”
In Shanghai, more than half the students tested finished in the top two categories in mathematics, he noted, and the figure in Singapore was 40 percent.
Only about 13 percent of French students made it into the top two categories in mathematics while in the United States only 8.8 percent did.
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發表於 13-12-8 19:49
