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Radical openness is still a distant future

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in the field of school education.

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We have such a hard time figuring out

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that learning is not a place but an activity.

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But I want to tell you the story of PISA,

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OECD's test to measure the knowledge and skills

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of 15-year-olds around the world,

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and it's really a story of how international comparisons

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have globalized the field of education that we usually treat

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as an affair of domestic policy.

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Look at how the world looked in the 1960s,

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in terms of the proportion of people

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who had completed high school.

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You can see the United States ahead of everyone else,

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and much of the economic success of the United States

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draws on its long-standing advantage

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as the first mover in education.

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But in the 1970s, some countries caught up.

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In the 1980s, the global expansion

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of the talent pool continued.

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And the world didn't stop in the 1990s.

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So in the '60s, the U.S. was first.

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In the '90s, it was 13th,

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and not because standards had fallen,

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but because they had risen so much faster elsewhere.

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Korea shows you what's possible in education.

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Two generations ago, Korea had the standard of living

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of Afghanistan today,

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and was one of the lowest education performers.

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Today, every young Korean finishes high school.

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So this tells us that, in a global economy,

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it is no longer national improvement that's the benchmark for success,

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but the best performing education systems internationally.

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The trouble is that

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measuring how much time people spend in school

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or what degree they have got is not always

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a good way of seeing what they can actually do.

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Look at the toxic mix of unemployed graduates on our streets,

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while employers say they cannot find the people

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with the skills they need.

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And that tells you that better degrees don't automatically translate

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into better skills and better jobs and better lives.

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So with PISA, we try to change this

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by measuring the knowledge and skills

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of people directly.

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And we took a very special angle to this.

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We were less interested in whether students can simply

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reproduce what they have learned in school,

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but we wanted to test whether they can extrapolate

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from what they know

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and apply their knowledge in novel situations.

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Now, some people have criticized us for this.

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They say, you know, such a way of measuring outcomes

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is terribly unfair to people, because we test students

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with problems they haven't seen before.

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But if you take that logic, you know,

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you should consider life unfair, because

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the test of truth in life is not whether we can remember

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what we learned in school,

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but whether we are prepared for change,

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whether we are prepared for jobs that haven't been created,

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to use technologies that haven't been invented,

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to solve problems we just can't anticipate today.

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And once hotly contested,

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our way of measuring outcomes has actually quickly become the standard.

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In our latest assessment in 2009,

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we measured 74 school systems

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that together cover 87 percent of the economy.

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This chart shows you the performance of countries.

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In red, sort of below OECD average.

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Yellow is so-so, and in green are the countries doing really well.

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You can see Shanghai, Korea, Singapore in Asia;

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Finland in Europe;

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Canada in North America doing really well.

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You can also see that there is a gap of almost

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three and a half school years between

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15-year-olds in Shanghai and 15-year-olds in Chile,

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and the gap grows to seven school years

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when you include the countries with really poor performance.

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There's a world of difference in the way in which

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young people are prepared for today's economy.

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But I want to introduce a second important dimension

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into this picture.

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Educators like to talk about equity.

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With PISA, we wanted to measure how they actually deliver equity,

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in terms of ensuring that people

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from different social backgrounds have equal chances.

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And we see that in some countries, the impact

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of social background on learning outcomes

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is very, very strong.

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Opportunities are unequally distributed.

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A lot of potential of young children is wasted.

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We see in other countries that it matters much less

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into which social context you're born.

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We all want to be there, in the upper right quadrant,

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where performance is strong and learning opportunities are equally distributed.

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Nobody, and no country, can afford to be there,

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where performance is poor

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and there are large social disparities.

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And then we can debate, you know, is it better

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to be there, where performance is strong

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at the price of large disparities?

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Or do we want to focus on equity and accept mediocrity?

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But actually, if you look at how countries come out on this picture,

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you see there are a lot of countries that actually

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are combining excellence with equity.

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In fact, one of the most important lessons from this comparison

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is that you don't have to compromise equity

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to achieve excellence.

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These countries have moved on from providing excellence

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for just some to providing excellence for all,

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a very important lesson.

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And that also challenges the paradigms of many school systems

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that believe they are mainly there to sort people.

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And ever since those results came out, policymakers,

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educators, researchers from around the world

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have tried to figure out

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what's behind the success of those systems.

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But let's step back for a moment

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and focus on the countries that actually started PISA,

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and I'm giving them a colored bubble now.

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And I'm making the size of the bubble

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proportional

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to the amount of money that countries spent on students.

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If money would tell you everything

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about the quality of learning outcomes,

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you would find all the large bubbles at the top, no?

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But that's not what you see.

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Spending per student only explains about,

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well, less than 20 percent

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of the performance variation among countries,

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and Luxembourg, for example, the most expensive system,

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doesn't do particularly well.

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What you see is that two countries with similar spending

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achieve very different results.

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You also see -- and I think that's one of the most encouraging findings --

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that we no longer live in a world that is neatly divided

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between rich and well-educated countries,

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and poor and badly-educated ones,

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a very, very important lesson.

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Let's look at this in greater detail.

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The red dot shows you

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spending per student relative to a country's wealth.

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One way you can spend money is by paying teachers well,

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and you can see Korea investing a lot

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in attracting the best people into the teaching profession.

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And Korea also invests into long school days,

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which drives up costs further.

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Last but not least, Koreans want their teachers

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not only to teach but also to develop.

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They invest in professional development and collaboration

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and many other things.

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All that costs money.

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How can Korea afford all of this?

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The answer is, students in Korea learn in large classes.

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This is the blue bar which is driving costs down.

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You go to the next country on the list, Luxembourg,

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and you can see the red dot is exactly where it is for Korea,

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so Luxembourg spends the same per student as Korea does.

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But, you know, parents and teachers and policymakers

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in Luxembourg all like small classes.

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You know, it's very pleasant to walk into a small class.

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So they have invested all their money into there,

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and the blue bar, class size, is driving costs up.

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But even Luxembourg can spend its money only once,

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and the price for this is that

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teachers are not paid particularly well.

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Students don't have long hours of learning.

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And basically, teachers have little time to do anything else than teaching.

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So you can see two countries spent their money very differently,

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and actually how they spent their money

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matters a lot more than how much they invest in education.

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Let's go back to the year 2000.

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Remember, that was the year before the iPod was invented.

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This is how the world looked then

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in terms of PISA performance.

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The first thing you can see is that the bubbles were a lot smaller, no?

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We spent a lot less on education,

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about 35 percent less on education.

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So you ask yourself, if education has become so much more expensive,

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has it become so much better?

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And the bitter truth really is that, you know,

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not in many countries.

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But there are some countries which have seen

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impressive improvements.

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Germany, my own country, in the year 2000,

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featured in the lower quadrant,

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below average performance, large social disparities.

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And remember, Germany, we used to be one of those countries

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that comes out very well when you just count people who have degrees.

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Very disappointing results.

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People were stunned by the results.

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And for the very first time, the public debate in Germany

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was dominated for months by education,

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not tax, not other kinds of issues, but education

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was the center of the public debate.

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And then policymakers began to respond to this.

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The federal government dramatically raised its investment in education.

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A lot was done to increase the life chances of students

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with an immigrant background or from social disadvantage.

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And what's really interesting is that this wasn't just about

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optimizing existing policies,

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but data transformed some of the beliefs and paradigms

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underlying German education.

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For example, traditionally, the education of the very young children

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was seen as the business of families, and you would have cases

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where women were seen as neglecting their family responsibilities

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when they sent their children to kindergarten.

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PISA has transformed that debate,

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and pushed early childhood education right at the center

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of public policy in Germany.

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Or traditionally, the German education divides children

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at the age of 10, very young children,

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between those deemed to pursue careers of knowledge workers

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and those who would end up working for the knowledge workers,

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and that mainly along socioeconomic lines,

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and that paradigm is being challenged now too.

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A lot of change.

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And the good news is, nine years later,

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you can see improvements in quality and equity.

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People have taken up the challenge, done something about it.

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Or take Korea, at the other end of the spectrum.

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In the year 2000, Korea did already very well,

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but the Koreans were concerned that only a small share

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of their students achieved the really high levels of excellence.

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They took up the challenge,

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and Korea was able to double the proportion of students

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achieving excellence in one decade in the field of reading.

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Well, if you only focus on your brightest students,

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you know what happens is disparities grow,

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and you can see this bubble moving slightly to the other direction,

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but still, an impressive improvement.

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A major overhaul of Poland's education

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helped to dramatically reduce between variability among schools,

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turn around many of the lowest-performing schools,

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and raise performance by over half a school year.

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And you can see other countries as well.

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Portugal was able to consolidate its fragmented school system,

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raise quality and improve equity,

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and so did Hungary.

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So what you can actually see, there's been a lot of change.

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And even those people who complain and say that

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the relative standing of countries

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on something like PISA is just an artifact of culture,

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of economic factors, of social issues,

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of homogeneity of societies, and so on,

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these people must now concede that education improvement is possible.

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You know, Poland hasn't changed its culture.

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It didn't change its economy. It didn't change

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the compositions of its population.

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It didn't fire its teachers. It changed its education policies

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and practice. Very impressive.

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And all that raises, of course, the question: What can we learn

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from those countries in the green quadrant

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who have achieved high levels of equity,

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high levels of performance, and raised outcomes?

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And, of course, the question is, can what works in one context

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provide a model elsewhere?

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Of course, you can't copy and paste education systems wholesale,

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but these comparisons have identified a range of factors

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that high-performing systems share.

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Everybody agrees that education is important.

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Everybody says that.

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But the test of truth is, how do you weigh that priority

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against other priorities?

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How do countries pay their teachers

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relative to other highly skilled workers?

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Would you want your child to become a teacher

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rather than a lawyer?

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How do the media talk about schools and teachers?

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Those are the critical questions, and what we have learned

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from PISA is that, in high-performing education systems,

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the leaders have convinced their citizens to make choices

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that value education, their future,

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more than consumption today.

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And you know what's interesting? You won't believe it,

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but there are countries in which the most attractive place

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to be is not the shopping center but the school.

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Those things really exist.

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But placing a high value on education

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is just part of the picture.

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The other part is the belief that all children

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are capable of success.

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You have some countries where students

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are segregated early in their ages.

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You know, students are divided up,

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reflecting the belief that only some children

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can achieve world-class standards.

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But usually that is linked to very strong social disparities.

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If you go to Japan in Asia, or Finland in Europe,

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parents and teachers in those countries

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expect every student to succeed,

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and you can see that actually mirrored in student behavior.

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When we asked students what counts

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for success in mathematics,

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students in North America would typically tell us,

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you know, it's all about talent.

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If I'm not born as a genius in math, I'd better study something else.

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Nine out of 10 Japanese students say

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that it depends on my own investment, on my own effort,

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and that tells you a lot about the system that is around them.

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In the past, different students were taught in similar ways.

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High performers on PISA embrace diversity

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with differentiated pedagogical practices.

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They realize that

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ordinary students have extraordinary talents,

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and they personalize learning opportunities.

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High-performing systems also share

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clear and ambitious standards across the entire spectrum.

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Every student knows what matters.

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Every student knows what's required to be successful.

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And nowhere does the quality of an education system

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exceed the quality of its teachers.

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High-performing systems are very careful

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in how they recruit and select their teachers

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and how they train them.

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They watch how they improve the performances of teachers

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in difficulties who are struggling,

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and how they structure teacher pay.

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They provide an environment also in which teachers work together

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to frame good practice.

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And they provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow

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in their careers.

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In bureaucratic school systems,

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teachers are often left alone in classrooms

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with a lot of prescription on what they should be teaching.

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High-performing systems are very clear what good performance is.

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They set very ambitious standards, but then they enable

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their teachers to figure out,

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what do I need to teach to my students today?

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The past was about delivered wisdom in education.

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Now the challenge is to enable user-generated wisdom.

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High performers have moved on from professional

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or from administrative forms of accountability and control --

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sort of, how do you check whether people do what they're supposed to do in education --

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to professional forms of work organization.

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They enable their teachers to make innovations in pedagogy.

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They provide them with the kind of development they need

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to develop stronger pedagogical practices.

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The goal of the past was standardization and compliance.

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High-performing systems have made teachers

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and school principals inventive.

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In the past, the policy focus was on outcomes,

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on provision.

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The high-performing systems have helped teachers

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and school principals to look outwards to the next teacher,

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the next school around their lives.

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And the most impressive outcomes of world-class systems

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is that they achieve high performance across the entire system.

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You've seen Finland doing so well on PISA,

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but what makes Finland so impressive

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is that only five percent of the performance variation

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amongst students lies between schools.

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Every school succeeds.

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This is where success is systemic.

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And how do they do that?

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They invest resources where they can make the most difference.

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They attract the strongest principals into the toughest schools,

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and the most talented teachers

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into the most challenging classroom.

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Last but not least, those countries align policies

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across all areas of public policy.

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They make them coherent over sustained periods of time,

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and they ensure that what they do is consistently implemented.

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Now, knowing what successful systems are doing

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doesn't yet tell us how to improve.

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That's also clear, and that's where some of the limits

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of international comparisons of PISA are.

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That's where other forms of research need to kick in,

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and that's also why PISA doesn't venture into

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telling countries what they should be doing.

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But its strength lies in telling them

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what everybody else has been doing.

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And the example of PISA shows that data

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can be more powerful than administrative control of financial subsidy

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through which we usually run education systems.

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You know, some people argue that

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changing educational administration

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is like moving graveyards.

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You just can't rely on the people out there to help you with this. (Laughter)

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But PISA has shown what's possible in education.

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It has helped countries to see that improvement is possible.

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It has taken away excuses from those who are complacent.

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And it has helped countries to set meaningful targets

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in terms of measurable goals achieved by the world's leaders.

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If we can help every child, every teacher, every school,

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every principal, every parent see what improvement is possible,

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that only the sky is the limit to education improvement,

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we have laid the foundations

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for better policies and better lives.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)