The latest analysis of international math
scores will have some disturbing news for Canadian professionals
spending loads of cash on tutoring and enrichment for their kids: Their
offspring were outmatched by the children of janitors in Shanghai.
Ever since the PISA exam scores were announced in December, parents and education experts have been fretting over Canada’s 13th-place ranking in math.
But when parental education is taken into account, it turns out the
children of the country’s doctors and lawyers fall even further in the
rankings: They placed 22nd when compared to their similarly advantaged peers around the world.
Canadian students with parents working in
the least-skilled jobs, such as cleaners and couriers, may have
answered, on average, fewer questions correctly than the better-off
students in their class. But when ranked against their global peers,
they did much better – placing 10th. (One caveat: The sample size of
students by category varied between countries, sometimes significantly –
Leichtenstein, for instance, recorded a very small number of students
from this group, so wasn’t counted.)
The good news: Canada has one of the most equal-opportunity education systems in the world, according to the OECD study.
“We do a very good job, and put a lot of energy, into being average,” says Miles Corak,
an economics professor at the University of Ottawa, who studies
equality. “This is good because in not letting the least advantaged kids
– in terms of family resources – fall behind, we have an overall higher
score, and frankly in the long run, a more inclusive society.”
At the same time, Corak observes, “average is increasingly not good enough.”
The
2012 rankings of the PISA exams – which tests 15-year-olds in 64
countries in math and reading – raised alarms in Canada because students
had continued a nearly decade-long drop in math scores, falling out of
the top 10.
The latest study shows
that, generally, kids from more advantaged backgrounds outperformed
their less well-off counterparts, especially in math. But global
comparisons were revealing. In Shanghai, which came first in
international scores and where 15-year-olds outperformed all countries
in every category by parental education, students from the least-skilled
families were good enough to place 10th among all students with
professional or managerial parents – significantly ahead of teens in
countries such as Canada, Britain and the United States.
The
study reveals an important story hidden within the overall rankings.
For instance, while Finland outranked Germany overall in average math
scores, this was because the Scandinavian country has low inequality in
its education system. By contrast, while German students with parents
working in manual occupations performed “very poorly,” the study found
that the children of professionals in Germany were among the highest
achievers in the world.
The studies
concludes that the fact that “students in some countries, regardless of
what their parents do for a living, outperform children of professionals
in other countries shows that it is possible to provide children of
factory workers the same high-quality education opportunities that
children of lawyers and doctors enjoy.”’
Since
the December results, there has been a lot of debate about the validity
of comparisons of diverse countries, such as Canada, to more cities
such as Shanghai, the financial centre of China. The fact that China’s
results are divided up by city-region on the PISA scores has been
controversial, as this Brown Center on Education column points out,
even though the head of PISA has stated in previous years that rural
results, which are not released by China, are in line with the public
results.
Many education experts have
pointed out that the high scores of Asian countries are capturing a
“shadow education” in which the vast majority of students, even those
from low-income families, participate in private tutoring in addition to
regular classes. (The Shanghai results also include a smaller
percentage sample of all the 15-year-olds in the city, many of whom
don’t attend public schools because of passport-type licensing system
for families called “hukou” that restricts access to certain municipal services.)
But
experts have also noted a key difference in the learning culture of
places such as Shanghai, where achievement is consider to be the result
of work, and North America, where achievement has tended to be
considered more based on ability.
And
for all the caveats, these results should spark a discussion about
Canada’s math rankings that step outside the narrow domains of classroom
and curriculum. When the average janitor’s son in Shanghai outperforms
Canadian students with every advantage, it’s time to take a hard look at
the big-picture cultural messages our kids are getting about
resilience, grit, and the achievement to be found in hard work.
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