En su edición de esta semana, la revista The Economist trae un interesante artículo —The race is not always to the richest— sobre los resultados de la prueba PISA-2006, resultados cuyo debate nacional aquí hemos estado siguiendo para diversos países del mundo y para Chile en particular.
Ver texto completo del artículo del Economist más abajo.

Education
The race is not always to the richest
Dec 6th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Money and effort aren’t enough to impart the skills and knowledge needed in a cut-throat world
(Gráficos ver en la versión original).
SPOOKED by the effects of globalisation on their low-skilled citizens, rich countries have been pouring money and political energy into education. In the United States, it has been proclaimed that no child will be left behind. Whether this programme, launched by George Bush in 2002, has raised standards will be a big issue in the 2008 presidential election. Next year Britain will introduce ambitious new qualifications, combining academic and vocational study. For the industrial countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation 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 shows average attainment staying 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% 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 the 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. Some individual states would welcome a separate assessment.
The results are unsettling for Britain, too. The country was excluded from the OECD’s 2003 study because its sample of students was so poor. That, conveniently, disguised what is now apparent: that the excellent results of 2000, when the country came seventh in reading and well above average in both maths and science, were a statistical blip. This time Britain is way down the league in all three subjects. OECD analysts and British officials are highlighting the good news: immigrants do comparatively well, and 3% of British students put in top-ranking performances in science, as compared with only 1% across the OECD. “A fresh start,” said OECD officials, diplomatically—but the results have embarrassed a government that claims to have put education at the top of its agenda for a decade.
The improvement prize went to Poland, an also-ran in 2000. That reflects not increased spending, but successful reforms in 1999, which ended the practice of early selection on ability. By the second study, in 2003, the gains were already noticeable—and so marked that OECD statisticians cautioned privately that two data points do not make a trend, and decided to wait and see what happened next time. Further improvements have dispelled all doubts, making Poles the poster children for the proposition that early “tracking”—allocating pupils to different sorts of schools or programmes—hurts weak ones without benefiting the rest. “We have learnt that you can really make a change by bringing weaker performers into more demanding streams,” says Barbara Ischinger, the OECD’s director of education.
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.
Another common theme is that rising educational tides seem to lift all boats. In general—the United States and Britain may be exceptions—countries do well either by children of all abilities, or by none. Those where many do well are also those where few fall behind. A new feature in this year’s study is an attempt to work out how differences between schools, as opposed to differences within them, determine performance (see chart). Variation between schools is big in Germany (to be expected, as most schools select children on ground of ability). But results also vary in some countries (like Japan) with nominally comprehensive systems. In top-performing Finland, by contrast, the differences between schools are nearly trivial.
I’ll show you how to be top
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.
Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.