OECDPISA learning outcomesSpooked by the effects of globalisation on their low-skilled citizens, rich countries have been pouring money and political energy into education. In the industrial countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation 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 (PISA) shows average attainment remaining 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 percent 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 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.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.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.MexicoNew rector for top universityWith some 160,000 undergraduate…
