Review of McKinsey report: How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top

Abstract

These are heady times in the world of international survey assessments. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which sponsors the Program in International Student Assessment (PISA) and the International Adult Literacy Strategy (IALS), and the International Education Agency (IEA), which sponsors the Trends In Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study (PIRLS), have achieved substantial, if indirect, influence on education policy in many nations. Over the last two decades, these four assessments have expanded in both scope and coverage. Each successive administration has involved a larger number of jurisdictions and garnered greater coverage in the media when scores are announced. More significantly, in many of these jurisdictions policy makers attend to the outcomes (particularly the so-called league tables) and new governmental policies are enacted as a result. Of course, the interest in education stems largely from an appreciation of the role of human capital development in economic growth (Hanushek et al. 2008). At the same time, education researchers have taken advantage of the treasure trove of data to conduct sophisticated analyses: some focus on the relationships among student performance, student background characteristics and school contexts; others look for connections between student outcomes and classroom practices. More often than not, an important goal is to identify those conditions that account for the success of the ‘‘highflyers,’’ those jurisdictions that top the charts. To this ever-growing corpus, McKinsey and Company has contributed the present report, a study of 25 jurisdictions selected on the basis of their performance on PISA 2003, TIMSS or the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a bi-annual assessment carried out in the United States. Most were either top scoring or displayed clear improvement trajectories over a number of administrations. A few countries in the Middle East and Latin America were included for comparison purposes, although they are not much mentioned in the text. The authors conducted an extensive literature review and a large number of interviews. In the end, they reached a rather unsurprising conclusion;