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We study whether autonomous schools, which are publicly funded but can operate more independently than government-run schools, affect student achievement and school segregation across 15 countries over 16 years. Our triple-differences regressions exploit between-grade variation in the share of students attending autonomous schools within a given country and year. While autonomous schools do not affect overall achievement, effects are positive for high-socioeconomic status students and negative for immigrants. Impacts on segregation mirror these findings, with evidence of increased segregation by socioeconomic and immigrant status. Rather than creating "a rising tide that lifts all boats," autonomous schools increase inequality

Intersectionality highlights that different aspects of individuals' identities are not independent of each other. Instead, they interact to create unique identities and experiences, which cannot be understood by analysing each identity dimension separately or in isolation from their social and historical contexts. Intersectional approaches in this way question the common classification of individuals into groups (male vs. female, immigrant vs. native etc.), which raises important implications for the policy-making process. In education, analyses with an intersectional lens have the potential to lead to better tailored and more effective policies and interventions related to participation, learning outcomes, students' attitudes towards the future, identification of needs, and socio-emotional well-being. Consequently, as elaborated in this paper, some countries have adjusted their policies in the areas of governance, resourcing, developing capacity, promoting school-level interventions and monitoring, to account for intersectionality. Gaps and challenges related to intersectional approaches are also highlighted.

Principals (policy makers) have debated the progress in U.S. student performance for a half century or more. Informing these conversations, survey agents have administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math and reading in 160 waves to national probability samples of selected cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. This study is the first to assess consistency of results by agency. We find results vary by agent, but consistent with Flynn effects, gains are larger in math than reading, except for the most recent period. Non-whites progress at a faster pace. Socio-economically disadvantaged white, black, and Hispanic students make greater progress when tested in elementary school, but that advantage attenuates and reverses itself as students age. We discuss potential moderators.

Individual teachers, administrators, and parents made tremendous efforts to continue educating the Commonwealth's children between March and June of this year. But no amount of dedicated individual effort could have overcome fundamental challenges: weak guidance to districts from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) against a backdrop of deficient knowledge and sophistication statewide with regard to virtual learning. Digital education has been empirically proven to be most successful when schools prepare and follow best distance learning practices. However, the Commonwealth lacks even the minimum technological infrastructure for virtual learning, as exemplified by districts scrambling to obtain electronic devices and internet connections during the school closure. It is encouraging that Governor Baker and the DESE have described a fall 2020 return to brick-and-mortar schooling--with appropriate health measures to maximize safety--as a significant priority. The present challenge is how to implement this much-needed return to school, optimally balancing the importance of in-person schooling with the countervailing importance of protecting against the virus. The following paper contributes important insights, based upon careful review of other countries that have already successfully reopened their schools. [Foreword written by David S. Clancy and Dr. John G. Flores.]

The aim of the OECD Career Readiness project is to identify patterns of teenage attitudes and activities that are associated with better transitions into employment by analysing multiple national longitudinal datasets. This paper looks for further evidence of the link between teenage activities, experiences and career-related thinking and adult career outcomes by analysing 10 new datasets from eight countries. Overall, the results of this paper find further evidence that secondary school students who explore, experience and think about their futures in work frequently encounter lower levels of unemployment, receive higher wages and are happier in their careers as adults. The findings of this paper are analysed together with the evidence from the two previous working papers of the Career Readiness project, concluding that there is international evidence to support 11 out of the 14 potential indicators that were explored as indicators of career readiness.

This paper quantifies the learning gain that accrues to 15-year-old students over one year of schooling in 18 countries and economies, where the cohort eligible to sit the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)ISA test overlaps with two distinct school cohorts. School-entry regulations are used as an exogenous source of variation for grade levels in an instrumental- variables framework. The focus on the joint effect of schooling and age, together with (local) linearity assumptions, make it possible to account for differences in school-starting age across students who are expected to be in different grades. On average, students' test scores increase by about one-fifth of a standard deviation over a school year. While estimates of the grade gain for individual countries and economies come with wide confidence intervals, this study also shows the annual learning gain of students around the age of 15 tends to be larger in high-income countries compared to middle-income countries.

While more women than ever now participate in the paid workforce, it still can be hard to find women in top leadership positions. To understand why so few women are in top leadership positions, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) set out to understand what factors help women achieve leadership positions, what factors prevent it, and how organizations could add more women to their leadership ranks. In this paper, the authors raise five key questions that women should reflect on as they consider their ambitions. They summarize five key lessons that came up repeatedly in conversations with women leaders who had worked their way into leadership positions. The authors also discuss some of the changes organizations can make to increase the number of women leaders. These include policies and changes in organizational culture. Research was conducted two phases. First, the authors surveyed 204 women leaders from Singapore, Australia, India, and Korea. The authors gave them a list of reasons that might contribute to the lack of women in leadership positions and asked them to select up to five items they most agreed with and five they most disagreed with. In phase two, the authors conducted 27 face-to-face interviews with women leaders working in Singapore. Women told their personal leadership stories, shared their perspective on women leaders' career enablers and blockers, and also completed the phase 1 survey. The authors learned that there is no single reason or simple solution. Increasing the number of women in leadership positions will require aspiring women leaders to develop themselves professionally and, in some cases, adopt new behaviors. But the organizational context that women work within is also important.

Digital technologies offer immense potential for transforming teacher learning and the delivery of professional development activities throughout teachers' careers. As the COVID-19 pandemic has made face-to­-face professional learning challenging or impossible for teachers to attend in many contexts, online professional learning options for teachers have been receiving renewed attention. This paper puts forward research evidence on the effectiveness of various forms of online learning for teachers and adults, and examines prerequisite conditions for enhancing teacher learning through digital technologies. Teachers' engagement in online learning activities, as captured by OECD surveys, remained limited in many OECD countries before the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper provides a basis for investigating how policies can support teachers' engagement in professional learning using digital technologies and help strike a balance between system-level provision of online teacher professional learning opportunities and the facilitation of teacher-led initiatives.

This paper aims to survey the current landscape of education policy evaluation across OECD countries and economies by examining recent trends and contextual factors that can promote more robust education policy evaluation, as well as identifying key challenges. It takes a view of policy evaluation as an activity that takes place throughout the entire policy cycle, before, during, and after a reform is implemented. It proposes a supporting framework for education policy evaluation that integrates institutional factors which can help to build robust underpinnings for policy evaluation. It also presents some specific considerations to take into account for individual policy evaluation processes. Analysis of more than 80 evaluations across OECD education systems provides an indication of the diversity of approaches taken in the policy evaluation process. Key findings refer to the "who", "when", "what", "how", "for what" and "what next" of policy evaluation processes through a comparative lens.

Triangulation -- a combined use of different assessment methods or sources to evaluate psychological constructs -- is still a rarely used assessment approach in spite of its potential in overcoming inherent constraints of individual assessment methods. This paper uses field test data from a new OECD Study on Social and Emotional Skills to examine the triangulated assessment of 19 social and emotional skills of 10- and 15-year-old students across 11 cities and countries. This study assesses students' social and emotional skills combining three sources of information: students' self-reports and reports by parents and teachers. We examine convergent and divergent validities of the assessment scales and the analytical value of combining information from multiple informants. Findings show that students', parents' and teachers' reports on students' skills overlap to a substantial degree. In addition, a strong 'common rater' effect is identified for all three informants and seems to be reduced when we use the triangulation approach. Finally, triangulation provides skill estimates with stronger relations to various life outcomes compared with individual student, parent or teacher reports.

The OECD's new Study on Social and Emotional Skills aims to provide policy makers, educators, families and communities with a comprehensive set of tools to foster students' social and emotional learning. The Study's assessment framework -- presented in this paper -- is a result of an extensive literature review of previous research, existing frameworks and assessment approaches in the area of social and emotional skills. The framework, developed by a team of experts in various domains, incorporates evidence from psychology, education, organisational sciences, sociology, economy, and public policy. This framework describes the objectives, characteristics and expected outcomes of the Study. It presents the conceptual model of social and emotional skills assessed in the Study, their development, malleability and predictive value. The framework also discusses how factors in students' family, school and peer environment influence their social and emotional skills' development along with the contextual questionnaires designed to gather this information. The framework also presents the Study's design, assessment approach, instrument development process, sampling procedures and data collection methods.

The worldwide school closures in early 2020 led to losses in learning that will not easily be made up for even if schools quickly return to their prior performance levels. These losses will have lasting economic impacts both on the affected students and on each nation unless they are effectively remediated. While the precise learning losses are not yet known, existing research suggests that the students in grades 1-12 affected by the closures might expect some 3 percent lower income over their entire lifetimes. For nations, the lower long-term growth related to such losses might yield an average of 1.5 percent lower annual GDP for the remainder of the century. These economic losses would grow if schools are unable to re-start quickly. The economic losses will be more deeply felt by disadvantaged students. All indications are that students whose families are less able to support out-of-school learning will face larger learning losses than their more advantaged peers, which in turn will translate into deeper losses of lifetime earnings. The present value of the economic losses to nations reach huge proportions. Just returning schools to where they were in 2019 will not avoid such losses. Only making them better can. While a variety of approaches might be attempted, existing research indicates that close attention to the modified re-opening of schools offers strategies that could ameliorate the losses. Specifically, with the expected increase in video-based instruction, matching the skills of the teaching force to the new range of tasks and activities could quickly move schools to heightened performance. Additionally, because the prior disruptions are likely to increase the variations in learning levels within individual classrooms, pivoting to more individualised instruction could leave all students better off as schools resume. As schools move to re-establish their programmes even as the pandemic continues, it is natural to focus considerable attention on the mechanics and logistics of safe re-opening. But the long-term economic impacts also require serious attention, because the losses already suffered demand more than the best of currently considered re-opening approaches.

Are teachers and principals aligned in their perceptions of the core components of the theory of Leadership for Learning across countries, or are there subgroups of schools in which there is misalignment? The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which a congruency-typology model of leadership for learning is distributed across countries/economies using the TALIS 2018 dataset through examining the interaction of significantly different subgroups of teacher and principal responders through using multilevel latent class analysis (LCA) with a cross-level interaction. I analyse data from lower secondary schools of n=152 635 teachers in 9 079 schools and their principals across 47 countries/economies. Currently in the research literature on school leadership, leadership for learning has emerged as a framework to bring together managerial, transformational, distributed, and instructional leadership. Yet little is known about leadership for learning across national contexts. This study 1) maps the TALIS 2018 survey items to the current literature and surveys for leadership for learning, 2) then details the methods and analysis framework to examine if there are multiple significantly different types of teachers, principals, and schools from a leadership for learning theory framework. The final model 3) identifies a three-group teacher typology and a three-group principal typology, linking these types to school context, covariates, as well as teacher and principal training and experience. Results relate directly to the intersection of research, policy, and practice for training and capacity of school leaders across 47 countries/economies globally.

This paper explores the impact of test-taking conditions on the quality of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) assessment. Interviewers record information about the room of assessment and interruptions that occurred during each interview. These observations, along with information on interviewer assignment size and a careful look at interviewer effects, provide insights into the quality of the assessment. This working paper first describes the variations in test-taking conditions among participating countries. Second, it examines interviewer assignment sizes and the frequency of interruptions, finding that both vary markedly among countries (contrary to the room of assessment). The paper then looks at the relationship between these variations and response rates and engagement measures. While neither the room of assessment nor the recorded interruptions impact quality differences among countries, interviewer assignment size and interviewer effects may have a mild impact on results.

Numeracy and literacy skills have become increasingly important in modern labour markets. The large gender differences that several studies have identified have therefore sparked considerable attention among researchers and policy makers. Little is known about the moment in which such gaps emerge, how they evolve and if their evolution differs across countries. We use data from large-scale international assessments to follow representative samples of birth-cohorts over time, and analyse how gender gaps in numeracy and literacy evolve from age 10 to age 27. Our results suggest that, across the countries examined, males' advantage in numeracy is smallest at age 10 and largest at age 27. The growth in magnitude of the gender gap is particularly pronounced between the age of 15 and 27. Such evolution stands in sharp contrast with the evolution of the gender gap in literacy, which is small at age 10, large and in favour of females at age 15, and negligible by age 27.

This study uses the PIAAC data to examine the relationships between education system characteristics (e.g. early tracking and vocational education orientation) and distributions of adult numeracy skills. It also investigates the effects of postponing the tracking age and easing university access for students on a vocational track on the average skills and different percentiles of the skills distribution. Correlational analysis suggests that education systems with more students enrolled in vocational tracks have on average higher levels of numeracy skills and more compressed skills distributions between the 50th and 90th percentiles. Further analysis suggests that postponing the tracking age among 14 European countries does not have a significant effect on the average skills of the population. However, it increases skills for individuals at the 10th, 20th, and 30th percentiles of the skill distribution. Expanding university access is associated with an increase in numeracy skills, particularly for individuals at the bottom three deciles of the distribution.

Set against the backdrop of increasing economic interdependence in East Asia, the idea of regional integration is now being discussed as a long-term political process in the region. As in the field of the international economy, de facto integration and interdependence exist with respect to the internationalization of the higher education system in East Asia. Based on the results of a comprehensive Japan International Cooperation Agency Research Institute (JICA-RI) survey of 300 leading higher education institutions active in cross-border higher education, located in ten Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member Southeast Asian countries and three Northeast Asian countries (China, Japan, and Korea), this paper examines universities perceptions of the degree of cross-border activities, the significance of their expected outcomes, and their regional preferences for partners. The objective is to envision a direction for a future regional higher education framework in East Asia and to consider the policy implications of the internationalization of higher education in East Asia in the context of regionalization. The findings related to the degree of cross-border activities suggest a current perception that there is more prominent in conventional than in innovative activities, but that innovation will rise considerably in the future. With respect to the significance of expected outcomes,academic and political expected outcome are perceived to be more significant than economic expected outcome, which are nevertheless expected to be more significant in the future. Finally, in terms of their preferred regions of partners, universities in East Asia overall place a high priority on building partnerships within their own region. Yet, among Northeast Asian universities, North America is perceived as the most active partner. (Contains 3 figures, 21 tables, and 13 footnotes.) [This paper was prepared as part of a Japan International Cooperation Agency Research Institute (JICA-RI) research project titled, "Cross-border Higher Education for Regional Integration and the Labor Market in East Asia."]

As digital tools proliferate and improve, solid instruction in the basics will eventually become "flat"--available anywhere globally--and the elements of excellent teaching that are most difficult for technology to replace will increasingly differentiate student outcomes. As a result, teacher effectiveness may matter even more than it does today, as the selectivity and prevalence of the teachers-in-charge who will leverage technology--and be leveraged by it--will be the distinguisher of learning outcomes among schools and nations. But in order to allow for such a drastic reshaping of the education system in the U.S., myriad policies affecting teachers--from professional development to compensation--will need to be revamped. This paper outlines how. (Contains 46 endnotes.)

Teacher selection, retention, and evaluation form a contentious policy knot. This paper: (1) reviews the recent history of teacher labor markets; (2) describes the teacher selection, preparation and retention policies of three countries that successfully reformed their systems; (3) proposes a different theoretical guide; and (4) reviews key teacher survey data and a large, current experiment in teacher evaluation. Based on this evidence, it then proposes a more promising experiment in teacher selection, preparation, and assignment. This proposed experiment offers an opportunity to overcome some cultural and institutional character flaws. It would systematically select, train, and place our most capable teachers with our highest-need children and families. It deliberately limits turnover and limits costs in several ways.

This paper looks at the importance of mechanisms that give formal recognition to vocational skills acquired through work-based learning and how such mechanisms might be developed. It describes how skill recognition can benefit individuals, employers and society as a whole, and identifies in which contexts skill recognition has the highest potential to bring benefits. The focus is on three tools that are commonly used to shorten the path to a formal qualification: admission into a programme, reduced programme duration and qualification without a mandatory programme. For each of these tools, this paper sets out country approaches, discusses common challenges that arise in their implementation and advances policy messages to support policy design and implementation.

Resilience refers to the capacity of individuals to prosper despite encountering adverse circumstances. This paper defines academic resilience as the ability of 15-year-old students from disadvantaged backgrounds to perform at a certain level in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in reading, mathematics and science that enables them to play an active role in their communities and prepares them to make the most of lifelong-learning opportunities. Using data from the most recent PISA cycles, this paper explores changes in the share of resilient students over time (2006-2015); highlights the importance of school environments and resources in mitigating the risk of low achievement for disadvantaged students; and identifies school-level factors that are associated with the likelihood of academic resilience among socio-economically disadvantaged students. Analyses reveal that several countries were able to increase the share of resilient students over time, reflecting improvements in the average performance of students, or a weaker relationship between socio-economic status and performance. In the vast majority of education systems examined, the likelihood of academic resilience among disadvantaged students is lower in schools where students report a negative classroom climate. The paper concludes by exploring school policies and practices that are associated with a positive classroom climate. [This work was supported by a contribution to the PISA programme of work from Vodafone Germany Foundation.]

The paper examines between-country differences in the mechanisms through which education could promote generalised trust using data from 29 countries participating in the OECD's Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). Results indicate that education is strongly associated with generalised trust and that a large part of this association is mediated by individuals' literacy skills, income and occupational prestige. However, education gradients in levels of generalised trust and in the extent to which they are due to social stratification mechanisms or cognitive skills mechanisms vary across countries. Differences across countries in birthplace diversity and income inequality are correlated with how strongly education is associated with trust in different countries, as well as in the relative magnitude of direct and indirect associations. In particular, the relationship between literacy skills and generalised trust is stronger in the presence of greater birthplace diversity but is weaker in the presence of greater income inequality.

There is growing evidence that students throughout the world no longer see the US as the primary place to study; that in some form this correlates with a rise in perceived quality and prestige in the EU and elsewhere; and further, that this may mean a continued decline in the US's market share of international students. There clearly are a complex set of variables that will influence international education and global labor markets, including the current global economic recession. Ultimately, however, we think these factors will not alter the fundamental dynamics of the new global market, which include these facts: the international flow of talent, scientific or otherwise, is being fundamentally altered as nations invest more in educational attainment and human capital; the US will continue to lose some of its market share over time--the only question is how quickly and by how much; and without a proactive strategy, nations such as the US that are highly dependent on global in-migration of talented students and professionals are most vulnerable to downward access to global talent, with a potentially significant impact on future economic growth. This study provides data on past and recent global trends in international enrollment, and offers a set of policy recommendations for the US at the federal, state, and institutional level. This includes our recommendation of a national goal to double the number of international students in the US over the next decade to match numbers in a group of competitor nations, and requires recognition that the US will need to strategically expand its enrollment capacity and graduation rates to accommodate needed increases in the educational attainment rate of US citizens, and to welcome more international students. Attracting talent in a global market and increasing degree attainment rates of the domestic population are not mutually exclusive goals. Indeed, they will be the hallmarks of the most competitive economies. (Contains 6 figures and 41 endnotes.)

We assess the relationship between general literacy skills and health status by analysing data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), an international survey of about 250,000 adults aged 16-65 years conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 2011-15 in 33 countries/national sub-regions. Across countries, there seems to be a strong and consistent association between general literacy proficiency and self-rated poor health, independent of prior socio-economic status and income. General literacy proficiency also appears to be a mediator of the association between self-education and self-rated poor health. While the literacy-health association is robust over time, it varies in magnitude across countries. It is strongest for those with a tertiary or higher degree and does not appear to exist among young adults (ages 25 to 34 years). Future studies are required to understand the contextual factors that modify the general literacy proficiency-health association.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the link between age and proficiency in information-processing skills, based on information drawn from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The data reveal significant age-related differences in proficiencies, strongly suggesting that proficiency tends to "naturally" decline with age. Age differences in proficiency are, at first sight, substantial. On average across the OECD countries participating in PIAAC, adults aged 55 to 65 score some 30 points less than adults aged 25 to 34 on the PIAAC literacy scale, which is only slightly smaller than the score point difference between tertiary educated and less-than-upper-secondary educated individuals. However, despite their lower levels of proficiency, older individuals do not seem to suffer in terms of labour market outcomes. In particular, they generally earn higher wages, and much of the available empirical evidence suggests that they are not less productive than younger workers. Older and more experienced individuals seem therefore able to compensate the decline in information processing skills with the development of other skills, generally much more difficult to measure. On the other hand, proficiency in information-processing skills remain a strong determinant of important outcomes at all ages: this makes it important to better understand which factors are the most effective in preventing such age-related decline in proficiency, which does not occur to the same extent in all countries and for all individuals. Two broad interventions seem to be particularly promising in this respect. First, it is important to ensure that there is adequate and effective investment in skills development early in the life-cycle: as skills beget skills, starting off with a higher stock of human capital seems also to ensure smaller rates of proficiency decline. Second, it is equally important that policies are in place that provide incentives to individuals (and firms) to invest in skills across the entire working life. In this respect, changes in retirement policies can not only have the short-term effect of providing some reliefs to public finance, but have the potential to radically reshape incentives to stay active, to practice their skills and to invest more in training, thus helping to maintain high levels of proficiency. One table, Age Differences and Age Effects, is appended.

Using the 2012 PIAAC data, our analysis confirms that there are significantly higher earnings and employment returns to "both" increasing levels of formally recognised education, and to increasing levels of numeracy, literacy and information and communication technologies (ICT) skills proficiencies controlling for the level of education. Unsurprisingly, the labour market returns to changes in formally recognised levels of education in general exceed the labour market returns associated with increasing levels of skills proficiency. In the case of literacy and numeracy proficiencies, improved literacy and numeracy skills narrow the labour market outcomes gap between individuals with different levels of formally recognised education, but do not close it completely. The analysis demonstrates more substantial returns to ICT skills. Furthermore, possession of higher levels of ICT skills and lower levels of formally recognised qualification are often associated with higher returns compared to individuals with higher levels of formally recognised education but lower ICT proficiency levels. In other words, ICT skills proficiencies often entirely compensate for lower formally recognised qualifications in the labour market. Contains the following annexes: (1) Country Literacy and Numeracy Profiles; and (2) Demographic Control Variables.

This paper explores the impact of policies and institutions on employment and unemployment of OECD countries in the past decades. Reduced-form unemployment equations, consistent with standard wage setting/price-setting models, are estimated using cross-country/time-series data from 21 OECD countries over the period 1982-2003. In the "average" OECD country, high and long-lasting unemployment benefits, high tax wedges and stringent anticompetitive product market regulation are found to increase aggregate unemployment. By contrast, highly centralised and/or coordinated wage bargaining systems are estimated to reduce unemployment. These findings are robust across specifications, datasets and econometric methods. As policies and institutions affect employment not only via their impact on aggregate unemployment but also through their effects on labour market participation -- particularly for those groups "at the margin" of the labour market, group-specific employment rate equations are also estimated. In the "average" OECD country, high unemployment benefits and high tax wedges are found to be associated with lower employment prospects for all groups studied, namely prime-age males, females, older workers and youths. There is also evidence that group-specific policy determinants matter, such as targeted fiscal incentives. The paper also finds significant evidence of interactions across policies and institutions, as well as between institutions and macroeconomic conditions. Consistent with theory, structural reforms appear to have mutually reinforcing effects: the impact of a given policy reform is greater the more employment-friendly the overall policy and institutional framework. Certain more specific interactions across policies and institutions are found to be particularly robust, notably between unemployment benefits and public spending on active labour market programmes as well as between statutory minimum wages and the tax wedge. Finally, it is shown that macroeconomic conditions also matter for unemployment patterns, with their impact being shaped by policies. (A bibliography is included. Contains 144 footnotes, 9 figures, 3 boxes and 27 tables.)