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Paying More for Less: Placing Canadian Education in an International Context

by Patrick Basham

Defenders of the educational status quo frequently remark upon how well Canadian students compare with their international peers despite the relative paucity of educational funding in this country.

Unfortunately for both Canadian students and taxpayers, neither claim is accurate. In fact, the latest research reveals quite the opposite: Canadian students perform relatively poorly vis-à-vis their international counterparts despite the most generous educational funding in the developed world.

In the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) current compilation of education indicators for economically advanced countries, the Paris-based research organization uses results from the most comprehensive international academic achievement surveys, as measured by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement.¹

The OECD's use of standardized average achievement score data allow researchers to place Canadian schools and students in an international context, thereby enabling a comparison of our education system's performance with that of systems operating in other countries.

Overall, Canadian students' abilities are very ordinary. An analysis of the distribution of mathematics achievement scores for fourth grade students reveals that the average Canadian student scores lower than the average OECD student. Broken down by country, the average Canadian student scores lower than the average American, Australian, Japanese, Korean, Austrian, Irish, Dutch, Czech, and Hungarian student.

The OECD report also provides a percentage breakdown of fourth grade mathematics students scoring above the 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles, respectively, of the collective OECD achievement distribution. On average, 41.4 percent of the students from OECD countries score above the 50th percentile; in Canada, however, only 37.7 percent of them do so. The OECD average above the 75th percentile is 19.4 percent; the Canadian average is just 15.5 percent. Among students scoring above the OECD's 90th percentile, Canada manages to place only 5.0 percent compared with an OECD average of 7.5 percent.

The science achievement data reveal the typical fourth grade Canadian student to be average, at best, by OECD standards. Broken down by country, our students score lower than, for example, English, American, Australian, Dutch, and Japanese students. The results are similar for the percentile distribution of science achievement scores for fourth grade students. Again, Canadian students on average score lower than their American, Australian, and English peers.

Of course, it is important to measure not only absolute achievement but also student progress from one grade to another. As the leading American education policy experts Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Prof. Herbert J. Walberg recently noted, "The big question about the impact of schools ... is not how much students know at one point in time, but how much progress they make as the years go by."²

The value of the OECD data is enhanced, therefore, by these measures of "value-added" progress, which allow for the measurement of actual school influence, rather than socio-economic and other environmental factors.

To put it euphemistically, the news for Canadians is not good. In comparative terms, from grade to grade, Canadian schools make some of the smallest academic improvements.

For example, the increase between our students' average fourth and eighth grade science scores is 10 percent less than the difference between the average OECD student's fourth and eighth grade scores. In terms of progress in science, Canadian schools score lower than, for example, Greek, Portuguese, Scottish, and Icelandic schools. In terms of science progress from seventh to eighth grade, Canadian schools place an embarrassing 21st out of 24 OECD countries.

Regarding mathematics progress from the fourth to the eighth grades, Canadian schools place behind Icelandic, Japanese, New Zealand, Norwegian, Korean, and Czech schools. The progress in mathematics from seventh to eighth grades is similarly discomforting: Canadian schools place 14th out of 24, behind Spanish, Greek, and French schools.

Although the comparative performance of both Canadian students and the Canadian educational system is demonstrably mediocre, do our teachers' unions and educational bureaucrats nevertheless have a point when claiming that the only thing wrong with public education is an insufficient supply of public funds?

According to the OECD, they most certainly do not. The reality is that Canada subsidizes education at a higher rate than all but one other OECD country.

Canadian expenditure on primary and secondary education is equivalent to 4.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP); Sweden, at 4.5 percent of GDP, is the only OECD country that spends at a higher rate.³

The OECD draws an inescapable conclusion from the current education indicators:

The fact that there appears to be neither a strong nor a consistent relationship at the national level between the level of resources and student outcomes provides further evidence that variation between countries cannot be explained alone in terms of financial or staff resource levels and that the search for improvement in school performance must extend to factors that lie beyond material inputs.

Clearly, this report significantly strengthens the position of those who favour focusing attention upon parental involvement, teacher accountability, freedom of movement for students between schools, and other non-material influences upon school performance.

However, the critical public policy question is whether, thanks to the OECD, the members of our educational establishment are now forced to come out from behind the tarnished intellectual facade that masks their professional self-interest to defend the costly, unproductive status quo.

Notes

¹ Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1995, 1996, and 1997). Specifically, the OECD data track the development of students between the ages of 9 and 14 in mathematics, science, and reading.

² Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Herbert J. Walberg, "The World's Least Efficient Schools," The Wall Street Journal, June 22, 1998, p. A22.

³Source: The OECD database. Figures refer to 1994 expenditures.

Patrick Basham is The Fraser Institute's Director of the Social Affairs Centre. He is completing his Ph.D. in Political Science from Cambridge University.

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