Canadian students among top in UN test
15-year-olds rated: Money spent on education does not guarantee best results
Heather Sokoloff
National Post
Wednesday, July 02, 2003
CREDIT: Corbis
Canada spends US$58,000 per student by Grade 10.
Canadian teenagers performed among the best in the world on international tests of reading, math and science, outscoring countries such as the United States, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland -- all of which spend significantly more than Canada on public education.
Students from Western Europe and North America, as well as Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and China, scored the highest on a series of tests administered to 15-year-olds in 43 countries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The results, originally released in 2001, were analyzed in a report released yesterday by the OECD and UNESCO, the United Nations' educational arm.
Researchers concluded that although a country's academic performance can be largely determined by its gross domestic product -- explaining why Latin American countries, Indonesia, Thailand and Albania lagged behind the rest of the world -- high spending on public education among industrialized countries does not guarantee academic success.
"It's not a one-to-one relationship," said Yan Hong Zhang, a Montreal-based policy analyst for UNESCO's Institute for Statistics and one of the report's authors.
Dr. Zhang noted that Italy spends about US$59,000 on each student from the beginning of primary education to the end of Grade 10, twice as much as Korea, one of the top-performing countries in all three basic subjects.
Italy, however, performs significantly below the international average, at about the same level as Poland, Liechtenstein and Greece.
"The quality of national education systems can be more important to learning than national or individual wealth," Dr. Zhang said.
The report found 43% of the variation between scores can be attributed to a country's gross domestic product, while each country's per-student expenditure explains 54% of the variation between performances.
Canadian teenagers trailed only Finland, Korea, Hong Kong and China in a test designed to gauge the reading abilities of students nearing the completion of high school. Other countries in the top 10 were Japan, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and Britain. The United States placed 16th.
Scores in math and science were similar, with students from Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and China earning the highest scores.
Canada's spending of US$59,800 on each student's education by the end of Grade 10 is surpassed by the United States, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland and Austria.
Finland spends US$47,000 per pupil, Sweden US$54,000 and Japan US$54,700. The U.S. pays US$65,000, the same amount as Denmark.
Mexico allocates US$12,000 for each school child, more than any other Latin American country.
Peru, with the largest proportion of students who failed the test, spends US$3,479 per student by the conclusion of Grade 10. Indonesia spends the least in the world at US$1,000.
Dr. Zhang says Canada is successful because the gap in academic performance between rich and poor students is among the narrowest in the world, showing it is possible to achieve educational quality and equity at the same time.
Countries with the largest performance gap between rich and poor are the United States, Argentina, Chile and Israel.
All dollar figures were adjusted to reflect the purchasing power of a dollar in each country evaluated in the report.
hsokoloff@nationalpost.com
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