From Preschool to PISA

We still don't have a ranking of kindergartens although no doubt that will happen one day. But there is now a country ranking of early education prepared by the Economist Intelligence Unit for the Lien Foundation "a Singapore philanthropic house noted for its model of radical philanthropy" (Economist print edition, 30/06/12). Details can be found here.

The ranking combines four indicators, Availability, Affordability, Quality of the Preschool Environment and Social Context, "which examines how healthy and ready for school children are".

The top five are:
1.  Finland
2.  Sweden
3.  Norway
4.  UK
5.  Belgium

The bottom five are:

41. Vietnam
42.  China
43.  Philippines
44.  Indonesia
45.   India

It is interesting to compare this with the  ability of fifteen year old students as measured by the 2009 PISA report. Finland, which is top of the preschool ranking, also scores well on all three sections of the PISA rankings, Reading, Science and Maths.

However, the United Kingdom which is ranked 4th in the preschool rankings does no better than the OECD average in the PISA ranking for Reading and Maths although not too badly in Science.

At the bottom of the preschool rankings we find China and India. In the PISA plus ranking India was represented by just two states and they preformed miserably.

On the other hand, China whose preschool system is ranked 42nd out of 45, does very well, ranking first in all three sections, or rather Shanghai does very well.

A warning is needed here. Mainland China is represented in the PISA rankings only by Shanghai. The results would almost certainly be very different if they included the whole of China including its huge rural hinterland. It is likely that if all of  China had been assessed its scores would have been something like Taiwan (Chinese Taipei), 495 instead of 556 for Reading, 543 instead of 600 for Maths and 520 instead of 575 for Science.

Even so, it is striking that the UK could have such highly ranked  preschools and such  modest secondary school achievement while China has lowly ranked preschools but such high scores at secondary level if we just consider Shanghai or scores similar to Taiwan's if we estimate what the nationwide level might be.

There are other apparent anomalies. For example, Singapore is only slightly better than Mexico on the preschool rankings but forges well ahead on the PISA rankings.

It could be that preschool education does not have much to do with long term achievement. Also, some of the criteria, such as how healthy children are, may not have much do with anything that a preschool does or can do. Nor should we forget the preschool ranking deals with input while the PISA rankings are about performance.

Furthermore, it is likely that the culture, social structure and demography of contemporary Asia, Europe and the Americas explain some of these differences in the effect of preschool education.