PISA排行榜發佈 莫被上海超級學生嚇倒

You may never have heard of Andreas Schleicher, a placid German who wouldn’t look out of place as the reliable engineer in an Audi advert, but he is the Most powerful man in global education. An employee of the OECD, he is the man in charge of Pisa, a triennial assessment that measures the performance of children across 65 countries and regions.

你或許從來沒有聽說過安德烈亞斯•施萊歇(Andreas Schleicher)，這位性格溫和的德國人即便在奧迪(Audi)的廣告中扮演一位可靠的工程師也不會顯得不搭調，但他是全球教育領域最具影響力的人物。作爲經合組織(OECD)的一名職員，他負責掌管“國際學生評估項目”（簡稱PISA），這是一個每三年舉辦一次的測試項目，考察65個國家和地區學生的能力表現。

Despite OECD warnings that the results are not reliable enough to present as league tables, they always are. And a country’s placing can inflict trauma on national psyches. When Pisa was first released, the Germans were so astonished at their relatively poor results that they invented a new word: Pisa-Schock.

雖然經合組織警告稱，從評估結果的可靠程度來說，這個項目並不適合用排行榜的形式發佈出來，但排行榜每次都有。而且一個國家的排名可能對該國民衆的心理造成重大打擊。當PISA項目的測試結果第一次發佈時，德國人對本國相對較差的成績大吃一驚，以至於他們發明了一個新詞：“Pisa衝擊”(Pisa-Schock)。

More recently, US officials, finding their pupils in the bottom half of the table, have talked of a “Sputnik moment”. When the latest results were published last week, England’s education secretary Michael Gove and his Labour counterpart Tristram Hunt immediately launched into battle over which party was most to blame for the country’s average performance. Much of Pisa’s power, in the west at least, comes from a sense that it represents a new and frightening geopolitical reality. Last week’s results saw east Asian countries move even further ahead and emerging economies such as Brazil, Indonesia and Turkey on the rise. Meanwhile, the US and western Europe have not improved at all – with the notable exception of Germany. In our nightmares this is what the balance of power looks like 10 or 20 years down the line.

近年來，美國官員在看到本國學生的成績在排行榜中位居後列時，就用“斯普特尼克時刻”(Sputnik moment)來形容他們所感受到的震撼（斯普特尼克一號是蘇聯發射的第一顆人造衛星，在當時給美國帶來巨大危機感——譯者注）。當最近一次測試結果於上週發佈時，身爲保守黨成員的英國教育大臣邁克爾•戈夫(Michael Gove)與工黨的特里斯特拉姆•亨特(Tristram Hunt)立即展開舌戰，爭論哪個黨派應爲英國學生的平庸表現負主要責任。

There are, though, reasons to question this narrative. Pisa tests a quite specific set of skills. Timss, another international test that looks more closely at the type of content we have in our curriculums, finds the UK and US up in the top 10, not so far off the far east.

PISA的影響力，至少就西方而言，部分源於一種認爲其代表了令人恐懼的地緣政治新現實的觀念。上週公佈的結果顯示，東亞國家的排名進一步提升，巴西、印度尼西亞以及土耳其等新興經濟體的排名也在上升當中。而美國和西歐國家的排名則完全沒有進步——只有德國是個明顯的例外。這正是我們噩夢中未來一、二十年世界實力的分佈態勢。

Moreover the seemingly intuitive relationship between education and economic success is not that clear. In the first international mathematics test, in the early 1960s, the US came last, yet has remained an economic superpower. The researcher Keith Baker actually found a negative correlation between scores in this test and future growth. Similarly, the US-based Chinese academic Yong Zhao found a negative correlation between Pisa scores and a global survey of entrepreneurial aspirations.

但有理由對這種觀念提出質疑。PISA考察的是一組非常具體的技能。另一項全球性測試“國際數學和科學趨勢研究”（簡稱TIMSS）更貼近西方的學校教學內容，英國和美國在該項考試中的排名處於前十名以內，並沒有遠遠落後於遠東國家。

That said, it would require some complacency to think we should pay no attention to Pisa at all. The risk of our current approach to Pisa analysis is that educators, fed up with being blamed for failure, simply dismiss it all as meaningless political theatre. That would be a shame since, for all its complexity, the results do raise important questions.

更重要的是，教育與經濟成就之間感覺上理所當然的關係其實並不明確。二十世紀六十年代初，美國在首個全球性數學測試中排名墊底，但仍是一個經濟超級大國。研究員基斯•貝克(Keith Baker)甚至發現，一國學生在這項測試中取得的成績與該國未來經濟增速之間存在負相關。與之類似，目前在美國工作的中國學者趙勇（音譯）發現，PISA成績與一項有關企業家抱負的全球調查結果之間存在負相關。

Particularly: how do poor children in Asian countries do so well? Only 6 per cent of the UK’s poorest quartile of pupils appear in the highest quarter of maths performers globally. In Japan and South Korea the figure is twice as high. In Shanghai and Hong Kong it is four times higher. The poorest quartile of students in Shanghai do better in maths than the richest in the UK.

儘管如此，需要很有一點自負才會認爲我們完全不用在意PISA測試結果。當前我們對待PISA的態度存在的風險是：教育者們受夠了因爲PISA結果不理想而備受指責，可能轉而單純將其看做是毫無意義的政治做戲。這將是很遺憾的結果，因爲PISA測試儘管存在複雜性，但從其結果中確實可以看出一些重要問題。

It is tempting to put this down to “culture”. And it is true; the level of expectation in Chinese, Korean and Japanese schools, from both parents and teachers, is higher. The west’s obsession with innate ability means we tend to assume than a certain percentage of young people are not “suited” to academic pursuits.

最重要的一點是：爲什麼亞洲低收入家庭的孩子在測試中能夠取得好成績？在英國，來自收入排行後25%家庭的學生中，只有6%的人能躋身全球數學成績排名前25%的行列。而在日本和韓國，該比例是英國的兩倍。在上海和香港，該比例是英國的四倍。上海來自收入最低的四分之一家庭的學生比英國最富裕家庭孩子的數學成績更好。

Far Eastern students spend more time in school, more time in after-school lessons and more time on homework. And the work they are doing is harder and more complex. When a pupil falls behind, it is assumed they will be able to catch up with the right intervention rather than that they are “low ability”.

人們難免會把這種現象歸結於“文化差異”。確實，中國、韓國以及日本對學生的期望很高，這種期望既來自學生家長，也來自學校老師。而西方對天賦的過分強調意味着我們傾向於假定有一定比例的青少年“不適合”走上學術道路。

Yet policy has played a part too. Shanghai has seen big improvements over recent years through a series of reforms to get good teachers and headteachers into the weakest performing schools – something that was also behind much of the recent improvement in London’s schools.

遠東地區的學生花在學校、課外課程以及家庭作業上的時間比西方學生多。而且他們的課業難度更大、更加複雜。當一個學生成績落後時，他們通常會被認爲在有效干預手段的幫助下有能力追趕上來，而非天生“能力低下”。

Moreover, there has been huge focus on professional development; with teachers spending less time in the classroom and more time planning and researching (the cost has been bigger classes). Singapore has also invested in workforce development; headteachers there now get academic-style sabbaticals.

然而政府政策也發揮了一定作用。近年來上海推行了一系列改革措施，將優秀師資和校長資源注入教學表現最差的學校，取得了顯著效果——倫敦學校近年取得的進步部分也歸功於類似措施。

Some less-heralded high performers, such as Poland and Estonia, have also been investing in teachers, as well as toughening up their curriculums. Estonia in particular has managed to combine impressive rigour with modernity, recently introducing computer coding for all first-year primary students.

此外，東亞地區對教師的職業發展也高度重視：老師花在課堂教學上的時間減少，而花在規劃和研究方面的時間增加（由此導致的成本是每班人數的增加）。新加坡還在教師隊伍培養方面投入大量資金，當地的中小學校長現在能休學術假。

We do, though, need to be careful about cherry-picking things that seem to work abroad. As Professor Robert Coe of Durham university has said, almost any policy invoked as the recipe for a given country’s success can also be found in a low- performing country. Implementation is key. Whatever reforms are undertaken need clear objectives and widespread buy-in. Assigning blame for “failures”, whether to politicians or to teachers, does not help. It might be that our Sturm und Drang approach to the education debate is the first thing we need to change.

波蘭、愛沙尼亞等一些排名意外靠前的國家也在師資建設方面持續投資，並提高了教學內容的難度。特別是愛沙尼亞，該國將令人印象深刻的嚴格要求與教學內容的現代性成功結合起來，近期還面向所有小學一年級學生開設了計算機編程課程。