China outclasses West in key education survey of education capabilities

Teenagers from four big Chinese regions outshone Western contemporaries nations in a keenly watched survey of education capabilities published Tuesday, which also showed no improvement trend in developed countries over two decades.

The PISA survey is carried out every three years by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this time among its 37 member states and 42 partner countries and economies. The latest study, which was conducted last year among 600,000 15-year-old students who all took two-hour tests, showed that students in four Chinese regions of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang - as well as Singapore - topped the rankings, ahead of their Western counterparts in reading, mathematics and science.

In reading, which the OECD considers its headline indicator of education potential, the best performing OECD state was the tiny Baltic nation of Estonia, followed by Canada, Finland and Ireland. Angel Gurria, the OECD's secretary-general, said the students from the four Chinese provinces had "outperformed by a large margin their peers from all of the other 78 participating education systems".

Moreover, the 10 per cent most socio-economically disadvantaged students in these four areas "also showed better reading skills than those of the average student in OECD countries, as well as skills similar to the 10 percent most advantaged students in some of these countries." He cautioned that these four provinces and municipalities in eastern China "are far from representing China as a whole." Yet their combined populations amount to over 180 million people, and the size of each region is equivalent to a typical OECD country. "What makes their achievement even more remarkable is that the level of income of these four Chinese regions is well below the OECD average," Gurria said in a preface to the study.

"The quality of their schools today will feed into the strength of their economies tomorrow." But Gurria also sounded a word of caution over the Chinese system, indicating that more care needed to be taken with regards to students' well-being. "When it comes to those social and emotional outcomes, the top-performing Chinese provinces/municipalities are among the education systems with most room for improvement," he said. Looking at the results of the developed OECD countries, he said it was "disappointing" that most member states had seen "virtually no improvement in the performance of their students" since the first PISA survey of 2000.