By Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills, OECD
One of the frequent claims made to explain poor learning outcomes is that teachers are not drawn from among a nation’s best and brightest graduates. Conversely, high-performing countries are often presumed to recruit their teachers from among the top third of graduates.
It sounds plausible, given that the quality of a school system will never exceed the quality of its teachers. And, certainly, top school systems select their teaching staff carefully. But does this mean that, in those countries, the top graduates chose to become teachers rather than, say, lawyers, doctors or engineers?
Do high performers become teachers?
It is hard to know for sure because it is difficult to obtain comparative evidence on the knowledge and skills of teachers. But the OECD Survey of Adult Skills tested the literacy and numeracy skills of adults – including teachers. Using these data, it is possible to compare the skills of teachers with those of other college and university graduates.
The results show that, among the countries with comparable data, there is no single country where teachers are among the top third of adults with a college degree (based on average proficiency in numeracy or literacy); and there is no country where they are among the bottom third of college graduates. In fact, in most countries, teachers’ skills, as measured by the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, are fairly similar to those of the average person with a college degree (see Figure 1, which compares the numeracy skills of teachers, represented by the square diamond, with the distribution of numeracy skills among tertiary graduates, represented by the bar which extends from the 25th to the 75th percentiles of the distribution).
Note: Darker colours denote mean differences that are statistically significant at the 5% level.
Source: Survey of Adult Skills cycle 2.
However, there are some interesting exceptions. In Japan, one of PISA’s top-performers, teachers clearly outperform the average college graduate in numeracy. This is also true in Korea, Canada and the United Kingdom – which are other countries with above-average student performance in the PISA assessment of mathematics. Teachers also outperform the average college graduate in countries like France, the United States or Chile where student performance in PISA is at average levels or below. Interestingly, in Singapore, where students excel in the PISA mathematics assessment, teachers themselves perform below the average in the OECD Survey of Adult Skills.
Do high performing teachers produce high performing students?
These numbers tell us something about the attractiveness of the teaching profession in each country. But there is another way to look at this. While in most countries teachers tend to score similarly to college graduates on the Survey of Adult Skills, the knowledge and skills of graduates differ substantially across countries – and these differences are reflected among teachers too. The data show that teachers in Japan, the Netherlands and Finland perform highest on the numeracy assessment of the OECD Survey of Adult Skills.
So do countries where teacher perform better on the Survey of Adult Skills have better student learning outcomes? The pattern is not entirely clear but there is a tendency for teacher performance in numeracy and higher student learning outcomes in mathematics to go together (see Figure 2, which compares student performance in the PISA mathematics test with teacher performance in numeracy on the OECD Survey of Adult Skills).
However, there are many exceptions to this pattern. Most notably, in Singapore and Korea students perform far better than predicted from the numeracy skills of teachers alone. In Chile, the opposite is true. This suggests that other factors in addition to teachers’ numeracy skills, including their pedagogical skills, are related to students’ high mathematics performance.
All in all, unless countries have the luxury of hiring teachers from Japan, the Netherlands or Finland, they need to think harder about making teaching a well-respected profession and a more attractive career choice – both intellectually and financially. They need to invest more in competitive employment conditions to attract the brightest candidates, and in teacher development to make the brightest candidates the best teachers. If not, they risk being caught in a downward spiral – from lower standards of entry into the teaching profession, leading to lower self-efficacy among teachers, resulting in more prescriptive teaching and thus less personalisation in instruction. This negative cycle could drive the most talented teachers out of the profession entirely. And that, in turn, will result in a lower-quality teaching force.
