Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education Lessons from Pisa for the United States. This item is unavailable.Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education Lessons from Pisa for the United States

US President Obama has launched one of the world's most ambitious education reform agendas. Under the heading "Race to the Top", this agenda encourages US states to adopt internationally benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in college and the workplace: recruit, develop, reward, and retain effective teachers and principals; build data systems that measure student success; and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve their practices and turn around their lowest-performing schools. But what does the "top" look like internationally? How have the countries at the top managed to achieve sustained high performance or to significantly improve their performance? The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) provides the world's most extensive and rigorous set of international surveys assessing the knowledge and skills of secondary school students. This volume combines an analysis of PISA with a description of the policies and practices of those education systems that are close to the top or advancing rapidly, in order to offer insights for policy from their reform trajectories. THE OECD PROGRAMME FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ASSESSMENT (PISA) PISA focuses on young people's ability to use their knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. This orientation reflects a change in the goals and objectives of curricula themselves, which are increasingly concerned with what students can do with what they learn at school and not merely with whether they have mastered specific curricular content. PISA's unique features include its: Policy orientation, which connects data on student learning outcomes with data on students' characteristics and on key factors shaping their learning in and out of school in order to highlight differences in performance patterns and identify the characteristics of students, schools and education systems that have high performance standards. Innovative concept of "literacy", which refers to the capacity of students to apply knowledge and skills in key subject areas and to analyse, reason and communicate effectively as they pose, interpret and solve problems in a variety of situations. Relevance to lifelong learning, which does not limit PISA to assessing students' competencies in school subjects, but also asks them to report on their own motivation to learn, their beliefs about themselves and their learning strategies. Regularity, which enables countries to monitor their progress in meeting key learning objectives. Breadth of geographical coverage and collaborative nature, which, in PISA 2009, encompasses the 34 OECD member countries and 41 partner countries and economies.