1. Top-performing education systems: Who are they, and how do we know?
Dylan Wiliam

2. Which outcomes? Which students? Which causes? Wellbeing
International comparisons
PISA
TIMSS/PIRLS
Which students?
Which causes?

3. Finland’s PISA results, 2000 to 2015
What was Finland doing from 1990 to 1996…
…that it stopped doing from 1996 onwards…?

4. Netherlands

5. Australia

6. Canada

7. New Zealand

8. Germany

9. Poland

10. Norway

11. Understanding the scale of the effects
Assume, for a moment, that
differences between countries are entirely due to differences in teacher quality
that 80% of the benefit of having a good teacher is carried forward into the next year
that PISA scores are the results of 10 years of education
that the correlation of teacher quality and student achievement is 0.16

12. Teacher quality and student achievement
Study
Location
Reading
Math
Rockoff (2004)
New Jersey
0.10
0.11
Nye, Konstantopoulos, Hedges (2004)
Tennessee
0.26
0.36
Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain (2005)
Texas
0.15
Aaronson, Barrow, and Sander (2007)
Chicago
0.13
Kane, Rockoff, and Staiger (2008)
New York City
0.08
Jacob and Lefgren (2008)
0.12
Kane and Staiger (2008)
0.18
0.22
Koedel and Betts (2009)
San Diego
0.23
Rothstein (2010)
North Carolina
Hanushek and Rivkin (2010)
Chetty et al. (2014)
0.16
Chetty et al. was not included in Hanushek and Rivkin (2010)
Hanushek and Rivkin (2010)*

13. Top-performing systems are 50 points above average
So that their students progress by 5 more points per year
Then their teachers are 0.4 sd better than average [5÷(0.8*100*.16)]
In other words, the difference between the average U.S. teacher and the average teacher in a top-performing country is less than one-tenth the range of teacher quality in a typical U.S. school.

14. Differential diagnosis
“distinguishing a particular disease from others that present similar clinical features”

15. Association and causality
Factors for establishing causality
Strength
Consistency
Specificity
Temporality
Biological gradient (dose-response)
Plausibility
Coherence