Ep 68. The Finland myth, East Asia’s rise, and what makes education systems work with Montserrat Gomendio
This transcript was created with speech-to-text software. It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Canadian Podcasting Productions.
In this episode, Anna is joined by Dr. Montserrat (Montse) Gomendio, a former Secretary of State for Education in Spain. Montse is also a former Deputy Director of Education for the OECD, the international organization that administers the PISA test. Drawing on global data, including from PISA, Montse explains why some education systems consistently perform well while others struggle to improve.
Montse discusses the three key drivers of effective education systems: teacher quality, a knowledge-rich curriculum, and strong assessments aligned with that curriculum. Anna and Montse discuss what large-scale international assessments like PISA can (and can’t) tell us. The conversation also explores why education reform is so difficult to implement, what high-performing systems right like those in East Asia and Estonia get right, and whether Finland’s reputation as a model system is supported by evidence.
This is a fascinating conversation that will appeal to educators, policymakers, and anyone interested in what actually drives improvement in education systems.
This episode is also available in video at www.youtube.com/@chalktalk-stokke
MONTSERRAT GOMENDIO’S BOOK (OPEN ACCESS)Dire Straits-Education Reforms: Ideology, Vested Interests and Evidence: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0332
SHORT COURSE La Trobe Short Course: Evidence-informed Mathematics Teaching – An Introduction https://shortcourses.latrobe.edu.au/evidence-informed-mathematics-teaching
ResearchED CalgaryResearchED Calgary registration: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/researched-calgary-tickets-1984343272144
TIMESTAMPS
[00:00:22] Introduction [00:04:55] The role of Deputy Director of Education at the OCED [00:06:21] What is the purpose of PISA? [00:07:29] How is PISA different from TIMSS or PIRLS? [00:12:54] What is an appropriate definition of equity? [00:15:06] Measures that improve educational equity [00:19:57] The perplexing narrative about Finland as a top performer [00:28:42] Why do East Asian countries perform so well? [00:33:00] The importance of content knowledge [00:36:06] Misleading recommendations from the OECD [00:37:16] After-school tutoring in East Asian countries [00:41:36] Why implementation in different countries can be difficult: Latin America [00:46:18] Reducing class size: popular and expensive, but ineffective [00:48:08] What makes an effective teacher? [00:52:01] A look at Estonia’s education system[00:54:14] Why is it so hard to implement reforms even when they are evidence-based? [01:02:23] Preventing the reversal of good education policies [01:06:31] What are the main components that make an effective education system?
[00:00:04] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk & Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor and your host. Welcome back to another episode of Chalk & Talk.
This episode is available in both video and audio. Please do give the show a follow-on YouTube as well as on your favorite podcast platform. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Montse Gomendio, who brings a rare perspective on how education systems perform and improve. She has worked inside government as Spain's Secretary of State for Education and at the OECD, an international organization that produces global education data, including PISA. We talk about why some countries consistently perform at a high level on international assessments while others struggle to improve, even when we have strong evidence about what works. Montse told me that three things underpin effective education systems, teacher quality, a knowledge-rich curriculum, and assessments aligned with that curriculum.
In the episode, we go into detail about that and about other policies that tend to be effective. We talk about what international large-scale assessments can and can't tell us, and we discuss what high-performing systems, particularly in East Asia, seem to be getting right. And importantly, we talk about reform.
Why is it so difficult to implement evidence-based changes in education systems? What tends to get in the way, and what should policymakers focus on if they genuinely want to improve outcomes? And finally, you've probably heard Finland held up as a model education system.
I asked Montse whether the evidence actually supports that. This is a really insightful conversation for anyone interested in education or education policy and what the global evidence tells us about improving student learning.
Before we get started, I want to let you know that I'll be co-delivering a four-session short course on evidence-based math teaching through La Trobe University's School of Education starting this April 2026.
The course is open to teachers anywhere in the world. I'll include a registration link in the show notes. I'll also be speaking at ResearchEd in Calgary on May 9th. I hope to see some of you there. Now without further ado, let's get started.
I am excited to be joined today by Dr. Montse Gomendio. She is the former Secretary of State for Education, Vocational Training, and Universities in the Spanish government. In 2015, she was appointed Deputy Director of Education for the OECD, that's the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers PISA, an international test in math, science, and reading given to 15-year-olds. And in 2017, she became head of the OECD Skills Center.
She co-founded and co-chairs Skills We Go, which is a consultancy on education, training, and employment. She's a former member of the Board of the International Baccalaureate. She's a biologist by training, holding a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and she's a tenured research professor at the Spanish Research Council.
She has held several other leadership positions, including Director of the Spanish National Science Museum and Vice President of the Spanish Research Council. She has authored over 100 peer-reviewed scientific studies in several books, including Dire Straits Education Reforms, Ideology, Vested Interests, and Evidence, which I recently read. So that is quite a CV, and I'm really interested to talk to you today about education policy and what makes education systems perform well and what doesn't.
So welcome to the podcast.
[00:04:20] Montse Gomendio: Oh, thank you so much for the invitation. I'm very excited to join you.
[00:04:24] Anna Stokke: Great. So, you've had some unique roles. You were Secretary of State for Education in Spain, Deputy Director of Education at the OECD.
You've seen education from inside a national government and from inside the organization that produces PISA. Before we get into it, what does the Deputy Director of Education at the OECD actually do? Like, were you approving policy recommendations?
Were you involved in the design of PISA? Or what did you do there?
[00:04:55] Montse Gomendio: So basically, at the OECD, what we do is we give policy advice to governments, mainly to central governments, but also regional governments if they wish to join any of our projects. So my main role was to give advice when I started as Deputy Director, mainly on teacher quality, on higher education, and ECEC, Early Childhood Education and Care, the years before compulsory education. And then when I became head of the Skills Center, my role was still to give advice to governments, but on a completely different set of issues.
It was, the Skills Center had to do with building a bridge between education, employment and science and innovation. So, it was more about giving advice to governments about how to make their education systems more sensitive to the major changes that were taking place in the labor market. It's basically giving advice.
That advice is based always on evidence. Sometimes evidence provided by the OECD itself, like the evidence provided by PISA, but often evidence that we gather from other sources.
[00:06:09] Anna Stokke: You know, we hear a lot about PISA. That seems to get a lot of attention, more than TIMSS, which is another international assessment. What was the original purpose of PISA?
Why did they start administering PISA?
[00:06:21] Montse Gomendio: PISA started after TIMSS and PIRLS. And the main aim defined by PISA itself was to be able to compare education systems so that we could identify which education systems were doing better. We could identify the reasons why they were doing, performing better. And therefore, we could then advise other governments, the OECD being a member-led organization, which basically provides advice to governments on policies, on good policies.
And based on that evidence, we could provide advice to governments on how to improve their education systems. That was its mission from the beginning.
[00:07:02] Anna Stokke: OK, so that was the mission from the beginning, and that makes a lot of sense, right? What do you see as the benefits of these international tests? We have these large-scale assessments.
There's PISA and there's TIMSS. You know, sometimes we hear some criticism about these kinds of tests, but do you think we can actually compare student performance across different countries when they have different curricula or different cultural aspects, et cetera?
[00:07:29] Montse Gomendio: Yeah, that's the main argument. I think the comparison is rather straightforward and very useful. PISA is different from PIRLS and TIMSS in the sense that it doesn't take into account differences in curriculum, while PIRLS and TIMSS do.
So, PISA defines its mission as being able to compare countries regarding whether students have acquired the skills to develop professionally, personally, engage with civil society and so on. And that's why it doesn't concentrate so much on the curriculum, which could be a bad or a good thing, depending on your opinion. But the assessment is done completely independently from differences in curriculum between countries.
The main argument at the beginning, I don't think the argument is that powerful nowadays, was that you couldn't compare countries, that there were too many differences, as you say, cultural, historical and so on. But PISA, like most of the other surveys, focuses on maths, science and reading. And in particular, I mean, I do think science is very important and STEM is very important.
But if we concentrate on reading and maths, these are the basic pillars for learning. If you don't have the basic skills on numeracy and reading, you just can't learn. You can't continue learning.
I do think that understanding differences between countries is important. Also, I believe that the differences that were found between countries were much larger than were expected. Therefore, the expectation was that because the differences were so huge, that it would be easy to identify which were the factors that made good performing systems better.
And that's where the difficulty comes, because I do believe that the data provided by all these international surveys is very valuable. I do worry a bit about the kind of analysis, particularly that PISA uses to draw these conclusions. It's mainly correlations.
With correlations, you cannot draw causality. So, then it does a mixture of correlations and then comparisons between countries like Finland and others and so on. And it becomes a bit blurred in the sense that, you know, those analyses are not the right ones to draw causality.
When you compare countries, you cannot really take policies from one country to another one, which has a very different context and hope that it's going to have the same result. So, the copy-paste in the world of education policymaking doesn't really work. And the problem here is that although I insist I find the data from PISA and all other surveys really valuable, I do worry that some of the policy advice is misleading.
And for that reason, what we see until COVID, when we have a huge decline, is that most countries remain stable. So even though PISA provides policy advice, provides tons of data to countries and policymakers, most of the countries have not improved. And those that have improved, which are mainly countries in East Asia, have not improved because they have followed PISA policy recommendations.
They have improved because they already had policies in place that helped them improve. The data are valuable. The advice sometimes misleading because of the way it's elaborated.
[00:11:05] Anna Stokke: OK, so what I hear there is, yes, the data is valuable, but you have to be a little bit careful about drawing causation from correlation. So, you have to be a bit careful about some of the advice. And also, I think you said that despite being around for many years and PISA giving policy advice, a lot of countries haven't really improved.
[00:11:28] Montse Gomendio: Most of the countries haven't improved.
[00:11:30] Anna Stokke: Most haven't improved.
[00:11:32] Montse Gomendio: It's basically a flat line. And in that sense, I think the main mission has not been achieved because we thought PISA started in the year 2000. It takes place every three years until COVID, say until the last cycle before COVID, which was 2018.
There were 20 years where countries should have improved if the policy advice was correct. And they didn't. They just most of them remain stable, except again for the countries in East Asia, which continue to improve and seem to have no ceiling, particularly countries like Singapore.
They just keep doing better while the others remain stagnant.
[00:12:11] Anna Stokke: So, we'll get into some of the recommendations in a little bit. I wanted to mention something about equity because this is important. I think a lot of times people think that when students come from disadvantaged backgrounds, there's not a lot you can do.
And that oftentimes poor scores are related to students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. And in your book, as I understood it, one of your findings is that improving education quality actually benefits all students, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds. So, can you say a little bit about that?
[00:12:54] Montse Gomendio: Sure. Yeah, I'm really glad that you asked me this question. Equity is difficult to define, to start with. What do we mean by equity?
And then very often people assume that equity means that all students should have similar outcomes. I think that's wrong. I think that's wrong.
And I think when that concept of equity has been implemented with policies aimed at getting students to get similar outcomes, what has happened is that, of course, you have to go to the minimum denominator and then just start lower it for all students. Right. I think there are much better definitions of equity, which are not mine.
They're actually from authors from the OECD, which basically define equity as a system which minimizes the impact of those factors, which we know tend to decrease student performance, like family, socioeconomic background, like whether you're a migrant and so on. But that doesn't mean that the differences between students have to be small, because if that's what you're aiming to, then they may be small, but they may all be very low. And then I don't think that's a great success, right?
What you want to make sure that students from disadvantaged backgrounds do first, that the system has high expectations for them and that the reason why they have high expectations is that they put in place compensatory measures from very early on, because these students have very difficult starting points and we need to recognize that. And the sooner you implement these compensatory measures, the easier it's going to be for them to catch up and then hope that they will reach their maximum potential with this factor, such as socioeconomic background, having a minimal impact. That's my understanding of equity and those countries that have implemented policies which are aligned with this definition have achieved very high levels of equity and equality at the same time.
[00:15:01] Anna Stokke: OK, so that's remarkable. What kind of measures are you talking about?
[00:15:06] Montse Gomendio: First, when students go into compulsory education, I'm not going to talk about students who go to before compulsory schooling starts, right? That's a whole other world. But you can also implement compensatory measures there.
You find that as students start schooling, as I said, with very different starting points, some students may be able to read quite fluently. Some students cannot even start to read, for example. And then there are several possibilities.
Then you can have ability grouping so that the students who are lagging behind have the opportunity to catch up with the rest. And as long as that is flexible and as long as that does not signal that those students must remain forever in that group of, say, students that are lagging behind, then as they catch up, they can move to other groups. If eventually the group becomes more homogeneous, then you no longer need the ability grouping.
In more extreme cases, in countries where student heterogeneity is huge. And I'm talking about Singapore 40 years ago. Today, Singapore is the top performer, right?
But in 40 years, it has done this amazing journey going from a population that was largely illiterate to being the top performer system in the world. And what they did was students were so different in their starting points. They had tracking in primary.
By tracking, I mean not just ability grouping for some subjects, but some students were placed in different tracks where the academic component was more or less demanding or they had an applied component also sort of closer to what we regard in Europe as apprenticeships or vocational education and training. And this was to avoid early school leaving, which was very prevalent when the students started with a very, very bad starting point. As early school leaving decreased in primary, then they delayed tracking into secondary and eventually they delayed tracking beyond compulsory education.
But this takes place over time. So, the measures that you implement depend very much on the context and education systems like people mature over time. And if you start with an education system where most parents are illiterate, where the level of students is very, very poor, where teacher quality is still very low, then you may need these measures to help disadvantaged students.
And the idea that these measures discriminate against disadvantaged students have proven to be wrong, because the fear is that if you separate students into different groups or into different tracks, then you're going to discriminate against disadvantaged students and you're going to place them in a group or a track from where they can no longer escape and where there are no expectations for them. That's not the case.
In that group or that track, they are going to get all this additional support that they need. And once they catch up with the rest, then they can move to another track or to another group and improve over time. If you have a country like Finland, which since PISA started in the year 2000, is a very egalitarian country where most children start school already reading fluently because their parents have taught them at home, then you may not need those measures.
But to believe that not having those measures is what makes the system equitable is wrong. The system is equitable to start with, and that's why you don't need those measures.
[00:18:58] Anna Stokke: And so, one thing that I think you're saying is some of these things that people think actually go against equity, contribute to equity. So, tracking being one of those things.
And you brought up Finland, and I really want to talk about Finland because there are a lot of myths about Finland. And I like to bust myths on this podcast, so let's do this with Finland. I mean, Finland was all the rage in education talk several years ago, and a lot of people still talk about Finland being this great place to emulate the education system.
And, you know, there were education academics from Finland traveling the world and giving presentations about the education system there. But the truth is they did perform highly on PISA at one point, right? But they don't anymore.
What's the story with Finland? Tell us everything you know about Finland and what happened there.
[00:19:57] Montse Gomendio: So, what happens is in the year 2000, PISA starts and it starts with a small group of OECD member countries. And this is important to keep in mind because it means that those countries were rather similar to each other. Now, PISA has over 60 countries and they are very different from each other.
So, another question for international surveys is as the number of participating countries grows and they become more and more different, can you really transfer policies from really good performing countries to very poorly performing countries or is it more complicated than that? And I believe it's more complicated than that. So, in the year 2000 is the first PISA cycle.
And to everybody's surprise, including the Finnish people, Finland comes on top in reading, only in reading, not science and maths, because in science and maths, countries in Asia were already top performers. But this is a big surprise and no one understands, not Finland, not the OECD, nobody. And in contrast, Germany, where everybody expected the country to do very well, a powerful country in Europe, etc., does poorly. And does poorly mainly on equity because they do have very early tracking at that time. They have tracking at the age of 10 and they can show that the impact of family socioeconomic backgrounds is quite strong, while in Finland it's not. So from here, a legend starts to develop.
Why do I call it a legend? Because it's really one point. I mean, it happened in the year 2000 only for reading.
And since then, it's been declining and people have paid very little attention to the fact that it's been declining. Now, why did it perform so well in reading? I mean, the OECD sent teams, teams of people from the OECD to analyze it.
It was really a surprise for everybody. So, it's been a mystery for a while. But I think what most people conclude is first, when you are assessing 15-year-olds, you're not assessing the education system at the time.
You're assessing the education system 10 years before, because that's the time, they've been at school. And during the previous 10 years, the education system in Finland was very different from the education system after the year 2000. It was very centralized.
It had national examinations. It had inspections and so on. The one thing that they did have before, and they still have, is an excellent teaching force.
But then once the teachers were able to acquire a high level of quality because they are selected, only the top performing students go and study education, then the education degree is very demanding. The selection procedure to join the teaching force is also very demanding. So, they have an excellent teaching force.
And I would say this is the one common factor to all high performing systems. They gave these teachers a large degree of autonomy. And that's fine when you reach that level of autonomy.
But then the OECD started advising many other countries where teachers had not reached that level of quality to give teachers autonomy. Even more, it was the main sentence that became like, I don't know, written in stone, is that in Finland, they trusted teachers. And this trust in teachers became lost in translation.
So, at the beginning it was, they had a large degree of autonomy, which is true. Now we know that if you give that degree of autonomy to teachers that have reached high levels of quality, it has a positive impact. But if you give it to teachers that have a poor level of quality, the results decrease, and also the idea of trust was sort of stretched to mean that the teachers should not be evaluated, therefore students shouldn't be evaluated because that was an indirect way of evaluating teachers.
And the other factor that was left out of the interpretation was the parents. As I said, in Finland, there's a strong tradition for parents to teach the children to learn before they join school. So, if families get involved to that extent, which is the same case as countries in East Asia, by the way, then I'm not saying the education system is not important.
It's very important, but you can never forget the family. And if the family gets involved and teaches, in this case, learning, and also insists that students should put effort, have high expectations independently of their socioeconomic background, et cetera, this has a huge impact on their performance. Why has it declined?
Well, it's difficult. Probably in the year 2000, Finland was a much more homogeneous society and very egalitarian society than it is today because of migration. So probably this idea that you have a very comprehensive system, that you give teachers a large degree of autonomy, that there's little accountability and so on doesn't work if the student population becomes more heterogeneous.
But because everybody continued to praise Finland in a way that was counterproductive, because Finland didn't change, because everybody kept saying that what they were doing was great. So, they kept doing the same thing, even though the context was changing. And the result was that the levels of student performance declined really rapidly.
[00:25:57] Anna Stokke: So, if I'm understanding this correctly, they really only came out on top in the year 2000. Is that right?
[00:26:05] Montse Gomendio: That's right.
[00:26:06] Anna Stokke: And all because of this one year, we have been listening to rhetoric about Finland for the past 25 years, really. I still see people talking about this.
[00:26:18] Montse Gomendio: Oh yeah. Policymakers visiting, people writing books about it. It's called edu-tourism because so many people go to visit the schools and everything.
And on the other hand, you have countries like Singapore, which have, as I said, improved from being a country with really high levels of a large proportion of the population being illiterate. In 40 years, it has become the top performer. Cycle after cycle, it improves.
Apparently, there's no ceiling for them and no one pays attention. And what's interesting about this is that once you have such a powerful narrative that everybody likes, because it all sounds very good, right? You should give autonomy to teachers and it's all about equity and so on and so forth.
Well, in Singapore, teachers do not have that degree of autonomy, even though they are excellent teachers. Accountability on teachers or students are very strong. It's small, so there's an issue with whether that model is scalable, but still, there are national exams for all students, the curriculum is very demanding.
So, in some way, Singapore is a very different model from the Finnish one. And still the narrative hasn't changed. The narrative is we should follow Finland and we should give autonomy and have very comprehensive systems and put equity above quality and those sorts of things, which I think have shown to be wrong.
[00:27:46] Anna Stokke: Yeah, I'll be honest, I've always found this a little bit Eurocentric, that it was always Finland that people wanted to put up on a pedestal, when the East Asian systems have consistently outperformed others, particularly in math. It's interesting how people can take a narrative like that and run with it. Obviously, there are things about Finland that people like, and they would like those things to happen in their countries.
And so, they, that's why they're probably using Finland as the example. But we really should talk more about the East Asian systems. Like you've mentioned Singapore a few times, but there's also the South Korea, Japan, they all perform really well.
What are the things that they have in common? Like what are they doing that contributes to this success?
[00:28:42] Montse Gomendio: I think first and foremost, excellent teacher training. A very, very, very selective in the sense that only the top performing students can study education. The training at university is very, very demanding and very rich in knowledge content, and then the selection procedures to enter the profession are very strong, but also professional development is really well developed.
So, when I was in Singapore a couple of times, when I was working at the OECD, I had the opportunity to visit the Academy of Teachers. It's amazing because teachers spend quite a lot of time engaging in professional development, and they can choose whether they want to specialize on certain subjects or whether they want to become mentors of other teachers or whether they can become policymakers. So, there are different paths that they can choose, but they spent quite a large proportion of the time re-skilling, up-skilling, the lifelong learning of teachers is developed to an amazing extent.
And the teachers are of really high quality. This does not mean that they have high levels of autonomy because they don't, because the curriculum is very well developed, again, very rich on content knowledge, because the other debate now is whether knowledge matters or whether Google knows everything or ChatGPT or whatever, and whether it's important that kids learn facts and that they accumulate facts in their brains. And all these East Asian countries very clearly give a lot of importance to a student's learning content knowledge of all subjects.
And then they have very demanding evaluations. I really think it's not that difficult to understand what makes a good education system. I mean, its good teachers, good curriculum, good evaluations, and a good accountability system.
The problem is the diagnosis that you make of the stage at which an education system is, and therefore which are the right policies for that stage. Is this country ready for teacher autonomy? I mean, it's not easy.
It's not like you get a number and then the policymaker knows, yes, my teachers are ready. I mean, there's a lot of information that you can use, but it's not that straightforward. Or should I have early tracking or not?
And those are things that depend very much on the context. And first, it's not that easy sometimes to make that diagnosis. And second, if the diagnosis is that the system is still a very poor quality, the policymaker is in trouble.
I mean, to have to say our education system is a very poor quality and therefore I'm not going to give autonomy to teachers. I'm going to have early tracking and a number of things in most countries is politically very costly.
[00:31:46] Anna Stokke: Oh, yes, definitely. I want to back up on something you said there that the East Asian countries, they all put a lot of focus and importance on content knowledge and developing content knowledge. And I'm bringing this up because just yesterday someone sent me this clip and I guess it was, they were from Sweden and they were speaking at some conference to the OECD and they were emphasizing the importance of content knowledge.
And Andreas Sleisler kind of came back and said, “well, in today's world, people are measured on not what they know, but what they can do.” And I was kind of thinking, “well, that's strange because if, so first of all, how can you do something with knowledge you don't have, right?” Like being able to do things depends on having knowledge.
And I also kind of knew this about East Asian countries and findings from the OECD, so it seemed to me that he's giving advice that actually contradicts some of the things that the OECD has actually found to work.
[00:33:00] Montse Gomendio: Yeah, that's the kind of misleading advice that I was mentioning at the beginning that I disagreed with. So yeah, I think this is poor understanding of how our brain works. As you said, I'm a biologist by training, but I won't go into the details, but if you want to make sense of the world, you need to accumulate enough facts in your brain, in your long-term memory, so that any information that I give to you, you can immediately sort of try to locate it within that map of facts that you already have that are reliable and solid and so on, and decide whether you agree, disagree, whether it makes sense to you or not. If you don't have any information in your brain stored in your long-term memory, and every time you're giving a piece of information or an opinion, you need to go to Google or to chat with people to find out what is it that they're telling you because you have no information whatsoever about that, then you're just unable to think, and I completely disagree with that statement, and I think it's been very dangerous because people take the OECD very seriously. As I said, the advice goes directly to the governments, directly to ministers.
Ministers normally trust what the OECD tells them, and in many countries that did have knowledge-rich curricula, they change it for this competence-based curricula, where there is absolutely no content knowledge, no facts, no nothing, and then the children are growing without developing in their brain this long-term memory where they accumulate facts, and then they can make sense of the world, because otherwise you will be checking Google all the time and still not have a good idea of whether that makes sense or not. To be able to think, you need to have a lot of information in your brain, and the OECD says things like, oh, you don't need to memorize scientific facts, you need to think like a scientist. Well, I've been a scientist for the first part of my career, and I could not possibly think as a scientist before I accumulated many, many facts in my brain because I didn't know what, if I hadn't, I wouldn't have known what other scientists had said, what they had demonstrated, if I thought there were gaps or flaws in what they had concluded.
You need to store a lot of information in your brain, and that allows your brain to start to move to the biologist's hand. But your brain makes a lot of connections that then allows you to think more clearly about those issues, whatever they are. So, I think that's one of the most misleading recommendations to come out of the OECD.
And I also can tell you that there's absolutely no evidence from PISA to support that.
Anna Stokke (35:56 - 36:06): No, which makes you wonder why he's saying things like that. It's quite unhelpful. It's really just an opinion, right?
It's not evidence based.
[00:36:06] Montse Gomendio: Yeah, exactly. But the OECD is defined as an evidence-based organization that provides advice to governments, better policies for better lives, is the slogan. So, I think that's the problem that people cannot distinguish unless you go very deeply into the data, which most people are not able to do.
And that's why I wrote this book that you mentioned. They cannot distinguish what is based on evidence and what is a personal opinion. And then they assume that everything is based on evidence and it's not.
Some of those policy recommendations have led to very poor outcomes, I'm afraid.
[00:36:44] Anna Stokke: One other thing about the East Asian countries, I have heard people discount the strong performance because of a lot of afterschool tutoring. So this is quite common in Singapore, Japan, they have kind of these cram schools, right? Do you think that matters?
Do you think that we have to be careful about taking things from those countries because there's this sort of compounding factor that there's a lot of afterschool tutoring?
[00:36:16] Montse Gomendio: This is widespread, but it's much more acute in South Korea. And when I went to South Korea, I was amazed by these academies. They're called wangons or something like that.
I can't remember. Anyway, the many, many kids go to these academies after school. And the extent to which they put effort into these academies is such that the government has implemented curfews at 10 p.m. And then when I was there, there was a curfew. And this academy that I won't name had like a basement where the students could hide while the police searched. And then they went back to the classroom to continue. I thought that was too much, but that's the negative side of it.
The positive side of it is that, as I was saying with Finland and reading, families do get involved, families care, and families have great expectations for their children, not just well-off families, particularly families from disadvantaged children. They know that education is the engine of social mobility. They know education is the best chance that their children to have a good job, to have a good life and so on.
And it's a matter of degrees. It's good that the family gets involved. It's good that the family has high expectations.
Maybe in some cases like South Korea, many families go a bit over the top. But if you compare it with Spain, you know, in Spain, when I was Secretary of State, well, and before and after, the level of student performance in Spain had been below the OECD average forever from the year 2000 when we joined. And I thought it was obvious that if we were below the OECD average, we had to improve.
And then when I gave my first press conference about the PISA 2012 results, I said, you know, Spain is below the OECD average, so we should improve. And I gave examples. And some of those examples were East Asian countries.
And I thought the press conference had gone quite well until I went to my office and opened my laptop and the headlines in most media where the Secretary of State wants our students to be as stressed out as they are in South Korea, where everybody knows they have high rates of suicide. And it's like, well, no. I mean, one thing is to say that we need to improve.
Another thing is to say that students should be under such level of pressure. I think that's not good for obvious reasons. But I think the fact that families get involved, that there is this level of ambition, which in other countries you don't find, it's a positive thing.
You just have to be careful not allowing the system to put so much pressure. But to be honest, the problem in South Korea is that, just to give you one example, because there's always one reason why there's so much pressure in the system, is that there is an incredible bottleneck, because if students get into a few elite universities, then they get the best jobs. And if they don't get into those few elite universities, it's a completely different ballgame.
So, families put all this pressure so that eventually their children get into these few elite universities. If you don't have that bottleneck in other countries, the families don't put that much pressure, because the future of their children don't depend so much on whether they get into those universities or not. So, you have to be careful about the bottlenecks.
It's not just putting pressure for the sake of putting pressure.
[00:41:00] Anna Stokke: Yeah. But you still think we can take some of these things that you're saying work, that they do in East Asian countries, like a good knowledge-rich curriculum, high quality teachers, some accountability measures. What else did you mention?
[00:41:18] Montse Gomendio: Knowledge-rich curriculum, evaluations, and very high-quality teachers.
[00:41:24] Anna Stokke: Yeah, those are the things. I mean, these things work there. I mean, even if they're getting afterschool tutoring, those are kind of the things that are common to countries that get good results, right?
[00:41:36] Montse Gomendio: But it's not easy to implement in other places. Let's talk about Latin America, and Spain is similar, but let's talk about Latin America. And why do I make the comparison with Latin America?
Because 40, 50 years ago, Latin America was in a much better place than these countries in East Asia, particularly Singapore and South Korea. And today, these East Asian countries have taken over completely, and Latin American countries are doing very poorly. Just to give you an example, teacher quality involves being very selective with the students that go into the education degree, having a very demanding and knowledge-rich curriculum within the degree, and then being very selective in the process, professional development, evaluating teachers over their lifetime, and so on and so forth.
In Latin America, that would be very difficult to do because the unions are very powerful. I think this is legitimate. Look after the interests of their members.
Now, in countries where teacher quality is very low, then you get into a loop because the interest of their members is not to have high selection for students who go into university and not to have a very demanding, content-rich curriculum at university because the students who get into the education degree tend to be low performers in school already and not to have the opposite. Their interest is that the system is not too demanding because otherwise their members would be in trouble because they have not achieved those levels of quality. So, they are against, as a university is being selective with the students, they are against a very demanding curriculum.
They're against selection procedures and they are always in favor of decreasing class size because this involves hiring more teachers and therefore making the unions more powerful and increasing teacher salaries across the board without any link to how effective those teachers are. This may be the legitimate interest of those unions and their members. These interests are not well aligned with the interests of students.
But the problem then is that, take the example of class size, it's very easy for unions to convince families that diminishing class size is a good thing because then you get personalized learning and so on. Well, that's not the case. I mean, it's very difficult to explain to families, but that's not the case.
Why? Because if teacher quality is low, as it is in most of these countries, then whether you have, I don't know, 25, 20, 10 students in the classroom because they have a teacher who has not been trained to the right level, even if the teacher gives personalized training, the level of performance of the students is not going to improve. East Asian countries have chosen the opposite trade-off.
They have very large classes, but by large class sizes, I mean 40 to 50 students per classroom. And this is the reason why they have a much smaller teaching force of very high quality, which has the time to go to these academies of teachers to continue their professional development. So this trade-off between class size, whether you have a lot of teachers of low quality or a few teachers which are excellent, and the amount of time that they have to get to engage in professional development throughout their careers is a major trade-off that most people don't recognize because, I can tell you because I suffered it, increasing class size, even by just one or two students, is a killer for any policymaker in Latin America or in Europe, I guess in America too. It's regarded by families as the main indicator of the quality of the school.
And it's not. The evidence clearly shows that it's not.
[00:45:50] Anna Stokke: As you mentioned, you could have a teacher with a class of very few students. And if they don't know the math, sorry, your kid's not going to learn any math, right?
If they hate math, that's not going to go well. If you have a bad curriculum, it's not going to go well. If they're using really ineffective methods for teaching, it's not going to go well.
Those other things are the things that we need to look at before we start reducing class sizes. And it's expensive to reduce class sizes, right?
[00:46:18] Montse Gomendio: It's the most expensive measure because, unfortunately, I had to do the numbers because when I joined government in 2012 in Spain, we were at the peak of the financial crisis. So, we needed to find ways to reduce investment in education. It's a complicated story because in Spain, as in Canada, it's very decentralized.
So rather than finding measures to decrease investment, we had to give more flexibility to our regions so that if they wish to do so, they could implement measures that would reduce investment because we had to. There were very strict fiscal measures and so on. Only a few regions increased class size by one or two students, and we already had the smallest class size in the whole of the OECD.
You cannot imagine the political cost that got involved in that. And there was no way to reason. Being an academic, I was convinced, naively perhaps, that if you showed very solid evidence, then people would understand and they would support your measures.
When it's something of this kind and the conflicts are really strong because people actually, the conflict is about resources and how they are distributed. The conflict is not about different ideas about how to improve student performance.
Then just increasing class size by one or two students, which some regions did, only a few dared to do it, was a huge political cost, just massive.
[00:47:56] Anna Stokke: I wanted to back up because you mentioned even at the beginning that when you were working for OECD, you were supposed to be looking at like teaching effectiveness. So, what makes an effective teacher?
[00:48:08] Montse Gomendio: At the OECD, they ended calling this question the black box because it was so difficult to answer. So first, we started by looking at the obvious things like whether teachers have university degrees or whether teachers have master’s degrees. And the problem was that in most countries, teachers do have university degrees.
But now that, as I said, PISA has over 60 countries, what having a university degree means in one country, let's not give names, has nothing to do with what a university degree means in another country. So, the fact that they all have university degrees doesn't mean that they all have a similar training, that they have all reached a similar level of quality. So, to be honest, there was very little information about what makes a teacher effective.
And then in TALIS, which is a survey of teachers, but it's mostly a questionnaire, teachers were asked about whether they thought they were effective, something called self-effectiveness. And then we got absolutely counterintuitive results, although if you think about it, it makes sense in the sense that teachers in Singapore, as we said, the top performer felt that they were not well-prepared enough, that they needed more training and so on. While teachers in countries that were performing very poorly, like Mexico, felt they were doing fine and they did not need any more training or anything.
Well, this is not that teachers are lying or anything. This is a measure of how demanding the system is or not. In Singapore, it's very demanding.
The teachers feel that they always need to perform better and better and keep improving. In Mexico, it's not very demanding. Therefore, they feel they're doing fine, according to Mexican standards, which are not the standards that one would expect in most countries.
[00:50:08] Anna Stokke: So, it's hard to say what makes an effective teacher.
[00:50:12] Montse Gomendio: We know just the basics, the obvious things, like there's work by Hanushek, which shows the obvious, but it took ages to get this result, which is that the higher the level of skills of teachers and the higher the level of knowledge of the subject that they're teaching, the better the level of student performance. Pretty obvious, but it took ages to have an analysis showing that because it was very difficult to get the two variables together. It's very difficult to link things that go beyond whether they have degrees or whatever, because there is no such thing.
There's only one, but very limited, and it was done years ago, measuring either the level of skills of teachers or measuring in some way the pedagogy that they use in the classroom. There are so many confounding factors that I have to say that beyond being selective with the students, a very knowledge-rich curriculum during the education degree, and then a very selective procedure to get into the profession and professional development. Beyond that, we know very little, but we know that teachers matter a lot because if you follow teachers over time, some teachers have a great impact on students and some others don't.
So, we know the impact is huge. We don't know what is causing those differences in the level of impact that they have.
[00:51:46] Anna Stokke: One other country I wanted to ask about, because it's been coming up a lot lately in recent years, and that's Estonia. Is Estonia performing well? And if so, what are they doing that might be contributing to that?
[00:52:01] Montse Gomendio: Estonia is performing well. It's among the top performers in Europe. There are a number of reasons. Again, teacher quality is one of them.
And the other one, which I think is quite unique to Estonia, is that they implemented, not just in education, but in all the public sector, they digitalize the system to a very large extent. So, for example, in education, they can track students and the grades that they get and how they change over time and whether the rates that they get at the exams, what they choose, the subjects that they choose, if they do well or not. And that kind of information is very valuable for them to make decisions.
And in most countries, that information is lacking. So, I think that both having the information and the good use that they make of that information helps them understand the system very well, helps them understand the strengths and the weaknesses. The policies that they implement to overcome the weaknesses are the right ones in general.
[00:53:11] Anna Stokke: Yeah. OK, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, the more data you have, the more you can help students and target their weaknesses so that they improve before it snowballs, right?
[53:22] Montse Gomendio: Or even predict, you know, these students are not doing well. They are at risk of dropping out of school. We need to implement measures to prevent that before it happens.
In other countries like Spain, where we have the highest rates of early school leaving in Europe, only Romania has higher rates of early school leaving. We don't have that kind of information. So, it's really up to the teachers to identify students that are at risk of dropping out.
We don't have databases of that kind. We don't even have national evaluation.
[00:53:54] Anna Stokke: So, let's talk about barriers to reform. This is a major theme actually in your book that reforms are very difficult to implement, and you've mentioned that even with data, it can be very hard to convince people.
Why is it so hard to implement reforms even when they are evidence-based?
[00:54:14] Montse Gomendio: I think there are several reasons and I will end up concluding that the evidence really plays very little role because of the nature of those reasons. First, there's the political battle between different political parties who are competing to be in government. And I have to say that when I joined government in this respect, I was maybe a bit naive because in Spain you can become secretary of state without being a member of parliament or without being a member of a political party, which was my case.
So, I joined government as an expert, right? So my first moves were to look at the evidence; to analyze all the evidence and then to suggest which policies we should implement to overcome the problems that we have. No one was interested in that kind of evidence was my experience.
Why? If you're talking to political parties, just one example, but I think illustrates the point very well. One of my first meetings was with my predecessor from the Socialist Party and he hadn't left me any homework.
I mean, I didn't know what the urgent matters were or anything. So I wanted to discuss with him and understand in more detail what were the main issues, what projects were ongoing and so on. And basically, the only message that he wanted to give me is that if we changed the education law, they would never support anything.
And being an academic, I said, well, I don't understand. I'm very confused because I still don't know what we're going to propose. So how do you know that you're going to be against it?
And he said, well, because it's a socialist law, we're not going to support a government from another political party who changes our law. And that was it. It was like that for five years and there was no more discussion, no interest in the evidence.
I mean, it was very superficial and at the same time, a very strong conviction that because of the political gains, they were not going to support any of that. Then with the rest of the actors, I would say that what you discover or what I discovered is that, I mean, something very obvious in hindsight, which is the education system is a massive system that distributes lots of resources to many different stakeholders. And when you have conversations with them and you have amassed all these data and you have all these good ideas about which policies should be implemented to overcome these problems and so on, most people are not interested in discussing that.
So, people think that it's about differences in opinion about how to improve student performance. That's rarely discussed. Stakeholders come to you wanting to gain more resources, or at least in our case, as I said, we were at the peak of the financial crisis, not to lose resources or power, and that's their main concern.
And, you know, in my case, because the education is decentralized, so we transfer most of the budget to regions because we were at the peak of the financial crisis, I had no resources whatsoever. So different stakeholders would come and say, say unions, I want decreases in class size and increases in teacher salaries. And I said, you know, I can't do that first because it's up to the regions.
Second, because there's no funding, we didn't know we were going to be rescued like Greece and Portugal. It was a very difficult moment and they seem to understand, but then they turn these private conversations when they go out to speak to the media and try to stir up the public debate into things that have nothing to do with what we're trying to solve, or even with a conversation that had just taken place like, oh, the secretary of state wants to privatize education and those things that even if they have nothing to do with reality, because in the same way that people don't look at the evidence, people normally don't read the laws. So they come out, it's a conservative government, they say she wants to privatize education, in everybody's minds it clicks, it makes sense, you know, a conservative government in the peak of a financial crisis wants to privatize education, it's the same with health.
And then it's very difficult because if you are too academic and keep saying, no, you know, according to this data, blah, blah, blah, I mean, most people honestly are not interested, don't know what PISA is, don't understand. I would say don't even necessarily, when talking about families, care about the whole system, because it's very difficult for families to say, oh, according to PISA, we're below the OECD average. For them, the question is not that, for them, the question is, do I have a school nearby, which is good enough for my children?
What are you telling me about PISA scores and the whole national score? It's difficult for them to analyze the education system in those terms. So at the end of the day, all stakeholders have vested interest.
All stakeholders are receiving either resources or power or both. And their main concern when you're going to implement a reform is that the resources don't decrease. And that's very difficult because there are always winners and losers.
If you're going to change some rules, then, you know, someone is going to lose something, and then that someone comes out with arguments like they're going to privatize education or, to give you one example, we had, one of my main concerns was when I joined government, we had 30% of early school leaving and 50% of youth unemployment. I thought that was the worst, the worst aspect of our education system, an education system, which was described by the OECD as equitable because they don't take into account early school leaving. So, we modernize vocational education and training.
We try to make it more attractive to students so that students, rather than dropping out of school, would choose vocational education and training or apprenticeships. And the rejection to that measure was complete from all sides. They argued that what I wanted was for disadvantaged students not to reach university, that they called the vet track a sewage, where I wanted to push out of the education system students.
And I kept saying, I honestly don't understand your argument. I mean, these students are dropping out of school, going to the streets literally, and never finding a job in their lives. Why is vocational education and training worse than that?
And you get into these narratives that capture people's minds, but that have nothing to do with reality. And what I found dishonest is that, you know, that what they're fighting for is resources, but they're disguising it as they are looking after the interest of disadvantaged students and they're not. So, what you're trying to do is not to push them out of school, is to prevent them from dropping out of school.
And still the story's turned completely upside down.
[01:01:50] Anna Stokke: The other thing I wanted to ask about too, this happens a lot. So, a government comes in, they make some education policy, which may be good or bad, but then the next government can come in and just get rid of it. Do you think there should be some measures in place for making sure that doesn't happen or that there's more consistency?
I mean, this is education we're talking about, right? These are kids, I don't really care where someone sits on the political spectrum. I feel that people should all come together.
I don't see how education is partisan at all. That makes no sense to me. I just wonder if there should be some measures in place for ensuring consistency.
[01:02:33] Montse Gomendio: One of the reasons why I wrote this book is that I was still puzzled after five years in government and five years at the OECD about why they were so difficult to implement and so easy to reverse. And in East Asia, again, part of the reason for their success, which we haven't mentioned, is that they can make long-term plans like in Singapore. It's half democracy or however you want to call it, but you know, the same party has been in government for long enough to make long-term plans.
And then if they implement the right policies, they work. If you change the policies every three or four years, according to the political cycle, then nothing is going to work. I think the solution is quite easy, but again, you know, it's more an academic mind than a political mind, which is you evaluate, you implement policies and then you evaluate the impact and the basic consensus needs to be that what matters the most is student performance.
If those evaluations show that student performance is improving or early school leaving is decreasing or any of these things, then you must agree to keep them. In that sense, I, despite having been part of government, I really don't see why education should be so polarized. I really don't see why ideology should play such an important role.
As I said, I think the basic measures to develop a good education system are pretty obvious. That doesn't mean that they're easy to implement, as I said, but we all know what they are. So, let's put them in place and if they work, let's keep them.
I don't think that agreement should be that difficult, but it is. It is because at the end of the day, someone comes and when you think you're trying to reach consensus, they say typically, no, no, no, but we have to increase investment in education by whatever percentage of GDP and it's like, well, sorry, that's not the problem in most European countries or OECD countries. Why are you suggesting this, which you know is impossible?
Well, it's just a way of making sure that consensus is never reached. So, it's a political game and that kind of political game I dislike. Yeah, I think it's not good for education systems.
Having said that, I also have to say that in some countries it becomes a bit of a legend, like in Spain. There's this idea that every time a government from a different political party comes into power, they approve an education reform, which is different from the rest, just because of ideological reasons and the system changes completely and teachers can't adapt and it's all very unstable. Well, that's not true.
In Spain, we've had exactly the same model since 1990, and it only changed for three years when we implemented this reform that I've been talking about. And after that, it was reversed again and we've had the same model. So, there are some countries where people feel that the political changes occur very often.
That's not necessarily the case in all of them.
[01:05:54] Anna Stokke: Yeah, and I agree with you. I think the answer to most things is measure student success, right? And if students are improving, then you want to keep that policy.
And if they're not, then you want to try something else. It should be that simple, but it's not, as you have said.
So, to end off, can you just summarize for the listeners, what are the main components that make an effective education system when we're looking at the data coming from international large-scale assessments?
[1:06:31] Montse Gomendio: I think the main elements are very clear. I think they are teacher quality, the quality of the curriculum and a curriculum, which is rich in knowledge and evaluations, which are well aligned with the curriculum. Beyond that, there are other things that are important.
Whether you have ability grouping, whether you have tracking and when it starts, that depends on the stage at which your education system is, or whether you give autonomy to teachers. That depends entirely on whether your education system is still at a very early stage where everything's of poor quality, whether it's maturing at an intermediate stage or whether it's already become excellent. Some of the elements, there are many elements that you need to put in place for the system to work at the same time.
Some elements are common, like the three I gave you. Some others are very strongly context dependent and those you need to be careful with.
[01:07:52] Anna Stokke: OK, well, that's the formula. So, thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking with you today and thanks for sharing all your knowledge and your expertise and your experience with us.
It's really great to hear about these things and really helpful for me and my listeners. So, thank you.
[01:07:52] Montse Gomendio: Well, thank you very much for the invitation. I really enjoyed it.
[01:07:55] Anna Stokke: Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy this podcast, please consider showing your support by leaving a five-star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
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