The Importance of School Systems: Evidence from International Differences in Student Achievement

By Ludger Woessmann. Social Science Research Network, 2016

266 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school – socio-economic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school systems make a difference? This essay argues that differences in features of countries' school systems, and in particular their institutional structures, account for a substantial part of the cross-country variation in student achievement. It first documents the size and cross-test consistency of international differences in student achievement. Next, it uses the framework of an education production function to provide descriptive analysis of the extent to which different factors of the school system, as well as factors beyond the school system, account for cross-country achievement differences. Finally, it covers research that goes beyond descriptive associations by addressing leading concerns of bias in cross-country analysis. The available evidence suggests that differences in expenditures and class size play a limited role in explaining cross-country achievement differences, but that differences in teacher quality and instruction time do matter. This suggests that what matters is not so much the amount of inputs that school systems are endowed with, but rather how they use them. Correspondingly, international differences in institutional structures of school systems such as external exams, school autonomy, private competition, and tracking have been found to be important sources of international differences in student achievement.

Subfields: Demography, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cb79b6b3fe1676a8525059595d6319608d87d3ff

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Citations in the corpus

Measuring Success in Education: The Role of Effort on the Test Itself (2017, background): “perform so poorly relative to other countries despite its wealth and high per pupil expenditures? Examples of answers discussed in the literature include differences in learning due to socioeconomic factors, school systems, and culture (e.g. Carnoy and Rothstein, 2013; Woessmann, 2016; Stevenson and”
The economic impacts of learning losses (2020, background): “Moreover, additional years of schooling are systematically associated with higher employment and lower unemployment (see, e.g., (Woessmann, 2016[10])).”
Education production functions (2020, background): “There has also been wider analysis of educational production from other countries (Woessmann, 2016).”
Simulating the Potential Impacts of COVID-19 School Closures on Schooling and Learning Outcomes: A Set of Global Estimates (2020, unknown): “84 For additional details please see World Bank (2020) available online at http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/531681585957264427/Guidance-Note-on-Remote-Learning-andCOVID-19. 85 See for instance the policy response options described in Rogers and Sabarwal (2020). 86 Al Tuwaijri et al.”