While reforms are helping, budget cuts are sabotaging students’ performance
Fifteen-year-olds in southern European countries are struggling to catch up with their peers in international tests in maths, reading and science.
For years, southern European countries have failed to climb up the OECD’s Pisa rankings which assess the performance of 15-year-old students in mathematics, literacy and science.
Greece ranks 43rd out of 72 countries in science, the lowest score among advanced countries, and similar to the levels reported in Chile and Bulgaria. And while Spain and Italy do significantly better then Greece, both scored below the OECD average ranking 29th and 34th in the science assessment.
Two-in-10 Greek students fail to reach the baseline level of proficiency in maths, science or literacy, meaning they are unable to work out the price of an item in a different currency and struggle when reading text to pinpoint its main ideas. Worryingly, the situation has been worsening consistently in the past decade.
Conversely, in Spain, Italy and Portugal, one-in-10 students fail to reach these levels, slightly below the OECD average.
This rift was not always there. In 2006 Greece, Portugal and Italy reported very similar scores, now they differ by more than 40 points — equivalent to more than a year of schooling. Portugal dodged the group of low-performing countries altogether.
What happened to schools in Greece?
The European Commission’s education monitor says the Greek education and training sector was “strongly affected by very low and decreasing public spending, due to strict fiscal consolidation”. Indeed, funding has dropped more than one-third since 2009 and public spending on education is the lowest in the EU.
But funding is not the only problem. Teaching time in Greece is the lowest in OECD countries, about 40 per cent lower than the OECD average. The same EU report also points to “a lack of a culture of performance evaluation” as well as the need for “implementing new decentralisation measures to increase the financial and organisational autonomy of primary and secondary schools across the country”.
Contrary to most European countries, Greek schools are not able to select, pay or fire their schoolteachers, while teachers cannot pick courses, determine the content of the classes they teach or pick their text books. In terms of school autonomy, Greece ranks at the very bottom among 35 OECD countries.
So how did other peripheral countries improve their school systems?
Portugal, Italy and Spain have all introduced reforms aimed at improving the quality of teaching.
In Portugal these included a new funding formula linked to new performance criteria. Italy introduced new school and teacher evaluation systems while Spain’s school reforms — known as LOMCE — introduced a newly designed curriculum, assessments to detect difficulties at an earlier stage and a different approach to the promotion of skills-based teaching and learning.
The European Commission’s education monitor expects school outcomes in all these countries to improve further in the next few years.
Will these reforms suffice?
At this stage it is probably too early to tell, but despite the improvements Spain and Italy still have a wide gap to close and a few issues to tackle.
Both countries are marked by vast regional disparities. The poor regions of Italy and Spain are among the worst performers in the education league. Calabria, in the south of Italy, has a similar proportion of students lacking basic skills as Latin America, while students in Trento, in the wealthy north, perform similarly to their Singaporean peers, the league’s top performers.
Similarly, school outcomes in Madrid or the Extremadura region differ by 54 points in maths, a variation as wide as that between the first and the 23rd best performing countries.
While Portugal’s reformist efforts were coupled with a sizeable chunk of government spending reorientated towards education, Spain, Greece and Italy report some of the lowest shares of education spending in the EU.
Italy’s education system faced some of the most severe cuts — in some cases as high as 20 per cent — despite already being the OECD state with the lowest share of education spending.
To escape what the OECD calls the low-growth trap, peripheral countries need high human capital which can be delivered through efficient and high-quality education systems. Yet education has so far been “a net loser from austerity policies” in these countries”, according to a paper on “The asymmetrical educational consequences of economic recession in Southern Europe”.
The OECD students assessment results released this week gave further proof that peripheral countries must combine reforms with more spending, regardless of their budgetary constrains.
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