American economist Milton Friedman developed a theory of the overall purpose of business and business ethics that says “an entity’s greatest responsibility lies in the satisfaction of the shareholders.”
In other words, “the business of business is business” — nothing more.
Maybe so, but of late, more and more op-eds in business-related publications have been commenting on the role of education in the success or lack of success of the business of a nation.
A quick look at The Economist, the Financial Times, and the venerable Wall Street Journal reveals frequent coverage of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and its Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students’ reading, math and science literacy every three years. PISA is revered by some but questioned by others as misleading as a measure of education success.
Dr. Jerry Mussio, lead author of “A B.C. Case Study: International comparative study of high performing education jurisdictions,” was Canadian representative to OECD in the development of international education outcome indicators between 2000 and 2004.
Mussio wrote that worldwide school closures in early 2020 led to losses in learning that will not easily be made up for even if schools quickly return to their prior performance levels, and those losses “will have lasting economic impacts both on the affected students and on each nation unless they are effectively remediated.”
According to an article by Gloria Steiner-Khamsi and Shezleen Vellani in the 2018 Oxford Review of Education, both The Economist and Financial Times tend to focus on PISA in their analysis of the relationship between academic performance and the economy, whereas the Wall Street Journal pays greater attention to TIMSS (the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study)
TIMSS is conducted from Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development International Study Centre, which also conducts regular international comparative assessments of student achievement in reading (PIRLS, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) in more than 60 countries.
By now, you may find yourself agreeing with me that there may be too much assessment information out there to be able to draw meaningful conclusions about the correlation between a country’s education results and the economic stability and prosperity of that country.
Nonetheless, in its preface to the release of 2018 PISA results, the OECD provides a pretty succinct attempt to make that link.
“Equipping citizens with the knowledge and skills necessary to achieve their full potential, to contribute to an increasingly interconnected world, and to convert better skills into better lives needs to become a more central preoccupation of policy makers around the world. In working to achieve these goals, more and more countries are looking beyond their own borders for evidence of the most successful and efficient education policies and practices.”
It is hoped that PISA can lead to some insights into the economic impact of those differences country to country.
OECD also claims that further analysis reveals a positive relationship between education spending and PISA results, inasmuch as the costs of increasing educational spending for the currently lowest-spending countries are likely to be recouped by increased economic growth rates within a little more than a year.
All well and good, but the main problem in reaching defensible conclusions in correlating a nation’s education success on a PISA or TIMSS assessment with economic well-being involves comparing nations with different educational standards, environments, and cultures.
This is inherently difficult and may even be academic quicksand. That is because much of the difference in PISA scores among/between countries is attributable to unmeasured, country-specific factors.
This provides an undeniable challenge but, according to Eric Hanushek, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, it is a challenge worth confronting: “Because the benefits of education investments are seen only in the future it is possible to underestimate the value of improvements … recent economic modelling relates cognitive skills as measured by PISA and other international instruments to economic growth.”
A final word from Dr. Mussio, who cites research that suggests grade 1 to 12 students affected by school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic might expect three per cent lower income over their lifetimes.
For nations, lower long-term growth related to such losses might yield an average of 1.5 per cent lower annual GDP for the remainder of the century, he writes.
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
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