PARIS — In the world of international education, what Andreas Schleicher thinks matters.  As a special adviser to the secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, he has the attention of policy makers in the world’s wealthiest countries.  As a leading figure behind the O.E.C.D.’s annual review, “Education at a Glance,” and its Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests the literacy, mathematical competence and scientific knowledge of 15-year-olds around the world, he has changed the way countries think about what goes on in their classrooms.  Q. How did you come to be a specialist in education?  A. My background is in physics. When I entered the O.E.C.D., it was still a foreign world to measure education. We put out “Education at a Glance” and then PISA in the year 2000 and that really received a strong recognition by governments — to look at the outcomes.  Q. Presumably not everyone was pleased?  A. No. But I think everyone accepted it. Nobody’s pleased with every number. But PISA didn’t get contested in a way that people would have done with many other types of comparisons. That was the idea: to build a bulletproof instrument for evaluating education.  What our work has done — it has limited the room for political arbitrariness. Education is a field which has been quite dominated by ideologies, from the classroom to public policy. And I think this work, first of all, it shows what’s possible. You can look at lots of countries who achieve what you don’t achieve. It has taken away excuses from those who are complacent.  Q. So you can say: “We know this is possible.”  A. I think you can go one step further. You can ask yourself: “What is it that makes systems more successful than my own? What have they done differently?” You can use the world as a laboratory. If you think about free schools in England, well, look at what happened to free schools in Sweden.  Education is a very inward-looking business. Schools don’t have a natural tendency to look at other schools; teachers are in isolation in the classroom. And education systems have no tradition to learn from each other.  Q. Did some countries refuse to engage with PISA at first?  A. Yeah. A lot. But within one year, everybody turned around. First the dynamic was: “It can’t be done.” Also, the project was eight times as expensive as our whole budget for education. But the moment people saw scientifically this can be done, the dynamics changed. We’ve now got 74 countries — every major economy is part of this. China and India are still patchy for various reasons, but they are making progress, too.  When we opened it to non-O.E.C.D. countries, many industrialized countries said, “Why do we want to work with these countries?” They had this idea the world was neatly divided into rich and well-educated countries and poor and badly educated ones. And then suddenly they see a lot of the world’s best-performing systems are not the rich ones. They are outside the O.E.C.D., like Singapore or Hong Kong.  Q. What were the biggest surprises?  A. How much variability in performance there is — how big the gap really is in the world. But the more important finding for us was that quality and equity didn’t seem to be opposing policy objectives.  Some people argue, if you want to achieve excellence you have to accept a lot of inequality. Other people say, if you focus on equity, you’ll end up with mediocrity. What our comparisons have shown is that success is about achieving excellence — maybe not for all, but for many. And that it is an achievable goal. That’s something that education theory didn’t proclaim. Nor did we assume that would be the outcome. But it has been a very clear finding from PISA.  For example, the impact of social background on learning outcomes was not inevitable. You have countries that are very, very good at moderating the impact of social background.  Q. The United States is not one of them?  A. Much of the professional literature comes from the English-speaking world. So it was particularly that part of the world that was most struck by the fact that in Finland there is only a 5 percent performance variation among schools. Every school succeeds.  Q. Without one succeeding at the expense of another?  A. Exactly. Another issue which I found really interesting: When we think about market mechanisms in education, we think about managing consumer demand. It’s all about school choice.
Andreas Schleicher, special advisor to the secretary general of OECD, has run the organization's international education surveys since 2000.