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L. Wössmann, Uni-Professor und Abteilungsleiter am ifo Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, vertritt die Meinung, dass mangelnde Schulbildung, wie sie durch PISA getestet wird, eine zentrale Ursache langfristig entstandener wirtschaflticher Probleme ist. In diesem Zusammenhang und mithilfe einer Fülle von Fakten stellt Wößmann 12 große Schulirrtümer vor (z.B. "Mehr Geld = bessere Schüler", "Kleinere Klassen = bessere Schüler" oder "In unseren Schulen stehen allen die gleichen Chancen offen.") und liefert wissenschalftich fundiert Lösungsansätze. Der Autor sammelte viel statistisches Material, das er in verständlichen Grafiken präsentiert. Trotz der Komplexität des Themas ist dies ein durchaus anschauliches und lesenswertes Sachbuch. Ausführliche Anmerkungen und Literaturhinweise zu den einzelnen Kapiteln. Vergleiche auch zum Thema L. Kühn: "Schulversagen" (BA 4/07), P.-J. Brenner: "Schule in Deutschland" (BA 6/06). Ein wichtiger Diskussionsbeitrag zur nach wie vor aktuellen PISA-Thematik. Breit einsetzbar für Eltern und Pädagogen. (2 S)

East Asian students regularly take top positions in international league tables of educational performance. Using internationally comparable student-level data, I estimate how family background and schooling policies affect student performance in five high-performing East Asian economies. Family background is a strong predictor of student performance in South Korea and Singapore, while Hong Kong and Thailand achieve more equalized outcomes. There is no evidence that smaller classes improve student performance in East Asia. But other schooling policies such as school autonomy over salaries and regular homework assignments are related to higher student performance in several of the considered countries.

International comparative studies of student performance have initiated political discussions in countries all over the world on how to improve the educational achievement of students. The empirical evidence suggests that central exams help to achieve higher student performance. Central exams direct the incentives of all educational actors towards furthering students' knowledge. By providing the education system with performance information they improve the monitoring of students, teachers, schools, administrators, and parents. Using an international micro database of nearly half a million students, this paper finds that students in countries with central exit exam systems perform substantially better in their middle-school years in both math and science than students in countries without central exams. In quantitative terms, their advantage is 35 to 47 percent of an international standard deviation in test scores, or roughly the equivalent of one year of schooling. The beneficial effect increases as students advance through middle school. Good and bad students alike perform better in central-exam systems. In math, the gain of high-performing students is slightly larger than that of low-performing students. There is some evidence that central-exam systems equalize educational opportunities for students from different parental backgrounds. School autonomy in budgetary and salary decisions is detrimental in systems without central exams but turns around to be beneficial in systems with central exams. Thus, central exams seem to be a prerequisite for a decentralized system of autonomous schools to achieve high performance. The efforts of teachers and students are more concentrated on the goals of the education system when central exams are in place, and parental involvement becomes more informed and effective. Thus, central exams exert their effects through several different impact channels by changing the behavior of different actors in the education process. Given the shortcomings of most school- and teacher-based accountability systems and the substantially higher costs of most resource-based policies, central-exam systems seem a highly attractive policy alternative.

A review of the measures of the stock of human capital used in empirical growth research reveals that human capital is mostly poorly proxied. The simple use of the most common proxy, average years of schooling of the working-age population, misspecifies the relationship between education and the stock of human capital. Based on human capital theory, the specification of human capital should be extended to allow for decreasing returns to education and for differences in the quality of a year of education. Cross-country differences in qualityadjusted human capital can account for about half the world-wide dispersion of levels of economic development and for virtually all the development differences across OECD countries.

This paper discusses the role of vocational education, and in particular apprenticeship education, in preparing students for the labor market, with a particular focus on a life-cycle perspective in changing economies. The basic idea is that vocational education may facilitate entry into the labor market but hurt employment opportunities later in life because of limited adaptability to changing economic environments. We summarize evidence on the changing effects of vocational education over the life cycle from the international adult achievement tests IALS and PIAAC and country-specific evidence. We then discuss policy implications for elements of future-oriented education systems, especially apprenticeship programs. (DIPF/Orig.) ; Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit der Rolle berufsspezifischer Bildung, insbesondere im Rahmen der dualen Berufsausbildung, in der Vorbereitung von Schülern auf den Arbeitsmarkt unter besonderer Berücksichtigung einer Lebenszyklusperspektive in einer sich verändernden Wirtschaft. Die Grundidee besteht darin, dass berufsspezifische Bildung den Einstieg in den Arbeitsmarkt erleichtert, im späteren Leben aber aufgrund von begrenzter Anpassungsfähigkeit an das sich wandelnde wirtschaftliche Umfeld die Beschäftigungsmöglichkeiten behindern kann. Wir fassen Evidenz über die sich verändernden Effekte berufsspezifischer Bildung über den Lebenslauf aus den internationalen Erwachsenentests IALS und PIAAC sowie länderspezifische Ergebnisse zusammen. Darauf aufbauend werden Politikimplikationen für Elemente eines zukunftsorientierten Bildungssystems diskutiert, mit einem besonderen Fokus auf die duale Berufsbildung. (DIPF/Orig.)

This paper presents evidence on the associations between family background, school characteristics and student performance in primary school in Argentina, Colombia and several comparison countries. As a general pattern, educational performance is strongly related to family background, weakly to some institutional school features and hardly to schools' resource endowments. In an international perspective, family-background effects are relatively large in Argentina, and relatively small in Colombia. A specific Argentine feature is the lack of performance differences between rural and urban areas. A specific Colombian feature is the lack of significant between-gender performance differences. Non-native students and students not speaking Spanish at home perform particularly weak in both countries. In Argentina, students perform better in schools with a centralized curriculum and ability-based class formation.

Cross-country evidence on student achievement might be hampered by omitted country characteristics such as language or legal differences. This paper uses cross-state variation in Germany, whose sixteen states share the same language and legal system, but pursue different education policies. The same results found previously across countries hold within Germany: Higher mean student performance is associated with central exams, private school operation, and socio-economic background, but not with spending, while higher equality of opportunity is associated with reduced tracking. In a model that pools German states with OECD countries, these fundamental determinants do not differ significantly between the two samples.