But PISA has shown what's possible in education.

High performers on PISA embrace diversity with differentiated pedagogical practices.

This is how the world looked then in terms of PISA performance.

That's also clear, and that's where some of the limits of international comparisons of PISA are.

So with PISA, we try to change this by measuring the knowledge and skills of people directly.

PISA has transformed that debate, and pushed early childhood education right at the center of public policy in Germany.

Of course, assessments do not cover every important skill or attitude. But there is convincing evidence that the knowledge and skills that the PISA system assesses are essential to students future success, and the OECD works continuously to broaden the range of cognitive and social skills that PISA measures.

At the top of the international league table according to the latest PISA study, is the Shanghai district of China.

Before PISA, many governments claimed that they oversaw the world s most successful education systems, and insisted that they had already taken the steps needed to address any shortcomings. By exposing weaknesses in a particular country s system, PISA assessments help to ensure that policymakers recognize and, it is hoped, address remaining deficiencies.

(f) The Don Quijote mission was proposed by the Deimos Space Company, EADS Astrium Ltd., the University of Pisa and the Spaceguard Foundation.

With PISA, we wanted to measure how they actually deliver equity, in terms of ensuring that people from different social backgrounds have equal chances.

But let's step back for a moment and focus on the countries that actually started PISA, and I'm giving them a colored bubble now.

That's where other forms of research need to kick in, and that's also why PISA doesn't venture into telling countries what they should be doing.

And the example of PISA shows that data can be more powerful than administrative control of financial subsidy through which we usually run education systems.

Some claim that the PISA results are based on too wide a range of factors to be relevant, while others point out the challenges inherent in testing students in various languages and with different cultural backgrounds. Of course, comparing education across countries is not easy, but PISA remains the most useful tool yet developed for policymakers attempting to improve their national education systems.

You've seen Finland doing so well on PISA, but what makes Finland so impressive is that only five percent of the performance variation amongst students lies between schools.

The team involved in the Don Quijote mission is Deimos (the prime contractor), Astrium, the University of Pisa, the Spaceguard Foundation, the Paris Geophysical Institute (IPGP) and the University of Bern.

In the shadow of the Leaning Tower of Pisa sits the town storyteller, eating a bowl of pea soup. After that he tells some children the fairy tale The Princess and the Pea .

At the same time, PISA measures students social and emotional skills and attitudes toward learning, as well as educational equity and parental support all of which provides indispensable context for understanding scores on international assessments.

Those are the critical questions, and what we have learned from PISA is that, in high performing education systems, the leaders have convinced their citizens to make choices that value education, their future, more than consumption today.

The Special Rapporteur gratefully acknowledges the assistance given for the preparation of this report by Stefano Dorigo (Ph.D. candidate, University of Pisa), Paolo Palchetti (Associate Professor, University of Macerata) and Mark Toufayan (LL.M. candidate, New York University).

Like Chile, Brazil has sharply increased school enrollment but has yet to provide high quality learning opportunities to disadvantaged children. In the OECD s international PISA rankings of educational achievement, Brazil places near the bottom, below Mexico and Chile.

Consider that in 2003, the test scores of 28 of Turkish students could be explained by their socioeconomic standing in other words, the poorer the pupil, the lower his or her PISA scores. This was in line with the OECD average.

The orbital analysis necessary to find virtual impactors is carried out in two centres the Near Earth Objects Dynamic Site of the University of Pisa, Italy, established in 1999, and Sentry at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in the United States, established in 2002.

And even those people who complain and say that the relative standing of countries on something like PISA is just an artifact of culture, of economic factors, of social issues, of homogeneity of societies, and so on, these people must now concede that education improvement is possible.

But whether it constitutes a strategy for economic growth is another matter. What most people mean by better education is more schooling and, by higher quality education, they mean the effective acquisition of skills (as revealed, say, by the test scores in the OECD s standardized PISA exam).

But I want to tell you the story of PISA, OECD's test to measure the knowledge and skills of 15 year olds around the world, and it's really a story of how international comparisons have globalized the field of education that we usually treat as an affair of domestic policy.

The OECD established PISA as a global assessment, because in today s globalized world students must be able to collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds and appreciate different ideas, perspectives, and values. To give students the best possible chance to succeed, education must prepare them to handle issues that transcend national boundaries.

When Brazil emerged as the lowest performing education system in the first PISA assessment, released in 2000, many people rightly questioned the fairness of comparing an emerging economy to advanced countries like Finland and Japan. But Brazil rose to the challenge, making massive investments in improving the quality of teaching.

This should serve as a model for Latin America as it works to improve the quality of its educational systems. As it stands, the eight Latin American countries that take the OECD s standardized PISA exam are among the 15 worst performing countries of the 65 that participate in the program.

Creating a global platform for collaboration in education research and innovation has been the PISA initiative s aspiration from its conception in the late 1990s. Since then, policymakers, researchers, and experts have built the world s largest professional network dedicated to the development of robust, reliable, and internationally comparable information on student learning outcomes.

How can we measure what makes a school system work? Andreas Schleicher walks us through the PISA test, a global measurement that ranks countries against one another then uses that same data to help schools improve. Watch to find out where your country stacks up, and learn the single factor that makes some systems outperform others.

The sense of accountability that PISA fosters among governments and education ministers has helped to spur them into action. They increasingly turn to one another to learn how to apply innovations in curricula, pedagogy, and digital resources how to offer personalized learning experiences that maximize every student s chances of success and how to cope with diversity in the classroom.

Germany also featured in PISA 2000, recording below average performance and large social inequalities in education an outcome that stunned Germans and initiated a months long public debate. Spurred into action, the government launched initiatives to support disadvantaged and immigrant students, and made the notion of early childhood education a driving force in German education policy.

For example, PISA assessments have revealed that, while Japanese students excel at reproducing what they have learned, they often struggle when asked to extrapolate from that knowledge and apply it creatively. The effort that this has inspired to create more innovative learning environments was apparent last April, during a visit to the Tohoku schools destroyed by the 2011 tsunami.

PISA has already prompted important advances in education worldwide. The OECD will continue to work with the 80 participating countries to develop the program further, so that it can continue to help policymakers and educators design and implement better education policies and give their citizens access to the tools that they need to build better lives.