Falling schools productivity

What should we infer from the fact that productivity in education has fallen (pdf), as higher spending hasn’t led to proportionately higher attainments?
It’s  trivial to merely attack government waste here. Instead, there’s another possibility - that perhaps education suffers from severely diminishing returns. If so, the failure of higher spending to produce much better results isn’t due (just!) to New Labour’s incompetence, but to the nature of the education beast.
Three pieces of evidence make me say this.
1. The failure of higher spending to greatly improve results isn’t a local failure. Erik Hanushek has shown (pdf) that it’s happened around the world.
2. There’s very little correlation across countries between spending and attainment. My chart shows this. It compares the average Pisa scores on reading, science and maths in 2006 (from table A1.1 of this pdf) to spending per pupil in secondary schools. You can see that, insofar as there is a correlation, it’s driven by a couple of low-spending, low-achieving nations: Turkey and  Mexico. Strip these out, and there’s nothing in it.
The UK is in the middle of the pack here. We get better results than Denmark and Norway, despite spending less, but worse results than Finland and Korea despite spending more. Looking at this chart, you’d never guess there was anything odd about the UK’s education system*.
Of course, you can quibble with this in countless ways. I use it merely as a rough sketch of a general point.
3. Good education costs a fortune. Oakham School,  for example, charges over £15,000 a year before boarding charges,  and its results are good but not stunning: I don‘t think its atypical for fees or results.
These three pieces of evidence corroborate the ONS’s finding - they show that money is no guarantee of great educational achievement.
One reaction to this is the Goveian one - to say that we need to restructure schools, to introduce more competition and choice and reduce government control. The evidence that this will lead to a large improvement in standards is, though, mixed. And my chart suggests that a wide range of educational systems across countries is associated with only small differences in achievement - which should warn us that there’s no magic bullet.
There is, though, another possible reaction. We should ask: might there not be severe limits upon what education can achieve? Could it be that the task of putting knowledge, wisdom and culture into recalcitrant minds is doomed to be a forlorn one?
Shouldn’t we ask: what can education do? before we ask: what should it do?
I have no answers here, but I commend the work of James Heckman, such as this and this.
* Yes, I know Scotland’s is different. OECD data refer to the UK.

Comments

[spencer]

Can you compare productivity in British private schools compared to public schools.

In the US public(government) schools have weak productivity, but there is also no evidence that private(non government) schools
do any better. Moreover, private tuition in the US outside of church schools is much higher than expenditures per pupil in public ( state) schools.

No one, public or private seems able to improve on the age-old practice of a student at one end of a log and a teacher on the other end of the log.

[Mike Mathea]

The results are expected. All we have done is move from Blackboards and writing implements to fancy in class technology. We changed the method of passing on information from relatively low cost method to a high cost method.
To increase productivity the education of the students you still need to engage the students. I do not find on line students any more engaged that in class students.

[SC]

Schools such as Oakham charge a fortune because they offer, and parents desire, things other than those necessary to provide a good education. State school as I experienced it was generally adequate to educate a motivated child but it was very dull and had poor facilities. I shall be sending my child to private school so that she can enjoy her time making use of the excelent facilities as well as receiving an adequate education.

[Tom]

"Schools such as Oakham charge a fortune because they offer, and parents desire, things other than those necessary to provide a good education" ... primarily, mixing with 'the right people'.