Happy St. Patrick’s Day

Does Ireland have the best primary and secondary education system in the world?

We’re mixing it up a bit for St. Patrick’s Day today and giving you the usual Tuesday post on Monday. I’m writing to you today from the “Sunny Southeast” of Ireland, where I’ve lived since 2021. Contrary to an opinion I’ve heard from Americans for years, St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated in Ireland. The best way I can describe it is that it is more like the 4^th of July here, a national holiday marked by generally wholesome family fun. But before I head down to the parade, I wanted to try out an argument.

Looking at international assessment data, and taking into account other factors, I’d like to make the case that Ireland has the best primary and secondary education system in the world. I’ve been fighting this corner in presentations to Irish audiences for a year or two now and its time I trot it out for the Yanks.

The Data

Let’s look at three international assessments: PIRLS, PISA, and TIMSS.

PIRLS is an international reading assessment designed for students in their fourth year of schooling. It is administered by researchers at Boston College every five years and in 2021 saw 57 countries participate. If you scroll down to page 28 of the 2021 report (Exhibit 1.3), you will see that Irish students scored second in the world, a single scale score point behind Singapore. It is true that COVID delayed Ireland’s administration of the assessment, so students were slightly older when they took the exam, but amongst nations that delayed assessment, Ireland was the highest scorer.

PISA is an international assessment of 15-year-olds sponsored every three years by the OECD. In 2022, 81 countries participated in the exam and Irish 15 year-olds finished 8^th in mathematics, 2^nd in reading (pipped by Singapore again!), and 8^th in science. As an interesting comparison point to those that are following US NAEP scores, where the scores of the nation’s lowest performing students are dropping, Ireland is not following that trend. Even though Ireland saw a decline in mathematics scores, Ireland’s grade report states: “Over the most recent period (2018 to 2022), the gap between the highest-scoring students (10% with the highest scores) and the weakest students (10% with the lowest scores) did not change significantly in mathematics, reading and science. In mathematics, performance dropped to a similar extent for both high- and low-achievers.”

TIMSS is an international Math and Science assessment given to students in their 4^th and 8^th years of schooling by the same folks who sponsor PIRLS. In 2023, 58 countries participated in the test, and Irish students in 4^th grade were 11^th in the international standings in math and Irish 8^th grade students rose to 7^th. In 8^th grade, the only nations to do better than Ireland were Singapore (again!), Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and England. Given that both Hong Kong and England are constituent parts of larger countries, it doesn’t seem exactly fair to highlight them on their own, but that is how TIMSS reports the data.

The Context

Yes, readers, I can hear you all the way over here. Ireland did not finish first in any assessment, so how can it be the best? I’ll make a couple of arguments.

Let’s start with reading. Ireland is the best in reading, on both international assessments, if you don’t count Singapore. The Lee Kuan Yew stans might come for me for this, but I think that trying to compare nations to a sui generis principality like Singapore—an extremely wealthy city-state floating off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula—is tough. I don’t want to go so far as to say that Ireland has the best reading scores of “real” countries, because of course Singapore is a real country. But Ireland has the best scores in reading of all nations that are not extremely wealthy floating city-states.

But the bigger point that I would make is about efficiency. Check out this chart from the National Center for Education and the Economy.

Irish primary school students attend school for 183 days and Irish secondary school students only attend school for 167 days. That means Singaporean students are in school for seven additional days in primary school and 27 more days (a full five school weeks) in secondary school. But it isn’t just Singapore, looking at the nations that outscore Ireland in mathematics, it takes some of them 37 to 54 additional school days to do it. That is months of additional school time that South Korean and Japanese students are spending in school that Irish students are not.

And it isn’t just days in the year, but also hours in the day. Here is another chart from NCEE.

So South Korean students are not only in school for 220 days, but those days are 8 hours long. According to the Irish National Parents Council, primary school students spend 5 hours and 40 minutes in school, rising to six hours for secondary school students.

In math, yes, Japan and South Korea and Taiwan best Ireland, but to do so, they have their students in school for a substantially longer period of time. Many of these nations suffer with severe mental health problems in their school age students. I don’t think all of that is worth a few extra points on math assessments.

And it isn’t just time efficiency. According to the OECD, Ireland spends $10,959 per student per year in primary school and $12,390 per student per year in secondary school. This is below both the OECD and EU averages. South Korea spends $14,873 per student per year in primary school and $19,299 per student per year in secondary school. Not to make us Americans feel bad, but we spend $15, 270 in primary and $16,301 in secondary schools.

So when we take into account the time spent in school and the tax dollars paid to finance it, Ireland can certainly be seen as highly efficient in addition to being highly effective.

Finally, equity. Ireland was one of only ten education systems described by the OECD as having high levels of inclusion and fairness. The OECD wrote that these systems are systems where, “the strength of the relationship between student socio-economic status and performance is weaker than the OECD average, meaning these systems have high fairness by socio-economic status. They are also highly inclusive in that their percentages of 15-year-olds reaching at least basic proficiency in mathematics, reading and science are above the OECD average.” Two of those jurisdictions were Hong Kong and Macao (whose scores we should take with a mine of salt), and other than Japan, none of the other systems that outperformed Ireland on international assessments were included on the list.

Taken together, I think this makes Ireland the best primary and secondary education system in the world. Maybe I’m blinded by the waving Tricolors everyone has out for the day (first flown in Waterford by Thomas Francis Meagher, a contender for the most interesting man in the world for his time), but Ireland is only bested by a handful of Asian countries, and only in math, and those countries have their children in school for substantially more time, with some not-so-great consequences.

The Why

The image at the top of this post is the Salmon of Knowledge, a character in the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology. The fish contained all of the knowledge of the world and would bestow that knowledge on anyone who could catch and eat it. When Fionn mac Cumhaill (anglicized by your local Irish pub as Finn McCool) was tasked with cooking the fish for his master who had caught it, he burned his thumb touching it to see if it was cooked. After sucking on his finger to ease the pain, he accidentally gained the knowledge from the fish. Fionn went on to lead the Fianna, a heroic band of hunter warriors.

I cannot tell you how tempted I am to put together a twee book about lessons from Irish education (interwoven with mythology and every stereotype a publisher would allow me to cram in there) and then travel all-expenses paid around the world to keynote education conferences like cheerleaders for Finland and Shanghai did a decade ago. But alas, my conscience prevents me from doing so. Trying to distill the secret sauce of what makes an education system thrive is next to impossible to do with any integrity.

I can tell you that according to OIDEL, Ireland has the most educational freedom of any nation around the world. As Sean McGraw and Jonathan Tiernan show in their fantastic book The Politics of Irish Primary Education around 98% of Irish primary schools are private, with 89% of schools operated by the Catholic Church, 6% by the Church of Ireland, and 3% by Educate Together, a non-denominational school patron. Students are free to enroll in whatever school they like, and schools are paid by the state based on enrollment. Only a small percentage of schools are oversubscribed (McGraw and Tiernan estimate around 6%), forcing a decision tree of priorities to determine if the child gets a spot. Other than that, students can attend whatever school they want.

But is it that, or the strong phonics-based reading curriculum that schools follow, or a cultural affinity for education and literacy, or teacher quality (which at least anecdotally I have seen to be of incredibly high quality), or immigration of students from high achieving cultures, or some combinations of all of them? I don’t think we can disentangle that.

For now I’ll just say go raibh maith agat to the brilliant Irish educators behind these statistics and Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh to everyone else.