DEVELOPMENT

monitoring of teaching, the schools’ autonomy in the
selection of teachers, and the determination of the
study content. The referenced authors also find that
national testing has a positive effect if the results are
used only to compare schools, and not to group children
into different tracks of study.
However, assuming that impact of socio-economic
deprivation will decline, one should carefully monitor
whether the current good performance of Estonia’s
education system will continue in the future. Possible
risks are related to the liberal approach to the principle
of school choice. Although the right of the parents to
choose the school for their child is prevalent in many
countries, Estonia is different because mechanisms are
not utilised to balance the school choice model that has
a segregating effect. Thus, an analysis of the children
starting school in Tallinn from 2008 to 2011 showed
that admission to the popular schools in the city centre
was more probable if the child had completed a paid
prep-school, his or her mother had a higher education,
the father had a good income and they lived in the city
centre (Põder, Lauri 2013). Therefore, several segregation
mechanisms are simultaneously at work – an advantage
based on residence in the city centre schools, admission
testing, and the autonomy of the school director in
deciding whether to admit a child – which intensify each
other. Thus, several problems accompany the neoliberal
education agenda that promotes competition. It has
been discovered that it is more harmless to promote the
principle of school choice in mature countries where the
following preconditions exist: uniform school networks,
parents who are experienced at making selections, and
the ability and desire to consider collective interests
experiences (Perry 2007).
1.3.4
The educational contribution
to economic development
The OECD and IEA surveys provide the answer to the
question of which education systems are among the best
in the world, but based on them, we cannot draw any
direct conclusions about how education systems can
satisfy economic needs. In its education sub-index, the
Global Competitiveness Index, which is computed by
the World Economic Forum, has focused on this topic.
In order to measure the conformity of education with
the needs of the economy, the experts used a scale of 1
to 7 to evaluate the conformity of the following aspects
of the education system with a free market economy: the
quality of the teaching of the sciences in the schools; the
quality of the schools of economics and management;
the utilisation of the Internet in the schools; and the
training opportunities for employees in the workplace.
Unlike the PISA and IEA surveys, in which the respondents
are stakeholders in the education system (students,
teachers, school administrators), the World Economic
Forum’s data reflects the positions of experts outside the
education systems, i.e. the consumers of the education
product, the educational outcome.
Estonia is above average in all the indicators,
however, it stands out for the relatively low satisfaction
Figure 1.3.7
Percentage of students with low and high levels of
performance (%) in mathematics and the country’s
average score, PISA 2009.
Below the base level
Percentage
Singapore (562)
Rep. of Korea (546)
Finland (541)
Switzerland (534)
Netherlands (526)
New Zealand (519)
Belgium (515)
Germany (513)
Estonia (512)
Denmark (503)
Slovenia (501)
Slovakia (497)
France (497)
OECD average (496)
Austria (496)
Poland (495)
Sweden (494)
Czech Republic (493)
Great Britain (492)
Hungary (490)
Luxembourg (489)
Portugal (487)
Ireland (487)
Italy (483)
Spain (483)
Latvia (482)
Lithuania (477)
Greece (466)
Israel (447)
Bulgaria (428)
Uruguay (427)
Romania (427)
Chile (421)
Percentage
Source: OECD
Top level
60 50 40 30 20 10 0 10 20 30
60 50 40 30 20 10 0 10 20 30
with the level of the management schools and the conformity
of the education to the needs of the free market
as a whole. This reflects a greater concern about the
insufficient link to the economy. The World Economic
Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report states that the
Estonian Employers Confederation considers the inadequate
preparation of the workforce to be the main
drag on Estonia’s economic development (WEF 2012).
Since the given index is based on the assessments provided
by local experts, the critical attitude of the local
experts also affects the value of the index. By comparing
the educational indicators of global competitiveness
with the PISA results, it turns out that the Estonian
experts are more critical than the others when assessing
the level of the schools in their country. Thus, the
performance of the Estonian students in mathematics
and the sciences is higher than that of the Swiss and
Belgian students, but the Estonian economic experts
give the level of teaching in our schools a much lower
36
Estonian Human Development Report 2012/2013