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While international alliances among research universities are relatively well established, the challenges for the small liberal arts college to execute a meaningful global collaboration can be much more difficult, due both to the much smaller size of the institution, its more limited resources, and its smaller and more intimate culture centered on undergraduate teaching and learning. A new alliance of liberal arts colleges known as the Pacific Alliance of Liberal Arts Colleges (PALAC) was established in 2021 with the purpose to better articulate the global components of liberal arts education, and to collaborate on key projects that will build collective capacity for student-centered liberal arts education that engages with the world's most pressing problems. PALAC contains nine of the best liberal arts institutions from across the Pacific Region, including institutions in China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Canada, and the United States. This essay describes the origins, motivations, and context of the creation of PALAC, its member institutions, and some of the initial projects planned by the new organization, and goals for global impact for PALAC.

Intersectionality highlights that different aspects of individuals' identities are not independent of each other. Instead, they interact to create unique identities and experiences, which cannot be understood by analysing each identity dimension separately or in isolation from their social and historical contexts. Intersectional approaches in this way question the common classification of individuals into groups (male vs. female, immigrant vs. native etc.), which raises important implications for the policy-making process. In education, analyses with an intersectional lens have the potential to lead to better tailored and more effective policies and interventions related to participation, learning outcomes, students' attitudes towards the future, identification of needs, and socio-emotional well-being. Consequently, as elaborated in this paper, some countries have adjusted their policies in the areas of governance, resourcing, developing capacity, promoting school-level interventions and monitoring, to account for intersectionality. Gaps and challenges related to intersectional approaches are also highlighted.

Calls for increased monitoring and evaluation of education policies and practices have not, so far, included widespread and consistent assessments of the inclusiveness of education settings. Measuring inclusion in education has proven to be a challenging exercise, due not only to the complexity and different uses of the concept, but also to its holistic nature. Indeed, measuring inclusion implies analysing a variety of policy areas within education systems, while also considering the different roles of the system, the school and the classroom. This paper discusses the application of the input-process-outcome model to the measurement of inclusion in education, and key indicators that can be adopted by education systems and schools to this end. It makes considerations relevant to policy makers when designing indicators to measure inclusion, such as the extent of their application, the constraints related to data disaggregation and the relevance of intersectional approaches to inclusion.

This paper examines how international education (IE) as a tool of government foreign policy is challenged in an era of new geopolitics, where China's growing ambitions have increased rivalry with the West. It compares U.S. and Canada as cases first, by examining rationales and approaches to IE in both countries, second, IE relations with China before conflict and third, current controversies and government policy responses to IE relations with China. The paper concludes identifying contextual factors that shape each country's engagement with IE, but suggests that moving forward, the future of IE in a world of new geopolitics is likely to be far more complex and conflictual.

When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into fruition in the early 1990s, there were high hopes and expectations on what this emerging economic block could achieve. Although the agreement involved extensive conversations that led to regulations that facilitated trade across the region--the main intent of NAFTA--the same was not true for the higher education environment. Critics have argued that NAFTA's heavy focus on trade left little room for similar harmonization on issues like higher education. From this perspective, it is evident that if efforts to improve higher education are to gain traction in the trilateral relationship, they must be linked with regional trade and competitiveness. Yet even though NAFTA was not the vehicle for further cooperation on higher education, colleges and universities across Canada, Mexico, and the United States did embrace the opportunity and enthusiastically engaged in conversations that prompted trilateral collaboration. This article follows the key agreements that influenced and guided the early stages of NAFTA collaboration among higher education institutions, as well as developments that kept engagement across the three countries active. It also provides an initial list of areas in which future collaboration might focus. [The report was published in partnership with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. This working paper will be published as a chapter in the forthcoming book, "North America 2.0: Forging a Continental Future."]

Principals (policy makers) have debated the progress in U.S. student performance for a half century or more. Informing these conversations, survey agents have administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math and reading in 160 waves to national probability samples of selected cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. This study is the first to assess consistency of results by agency. We find results vary by agent, but consistent with Flynn effects, gains are larger in math than reading, except for the most recent period. Non-whites progress at a faster pace. Socio-economically disadvantaged white, black, and Hispanic students make greater progress when tested in elementary school, but that advantage attenuates and reverses itself as students age. We discuss potential moderators.

Students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex or somewhere else on the gender/sexuality spectrum (LGBTQI+) are among the diverse student groups in need of extra support and protection in order to succeed in education and reach their full potential. Because they belong to a minority that is often excluded by heteronormative/cisgender people, they are often the targets of physical and psychological harassment. Such discrimination can place them at risk for isolation, reduced academic achievement, and physical and mental harm. This paper provides a brief history of how the LGBTQI+ population has often been misunderstood and labelled in order to understand challenges faced by students who identify as a part of this population. It continues by considering supportive educational policies and programmes implemented from national to local levels across OECD countries. Finally, the paper considers policy gaps and discusses policy implications to strengthen equity and inclusion for LGBTQI+ students.

In both Canada and the United States, immigrants constitute a disproportionately large share of the supply of university-educated labour trained in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. This article examines the Canada-U.S. differences in the occupational skill utilization and earnings of STEM-educated immigrant workers. Using data from the 2016 Census for Canada and the combined 2015 to 2017 American Community Survey, this analysis focuses on immigrants with a university degree in a STEM field who were aged 25 to 64 and arrived as adults. Over one-half of STEM-educated immigrant workers in both countries held non-STEM jobs. In Canada, only about 20% of these immigrants with non-STEM jobs worked in occupations that required a university education, compared with 48% in the United States. There was a large earnings gap between STEM-educated immigrants and native-born workers in Canada, even after adjusting for sociodemographic differences, while no corresponding earnings gap existed in the United States. The earnings gap in Canada was particularly large for STEM-educated immigrants holding non-STEM jobs. Possible explanations for these results are discussed.

This study compares the differences in the mismatch between the education and occupations of immigrants in Canada and the United States, operationalized by over-education. It further explores how the cross-country differences may be related to the supply of and demand for university-educated immigrants and the way they are selected. Using comparable data and three measures of over-education, this study found that university-educated recent immigrants in Canada were much more likely to be overeducated than their U.S. peers. The over-education rate gap between recent immigrants and the native-born was much more pronounced in Canada than in the United States. In addition, while labour market demand was associated with a lower level of over-education in both countries, a greater supply of university-educated recent immigrants was positively associated with a likelihood of over-education among recent immigrants in Canada, but not in the United States. Furthermore, in Canada, the over-education rate was significantly lower among immigrants who were admitted through some form of employer selection (e.g., immigrants who worked in skilled jobs in Canada before immigration) than those who were admitted directly from abroad. Overall, this study provides insight into how the immigration system interacts with broader aspects of the labour market to shape the labour market outcomes of immigrants.

Since UNESCO's Salamanca Declaration in 1994, inclusive education has progressively attracted attention in international debates around education policy. While some evidence exists on the positive impact that inclusive education reforms can have on the academic and personal outcomes of diverse students -- and in particular of students with special education needs -- limited information is available on the economic sustainability of such reforms. Starting from the literature on the correlations between education and individuals' life outcomes, this paper reviews the existing evidence on the potential benefits and costs of inclusive education reforms. Specifically, the paper discusses the evidence on the shortcomings of current education settings for diverse groups of students -- with specific sections on students with special education needs; immigrant and refugee students; ethnic groups, national minorities and Indigenous peoples; gifted students; female and male students; and LGBTQI+ (which stands for 'lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex') students. It highlights the individual and societal costs deriving from the low academic, social and emotional outcomes of these students and the socio-economic costs these yield for societies. Where possible, the paper also presents evidence on the effects of inclusive education reforms on diverse student groups.

This paper looks at the popularity of after-school mathematics by focusing on the Kumon and Russian School of Mathematics models. In 1954, Toru Kumon, a high school math teacher in Japan, designed a series of math worksheets to help improve the test scores of his son Takeshi, a second grader. Toru's goal was to teach Takeshi how to learn independently through the worksheets and improve his calculation skills prior to reaching high school. By working every day on the problems, Takeshi was able to reach the level of differential and integral calculus when he was just a few months into the sixth grade. The Kumon model is based on four elements: (1) Individualized instruction; (2) Self-learning; (3) Small-step worksheets; and (4) Kumon instructors. Parents who want to give their children a head start in math before elementary school can enroll them in Kumon as young as age 3. From that age they can stay with the program through high school or until they complete the program. In the U.S. alone, Kumon has grown from more than 182,000 students and nearly 1,300 centers in 2008 to more than 279,000 students and more than 1500 centers in 2018. While the Kumon method involves repeating mathematical processes until students over-learn them to automaticity, the Russian School of Mathematics (RSM) promotes itself as believing in just the opposite. The RSM model was founded by Inessa Rifkin in 1997 with Irina Khavinson, a friend, educator, and fellow Russian immigrant, after concluding that her son Ilya was not receiving the same mathematics education that she received as a student in the Soviet Union. Their goal was to translate their own experiences with specialized Russian math programs into a school that offered the same opportunity to American children. Two decades later about 25,000 students are enrolled with RSM today, in 40 locations in 11 states and Canada. Russian School of Mathematics students attend a classroom once per week for varying lengths of time, depending on grade: 90 minutes for kindergarten through third grade; two hours for grades four through six; and two-and-a-half hours for grades seven and above. Algebra and geometry are on separate tracks starting in the sixth grade, though students may enroll in both. This paper reviews each model's methods, highlights their best practices, and shows how they complement or run parallel with mathematics taught in traditional classrooms.

The aim of the OECD Career Readiness project is to identify patterns of teenage attitudes and activities that are associated with better transitions into employment by analysing multiple national longitudinal datasets. This paper looks for further evidence of the link between teenage activities, experiences and career-related thinking and adult career outcomes by analysing 10 new datasets from eight countries. Overall, the results of this paper find further evidence that secondary school students who explore, experience and think about their futures in work frequently encounter lower levels of unemployment, receive higher wages and are happier in their careers as adults. The findings of this paper are analysed together with the evidence from the two previous working papers of the Career Readiness project, concluding that there is international evidence to support 11 out of the 14 potential indicators that were explored as indicators of career readiness.

In the past decade, American and Canadian pediatric societies have recommended that pediatric care clinicians follow a schedule of routine surveillance and screening for young children to detect conditions such as developmental delay, speech and language delays and disorders, and autism spectrum disorder. The goal of these recommendations is to ensure that children with these developmental issues receive appropriate referrals for evaluation and intervention. However, in 2015 and 2016, the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) and the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care issued recommendations that did not support universal screening for these conditions. This occasional paper is designed to help make sense of the discrepancy between Task Force recommendations and those of the pediatric community in light of research and practice. To clarify the issues, in this paper I review the distinction between screening and surveillance; the benefits of screening and early identification; how the USPSTF makes its recommendations; and what the implications of not supporting screening are for research, clinical practice, and families.

The digital revolution and automation are accelerating changes in the labour market and in workplace skills, changes that are further affected by fluctuations in international and regional economic cycles and employment opportunity. These factors pose a universal policy challenge for all advanced economies and governments. In the workplace, people seek to acquire contemporary and relevant skills to gain employment and retain transferable skills to maintain employment. The central purpose of this paper is to investigate how other nations or regions are dealing with these issues. What approaches are they taking to understanding the mix and dynamics of the skills attained by individuals and, more broadly, the totality of skills that in aggregate constitute a highly capable and adaptable labour force, one that supports firm viability and greater national productivity. This research has examined a range of initiatives and approaches being developed or in use in selected countries, including the United States, Singapore and New Zealand, and agencies/organisations; for example, the European Commission and the Skills for the Information Age Foundation. In doing so, it showcases the good practices used to ensure that occupational-level skills information remains current and widely accessible. [For "Identifying Work Skills: International Case Summaries. Support Document," see ED579875.]

The worldwide school closures in early 2020 led to losses in learning that will not easily be made up for even if schools quickly return to their prior performance levels. These losses will have lasting economic impacts both on the affected students and on each nation unless they are effectively remediated. While the precise learning losses are not yet known, existing research suggests that the students in grades 1-12 affected by the closures might expect some 3 percent lower income over their entire lifetimes. For nations, the lower long-term growth related to such losses might yield an average of 1.5 percent lower annual GDP for the remainder of the century. These economic losses would grow if schools are unable to re-start quickly. The economic losses will be more deeply felt by disadvantaged students. All indications are that students whose families are less able to support out-of-school learning will face larger learning losses than their more advantaged peers, which in turn will translate into deeper losses of lifetime earnings. The present value of the economic losses to nations reach huge proportions. Just returning schools to where they were in 2019 will not avoid such losses. Only making them better can. While a variety of approaches might be attempted, existing research indicates that close attention to the modified re-opening of schools offers strategies that could ameliorate the losses. Specifically, with the expected increase in video-based instruction, matching the skills of the teaching force to the new range of tasks and activities could quickly move schools to heightened performance. Additionally, because the prior disruptions are likely to increase the variations in learning levels within individual classrooms, pivoting to more individualised instruction could leave all students better off as schools resume. As schools move to re-establish their programmes even as the pandemic continues, it is natural to focus considerable attention on the mechanics and logistics of safe re-opening. But the long-term economic impacts also require serious attention, because the losses already suffered demand more than the best of currently considered re-opening approaches.