The Economist carries a generally helpful review of the OECD's PISA study, from which I take the image above, which shows how in Finland - top overall - the differences between schools are almost negligible. According to the Economist, the factors most affecting a country's ranking are: giving school principals the power to control budgets, set incentives and decide whom to hire and how much to pay them; publishing school results; and, most importantly, high-quality teachers. "A common factor among all the best performers is that teachers are drawn from the top ranks of graduates."
For more on that issue, see Dylan Wiliam's Keynote Speech at the 2007 ALT Conference, with this extract from the soon-to-be now-published full transcript squaring very well with the massive in-school variance revealed by the PISA study for Britain:
"The variability at teacher level is about four times the variability at school level. If you get one of the best teachers, you will learn in six months what an average teacher will take a year to teach you. If you get one of the worst teachers, that same learning will take you two years. There's a four-fold difference in the speed of learning created by the most and the least effective teachers."
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