Education is a subject of permanent public angst, and the conversation around it seems to paint New Zealand's education system as a failure. But a reader has pointed me at a graph which shows we're doing something right: New Zealand has one of the highest rates of top performing science students in the OECD:
And its not just science. Browsing the report this is based on (Top of the Class - High Performers in Science in PISA 2006 [PDF]), it seems that New Zealand is also very good at producing top readers (we rank third), and well in the top half of the OECD on mathematics (ranking 8th). So why the angst?
