Much of the existing educational research has focused on affluent Western societies. Despite comprising a broad swathe of the world population, less work has focused on lower middle-income economies such as the Philippines. Perhaps part of this reason is the lack of high-quality data in such contexts. PISA provides a potential solution to this…

A fundamental skill for growth and improvement in modern society is the ability to read--a skill still denied to many millions of children across the globe. A number of factors share the responsibility for this dilemma. In developing countries, most potential readers live under conditions where instruction is non-optimal or even unavailable…

The PISA studies of reading achievement of 15 year old students in OECD and partner nations show Anglophone nations to have continuing high proportions of weak readers (less than or equal to Level 2), with no improvement in this area from 2000 to 2006 (OECD, "Science competencies for tomorrow's world: Executive summary," 2007). The…