By the time you read this, the first headlines should be coming through from Paris on the 2011 version of OECD’s annual publication, Education at a Glance (EAG). We’ll be taking a deeper look at some of the statistics tomorrow and over the coming weeks, but today I wanted to offer some thoughts on the product itself.

Over the 16 years since EAG was first published, it has had a considerable effect on policy-making around the world. By drawing direct comparisons between national systems, OECD has kick-started an entire policy sub-culture around benchmarking national outcomes. Canada, however, has had difficulty taking advantage of this explosion of comparative data, because of the difficulty adapting our education data – which is designed for our own policy purposes – to the somewhat abstract categories that OECD uses to make data from such varied countries comparable.

There’s been a lot of hysteria over this last point over the years. Back when the Canadian Council on Learning was still around (ok, they technically still exist, but have you seen what they’ve been putting out since their funding got nuked?) the annual EAG release would reliably be accompanied with anguished wails from CCL, going on about how Statistics Canada’s inability to produce comparable data was depriving the country of much of this benchmarking goodness and turning us into some third world backwater.

Slowly, however, Statistics Canada has been getting better at this, so tomorrow’s EAG may have more Canada in it that have previous editions. But just remember as you read the press coverage that there are an awful lot of caveats and simplifications that go into EAG in order to make vastly different education systems comparable. For instance, population educational attainment – a measure on which Canada traditionally does very well – is calculated based on labour force survey questionnaires which use different questions in different countries. So is Canada really the best educated country, or do we just have slack labour force survey questions?

Caveat lector.