schooling duration across the population will increase from eight years to nearly 11. In a 2009 survey from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a worldwide evaluation of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance by the OECD, Chinese students from Shanghai achieved the best results in mathematics, science and reading.[28][29] The OECD also found that even in some of the very poor rural areas the performance is close to the OECD average.[30] While averages across the breadth of other countries are reported, China's rankings are taken from only a few select districts.[31] The PISA 2018 results showed that students of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang topped the rankings in reading, mathematics and science [32] and China's school children are now the smartest in the world.[33] OECD secretary-general Angel Gurria said the students from the 4 Chinese provinces had "outperformed by a large margin their peers from all of the other 78 participating education systems". Moreover, the 10% most socio-economically disadvantaged students in these 4 areas "also showed better reading skills than those of the average student in OECD countries, as well as skills similar to the 10% most, advantaged students in some of these countries," he said at a Paris news conference. He cautioned that these 4 provinces and municipalities in eastern China "are far from representing China as a whole." Yet their combined populations amount to over 180 million people, and the size of each region is equivalent to a typical OECD country even if their income is well below the OECD average. "What makes their achievement even more remarkable is that the level of income of these four Chinese regions is well below the OECD average".[33][34] Education policy Deng Xiaoping's far-ranging educational reform policy, which involved all levels of the education system, aimed to narrow the gap between China and other developing countries. Thus, modernizing education was critical to modernizing China, which included; devolution of educational 광진구 영어과외 광장동 구의동 수학과외
