Across OECD countries, governments are seeking policies to make education more effective while searching for additional resources to meet the increasing demand for education. The 2009 edition of "Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators" enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries' performance. It provides a rich, comparable and up-to-date array of indicators on the performance of education systems and represents the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the current state of education internationally. The indicators look at who participates in education, what is spent on it, how education systems operate and the results achieved. The latter includes indicators on a wide range of outcomes, from comparisons of students' performance in key subject areas to the impact of education on earnings and on adults' chances of employment. The indicators are organised thematically, and each is accompanied by information on the policy context and the interpretation of the data. The education indicators are presented within an organising framework that: (1) distinguishes between the actors in education systems: individual learners and teachers, instructional settings and learning environments, educational service providers, and the education system as a whole; (2) groups the indicators according to whether they speak to learning outcomes for individuals or countries, policy levers or circumstances that shape these outcomes, or to antecedents or constraints that set policy choices into context; and (3) identifies the policy issues to which the indicators relate, with three major categories distinguishing between the quality of educational outcomes and educational provision, issues of equity in educational outcomes and educational opportunities, and the adequacy and effectiveness of resource management. Most of the indicators in "Chapter A: The Output of Educational Institutions and the Impact of Learning" relate to the first column of the matrix describing outputs and outcomes of education. Even so, indicators in Chapter A measuring educational attainment for different generations, for instance, not only provide a measure of the output of the educational system, but also provide context for current educational policies, helping to shape polices on, for example, lifelong learning. "Chapter B: Financial and Human Resources Invested in Education" provides indicators that are either policy levers or antecedents to policy, or sometimes both. For example, expenditure per student is a key policy measure which most directly impacts on the individual learner as it acts as a constraint on the learning environment in schools and student learning conditions in the classroom. "Chapter C: Access to Education, Participation and Progression" provides indicators that are a mixture of outcome indicators, policy levers and context indicators. Internationalisation of education and progression rates are, for instance, outcomes measures to the extent that they indicate the results of policies and practices in the classroom, school and system levels. But they can also provide contexts for establishing policy by identifying areas where policy intervention is necessary to, for instance, address issues of inequity. Finally, "Chapter D: The Learning Environment and Organisation of Schools" provides indicators on instruction time, teachers working time and teachers' salaries that not only represent policy levers which can be manipulated but also provide contexts for the quality of instruction in instructional settings and for the outcomes of learners at the individual level. It also, for the first time, presents data from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) on teacher beliefs, practices, and job satisfaction as well as the role of teacher appraisal and feedback and the school evaluation system. This year's edition is published at a time when all eyes are focused on addressing the financial crisis and its economic and social fallout. Presenting data up to 2007, this edition cannot yet assess the impact of the crisis on education systems, but its indicators provide insights about how investments in human capital can contribute to the recovery. New features in the 2009 edition include an extension of the analysis of the economic returns to education to social outcomes; new data on long-term unemployment and involuntary part-time work among young adults; an analysis of the spending choices that countries make between factors such as teacher compensation, instruction time and class sizes; an analysis on teaching practices as well as teacher appraisal and feedback based on TALIS; and a review of excellence in education for 15-year-olds based on the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). (Contains 126 tables and 104 charts.