The need for the kind of routinized basic skills required by most workers in a mass-production economy was dying.  The skills needed now, we said, were not routine.  We would now need “people who have a good intuitive grasp of the ways in which all kinds of physical and social systems work.  They must possess a feeling for mathematical concepts and the ways in which they can be applied to difficult problems, an ability to see patterns of meaning where others see only confusion, a cultivated creativity that leads them to new problems, new products and new services before their competitors get to them, and, in many cases, the ability to work with other people in complex organizational environments where work groups must decide for themselves how to get the job done.”

And we said that the key to accomplishing these and a number of other similar goals was simple to state and extremely difficult to accomplish.  We would have to convert teaching from a blue-collar occupation into a real profession, a profession with the same kind of status that architecture, engineering, the law and medicine have.  We spelled out how far the United States would have to go to get there.  We showed how the supply of teachers was lagging further and further behind demand, even with abysmally low standards for becoming a teacher.  A chart in the Carnegie report showed that the United States was drawing more and more of our teachers from the non-college-bound high school tracks and fewer and fewer from the high school students who were in college preparation programs.  We showed the steady decline in scores of prospective schoolteachers on the college entrance matriculation examinations.  Most devastating, we showed a dramatic decline among first year college students who were women who were interested in teaching as a career. At the same time, there was an equally dramatic increase in the numbers of women interested in going into business and the law.  The message was:  Just as the United States was about to need by far the best teachers we had ever had, we were about to get the worst.  All we had to do to get that result was nothing.

As it turns out, we did not do nothing.  We did worse than nothing.  But I am getting ahead of my story.

The Carnegie Task Force proposed that all teachers be required to major in college in the subject they would teach in school, even in elementary school, and also be required to get a masters degree in teaching to make sure that they also mastered their craft; to make teachers’ compensation competitive with compensation for the high status professions; to base our teacher education programs on the best scientific knowledge about learning that was available; to create career ladders for teachers based on their acquisition of advanced knowledge and skill; and, not least important, to provide a truly professional environment for teachers in our schools, beginning with giving them the right to decide as a faculty how best to use the resources available to the school to meet the needs of their students. We suggested starting with the creation of a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, to establish truly professional standards for the work of teachers, and to have professional teachers set those standards.  Our little team spent the next year designing the National Board and getting it fairly launched.

I have just finished reading two books that brought all the memories of those years back in a rush: Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School, by Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan, and Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn From Educational Change in Finland?, by Pasi Sahlberg.  Hargreaves and Fullan set out to answer a very important question:  What would a true profession of teaching actually look like?  Sahlberg’s book traces the remarkable history of modern education reform in Finland, but at the heart of that story is the answer to another, no less important question:  If you happened to be in charge of the education system of an entire country, how could you plausibly put in place, over time, the kind of professional teaching corps described by Hargreaves and Fullan?

There is not nearly enough space available in this column to allow me to summarize either book.  I strongly recommend that you read both, if you have not done so already.  For me, the experience was a bit like reading Robert Frost’s poem about the road not taken.  Professional Capital describes, much better than I could have done at the time I drafted the Carnegie Report, what we would find in schools run by professional teachers.  They make it clear that mastery—real mastery—of the subjects to be taught and of the craft of teaching are important, but not, by any means, all that is important.  To be a pro, they say, you also have to have an aptitude for connecting with young people and supporting them in many different ways.  You have to be able to figure out when they are not learning what they need to learn quickly and draw on a wide range of scientifically-based knowledge and intuitive skills—the kind the best doctors have—to find the right solution or combination of solutions.  Critically important, you have to be prepared to be not a lone ranger, but a very productive member of a highly skilled team, the faculty of the school, drawing on their expertise and contributing your own in a process of continuous learning in which the students benefit mightily from the combined effort of the entire faculty.  And all of them have to be as good as you are and set standards for themselves and their own contribution that are just as high as the standards you have set for yourself.  You have to make sure that you take the time to interact with that faculty in a serious way.  And, lastly, you have to be prepared to work for years—Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours— to really master your craft.  There are no shortcuts in this process if you really want to be a pro.

Finnish Lessons is the story of the thirty years it took to move the Finnish education system from average performance to the envy of the world.  The tale is very well told and utterly engrossing.  Sahlberg describes Finland as consciously taking a unique path to education excellence.  In the years after World War II, he says, few people went beyond primary education, schooling focused on rote skills and memorization and the secondary schools that were available tracked students in the way that was then common in Europe.  He describes the circumstances that led, in the early 1970s, to the creation of Finland’s signature schools, the peruskoulu, the nine-year common school that offers the same demanding curriculum to all students.  He gives a feel for the opposition to this development from politicians and business executives who were sure that only a few students could really master that curriculum and that having the same expectations for all students would inevitably drive the standards down for Finland’s best students and doom the Finnish economy.  But he shows how the Finns’ understanding of the global challenges they faced, combined with their twin commitments to very high quality and very high equity in education won the day and then led to the realization that, in order to make the peruskoulu actually work, Finland would have to have a world-class teaching force, a teaching force drawn from the same pool of students from which Finland’s architects, engineers and doctors are drawn.

Sahlberg lays out the specific steps the Finns took to make sure that they could build that kind of truly professional teaching force, policy measures that are, I’m sure, familiar to most of those who read this newsletter.  Sahlberg makes the case, as well as it is ever going to be made, for professionalizing teaching as the key to world class student performance at the national level, but he is smart enough to know that no single factor explains this kind of success, that a nation cannot succeed in such an effort unless it thinks of its task as creating an effective system with many important mutually supporting elements.  And he knows that many of those elements, in Finland, are not likely to be adopted by many other countries, especially, the Finnish commitment to the well-being of its children on many fronts, the relatively even distribution of income in that country, the long-standing very high rate of book reading in that country, the early mastery of written language by young children watching captioned TV, and much more.  Still, there is no question in Sahlberg’s mind that, if you want high achievement and high equity, you have no alternative but to work as hard as you can to produce a highly educated, fully professional teaching force, and once you have it, to trust it will do the right thing by your children.

Which brings me to the nub of the issue.  What is quite striking about both of these books is the prominent role of arch villain that is played in both by the United States.  Throughout Finnish Lessons, Sahlberg contrasts the Finnish Way with GERM, an acronym he invented that stands for Global Education Reform Movement.  It is not a term of approbation.  He contrasts the Finnish Way with an education reform movement, whose key elements are “competition and choice, standardization of teaching and learning, tightening test-based accountability, and merit-based pay for teachers.”  He makes it clear that he regards the United States as the home of this agenda, and the agenda as the antithesis of everything that the Finnish Way stands for.

He is not alone.  The United States and what Sahlberg calls the GERM, play the same roles in Professional Capital.  This will come as no surprise to readers of Fullan’s Wrong Drivers, which describes the primary elements in the GERM agenda as the worst drivers one could imagine if one’s aim is to raise national student achievement to world class levels.  In my own book, Thinking for a Living: Education and the Wealth of Nations, which I wrote with former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall, we argued that the agenda that Sahlberg christens as GERM is a direct descendant of the kind of Tayloristic thinking that dominated “modern management” in the age of mass production.  The conception of teaching in that model is the antithesis of a professional conception of teaching.  It is a blue-collar model of teaching, the very thing that the Carnegie Report declared to be the enemy of any successful plan to greatly raise student achievement in the United States.

Sahlberg, Hargreaves and Fullan are right.  In the years following the release of the Carnegie report’s call for professionalizing teaching in the United States, we did the opposite.  We doubled down on the old, Tayloristic, blue-collar model of teaching.  At the end of their book, Hargreaves and Fullan urge American policymakers to adopt the set of attitudes toward teachers that they associate with successful policies in Canada and Finland.  At the end of his book, Sahlberg once again denounces the American choices and makes the case, if not for the details of the Finnish model, for its spirit.

All of this made me think hard about why Finland was able to move toward a professional model of teaching of the kind that we had advocated in the Carnegie report and the United States did not.  After reading Sahlberg on Finland, I think I understand it.

Teaching has had a very high status in Finland for a very long time, much higher than in the United States.  The word for teacher in Finland is the same for schoolteachers as it is for university professors.  In the 1950s, at state dinners, the order of precedence for leaving the table after the dinner was the senior statesmen first and then the teachers, followed by every other class of attendees.  As Sahlberg recounts the tale, the path from a very ordinary, low attainment education system after World War II to the development of the “Finnish consensus” to move forward with the peruskoulu in the early 1970s was accompanied by a steady increase in demand for education and a steady improvement in the ability of the Finnish education system to meet that demand.  Thereafter, as Sahlberg describes it, officials did what they had to do to greatly improve the quality of the teaching force and the success of these very high quality teachers, as revealed by the startling success of Finland in the initial and subsequent administrations of the OECD-PISA assessments.  These results not only provided a justification for trust in Finland’s teachers, but also staved off the demands from some important quarters to import into Finland important elements of the GERM agenda.  At no point in this story does Sahlberg tell us that the Finnish public lost faith in its teachers or had any reason to do so.

Now let us consider what was happening in the United States in the same period.  The Carnegie report, calling for the professionalization of the American teaching force, was released in June of 1986, not long after the implementation of the new peruskoulu in Finland and just as that country was putting in place the elements of its plan to professionalize its teaching force.  But the upward trajectory of teaching and of the public’s view of teachers in Finland was matched by a downward spiral in the United States.  Finland was going from middling performance on the international stage to the top of the league tables.  The United States was going from undisputed world leader in public education to the middle of the league tables.  At the same time, the cost of American schools was skyrocketing.  Income distribution in the United States was moving from among the most equal in the industrialized world to the least equal, steadily increasing the rate of poverty.  While Finland was climbing to technological preeminence in the global economy, global American companies were being hollowed out, iconic American firms were going under and the American consumer was living off of loans from China, a developing country.  Not least important for this story, as I said at the outset, the quality of American teachers was declining by many objective measures, matched by a steep decline in the performance of American school children, relative to the performance of the leading countries, which, one by one, were surpassing the United States.

What I realized, thinking about all this, is that the environment for education policy-making was hugely influenced by the upward trend in Finland and the downward trend in the United States.  The Finns never had a reason to distrust their teachers.  The long-standing reverence for teachers made it natural for the country to call on the best of their young people to come to the aid of their country by becoming teachers when the country responded to the emergency caused by the sudden failure of their protected market in the Soviet Union and the banking crisis, and just as natural for the best of their young people to answer that call by becoming teachers.  When the peruskoulu turned out to be a success, these fine new teachers were celebrated by the citizens and became the most desired spouses by other young people forming families.  They put their heart and soul into their teaching, which produced the Finnish surprise when the 2001 PISA scores came out, and that cemented the Finnish Way of education policy.  This is a classic virtuous cycle if ever there was one.

But the opposite happened in the United States.  The seeds were sown just after World War II, with the passage of the GI Bill.  Young soldiers, who would never otherwise have gone to college, did so.  Many went on to graduate schools.  In their 40s in the 1970s, many had more education and a better education than the women who taught their children.  Whereas before the war, teachers were respected because they had more education than the parents of the students they taught, after the war that became less and less true, and because it was less and less true, they were progressively less respected, especially in the middle class suburbs where the burgeoning class of professionals and managers lived.  In the 1970s, teachers’ salaries slipped badly relative to those of people in other college-educated occupations and, in the view of some influential Americans, teachers were on the “wrong” side of the civil rights issues.  Teachers, feeling that their backs were to the wall, joined the American Federation of Teachers if they were in the cities, or the newly unionized National Education Association if they were in the suburbs.  The unions they joined were not like the European unions, which included professionals and were invited to partner with business owners in setting important national policies.  They were conceived in the old Tayloristic American model, actually reinforcing the grip of the blue-collar model of teaching in the United States.  Then other countries began to outperform the United States, an enormous blow to national pride, and the cost of education went up without student achievement following, leaving many Americans with the impression that the teachers had taken the money and simply put it in their pockets, rather than to improve student performance.  Few Americans realized that, as American’s real wages were declining, full time homemakers were going into the workplace and were no longer at home when their children came home, an increasing number of families had only one parent, and the number of children in poverty was swiftly rising.  Much less did they stop to realize the significance of these trends for the work of teachers in our schools.

The cumulative effect of these developments in the United States was to alienate ordinary Americans from their teachers.  While Finnish teachers were being credited with improving student achievement, American teachers were being blamed for letting it decline. While Finnish teachers were celebrated for producing high achievement at modest cost, American teachers were scorned for increasing the cost of schools dramatically while doing nothing to improve student performance.  While Finnish teachers were doing whatever needed to be done to improve the performance of their students, American teachers were perceived to be working to the union rule and unwilling to police the poor performers in their own ranks.  The more American teachers were blamed for the poor performance and rising costs of American schools, the more they relied on their unions as their sole source of support and the more the unions were attacked, the greater their bunker mentality.  I have absolutely no doubt but that you and I—any of us—would have behaved in exactly the same way in the same circumstances.  But it produced a perfect vicious cycle.

This turn of events produced the current politics of American education.  Admired American governors started to take on the teachers and their unions and to demand that the educators take some responsibility for the poor performance of American students and become accountable for their own performance.  The Clinton administration was the turning point.  “Third Way” politicians like Clinton (and Blair in England) were not about to base their education policies on trust in teachers.  There was no constituency for trust of teachers in the United States, either among Democrats or Republicans.  Both parties were looking for ways to fix education but neither party could figure out how to do it by rebuilding the system from the inside.  Key figures in both parties perceived the education system to have been captured by the professional educators.  The forces created by the downward spiral I have described were so powerful and the respect for professional educators so depleted that key figures in both parties were trying not to fix the system but to blow it up.  The Democrats would not go for vouchers and the Republicans could not get enough support for vouchers from the public to put them into play, so the two parties settled on charters as the bipartisan strategy for fixing the schools.

It will do no good to tell American policymakers that they need to change their attitudes on these matters.  Their attitudes reflect the attitudes of the public at large.  What happened in the United States and England, I believe, was not an accident and not the result of stupidity.  It was the result of a downward spiral that Finland never experienced, and the jaundiced view formed by the American public about public educators that came from their bitter disappointment in their educators and the educators’ unions.  There is no doubt in my mind that the course that the United States is now on will lead to ever poorer performance.  All the evidence, from every quarter, points to that outcome.  I believe, however, that we will have to wait for GERM to burn itself out before we change course.  There is still time for the United States to adopt the agenda we put forward in the Carnegie report, the agenda the Finns came up with on their own.  I remain hopeful that Winston Churchill’s famous dictum that “Americans always do the right thing…after they have exhausted all the alternatives” will be prophetic in this case.

Ben Jensen, Program Director of the School Education Program at Australia’s Grattan Institute

This month, Betsy Brown Ruzzi, Director of the Center on International Education Benchmarking, interviewed Ben Jensen of Australia’s Grattan Institute about the Institute’s most recent report, Catching up: Learning from the best school systems in East Asia.  Jensen is Director of the School Education Program at the Grattan Institute, an independent public policy think tank that was established by the Australian government, major research organizations and business leaders in 2008.  The Institute focuses on domestic issues including elementary and secondary education, higher education, healthcare, economic wellbeing and productivity growth.  Prior to joining the Grattan Institute, Jensen spent five years at the OECD Education Directorate, where he focused on teacher policy, how schools operate and are organized, and how to accurately measure school performance.

Brown Ruzzi: We know that the Grattan Institute is engaged in research in many areas of Australian public policy, and particularly in education. Can you give us a brief overview of the work you do in primary and secondary education, what your research covers, what methods you use and the projects you have planned in the coming years?

Jensen:  Much of our work is focused on government policy, but we also do work at the school level.  We are particularly interested in how to increase teacher effectiveness. The evidence is quite clear that the greatest impact we can have is increasing teacher effectiveness, which also has the greatest impact on student learning.  As part of that work, we started to look internationally, partly because of my background at the OECD, and partly because Australia, despite its proximity to Asia, has actually been quite slow to learn form the high-performing systems in East Asia. We are doing some work in Shanghai, looking at various programs that deal with inequality, and we are also going to start to look at issues of initial teacher education because I think that is an area that is really crying out for reform. There are an alarming number of teachers in Australia, and in other countries, who say that they come out of their teacher education programs not prepared for the classroom. I think initial teacher education is going to be our next main area of research and again, we would like to do that in the international sphere.

Brown Ruzzi:  Based on your work in East Asia and your experience at OECD, what do you see are the key policy levers that drive high-performing education systems?

Jensen:  There are some very basic drivers.  In terms of education strategy, there are two in particular that I consider to be a difference between Australia and East Asia. The first is an unrelenting focus on student learning.  Student learning is the basis of everything in the East Asian systems, and the systems work to allocate resources to the areas that have the biggest impact on student learning, linking policy to the classroom.  The evidence is very clear that teacher effectiveness has the biggest impact on student learning, and those systems invest in the development of their teachers and in their professional learning in a way that far outstretches other systems.  For example, a few years ago in Singapore, the National Institute of Education (the place where all teachers are trained in Singapore) received feedback from their graduates that not all of their courses prepared them for the classroom, so they reworked their core curriculum to actually remove some subjects such as philosophy of education or history of education in order to put a greater emphasis on classroom practices. They do less of the professional development that a lot of teachers say is not as useful, and they put an emphasis instead on feedback and classroom observation.

The second main driver is connected to the first. The old saying is that successful education strategy is 20 percent design and 80 percent implementation, and I think that is true. In Australia and some other OECD countries, there is a severe disconnect between design and implementation.  However, once you begin to focus on implementation, you get public policy operating in a very different way. If you look at Hong Kong’s education strategy, it largely reads like an implementation framework. If you look at education strategies in some other countries, they are very broad statements of goals. Improving teaching and learning is about behavioral change, and if you focus on the behavioral change you want, you are focusing on implementation – how we can get into schools and help support and develop the behaviors we are looking for. Once you focus on student learning and implementation, you actually get results.

Brown Ruzzi: The Grattan Institute’s most recent report, Catching up: Learning from the best school systems in East Asia, discusses those issues in depth, and how, in particular, the four systems you examined (Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and South Korea) have both a strong focus on learning and a strong connection between policy and classroom-level implementation.  Digging a little deeper, what other commonalities did you find in the top-performing East Asian education systems?

Jensen: Well, first of all, there are of course some substantial differences between the systems, which we do outline in the report. So we focused on particular areas of particular systems that we saw as essential to success, such as initial teacher education in Singapore, because they are way ahead of even the other East Asian countries. In Shanghai, they have a very strong system of professional learning, teacher induction and mentoring. They have a huge amount of classroom observation incorporated into their teachers’ professional development, as does Singapore. These practices have a huge impact on student learning and I think a lot of OECD countries are struggling with the question of how to improve learning and professionalizing teaching, and these countries are clearly doing it well.

Brown Ruzzi: Essentially, then, your central point is that two common features of successful education systems, a constant focus on learning and an effective implementation plan, require high quality teacher education, strong induction programs for new teachers, a system of teacher mentoring and a cooperative learning environment for teachers?

Jensen: Yes, though it is important to recognize that it is not just about professional development or professional learning. Having an impact on student learning is our end game. And don’t forget, the high performing systems in East Asia have greater equality in student performance than what you see in other systems, because they often begin system change with equity programs.

The notion of professional cooperation is prevalent across all of the East Asian systems we studied.  While these systems put an emphasis on observing learning in the classroom, the really important difference here is that they are not just observing the teachers, but also observing the students, all the time. I think that is a really powerful mechanism not just to increase the professional learning of teachers, but also in helping students.  You have more than one teacher in the classroom working to identify the students who are falling behind and then helping them catch up. These systems also share the notion of teachers as researchers. This is, in particular, incredibly strong in Shanghai. No other system compares with them in this respect, though I think professional learning communities and teachers as researchers are very effective in Singapore as well, and a little bit less so in Hong Kong and Korea.  I think this is one of those areas where we are going to see quite a bit of change in school education in many countries.

Once there is some movement towards this professionalization, school improvement actually becomes an organic process where the system is improving internally – you have professional learning communities that are trying to find new teaching methods and new curricula, and really examine what is working or not working in their schools.

Brown Ruzzi: So when you speak of teachers as researchers, it’s not only that teachers are publishing in academic journals, but they are collaborating to identify strategies and tools that help improve student performance and this role is built into their career ladder systems?

Jensen: Yes, though I do think there are some academic expectations as well in some of these systems.  But to elaborate, in Shanghai, there are teacher research groups that identify an issue that they are going to study, then they work closely with students and look at practices within the school. The teachers are in each other’s classrooms observing what is working and what is not, and then at the end of the year, you have results. In Shanghai and Singapore this is carried out with a very sophisticated methodology that teachers have learned in the universities and teacher training programs.  And it helps to have the universities and the teacher training institutions closely linked with the schools.  This has a huge impact on both the teachers’ professional careers and on student learning.  Organizing this way leaves fewer students behind because these systems include a lot of observation and feedback of both the teachers and students so that they are able to quickly identify students who are at different levels and address their individual needs in a much more effective manner.

Brown Ruzzi: Are there any other things that these high performing systems have in common that you would like to mention?

Jensen: Yes, it is the quality of the people at all levels of the system from the Ministry through to the schools.  These systems put a heavy emphasis on finding and supporting effective professionals and this support helps increase the status of the profession.

Brown Ruzzi: In reading Catching up, I was surprised that you did not mention high quality, aligned instructional systems (aligned syllabi, curriculum frameworks, assessment and professional development) as one common element found in these top-performing countries.  In our research, we have found that this tends to be a central feature of these systems.

Jensen:  I do believe that is the case in each of these systems, but I see it as a matter of implementation. In Australia, we have just had a national curriculum introduced and I think it is really interesting to compare our curriculum with the curriculum in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, the curriculum is primarily about pedagogy – how to teach the subjects – while in Australia it is more about content or what to teach. When speaking about alignment, you do need links between professional development, assessment, curriculum and pedagogy. Australia is not there yet, but we are headed down that road. Australia is much like the United States in terms of having local jurisdictions responsible for education rather than being able to adopt a common approach, although we are headed in that direction.

Brown Ruzzi: Your report highlighted some of the major differences between East Asian countries and Australia in terms of how the teacher’s job is structured, ranging from the number of students assigned to each teacher to the amount of hours spent in a classroom versus working with other teachers.

Jensen: Yes. In the high performing East Asian countries, there is a clear message that professional learning is not something that you do after hours.  It is built into the system. I think that has a huge impact on student learning and how schools are organized.  Compared to the United States and Australia, the high-performing East Asian countries have larger class sizes and the teachers are spending less time in the classroom during working hours and more time collaborating and planning with their colleagues.

Brown Ruzzi: What has been the response to the report in Australia?

Jensen: I don’t think there has been any education report that has had more media attention than this one. At a policy level, there have been questions about how we take these findings and incrementally employ them in the education system. In Australia, we generally start education reforms with a focus on school funding. But now it is not just about spending more money, we really have to change how we operate our educational system and change our priorities. We don’t have effective teacher preparation, we don’t have professional collaboration, and we don’t have the student results we want. And yet, we are really spending a lot and the costs are only going up. I think our report has been effective in shining a spotlight on what meaningful reform looks like and how we can accomplish it. We have had a number of people tell us that we are changing the education debate in the country, and that is really exciting for us.

Brown Ruzzi: That is exciting. Are policymakers learning what you hoped they would learn from your report on these high performing systems?

Jensen: I think so. They may not be able to go as far as we would like, but we are already seeing policymakers talking along the lines of how to really improve professional learning. I also think there is a realization that we may never get the top performing graduates to enter teaching, so we really need to focus on professional learning in order to develop a strong teaching force.

Brown Ruzzi: Because the Confucian cultures of the countries you studied are different from Australia’s culture, what does Australia have to do differently from the East Asian countries in order to get the same strong results?

Jenson: If you look at the systems highlighted in the report, many of the areas in which they have established reforms are not culture-dependent. They are very practical reforms focused on improvements of professional learning systems and teacher education. If you look back just ten years, Hong Kong and Singapore were ranked, I think, about 14th or 15th [on international assessments] and then made a number of the reforms we have talked about, and now are some of the world’s top-performing systems. That does not require cultural change.

Brown Ruzzi: Do you see a contrast between what you learned from the East Asian systems and what we know about reforms in Finland, and if so, can you describe the central differences?

Jensen:  Finland certainly has the same emphasis on teachers and teaching that you see in the East Asian systems we studied. In Finland, the very top graduates go into teaching and they are then taught to the master’s level in higher education.  That is not true in all of the systems in East Asia.  I think Korea is the most similar in terms of the very highest achieving graduates going into teaching.  I also think there is a difference in pedagogy particularly in primary schools in Finland that use play-based learning more than other systems.  The East Asian systems have had to consciously move away from their historical focus on exams and towards a new focus on 21st – century skills and a constructivist approach to pedagogy. The East Asian systems are in the middle of moving in this direction while the Finns have made much more progress. I also think that in Finland, the connection between policy and the classroom is implemented differently, but that strong link exists, just in a different way. I would also include Ontario in the systems that use policy to create change at the school level.

Brown Ruzzi: Australia has put in place a number of major education reform initiatives in recent years including the National Assessment Programme in 2009, the national curriculum in 2011, initiatives targeting underserved students, the National Partnerships to improve teacher training and retention and the My School effort to report publicly on school performance as part of Australia’s accountability system.  What is the relationship to these reforms and the findings in your report on the East Asian top performers?

Jensen: There are some commonalities between Australia’s reforms and the ones that have taken place in East Asia. I think it is important to have a national curriculum in place. I think at the core, the reforms share a concern about how we improve teaching in the classroom, but the implementation strategy is very different partly because we are coming from a very different starting point. The East Asian systems are trying to move away from an exam-based culture, and we have done just the opposite.

Brown Ruzzi: Do you mean moving from a locally-driven to a centrally-driven accountability system?

Jensen: Exactly. And generally, in Australia, there is not a focus on implementation and how what we do impacts the classroom, except for the national assessments and perhaps eventually the national curriculum. Though again, if you compare our national curriculum to Hong Kong’s, ours is focused on what is taught with very little discussion of how it is taught whereas in Hong Kong, the focus is very much on teaching.

Brown Ruzzi: How does the current reform program fit into the politics of education in Australia today?

Jensen: It is a really interesting time for education in Australia, because we have had a change in government in three eastern states, and they were incredibly convincing wins and we are expecting them to be long-term governments. Having long-term governments opens the door for long-term strategic planning at the state level.

Brown Ruzzi: Given that Australia’s economy is powered by Asia’s need for raw materials, do Australians think they need a highly educated and trained workforce in the years ahead to drive the economy or do they believe that commodities will last forever?

Jensen: I don’t think you see many people at the state level saying that education is the most important priority, possibly because Australia has enjoyed economic growth for well over a decade.  With that said, we are now getting to a stage where unemployment is starting to increase, and that has led to more attention on the issue of training in some areas.  But when a country is doing well, it is often hard to make arguments for change.  You just don’t get that real need for reform or the support for reform that exists in other countries.  At least not yet.

Brown Ruzzi: In light of the change in government in some of your states as well as the overall conversations about reform in Australia, where do you see the recent Review of Funding for Schooling, or the “Gonski Report,” recommendations going? What impact will this report ultimately have on policy?

Jensen: I think our report made it clear that funding is not the main game. But in Australia, a central feature of the debate, as I mentioned earlier, is about funding government and non-government schools. There has been a lot of concern in Australia about inequality between schools and, because of that, Gonski was initially successful in getting support from different stakeholders for his effort to look hard at how schools are funded in Australia.  But with the release of his report and his panel’s recommendations to substantially increase education funding, achieving agreement between the federal and state governments will be difficult, particularly because next year there is a federal election in Australia. I do think there are good things in the report.  In particular, the recommendation for consistent funding for students with disabilities and increased funds for students who require more support.

Brown Ruzzi: Finally, what were your main takeaways from the most recent International Summit on the Teaching Profession in New York City?

Jensen: I think the overarching theme of the summit was the need for strong professional collaboration among teachers and an emphasis on teachers as researchers and how countries can benefit from instilling these qualities in their teaching forces. It was interesting that a number of different countries included these as priorities, and it made me think that these two areas are going to be a focus of change in the future.

Review of Funding for Schooling

Following the release in late 2010 of the PISA 2009 results, the Australian government, unhappy with how the nation stacked up against other high performing countries in Asia and Europe, commissioned a report to determine what changes, if any, were necessary in how schools in Australia are funded.  The Review of Funding for Schooling Final Report, delivered to Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard last month, is the first comprehensive review of Australia’s school funding system in almost 40 years.

The focus was on funding because, although Australia has for years been among the top performers on the PISA assessments, it has not fared well on the OECD rankings for equity.  The commission’s remit was to find a way to make Australia’s funding for the schools more equitable.

Up until now, the states have had the main responsibility for funding the regular public schools, and their formulas for doing that have been quite different.  About half of the schools in Australia are private—mainly Catholic—schools. The federal government has been supplementing their funding, mostly in the form of funding for particular programs.  The result has been a crazy quilt funding pattern.

The Commission started from the position that a modern advanced industrial economy has to educate all children—not just some—to a much higher standard than was formerly thought either possible or necessary.  It costs more to educate some children to a high standard than others, the Commission observed, so it follows that a fair, equitable and effective funding system would have to find a way to put more funds behind students who cost more to bring them to a high standard than it does behind students who can be brought to the same high standards more easily.

That reasoning brought the Commission to propose a form of pupil-weighted funding for Australia, in which all students would receive the same base amount of foundation funding, and amounts would be added for each student answering to certain specified criteria, such as language status, socio-economic status and disability status.

As with all such systems, the state could, in theory, simply redistribute the money currently available, in which case, for every school that received more, there would be another that got less, or government could “level up,” so that no school loses anything, most schools get more money, everyone is happy, and the treasury goes bankrupt.

The Commission chose a middle course, proposing to increase total school funding by $5 billion.  But not all of that would come from the federal government.  Some would come from the states.  And there would be a complicated dance done in order to make sure that all students would be served by the same funding formula, with different amounts being contributed by the different states and by the private schools’ constituents.

Australia is, of course, not the first nation to come to these conclusions, nor would it be the first to implement such a plan.   A growing number of countries have led the way.  As elsewhere, the reaction has been swift and predictable.  Although the Commission is proposing to add $5 billion Australian to the pot, that is not enough to “level up,” so there would be winners and losers.  Predictably, the elite private schools are upset because they could potentially lose if this proposal succeeds.

The Commission report signals that the members were very much aware that redistributing school funding would not by itself solve the equity problem in Australia’s schools.  They realized that it would be no less important to ensure that any additional resources are used effectively.  They urged the government to move away from the creation of a plethora of government programs mandating particular kinds of changes in the schools, often for narrow purposes or constituencies, and toward giving schools clear goals and much more discretion in how they use the funds allocated to them for the achievement of those goals.

How Australia’s School Funding System Works
Under the current system, which the authors of the report feel “lacks coherence and transparency” and is “unnecessarily complex,” money is allocated to schools based on the school’s socio-economic status.  As in the United States, the Australian states and territories are primarily responsible for funding their school systems.  This funding is allocated in a variety of ways depending on the state; each has a formula that enables the state to determine how much money each school or system should receive; states also can determine whether – and how – this funding must be spent. The federal government is responsible for providing funding for things like capital improvements and major education initiatives, and, unlike most other countries, is also the primary funder of non-government schools.  When funding non-government schools, under the current system, the government does not take into account what schools charge for tuition or other revenue streams.

What the New Report Proposes
In the proposed system, the authors would put in place what they call the Schooling Resource Standard to be uniform across Australia.  School funding to meet this standard would be achieved through several separate funding streams.  These streams include per student funding, with differentiated amounts for primary and secondary students and “loading,” which is additional funding for students and schools based on socioeconomic status, school size and location, special needs, English language learners and indigenous students.  And finally, they include a funding stream for capital improvements.  Every government school would be funded to the Schooling Resource Standard plus any applicable loadings.  All non-government schools would be funded to the Schooling Resource Standard as well, although in this case, the standard will be achieved through a combination of private and public funding.  Depending on the socioeconomic makeup of the students in each non-government school, the school would be expected to contribute between 10 and 80 percent of the standard, with the balance provided by the government, though the panel recommends that the minimum contribution per student be set at between 20 and 25 percent of the Schooling Resource Standard, excluding loadings, which will be fully publicly funded in all schools, government and non-government alike.

The federal government would be expected to bear about 30 percent of the overall $5 billion increase annually.  The central change that the new system would make is that the money would follow the student, not the school, which is expected to be a major step towards educational equity.

Public Reaction
As mentioned earlier, the proposal outlined in the panel’s final report has received mixed reactions in Australia.  Peter Garrett, the School Education Minister, has stated that the proposed model is not government policy, but has provided the states and territories with the modeling tool used in the report to enable them to test the model using current budgets.  The reform plan faces opposition from some state governments, concerned that the plan is too expensive, and from proponents of non-government schools, who feel that the reforms would mean that many of the elite non-government schools would lose funding and require greater outlays from private partners and parents.  While it is too early to tell if the report’s recommendations will be adopted in Australia, the report describes the education funding system in Australia today and provides a detailed approach to designing a weighted student funding system that may have implications for other countries interested in moving in this direction.

Other reports of note:

OECD (2012). Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools. Spotlight Report: Netherlands. This report was released as part of the OECD’s Overcoming School Failure: Policies that Work project, which provides evidence from OECD countries on policies that effectively reduce school failure.  This spotlight report draws from the OECD’s study, Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools, and provides a country overview of PISA scores, the degree to which students’ socio-economic background predicts student performance, and employment rates as related to degree attainment. The report examines some of the current issues and related school policies in the Netherlands including the country’s higher than average grade repetition rates, their policy that allows students to be tracked at 12-years old, their efforts to ensure equity in their school choice procedures, their school funding formula that is weighted for disadvantaged students and their strategies to prevent high school dropouts, improve low-performing schools, and increase parental engagement, particularly among migrant families. To prevent school failure, the report authors recommend using two parallel approaches: eliminating education policies and practices (such as grade repetition and early tracking) that hinder equity and targeting low-performing disadvantaged schools.

OECD (November 2011). Background Report for the Netherlands. This report is also part of the OECD’s Overcoming School Failure: Policies that Work project. It offers an overview of the Dutch approach for ensuring education equity, overcoming school failure and reducing drop out rates. The report describes that the number of high school dropouts in the Netherlands decreased from 71,000 in 2002 to 41,800 dropouts in 2009 and targets a 25,000 decrease in dropouts for 2016.  The report reviews the Netherlands’ education structure, governance system, and approach to fair and inclusive education practices and resourcing.  The last chapter provides an overview of Dutch educational policies including developing an ambitious learning culture; changing the amount, intensity and quality of learning time; learning from results and performance oriented cultures in schools; and improving teacher quality by, for example, developing more teachers to the master’s level.  The final chapter also analyzes the current and foreseeable causes of education failure (such as helping students overcome disadvantaged backgrounds) and reviews “Aanval op de uitval”, the Dutch dropout prevention program which is committed to activities to reduce the number of early leavers as well as systematic changes to prevent student failure.

2012 2nd International Conference on Economic, Education and Management
June 1-2, 2012, Shanghai, China
ICEEM 2012 is a meta-conference for researchers in the Asia-Pacific region to connect with international research communities for the worldwide dissemination and sharing of ideas for research in the field of economic, education and management. The 2-day conference will foster the building of research communities in the field of computers in education.

Comparative Education Society in Europe, 25th Conference
June 18-21, 2012, Salamanca, Spain
The topic of the Conference, “Empires, Post-coloniality and Interculturality: Comparative Education between Past, Post, and Present”, reflects some of the major scholarly issues in which academics, researchers, policy analysts and students in the field of comparative education are currently concerned and engaged.

Canada International Conference on Education (CICE-2012)
June 18-21, 2012, Toronto, Canada
The CICE is an international refereed conference dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practices in education. The aim of the conference is to provide an opportunity for academicians and professionals from various educational fields with cross-disciplinary interests to bridge the knowledge gap and promote research esteem and the evolution of pedagogy.

PGL12: 2012 Partnership for Global Learning Annual Conference
June 29-30, 2012 New York, New York
The Asia Society Partnership for Global Learning annual conference is dedicated to preparing American students to be globally competent and ready for college. The two-day event connects educators, business leaders, policymakers and resource providers to share best practices, build partnerships and advance policies to ensure the next generation is ready to lead in an interconnected world.

Attaining and Sustaining Mass Higher Education
September 17-19, 2012, Paris, France
This is the biennial general conference of the OECD’s Programme for Institutional Management in Higher Education. The conference will examine issues and challenges such as how to manage access, quality and accountability, funding and financing, institutional diversity, internationalisation, technology and the academic workforce. The goal is to identify longer-term trends and will include analyses of national and institutional policies, case studies and the latest research from the OECD and elsewhere. The Conference will bring together many different perspectives and look at the issues at the international, national, institutional, or sub-institutional level.

In their recent report published in February of this year, the Grattan Institute examined the school systems of several East Asian countries with a view towards drawing policy recommendations from what they learned for Australia. In the report, titled Catching Up: Learning from the best school systems in East Asia (and featured in last month’s International Reads) the authors look to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Korea and Singapore and focus particularly on teacher education, professional development, and approaches to learning. It is the combination of these factors, the authors believe, that produces such impressive results whenever their students are compared to their counterparts in other countries on international assessments such as PISA.

One of the most striking findings in this report is the rate at which students in Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Korea are learning as compared to their counterparts in the United States, the United Kingdom and, of course, Australia. Using the conversion rates utilized by Thompson et al. in their 2010 ACER publication, Challenges for Australian education: results from PISA 2009: the PISA 2009 assessment of students’ reading, mathematical and scientific literacy (based on OECD analysis of PISA score levels and student competencies), the authors of Catching Up were able to produce a table demonstrating how many months ahead students in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea were compared to students in the US, the UK, Australia and the EU21. A difference in reading of 39 points represents a full year of difference in learning; the number is similar in math (41 points) and in science (38 points). Thus the difference in student learning between the 2009 PISA top performer (Shanghai) and the bottom performer (Kyrgyzstan) is six to six and a half years of learning in all three subjects.

What emerges from viewing the PISA scores in this way is it shows how far ahead students in Shanghai are, even compared to their top-performing East Asian counterparts. In mathematics, students in Shanghai are more than two and a half years ahead of the average OECD student, with students in Singapore and Hong Kong about a year behind them. Students in the UK and the US, on the other hand, lag a few months behind the average OECD student. In science, again, students in Shanghai have a huge leg up on most others: they are nearly two years ahead of the average OECD student and at least half a year ahead of the other top performers, whereas in the UK, students have just a tiny advantage over the average OECD student, while the United States remains average. Finally, in reading, Shanghai is still the frontrunner by far, but the overall gaps are smaller. Students in Shanghai are “only” about a year and a half ahead of the average OECD student, and again about half a year ahead of the next-best top performer. The United States performs better, by a handful of months, than the average OECD student, while the UK is approximately on par with average.

A common perception about education in Asian countries is that students – and particularly teenagers like those tested in PISA – spend the vast majority of their time either in school or in “cram schools” in order to compete for spots at selective universities. While it is certainly true that the culture of “cram schools” persists in these countries, the authors of Catching Up argue that it is not the extra hours spent studying that lead to these massive gaps in student achievement between East Asian countries and other OECD countries. Instead, these gaps emerge from “effective education strategies that focus on implementation and well-designed programs that continuously improve learning and teaching” (12), which are in place in the top performing countries. As evidence for this statement, they point to Hong Kong, which leaped from 17th place in PIRLS to 2nd place in just five years. Cram schools and Confucian values, they contend, cannot explain that rise.  Neither can system size; although Hong Kong and Singapore are relatively small (Singapore has just under half a million students while Hong Kong has about 700,000), South Korea has 7.2 million students and is also a top performer. Rather, Hong Kong, like Singapore and other rapidly-improving East Asian countries, took it upon itself to implement a series of effective and well thought out reforms with a focus on teacher education, teacher professionalism, and funding equity to get to the top of the pack.

Steve Hargadon of the Future of Education recently interviewed Tucker on the shared strategies used by the top-performing education systems and Emily Richmond, of the Education Writers Association, chatted with Tucker about why United States fares so poorly on international comparisons, how fundamental changes are needed in how society views and treats teachers, and why there doesn’t have to be a choice between equity and quality when it comes to public schools. In his Education Week blog, Top Performers, Tucker challenges the new generation of business leaders to turn their talents and influence to systems-change so that U.S. students can perform at world-class levels.

Photo from the 2011 International Summit on the Teaching Profession

I left the second International Summit on the Teaching Profession not at all sure of what I had learned.  But, after a few days to sort it out, there is quite a lot.  Here it goes —

1.    Swiftly broadening goals

I was struck by the way many of the top-performing countries talked about their goals for their students.  Singapore is a good example.  Lee Sing Kong, the Director of Singapore’s National Institute of Education and a member of the Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB) Advisory Board, explained that the small country’s vision statement for its education system was completely overhauled recently.  They reminded themselves that what they do in education is for the learner, their needs, their interests, and not simply to cover the content.  They said they wanted to help their students achieve understanding of essential concepts and ideas, not just dispense information.  They want to prepare their students for the test of life, not just for tests.  They said they want to focus on teaching the whole child, on nurturing them holistically across domains, not on the subjects per se.  They want to teach their students the values, attitudes and mindsets that will serve them well in life, and not only how to score good grades on exams.

Shinichi Yamanaka, Deputy Minister of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, said that thirty years ago, when the economy shifted from mass production to high-value-added manufacturing and customized production, Japan decided that it had to overhaul its education system away from rote learning and toward the growth and development of the autonomous individual.  He said this was an enormous undertaking and, thirty years later, Japan is still figuring out how to accomplish it.

Zhang Minxuan, a key leader of Shanghai’s drive to the top of the education league tables, said that for more than a millennium, the Chinese people believed that if you could recite 300 famous poems, you could be a poet.  This led to the Chinese commitment to a regime of exams based on memorization and rote learning.  But, he said, they do not believe that anymore.  Their priorities are on thinking, problem-solving, preparing Chinese students to live in a highly integrated global environment and cultivating individual talent.

Mrs. Cherry Tse, the Permanent Secretary for Education for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, said that young people are now being exposed to masses of data on a scale not imagined by their parents and much now depends on being able to help them sort out the real information from “the crap.”  They need, as never before, to be “discerning,” to live and work effectively in a state of constant flux.  She worried that educators live in a sort of cocoon that will make it hard for them to prepare students for such a world.  Part of this worry comes from her belief that it is more important than ever for students in Hong Kong and elsewhere to develop a strong sense of empathy for people in other parts of the world, especially for those who are less fortunate.  The schools, she said, are not changing as fast as society, and that must be fixed.

Note that there is no mention in this litany of the importance of learning to read, to write and to have basic mathematical literacy.  This much is assumed.  Which is to say that the aim of education in the world’s leading mass education systems is no longer simply to provide basic literacy.  As these statements witness, the aim has now gone far beyond that to embrace what were, through the 20th century, the aims for only the elite.

2.    A focus on the distance between rhetoric and reality—or—between the political leaders and the teachers in the classrooms

I can hear you now dismissing the sentiments just expressed as the usual talk of politicians—vague aspirations that have little impact on what actually happens in classrooms.  Which leads to my second observation.  The very same people who made the observations just reported also worried about the distance between rhetoric and reality, which had the effect of making me believe that these people were expressing genuine ambitions for their education systems, ambitions they intended to make good on, to the best of their ability.  Some examples:

A representative of Norway pointed out that “we say we value 21st century skills but we test basic skills.  We are not testing what we say is most important.  I understand that the politicians need data for their purposes, but we need to be careful that their needs do not distort and distract from what is best for our students.”

A representative from New Zealand said, “We want our students to be capable, confident, creative and innovative, but all we measure is the first of these.  Some nations around this table put high stakes only on the first of these and some put high stakes only on language and math.”

Please note this last.  The international meetings I have gone to over the years have been models of politeness.  Statements of this sort are never made.  Because they are never made, the underlying issues are never raised, much less addressed.  But it did not end there.

3.    A focus on implementation

Mrs. Cherry Tse, from Hong Kong, said that it is now crucially important to align the goals of the system designers and managers [the government] with the goals of all the other participants, not least the teachers.  She mused about the difficulty of knowing whether government is doing the right (that is the moral) thing, and said that this is why it is so important to have a very inclusive discussion involving many stakeholders about the purposes of education to create as broad a consensus on that point as possible.

Kai-ming Cheng, one of the conference rapporteurs and a member of the CIEB Advisory Board, who is from Hong Kong, noted that the distance between the goals driving the system managers and the teachers tended to moderate in well-managed systems and be much larger and more problematic in systems that are not so well managed.

Ben Jensen, Director of the school education program at the Grattan Institute in Australia, observed that the expressed goals of many poor-performing national education systems are often very like those of successful systems.  He wondered whether what distinguishes the successful systems from the less successful systems might be the care and planning they put into implementation of their policies.  That is, he wondered whether it is execution, not intention, that separates the successful from the unsuccessful.

I am a veteran of many, many years of meetings at which senior representatives of national education systems have droned on and on, hour after hour about the virtues of their education systems and the wisdom of their plans.  This meeting was very different.  The room was full of people for whom their goals were not just rhetorical expressions of windy aspirations but statements of aims they knew to be very difficult to achieve that they were nevertheless working overtime to turn into reality.  They were quick to acknowledge their frustrations and concerns about their own plans.  They knew and quickly acknowledged the distance between their rhetoric and the reality on the ground.  They recognized that the only way they could bridge that gap was by paying far more attention in the future than they had in the past to the importance of execution, of making real changes happen on a very large scale on the ground in their schools.  And they were determined to pull that off.  They knew it would take a long time.  They came to this meeting to learn everything they could from their colleagues in other countries that would help them achieve their goals back home.

That was exhilarating.  And gave me more hope than I have had in some time.

I leave my readers around the world to ask themselves how their country fits into this account of the conversation at the second International Summit on the Teaching Profession.  How broad is your discussion of goals for students?  Can you assume that they will get the basic skills they need?  Or is that still an issue in your country?  Has your country really made the commitment to provide to all students the skills formerly thought appropriate only for a small elite?  Is your country’s education system still held captive to a high stakes accountability system driven by high stakes tests of the basic skills?  Is there a broad and deep consensus on a real 21st century conception of the goals of education?  Does your country acknowledge the distance between the aims of the designers and managers of the system and its teachers?  How large is that distance?  Does your country put as much energy and commitment into designing and carefully executing sound plans to implement your reform agenda as it does into its development, or does the old rhetoric fade into obscurity as the new rhetoric arrives to take its place?

Pasi Sahlberg, Director General of CIMO at the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture; Vivien Stewart, Senior Advisor for Education at the Asia Society; and Lee Sing Kong, Director of the National Institute of Education in Singapore

On March 9, 2012, Vivien Stewart, Senior Advisor for Education at the Asia Society, conducted a roundtable discussion on teacher quality issues with Lee Sing Kong, Director of the National Institute of Education in Singapore and Pasi Sahlberg, Director General of the National Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation (CIMO) at the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. All participants are members of the CIEB Advisory Board. The conversation focused on teacher education, professional development, evaluation, career ladders, and more.

Stewart: The issue of teacher quality is central to high quality education systems. Since Singapore and Finland are seen as having very high quality education systems that are producing high quality teachers, and since the two of you have been centrally involved in these developments, I want to talk to you today about the key reasons for your systems’ success and how other countries might learn from you both.

There are some general descriptions of how Singapore and Finland have developed high quality teachers in a number of publications.  What I want to try and do today is to get underneath those descriptions a bit.  So I guess the first question is where to begin in developing a high quality teaching force?  What do you do first, or do you do everything at once? Are there certain barriers and ways to overcome those barriers?

Sahlberg: I think one of the things that certainly everybody believes is that teachers need to have a high quality higher education experience; an academic and research based education in the universities that is competitive to degrees and academic programs available if they chose law or medicine or engineering. But this is not enough because if we don’t have, at the same time, a profession and working conditions comparable with other high quality professions, young people won’t choose to become teachers.

For example, Sweden and Finland have a very different situation in terms of selecting young people for teacher training.  In Sweden’s education schools, there is one applicant for every position – there is no competition, anybody who wants to can go there. At the same time, the education systems are very similar.  So there has to be something in the teachers’ working conditions in the two countries that is playing a major role here. In Sweden, school choice, privatizing education, testing and increased bureaucracy in the schools are often mentioned as things that prevent teaching from being the kind of profession where teachers can exercise what they have been trained to do.  So what I’m saying here is, we need to think about having good, high quality education and training procedures, and at the same time we need to make sure that the teaching in the school and within the school system is something where teachers can exercise this professionalism and that teachers are not blamed and shamed for the things that they are not actually responsible for.

Lee: I totally agree with Pasi, but in Singapore the situation is slightly different from Finland, from the angle of respect for the teaching profession.  Personally, I believe that in Finland, teachers are very well respected, and so you immediately are able to draw the best into teaching and then of course you provide them with the training, and by providing the best conditions in the school you help also to retain them and give them the satisfaction of what being a professional teacher is all about.  But in Singapore, we addressed a slightly different situation.

In 1991, if I had six vacancies for teaching, I only had five applications, and at that time, the respect for the teaching profession was not really high.  As an outcome, the best candidates did not necessarily want to go into teaching.  So we made a shift in the mid-90s, looking at three things in order to help the teaching profession evolve. The first was putting in place conditions that really raise the prestige and respect for the teaching profession. Then step two was providing whoever entered the teaching profession with the best training – in other words, not only giving them a good foundation of knowledge, but building in them a professionalism that allowed them to look upon themselves as professionals in the pursuit of preparing the future of the nation. Third, we worked on retaining them. In order to do this, the working conditions of teachers must be well looked after. Over the years we noticed that other demands slowly creep onto the teacher’s portfolio. They may have to do certain administrative work, they may have to do certain extracurricular activities and a lot of this puts a heavy toll on the teacher.  So what do we do?  I think the Minister of Education in Singapore, very wisely, began to look at ways of how to avoid these extracurricular demands on the teacher so that they ease their workload and then again concentrate on the core business of educating and mentoring the children.

I believe that it is through this series of measures that the prestige of teaching has been raised, and a conducive environment for employee retention has been established.  From the mid-90s to now, the quality of the Singapore teaching force slowly progressed and evolved to what it is today.  But it does take time to really evolve the quality teaching force.

Stewart: I think both Singapore and Finland are seen as having strong and thoughtful teacher preparation programs, whereas I think in the majority of countries there is a lot of criticism and dissatisfaction with the nature of teacher preparation programs; their relevance, their rigor.  So, if you had to pick three things about the Finnish and the Singaporean teacher preparation programs that you feel are the most important in producing effective teachers, what would you emphasize?

Sahlberg: I think the first characteristic of the Finnish teacher education system, where the program normally takes about five years, is that from day one, students are guided and encouraged to develop their pedagogical thinking.  In other words, there is a focus on thinking about why they teach and how they teach and what it takes to be a teacher. I think the second strong element of the Finnish way of educating teachers, including primary school teachers, is the way we combine theory and practice.  This is done by having teacher training schools attached to universities, and the practical training is very closely integrated into the normal teacher training program.  This combination of theory and practice is a typical and often-mentioned strong point of Finnish teacher education. The third feature, and this comes very close to the nature of teaching and working as a teacher in Finland, is the idea of creativity as part of the work of all teachers here.  I think Finnish teacher education is systematically trying to encourage teachers to be creative educators, rather than educating them towards only one way of teaching.  This is of course relevant because the way our schools operate, teachers have a great degree of autonomy and teachers are rewarded not according to their level of educating people to the standard, but by how they are able to find new ways of teaching and alternative ways of arranging work in the classrooms and schools, and that’s why this creative, open minded aspect of growing as a teacher is a very normal and typical part of teacher education in Finland.

Stewart: If I may add a fourth, I think one of the things that is striking about Finnish primary schools is the way teachers deal with children when they are behind. Teachers seem to have a very extensive repertoire of ways of thinking about and dealing with that, in addition to then having teachers who have even more training helping them. Is that something that all primary teachers get that prepares those teachers to deal with the whole range of students in the classroom?

Sahlberg: Yes, exactly.  Particularly in our primary schools, but in all schools really, we have tried to create a situation where all the teachers have the responsibility of making sure that everybody will have equal opportunities to be successful and no child is left behind in our school system.  This means that in teacher education everybody has to gain the knowledge and understanding and skills related to special education so that they can understand and diagnose and deal with the issues, both psychological and social, in the classroom.

Stewart: And one final question  are all the institutions that train teachers in Finland seen as being of comparably high quality?  In the US and in other countries, there are widely varying standards and perceptions of the quality of teacher training institutions.

Sahlberg: It really doesn’t make any difference which university or school of education you go to in Finland. The Ministry of Education in Finland oversees universities, teacher education departments and teacher licensing.  No matter where you graduate from, you are always a qualified teacher.  The teacher education curriculum in all of our universities is pretty much the same.  The teacher education programs have the same requirements and the same academic rigor throughout the country.

Stewart: Singapore only has one teacher training institution, the National Institute of Education.

Lee: I think in Singapore, if you ask me for the three most important parts of teacher education, they are encapsulated in the model of teacher education that we have developed based on values, skills and knowledge.  The values that we inculcate in our student teachers are that as a teacher, the heart of the work is learning.  The learning in class can come in various forms, have various profiles, but we know that every child can learn.  Some may be fast learners, some may be slow, but it’s just a matter of a different approach to help the slower learners do well.

That is the first set of values. The second set of values is teacher professionalism.  In initial teacher preparation programs, we have a limited amount of time and we cannot equip the teacher with all the professional knowledge and practice that he or she needs.  Upon graduating, a beginning teacher must continue to learn and to evolve through professional development to upgrade their skills, upgrade their knowledge, and improve their professionalism as a teacher. We always have described this like a carpenter with a toolbox.  When you first go to the tool shop you bring an empty box, then you fill it up with all the different tools.  When you encounter a particular job, you take out the right tool. Likewise, we equip the teachers with the repertoire of pedagogical tools so that when he or she encounters a group of students with a certain learning profile, he takes the right tool to address that learner.

And the third key area is knowledge.  Domain knowledge of the discipline that they teach is critical, because as the literature and research have highlighted, those teachers with good subject knowledge can adopt the right tools to truly engage and enthuse the students.

So these are three key areas of importance that we look at in initial teacher preparation, but they must also evolve because teacher education programs must be able to equip teachers and prepare them to be relevant to the current landscape. If the teacher is not relevant to the learners that they are dealing with, be it in terms of the knowledge they teach or be it in terms of the tools that they use, then I think the impact of that teacher’s teaching will be minimal.

Stewart: I know that the National Institute of Education has recently undergone a review of its teacher education program within the last couple of years.  What was the impetus to that revision?  What were the things that you felt needed to change?

Lee: There are quite a few things that have undergone this review, including the curriculum, planning and implementation.  First, we looked at the value system and found that values needed to go beyond being learner-centered and teacher-centered, but also include the idea of a professional community where teachers understand that there is value in engaging the community as a whole and sharing with one another best practices and experiences, so that the whole profession can grow.

In terms of the curriculum, there were a few changes.  The first change was to provide a better coherence and interconnection of the modules that the student teachers engage in.  Every teacher education program has a set of modules and activities.  We have brought greater coherence by developing a map of the whole program so that when the teacher looks at the whole program structure and the activities and the theories behind them, they are able to see a bigger picture of how they all relate to each other.

The third change is exactly what Pasi spoke about, the improved relationship between theory and practice. We strengthened the partnership between the National Institute of Education and the schools in order to prepare the next generation of teachers.  We engage senior teachers to mentor student teachers, and throughout the process, we have added varied interactions between the experienced teachers and the student teachers, in terms of skills, practice and theory, all of which tie in with the program map in terms of the understanding of how modules relate to activities.  The student teachers are able to understand that when they do something in the classroom, they are translating a particular theory into practice and they also understand which practices they are strong in and which they are weak in and they then work with their mentors to improve those practices.

The next change is the introduction of the e-portfolio.  This is a tool that we use to encourage very strong reflection on the part of the student teacher.  Student teachers sit down with their mentor teacher to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the lesson that they taught, and then the student teacher has the opportunity to reflect on that feedback and channel their reflections in the e-portfolio, which contains a track record of the practices, the experiences, the discussions and the reflections of the student teacher.  The student teachers then use the information from the e-portfolio to identify areas of improvement and work with professors at the university or their school-based mentors.

We have had very positive feedback from our student teachers who are using this new e-portfolio program.

Stewart: Pasi, you said that working conditions was the second part of the answer to how to have a high quality teaching profession.  The term working conditions means different things to different people; sometimes it’s sort of a code word for salaries, and for other people it means additional time for professional development or for others, a leadership role in the school.  When you talk about professional working conditions in Finnish schools, what are the key elements?

Sahlberg: It’s a very important question, Vivien.  In the Finnish context, when we’re speaking about professional working conditions or respectful working conditions, we of course include all of the things that you said, but I would say that three things come before others.

One of them is that we have paid a particularly close attention in Finland to the fact that teachers have a considerable amount of authority and power to determine the actual curriculum that they use.  In other words, teachers need to be able to make decisions regarding not only the methods of teaching, but also the content, the sequencing and the entire arrangement of their own teaching.

Then the second one, of course, is the actual execution of these teaching plans in class by teachers so that they have both autonomy and also professional responsibility for their work as part of the collective community of teachers in their own schools and in the wider community.  I think teachers in Finland feel that they are doing something together and that they really have control over what they do.  Control is not coming from any authority, or principal, or the ministry or government.  Teachers have control over their own teaching.

Then the third element of this professional working condition issue is being able to decide about assessment and evaluation in their work.  There are naturally two elements here.  One is student assessment – reporting and assessing how well their own students are learning in the school and reporting this to parents.  Then, being part of a professional community that evaluates the work of the school and again collectively, together with the principal, deciding how this will be reported.

People should not think that that there is total freedom in Finland to do all these things.  I think we have been quite successful in designing, over the last 30 years, national frameworks for the curriculum, evaluation and monitoring policies that enable teachers to use their knowledge and skills and there are not really too many complaints or arguments regarding this situation.  I think Finland has also been rather lucky in the sense that this whole process has created a situation where there is a great deal of trust within the education community and the society as a whole; meaning that there is confidence in public education.

Stewart: The level of trust in Finland is very striking, and so for people coming from countries that have a different cultural milieu, it’s hard to imagine.  It seems very attractive but it’s kind of hard to imagine how to get to a place where there is that level of trust in the profession.  Do you have any thoughts about that?

Sahlberg: Oh yes, because this is one of the most often asked questions when people come to Finland from other countries.  I always warn people that you have to look at the whole country and the society.  The culture in Finland is very much built on the same idea of trust; it’s not only education where we have a lot of trust, but it’s the entire society where we typically have a very wide degree of trust among people.   This is because of many things.  For example, we are fairly equal in terms of wealth.  There is a fairly low level of crime and that of course increases the level of trust within the society.

At the same time, I also believe that there are many things that can be done to enhance trust within an education system because when I started to teach about 25 years ago, we had all sorts of centrally issued regulations, directives and orders and were forced to behave in a certain way.  So, we have been handing over the decision power including curriculum planning, textbook selection, student assessment and special education, and many other things, to teachers at schools, which has gradually also increased and strengthened the feeling of trust in many ways in our society.

Lee: If I may make a comment here, trust will need time to develop, and trust between the teacher and the parents or between society and the teaching profession must be built up based on mutual respect.  That’s why I think this respect can grow when we begin to celebrate the goodness of teachers.  If the society continues to bash teachers for failing to do this or failing to do that, and pushes all the responsibility onto the shoulders of teachers, I think that will continue to depress the image of the teaching profession.  When the teaching profession continues to decline, the trust between the society and the profession, or the parents and the teachers will also decline.  Do you agree, Pasi?

Sahlberg: I totally agree with what you said.

Stewart: Coming to the issue of teacher working conditions in Singapore, it’s obviously somewhat different from Finland.  I think one of the striking things, looking at Singapore from the outside, is the career ladders for teachers and increasing salary levels when teachers add additional skills as a way to keep people motivated, improving their work, and keeping them in the profession.  I was wondering if you could talk a little about that.  I’d be interested in what the criteria are for promotion, who develops them, who decides and on what basis?

Lee: I think in Singapore the teaching profession, like all other professions, is dealing with a very young generation of new teachers.  In fact, in Singapore the median age of teachers is only 33 years old.  The baby boomers have retired and therefore there is a big group of young teachers coming in, and they are a very different generation of people. Younger generation teachers, like in other professions, expect recognition and strong encouragement.  After two or three years in the profession, they expect at least to be recognized in terms of a promotion.  So that’s why in Singapore, the Ministry of Education has developed three tracks for teachers: the leadership track, the teaching track and a specialist track.  We have also included many intermediate steps as compared to in the past so there are more opportunities for young teachers to be promoted.  So that will help in terms of retaining teachers in the profession.

Now, how do we evaluate teachers?  The Ministry of Education has developed a framework and called it EPMS, the Enhanced Performance Management System.  Within this management system framework, we lay out very transparent criteria for teachers at each stage of their career: what kind of competencies we expect and what level of responsibility we impose at each level related to attitude, a teacher’s perspective on teaching, how they manage student learning and their values including believing every child can learn.  We have defined these criteria for beginning teachers through professional teachers.  Every year, when the principal and the vice-principal as well as the head of the teacher’s department come together to appraise the teacher, the teacher’s own feedback is also taken into consideration.  For example, if a teacher says, “Look, I fell somewhat short in this area of this competency and I would like to go for professional development,” the principal will be able to see the value that this teacher places on improving their professional practice and skills.  So a lot of these criteria are captured within the EPMS framework which is very transparent for the teachers and done by a group, not by one individual so there is a greater chance that the evaluation results and promotion decisions will be accepted.

One very clear part of the framework is that we do not assess teachers based on student achievement in the classroom. We don’t do that.  We look at teachers from a professional development angle in terms of competency, acquisition of knowledge and skills, practice and professionalism.

Stewart: Do you use student achievement at all?

Lee: If it is included at all it will be as a passing comment; that your professionalism perhaps could be further looked at simply because currently your group of students are not improving as expected.  One good thing, or rather a controversial thing, is that we stream students into various streams so therefore the expectation of how the student performs in each of the classrooms is clear.  Let’s say a teacher teaches students that are less academically inclined, and the student performance is not good.  You can look at other factors as contributing to why the students are not learning rather than just place the total responsibility on the teacher.

Stewart: Pasi, how is teacher evaluation thought about in Finland?

Sahlberg: Most of the teacher evaluations that we do in Finland are done at the school level by the school principal and teachers themselves, so we don’t really have too much discussion about formal teacher evaluation in the country.  It’s very much decentralized within the system to the level of the school and it’s a very important part of every principal’s work.  When principals are prepared to work as the leaders of the schools, this is an important part of their training and responsibilities at the moment.

Stewart: But it’s up to them how they design it?  There isn’t a standard template that they use?

Sahlberg: No, we don’t have standards for teacher behavior or teacher evaluation, so it’s up to each and every principal.  I think the closest to a standard that we have is that we encourage every principal to have regular development conversations with their staff, where they go through how the teachers are working and where the areas of further development may be and what they find difficult and so on, but principals may do this in very different ways. It always includes classroom observations as well, so the principals are expected to go and see what’s going on in the classroom so that they can really talk about what’s going on in teachers’ work, but this is not the kind of a standardized form of evaluation as it is in many other places.  Since we don’t have the data on student achievement that could be used at the level of individual teachers, we’re not really even talking about that when evaluating teachers.

Stewart: Let me ask you each one final question.  Looking to the future in Finland and Singapore, what do you see as the key challenges to maintaining a high quality teaching profession?

Sahlberg: This is a critical question for Finland.  For the last 20 years, we have been able to attract the most motivated and talented young people into teaching.  We don’t really need much improvement in this situation because this is as good as the situation can get in terms of teachers in general, but I think many, if not most, of the challenges are coming from the changing nature of Finnish society.  We are now, for the first time, hearing quite worrying signals, particularly from young teachers, that many of them find it difficult to manage classrooms where diversity is becoming more and more visible, not only because of the increasing immigration, but also because of increased levels of child poverty, although they are still very low compared to other countries.  We have more single or no parent pupils in our school system.  It’s really changing the whole nature of working as a teacher, where the education and upbringing of children is becoming more central to the teachers’ work, rather than just teaching knowledge and skills as it used to be.  So this is something that we are really thinking about; how do we alter the teacher education program so that we have more time for classroom management to make sure that the young teachers can do what they want to do.  On the other hand, if we are able to maintain these professional working conditions that are really attractive at the moment for many young people, I think we will be able to still maintain teaching as a popular profession, but we need to be alert to this and not to rely on the past.

The financial issues in Finland are another challenge for the entire system of education and it’s immediately reflecting on teachers. We have several municipalities that are running the schools with serious public funding challenges, which means the class sizes tend to increase and resources in these schools are decreasing.  So, there are many things that are changing the situation very quickly and there are some dark clouds, so to speak, here in Finland.  But I’m still optimistic, but we need to continue to work hard.

Stewart: And Sing Kong, what do you see as the challenges to maintaining Singapore’s high quality teaching profession?

Lee:  There are actually four very prominent key challenges I think Singapore has to address in the future.  I think number one, like what Pasi said, is the growing diversity of students in the classroom; not just from different cultural and religious backgrounds, but also a range of students from different socio-economic backgrounds.  So these are issues teachers must confront and they’re not even issues that I think a professional teacher is able to manage.  Therefore, we have to constantly provide different kinds of support to teachers. We’re still deliberating and still debating as to how to give teachers the kind of support that will enable them to manage more diverse classrooms in the future.  That’s the first challenge.  The second challenge is literally the fast-changing demands of the 21st century landscape, especially what employers want and how we can prepare our students to face the future.  There is so much uncertainty about the future.  We have to really plan not just from the point of view of the teaching profession, but also the curriculum.  The third is that parents are much more educated than in the past.  It is a very different thing to work with parents who are less educated than with parents who are well-educated.  They question the professionalism of the teacher at times and such questioning can put pressure on the teacher.  So how do we address the issues of some irrational and unreasonable parents?  How do we work with parents to really mitigate these issues of putting pressure on the teachers and to create a greater partnership?  The fourth challenge, like what Pasi said, is competition for resources.  When industries continue to evolve and grow, I think it is a continual challenge to really upgrade or improve and evolve the teaching profession to be on par with the others, so that we can continue to attract the better ones into the profession, and retain them. I think this challenge is real and somewhat a competition for resources.  It’s going to also aggravate the problem of retention.

Stewart: Thank you both very much for your time.  It was a really good discussion that others can learn quite a lot from on the issue of teacher quality.

Although the project has just started, the World Bank has already produced numerous products based on the information they have collected thus far.  One of these reports, Strengthening Education Quality in East Asia, was published in December 2011 and presents data in a wide range of SABER’s assessment areas: teacher policies, school autonomy and accountability, private sector engagement, vocational tracking, information and communication technology, and tertiary education.  The authors of the report examine 13 countries and economies in East Asia, rating their policies in each area as either latent, emerging, established or advanced, while also examining overall trends in educational policy shifts in the region.  This report represents an example of the types of benchmarking and comparisons the data collected in the SABER project will be able to facilitate, and is well worth a read, particularly for those interested in education systems in East Asia.  Another report produced with SABER data, published in August 2011, is particularly relevant now, as the international education community recently turned its attention to the teaching profession at the second International Teaching Summit in New York.  This report, authored by Emiliana Vegas and Alejandro Ganimian, is titled, “What Are the Teacher Policies of Top-Performing and Rapidly-Improving Education Systems?,” and it lays out teacher policies based on empirical evidence that they have collected and existing studies on this topic.

In their report, the authors rely both on data collected directly from participating countries and economies as well as information from multiple databases set up to compare international student performance.  Using these multiple sources of information, the authors selected a set of 20 countries that they considered to have the most successful education systems in the world.  From there, the authors analyze these countries’ and economies’ teacher policies in order to tease out commonalities that indicate best practices.  The term “successful” when defining education systems is especially important here.  The 20 education systems that Vegas and Ganimian chose to highlight are not necessarily worldwide top-performers.  Instead, they are classified into four categories, each with five members.  The first is “top-performing and rapidly improving;” this group includes Hong Kong, Canada, Finland, Belgium and South Korea.  The second group is “top-performing;” Japan, Taipei, Singapore, the Netherlands and Hungary receive this distinction.  The third group is composed of “rapidly-improving” systems that have made long-term gains: Chile, Iran, Luxembourg, Israel and New Zealand.  And the final group consists of systems that have shown rapid improvement over the short term: Ghana, Armenia, Lebanon, Indonesia and Mexico.  The classification of these systems as “successful” rather than “top-performing” is important, because it allows for an analysis of policies that have helped systems improve alongside the policies that have been in place in top-performing countries for a long time.

SABER – Teachers, the arm of the broader SABER program focused solely on teaching, analyzes 10 discrete policy areas:

-    The requirements to enter and remain in teaching,
-    Initial teacher preparation,
-    Recruitment and employment,
-    Teacher workloads and autonomy,
-    Professional development,
-    Compensation,
-    Retirement rules and benefits,
-    Monitoring and evaluation of teacher quality,
-    Teacher representation and voice, and
-    School leadership.

For the purposes of this report (and the broader analysis that the World Bank is conducting with SABER), SABER has identified eight policy goals on which they collected data.  The authors view these policy goals as “best practice” policies a country should have in place or try to establish.  These policies include:

-    Setting clear expectations for teachers,
-    Attracting the best into teaching,
-    Preparing teachers with useful training and experience,
-    Matching teachers’ skills with students’ needs,
-    Leading teachers with strong principals,
-    Monitoring teaching and learning,
-    Supporting teachers to improve instruction, and
-    Motivating teachers to perform.

Each of these goals has been linked to “policy levers,” which are defined as “actions that governments can take to improve.”  Levers are linked to specific indicators.  For example, for the policy goal “motivating teachers to perform,” the levers are: having minimum mechanisms in place to hold teachers accountable, rewarding high-performing teachers, and sanctioning low-performing teachers.  The indicators in this case range from things such as “is teacher absenteeism taken into account in teacher performance evaluations?” to “do high-performing teachers get better chances of promotion?” The goal of this report is to provide an analysis of these various layers, from broad policy goals down to specific indicators, to provide a portrait of what the most successful systems are doing.  As the authors point out in their introduction, “the impact of many reforms depends on specific features of their design.”  They give the example of teacher merit pay: in some countries, this has proven successful; in other countries, it has not.  It is only by analyzing how merit pay is implemented, from the way teachers are evaluated to the types of incentives and administrative procedures used, that governments hoping to borrow these policies can best determine how to implement them.

While data has not been published yet on a number of the indicators, several insights emerge from this report.  Vegas and Ganimian find, for example, that in successful education systems, just 30-50 percent of teachers’ working hours in primary school and 25-40 percent in secondary school are devoted to instruction, suggesting that these countries place a premium on lesson preparation rather than classroom hours.  With regard to teacher pay, they find that starting salaries range from 80-120 percent of the GDP per capita, while average pay falls between 100-200 percent of GDP per capita, even in the “rapidly improving” countries.  While education researchers have long known that top-performing countries prioritize lesson planning and teacher collaboration and development, as well as paying their teachers well, the SABER data provides a portrait of how these policies are enacted, and suggest specific benchmarks that countries can meet in terms of how they structure statutory work hours or how they position teacher pay relative to other salaries.

Another interesting set of findings deals with teacher evaluation.  The authors find that in most successful systems, teachers have at least one and as many as three internal evaluations annually (evaluations done by school principals and peer review), while external evaluations (school inspections) are somewhat deemphasized.  Teacher evaluations in these systems tend to rely on a combination of information drawn from student achievement data, peer reviews and principal observations, while data gleaned from school inspections are used only in a minority of successful systems.  Teachers are generally expected to be able to demonstrate innovative teaching practices, strong classroom management, and subject-specific knowledge in addition to subject-specific pedagogical skills.  The ways in which teachers are evaluated has been a serious topic worldwide, with many education systems seeking the perfect blend of internal and external oversight.  While not promoting any specific format, the SABER data does shed light on how teacher evaluation is being done in countries with some of the strongest and rapidly improving education systems in the world.

While this new initiative from the World Bank is highly ambitious and impressive in its scope, it is important to note that in this early stage of the work, the data collection activities have been driven to some degree by pre-determined categories that define top-performance.  In future reports, it will be important to keep a close eye on whether or not these pre-determined “best practice policies” are borne out by the evidence.  As this initiative evolves, Top of the Class will be sure to continue to cover new reports and findings from this comprehensive source of information about important issues in education worldwide.

Other Reports of Note

OECD (March 2012). Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders for the 21st Century: Lessons From Around the World.
This publication underpins the 2012 International Summit on the Teaching Profession by summarizing research about what can make educational reforms effective and highlighting reforms that have produced specific results, showed promise or illustrated imaginative ways of implementing change. The report, like this year’s summit, is organized around three interconnected themes including developing effective school leaders, preparing teachers to teach 21st century skills, and the issue of teacher demand and supply.

OECD (March 2012). The Experience of New Teachers – Results from TALIS 2008.
This report examines the working lives of new teachers through the TALIS 2008 survey of lower-secondary school teachers. New teachers are defined as having two years or less of teaching experience.  In most countries, new teachers assume virtually the same teaching responsibilities as more experienced teachers, but they report that they often lack the necessary classroom management skills for effective teaching and learning. Their classrooms often have insufficient time devoted to teaching and learning and poorer disciplinary climate.

EI Research Institute (March 2012). The Future of the Teaching Profession.
This paper is a review of the available evidence on the relationship of the teaching profession to societies and governments globally.  It reviews possible next steps that governments, communities, and the teaching profession itself could take to enhance the learning, efficacy, and status of teachers.  It illustrates how policy has been shaping the nature of the practice, often with the effects that limit teachers’ professional judgment and which may, in the process, constrain student achievement.  Most importantly, drawing on evidence from international research, this study offers alternative propositions for system redesign, providing vignettes of breakthrough practices from around the world.

OECD. (November 2011). Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from around the World.
The 2011 International Summit on the Teaching Profession is the basis for this report; the authors summarize the evidence that underpinned the summit and highlight some of the major lessons to be taken away from that meeting.  The chapters are organized around the recruitment and initial preparation of teachers; teacher development, support, employment conditions and careers; teacher evaluation and compensation; and teacher engagement in education reform.  In each of the chapters, the authors delve into problems faced and the strategies employed by participating countries, pulling out particularly effective or interesting techniques that have policy implications for other OECD countries and economies. They argue that top teaching forces are not the result of cultural respect for teachers but of certain, deliberately formulated policies.  They also advocate for a high level of teacher responsibility and a prominent, highly-engaged role in education reform.

Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics (October 2011). Teachers’ Pay and Pupil Performance, Paper No. CEPCP352.
This article, a summary of a longer report titled “If You Pay Peanuts, Do You Get Monkeys?”, examines how teacher salaries are determined across OECD countries with an eye towards explaining how the real and relative levels of teacher compensation affect the quality of a country’s teaching force.  Using OECD data and their own methodologies, the authors find that there is a statistical correlation between teacher salaries and student outcomes, and argue that a 10 percent increase in teacher pay would result in a 5-10 percent increase in student performance.  They end the article with a series of policy recommendations related to their findings.

The Grattan Institute (February 2012). Catching up: Learning from the best school systems in East Asia.
Australia’s Grattan Institute examines East Asia’s four top-performing education systems: Hong Kong, Korea, Shanghai and Singapore in light of the fact that these systems are not among the world’s top spenders.  The report also highlights that their success is dictated not only by culture and tradition, but by a commitment to equity and excellence.  Just a decade ago, Hong Kong was ranked 17th in the world in reading in the PIRLS assessment while Singapore was ranked 15th, and both countries have since rocketed to 2nd and 4th place, respectively.  The authors of this report find that while many countries set common goals, the difference between the top performing countries and others is that the top performers pay very close attention to implementing those goals at the classroom level.  The report includes a detailed comparative analysis for each of the East Asian countries, Australia and the United States.  In addition to the full report, the Grattan Institute has produced a 33-page executive summary.

Video from the Future of Teaching Profession Conference

Recent Conferences of Note
The Future of the Teaching Profession
February 16-17, 2012, Cambridge, UK
Leadership for Learning (LFL) hosted this two-day event at the Møller Centre in Cambridge, which explored research and policy in relation to teacher quality and the development of the teaching profession. Planned with EI (the global federation of teacher organizations), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the Open Society Foundations, the seminar included representatives from government, academia, unions and schools from 28 countries. More information is available on the LFL web site including a record of the discussion, relevant papers, and videos of the presentations.

Mark Your Calendar
The 56th Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES)
April 22-27, 2012, San Juan, Puerto Rico
The worldwide education revolution over the past 150 years has thoroughly transformed human society.  The relentless inclusion of ever more people into formal and non-formal schooling—from early childhood education to advanced university training and beyond—is a social revolution with cultural, material, and political consequences for human life around the globe.  This conference aims to answer questions such as “What has been the legacy of the education revolution?” and “What are its current challenges and promises for the future?”

2012 2nd International Conference on Economic, Education and Management (ICEEM 2012)
June 1-2, 2012, Shanghai, China
ICEEM 2012 is a meta-conference for researchers in the Asia-Pacific region to connect with international research communities for the worldwide dissemination and sharing of ideas for research in the field of economic, education and management. The 2-day conference will foster the building of research communities in the field of computers in education.

Comparative Education Society in Europe, 25th Conference
June 18-21, 2012, Salamanca, Spain
The topic of the Conference, “Empires, Post-coloniality and Interculturality: Comparative Education between Past, Post, and Present”, reflects some of the major scholarly issues in which academics, researchers, policy analysts and students in the field of comparative education are currently concerned and engaged.

Canada International Conference on Education (CICE-2012)
June 18-21, 2012, Toronto, Canada
The CICE is an international refereed conference dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practices in education.  The aim of the conference is to provide an opportunity for academicians and professionals from various educational fields with cross-disciplinary interests to bridge the knowledge gap and promote research esteem and the evolution of pedagogy.

PGL12: 2012 Partnership for Global Learning Annual Conference
June 29-30, 2012 New York, New York
The Asia Society Partnership for Global Learning annual conference is dedicated to preparing American students to be globally competent and ready for college.  The two-day event connects educators, business leaders, policymakers and resource providers to share best practices, build partnerships and advance policies to ensure the next generation is ready to lead in an interconnected world.

Education Benchmarking News
Class size lift could help education – Treasury
Stuff (New Zealand)
March 20, 2012

New system unveiled to spur vocational education
China Daily
March 9, 2012

Govt to raise education spending to 4% of GDP
China Daily
March 6, 2012

1,119 badly-rated teachers to undergo retraining
The Korea Herald
February 19, 2012

Lessons from Asia show way forward for schools
The Australian
February 17, 2012