Marc Tucker: In your essay, Learning and society in a post-industrial era, you describe the way the nature of work is changing in advanced industrial societies and how that is affecting the kinds of skills people now need.  How and when did that research begin?

Kai-ming Cheng: I started my study of the workplace about 12 or 13 years ago by looking at the way work was organized at investment banks like Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong.  I found that the investment bankers work in small task forces and teams, just a few people — a one-stop shop.  In other organizations, these task forces are often called a deal team, an account team, a project team and so on.  These teams function semi-autonomously, with great freedom to respond to the quickly changing environment in which they work.  The team members bring different skills, knowledge and experience to the work and are expected to draw on one another constantly to get the work of the team done.  They function like professionals.

This is very different from the typical pyramidal structure in the traditional industrial company where you usually find a whole army of front line workers each of whom reports to a supervisor who in turn reports to another supervisor, all culminating in a supervisor of supervisors, all of whom look upward in the pyramid, looking for close direction from their superiors.   In that structure, the expertise is above each worker in the pyramid, each worker operates only in a narrow sphere and the autonomy of each worker is very limited.  This organizational pyramid at the work place has been mirrored in the structure of whole societies and the structure of knowledge.

For a very long time, formal education has been designed to supply workers with the skills they would need in the traditional system of work organization.  But the industrial system seems to be moving slowly away from this pyramidal structure toward the kind of structure I saw at Morgan Stanley.

Now employers seem to be much less focused on turning out standardized products in large quantities and much more focused on producing high quality customized services and tailor made products.  So you have “less of more” — less quantity and more variety.  The Morgan Stanley case is a good example.  The client is no longer expected to move around and be served by different department of the organization, nor is each department expected to face all clients.  Instead, the client is assigned a team whose job it is to meet that client’s unique needs, needs that are constantly changing.  Those needs are often very complex and demand a holistic service by integrating all kinds of expertise on the part of the firm.  This is happening more and more and in many workplace situations.

MST: Tell us how this impacts the work that people do and what they have to know to do it.

KMC: In the pyramidal situation, typically the front line worker only needs to know how to follow instructions and what the procedures, rules or regulations are.  The workers don’t have to design, run risks or face the clients directly, most of the time. They are protected by bureaucracy.  They are not liable for their mistakes as long as they follow procedures.  They are not at risk of facing any moral dilemmas or personality conflicts with clients.  But now, in small groups, even the frontline workers have to interact with clients, they have to solve problems and design, they have to run risks.

MST: By contrast what did the people that were expected to lead in the mass industrial complex have to do and know?

KMC: The people on the top had to design all the procedures and think of the strategies for the whole company’s development.  They had to face the market and changing environments and changing clients.  They had to run risks and design the product or the services.  They were responsible for organizing the whole thing.

MST: How are the changes in the workplace leading to the types of skills workers must have today?

KMC: Back to the case of Morgan Stanley.  When you are in a group of five or six people, apart from the group head or leader there is no layer, instead, there is integration of expertise.  Everybody has to share the same responsibilities such as brainstorming, thinking of what to do next, working with others on a team, being creative all the time regardless of where you are and you have to constantly face ethical challenges and moral dilemmas, and you have to think outside the box, you have to run risks, you have to face changing networks and changing markets, and no one is doing the same thing all the time, you have to adapt to change on a daily basis.

In the typical old organizations, everything had to be committed to writing.  People relied on minutes of meetings, directives and reports for their direction.  Old-style minutes, if you remember, often did not identify the speaker.  So nobody had to bear any personal responsibility, but now you can’t do that because you are held responsible right on the spot.  The skills that are needed are no longer about following rules.  Now you need communications, brainstorming, and presentation skills and to be able to use SMS, Whatsapp, Twitter and other technologies.  Communication becomes the central activity above all else.

MST: Your paper presents a picture of an increasing distance between what educators are doing and what people actually need to function well in this world.

KMC: Let me first give you the other story about the changes now taking place. Today, individuals may not do what they learn.  In the University of Hong Kong, 35 percent of engineering majors are not entering engineering at all.  In 2006, in the United Kingdom, the average citizen changed his or her job 13 times.  In America it was an average of 10.6 job changes.  People have to adapt to changing environments, changing clients, changing networks, changing expertise and so on.

This is a fundamental change in society.  In the agricultural society, for a very long time, people were bound to the land in an unchanging cycle of seasons and crops.  Then we had the mass-production industrial society in which many people worked for a long time in the same firm doing much the same job, simply following instructions.  They have been bound to organizations and occupations, in much the same way their predecessors were bound to the land and nature.  But now that is all coming unglued.  Individuals are increasingly less bound to either organizations or occupations, but now they fall into insecurity and uncertainty.

MST: Employers are getting less and less of their workforce from full time employees and more from individual contractors.

KMC: That’s right.  More and more people in Hong Kong are freelancing and serving several companies at one time, or working in home offices.  There is a new term I just learned for people in the performing arts, they call it “multiple portfolios.”  A ballet dancer I know performs, teaches, designs for other people, invests in real estate, and joined an NGO to work on rural China.  So what kind of occupation is she really in?  Also, I think with the collapse of middle management, jobs will become less and less.  More and more people will be working outside organizations and more and more people will have to create their own work.  Do you think this is happening in the United States?

MST: It is happening in the United States.  The leading edge of that is that people who would have ten years ago been employees in large and medium size firms and who are now working as independent contractors and working for more than one employer.  They are ipso facto entrepreneurs whether they want to be or not.

You describe our education systems as being organized in the pyramidal fashion that most businesses have now abandoned.  What are the signs that the education system is still organized to produce people for a world that is actually disappearing before our eyes?

KMC: The education system is trying to turn human beings into human resources according to the labor market pyramid, which unfortunately no longer exists. Every person is put into a compulsory education system and the mentality is sorting people, classifying people and ranking people.  So you have a pyramid with a large number of people with a primary education, less with a high school education and relatively few with college, university experiences.  Then you have corresponding places these people will go – those with high school education will become laborers; those with a technical education will become technicians, and those with higher degrees will become engineers, and so on and so forth.  In most countries that is the design, and it is not only the design but also the mentality.  At ten years old if you cannot meet the standards of Grade 3, you are seen to be a failure.  If you cannot pay attention for a long enough period of time then you have attention deficit disorder.  The system is basically set up to produce an army of students organized into schools with the same courses, same curriculum and same examinations.  Some will go farther than others and that is how we sort them out.  When this system was well matched to its environment, it was OK if a student dropped out of school, because the economy could easily absorb such students.  But now that is no longer possible.  Even in the services, workers now have to know other languages, work well with others and make decisions.  We have to turn a system that has been organized to sort students out and instead organize it to make sure that virtually all students are very well educated.  This trend is irreversible.  The mode of production has changed.  People’s lifestyles have changed.  Because of that, educators who are trained in the 20th century are perhaps not the best candidates for reformers.  They only know education as assisting a few instead of everybody.  This is the challenge.  If we think different people should be allowed to learn differently, how do we do it?

MST: You evidently believe that if we are going to enable people to cope with changes, we should focus less on the structure of the system and the resources it requires, and more on learning and the kinds of learning experiences people deserve.  Why is this true?  What does it mean to you?

KMC: The system we have is based on credentials.  The kindergartens that parents want their children in and teachers want to teach in are the ones that will get their graduates into the best primary schools, and those schools are designed to get their graduates into the best secondary schools, and those schools see their job as getting their graduates into the best colleges, and so on up the qualifications tree.  Everyone’s focus is on the credential, which unlocks the key to the next stage in the series.  What we do not focus on is what is actually learned at each stage of the structure, which brings about implications for life.  We need to move away from the focus on credentials.  How do we prepare young people to face such a future, one that is likely to be even more challenging, and ever more precarious?  It is certainly true that workers will have to have real expertise that is deep.  But that will no longer be enough.  There is no guarantee that what you have already learned will enable you to do well in the future.  At Morgan Stanley, they seldom appoint people in investment banking with financial, economic or accounting backgrounds.  Even the accounting companies like KPMG, are hiring people other than accountants.  Employers are looking at how well the candidates for their jobs will be able to cope with a very uncertain future, how fast they will be able to learn and what they will need to know.

The new curriculum reform we put together in Hong Kong in 2002 is called Learning to Learn.  Learning—continuous learning—has become fundamental.  Not just for the whole working life, but also for family life, cultural life, political life, religious life, life after retirement and so forth.

MST: You have developed a framework for thinking about learning.  Would you share it?

KMC: I looked into the science of learning and realized there are five points that may summarize what learning is:

•    Learning is meaning-making, that is, making sense of the world around us;
•    Learning is about construction of knowledge, rather than transmission of knowledge;
•    Learning is about experience, hence “learning by doing”—real life experience is the best learning;
•    Learning is about understanding and using knowledge—you can’t claim understanding before you can successfully apply it in practice; and
•    People learn in groups.

I use these as guidelines to understand the education system.  It really matters whether we are giving students the kinds of learning experiences they deserve, whether the pedagogy is helping the student to be an active learner, and whether the assessments are helping students understand, experience and apply the knowledge, or whether we are simply testing how much students have stored in their brains.  I use these guidelines to determine which reforms are moving in the right direction and which ones are not.

MST: What would schooling look like if it answered to that description?  What would a classroom look like?

KMC: Central to this question is whether or not they are having real-life experiences.  In medicine for a long time, students spent years learning basic science such as pathology and pharmacology.  Only after that were they allowed to practice as a resident.  Because, so the theory went, if you don’t have the theory, then how can you practice?  But that is not true anymore.  In problem-based learning, now medical students start out tackling medical problems, first on paper, then on videos, but soon doing grand rounds in hospitals under the supervision of medical doctors, seeing real patients.  They are asked to research the presenting symptoms and learn what they need to learn to interpret the data, come up with a diagnosis and propose a treatment.  They work in groups.  They have access to the classes in the subjects they used to have to take first, but those courses are shorter, and take much less time than they used to.  In the end, they have all the theoretical knowledge they need, but they are acquiring that knowledge in a context of practice. If you put learning in context and make experiences central in the learning process, things would be very different, and students would learn not only more, but much more efficiently.

In Hong Kong when we reformed the curriculum in 2002, we began with the question: What are the kinds of learning experiences that these 15- or 18-year old students deserve?  When we looked back at the existing curriculum at the time, the subjects were far too overwhelming and took up far too much of students’ time, leaving little room for other experiences that the students deserved.  So we compressed the formal curriculum and made more room for critical thinking, sports, workplace experiences, service learning, experiential learning, philosophy, etc.  So the learning cycle becomes very different—you are preparing humans beings for the future they will face.

MST: In the world you have painted, businesses face clients that want enormous variety and it’s impossible to predict what a student would need to know ten-years from now when they are well-established in the workforce.  So some would argue that it ought to be up to each teacher to decide what they think is appropriate to teach.  How do you balance between structure and variety in students’ experiences in designing a curriculum?  How would you think about what all students need to know versus what some students need to know?  How would you balance the need for choice and the need for a common curriculum in designing an education system?

KMC: I think that is exactly the right question.  How much should be fundamental and how much should be selective?  There are two schools of thought on this – those who argue for the basics and a higher proportion of fundamentals and those who argue for a higher proportion of selection by the student.  I don’t have a good answer to that.  In the debate that led the Harvard curriculum reform in 2005, there was equal attention to broad knowledge base and specialized learning in a particular discipline area.  One fundamental thing we have to resolve relates to assessment.  Assessments are meant to have a uniform expectation of everybody, which has become increasingly impossible.  But then how can you work in a system without assessments?

MST: We have concentrated on being able to measure what you have learned, not your capacity to learn.  It does strike me when you add up all the requirements that you have laid out for people to be competent in the environment you just described, it includes a whole long list of things that we can’t measure—morale capacity, social capacity, learning to learn, etc.  We are now measuring less and less of what we think is desirable for kids to acquire from their education.  This strikes me as a very serious problem.

KMC: I am not against measuring knowledge but more important is how students use that knowledge.  That is why I think PISA, although not perfect, is a good starting point.  It challenges the whole system of measurement.  Assessment people tend to think that if you have learned, it should be measured.  But do you really need to measure a whole person’s learning and the whole person’s knowledge or can you set a threshold and see what a person achieves?  We would have to think very hard about how to measure the threshold and what the threshold would be.  If we can assure that all can learn to a certain level, then the rest of the learning experience can be very healthy.

There is a kind of cult of assessment that is almost replacing improvement with testing.  We have an analogy of a pig farmer who is worried that the pig is not heavy enough.  He weighs the pig each and every minute, as if that will increase the pig’s weight.  That is happening in our education system.  Much that we care about cannot be measured, or is not measurable until long after the individual has left school.  We will have to trust our teachers to teach what we are interested in and not distort the learning process by incessantly testing the limited menu of things we can assess with formal instruments.

High-performing education countries work hard to ensure that all of their students, whether they continue their education after compulsory schooling in university or in vocational and technical training, receive high quality learning experiences.  In the United States, much of the post-high school vocational education and training occurs in community colleges.  On May 7^th, NCEE will released a new report, What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready?, a two-year study of mathematics and English literacy requirements of first year students in community colleges in the United States.

Community colleges are the primary institution providing technical and career-oriented education in the United States.  The most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports that more than 40 percent of all first year college students in the United States attend a public or private community colleges. (See chart above)  The percent of U.S. college students enrolled in community college has risen by over one-third since the 1970s.  (NCES, 2012, Condition of Education) Of the students who enroll in these institutions, however, less than 30 percent have earned a degree, even after four years. (See chart below)

One issue with completion rates for community college in the United States is the very large percentage of students who enroll and are then placed in remedial classes from the start.  NCES reports that more than 40 percent of all students who attend community college enroll in at least one remedial class, often more.  Almost all community colleges administer placement tests to incoming students to assess readiness for credit-bearing classes.  Colleges vary in whether they require or merely recommend placement in mathematics or English remediation classes.  Less than 20 percent of students who enroll in at least one remedial class attain a degree within five years of enrollment. (See chart below)

The OECD has been the central organization collecting comparative data on post secondary education rates in different countries.  They have developed a classification system for this data, dividing institutions into two types: type A (theoretical programs of three to four years in length, equivalent to a Bachelor degree program in the United States) and type B (a career-oriented program of two years in length, comparable to a community college degree in the United States).   According to the chart below, the U.S. community college graduation rate as a percent of the population has increased slightly since 1995.  What information is available, however, suggests that graduation rates in many top performing countries are also rising, often faster than in the United States.  The chart also hints at the structural differences among countries, with much larger type B systems in many of the countries (New Zealand, Japan and Australia) than in the US.

In the United States, it is clear that the community college sector is a key to training students in technical skills.  To learn more about what students in the United States need to know to be successful in community college, see the NCEE report and watch full video of  the release event at:  http://www.ncee.org/college-and-work-ready

Technology

This month, several East Asian top performers are piloting new programs intended to integrate technology and education.  In Singapore, the Nanyang Polytechnic recently signed an agreement with Samsung to establish an “Innovation Centre” based at their institution.  One of the major initiatives to come out of this agreement will be research into creating new learning environments, and particularly learning environments that make use of technology.  Researchers will be looking at how technology can be used to create new pedagogies and as a way to collect and use data about student learning.  Asia Pacific Future Gov reported on the story.

In China, the Beijing government has new plans to integrate technology more fully into classrooms in that municipality by providing financial support to schools and students.  In addition to issuing free tablet computers to all first- and second-grade students in one of their school districts as part of a pilot program, the government has announced that they have set aside nearly US$500,000 to increase the use of e-books and tablets in schools.  Teachers have reported both successes and setbacks with the trial tablet program.  One setback is the lack of resources to use with the technology, and the Beijing Academy of Educational Science has been tasked with creating new programs and electronic texts.  Parents, too, have mixed feelings about the project: some are worried about the health issues that may arise from young children looking at screens all day, while others are concerned that technology will distract students from focusing on their lessons.  Read the full story at Xinhuanet.

Higher education in China may also be getting a technology makeover in the form of Massive Online Open Courses (better known as MOOCs).  Coursera, one of the most popular sites for MOOCs, is hoping to expand into China.  Currently, MOOCs haven’t taken hold in China as firmly as they have in places like India, largely because of the language barrier -– not enough Chinese students speak English.  Andrew Ng, one of Coursera’s founders, wants to change this.  He plans to create Coursera lessons in Chinese to make university education more widely accessible to Chinese students, believing that Coursera can “embody the Confucian value of making no social distinctions in teaching.”  Some university officials in China have also voiced support for the expansion of MOOCs in that country.  Read the full story at the People’s Daily Online.

In Hong Kong, a charity group called WebOrganic has launched that city’s first-ever educational YouTube channel.  The Hong Kong Digital Academy YouTube Channel encourages teachers throughout Hong Kong to create and share video lessons and tutorials online, which other teachers can then incorporate into lesson plans and homework assignments for students.  Teachers from around Hong Kong may now submit videos to WebOrganic, which will then upload them onto its channel.  The project is meant to allow more students to benefit from high quality teaching. Previously, teachers could only upload videos to school servers, which would then slow down as a high volume of students watched the same video at the same time. Now, with the videos hosted on YouTube, an unlimited number of students can stream the tutorials anytime, expanding the reach of high quality teaching tools outside the wealthier schools where they are produced.  There are currently 38 educational videos available on the channel, from teachers in four Hong Kong schools.  Read more at the Hong Kong Standard.

School-to-Work Transitions

Both China and Japan have begun new approaches to help young people make the transition from school to work.  In Japan, businesses have traditionally begun to recruit university students prior to graduation, which means that students in their final years of higher education often slack on their studies as their focus turns to job-hunting.  Businesses compound the problem by holding information sessions, initial screenings, testing and interviews during class hours.  In order to redirect their attention back to their last years of schooling, a new government team formed by the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry plans to request that businesses seeking to make new hires delay their recruiting activities until April of senior year.  An editorial in the Japan Times, calling for delaying recruitment until after graduation, argues that “students needs to study for a full four years before embarking on the time-intensive undertaking of finding a job.”

In Shanghai, the problem is not overzealous businesses recruiting students, but high rates of youth unemployment.  People who are under the age of 35 account for more than a quarter of all unemployed people in that city.  The government hopes to ameliorate this problem by matching the youth, many of whom do not have qualifications that would allow them to get good jobs, with companies willing to participate in the program.  The companies are in charge of ensuring that the hires learn the skills that the companies need, and then allow them to apply for positions within the company.  Over the course of 2012, which was the first year of the program, the number of unemployed youth decreased by 9,000, down from an overall total of 80,000.  Read more at The Global Times.

Teaching English in East Asia

Students in the top-performing East Asian countries often have English language lessons as a major part of their primary and secondary curriculum.  In Japan, there has been new movement toward increased proficiency in English for all higher education students.  Recently, when the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan proposed their first major school reform proposal, they called for the reform of English education and advocated that all public and private universities require their applicants achieve a specified minimum score on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).  The Japan Times editorial board refuted the plan, writing, “the proposal offers no genuinely effective measures for improving the teaching and learning of English in Japan.”  They argued that resources would be better spent on supporting English teachers to improve their English skills and teaching methods.  In addition, they point out that these tests only assess speaking, listening, reading and writing and fail to address the ability to use English in the real world.  They are further concerned about who would pay for the TOEFL tests as the current official price is $225 per person.

Meanwhile, the University of Cambridge recently pioneered its new computer-based English language test with students in Hong Kong.  The test, which 48 Hong Kong students took at the end of March, uses computer-based technology to measure language skills in listening, reading, writing and even speaking by using a computer-generated animated character.

In China, the head of the Chinese Intelligence Research Agency, Zhang Shuhua, recently called English-language education in that country “destructive” to China’s overall educational goals.  He believes that schools may be placing too much emphasis on learning English (with poor results) at the expense of other subjects.  The South China Morning Posthas more details.

Reports and League Tables of Note

This month saw the publication of two reports and one new league table offering insight into global education performance.  The OECD has launched the PISA Test for Schools, and has published results based on the first administration of that test.  In previous administrations of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the OECD has sampled populations of students in both developed and developing countries in order to assess how those students perform compared to their peers worldwide.  However, more specific information about student performance in these countries, such as school-level data, has not been available until now.  The results of the first administration of the OECD Test for Schools, in which individual schools were able to choose to participate in a “PISA-style test” to compare their students with the world’s top performers, are now available. ­ This test, like PISA, focuses on applying math, science and reading skills to real-world problems.  The OECD hopes to expand the availability of the test to countries including Spain and the United Kingdom soon.  Read the full story at the BBC.

America Achieves has produced a report based on the results of the roughly 100 U.S. schools that participated in the first administration of the OECD Test for Schools.  In contrast to what some researchers have argued, this new report finds that when you look at students in the middle-to-upper middle class in the United States, they are lagging significantly behind students in other countries – including 24 other countries in math and 15 in science.  In addition to taking into account the already published PISA data and the OECD PISA Index of Economic, Social and Cultural Status, the report is able to use the results of the new test to look at how specific US schools are doing with reference to their student populations.  The report’s authors find that there are world-class schools in the United States in which students outperform most other countries in the world and can be considered on par with the average scores of the top performer, Shanghai.  On the other hand, they find that some schools that are considered to be top performers in their states are actually lagging woefully behind the rest of the world.  More resources related to their findings, including case studies of schools, a sample test and videos, are available here.

Beginning in September 2013, the OECD Test for Schools will be available to all high schools in the United States.  Schools will be able to decide whether they want to participate in the program, and also whether they want to make their results public.  In the initial pilot administration of the test, 13 schools out of the 100 tested shared their results nationally in the America Achieves report.  All of these schools are considered “exceptional” according to the report’s definition, and had scores that were equal to or better than the top international performers in the 2009 PISA administration.

UNICEF has released a new report ranking children’s well-being in 29 wealthy countries. The report ranks the Netherlands, Norway, Iceland and Finland at the top for overall childhood well-being based on five dimensions of children’s lives: material well-being, health and safety, education, behavior and risks and housing and environment.  Canada came in at number 17, while the United States was ranked 26^th.  (Though Japan, New Zealand, and Australia qualified as wealthy nations and were included in the study, they had data for fewer than 75% of the indicators used and were not included in the final rankings.) In rating children’s educational well-being, UNICEF considered four indicators: educational achievement by age 15, preschool enrollment rates, participation in further education and what percent of children aged 15-19 participate in education, employment or training. The Netherlands ranked 1^st for children’s educational well-being, Finland ranked 4^th, Canada 14^th, and the United States 27^th, above only Greece and Romania. While the report gives an overall picture of children’s lives over the last decade, most data in the report applies to the period 2009–2010, the latest comparative information available. Visit UNICEF.com to see an interactive map of country rankings along each indicator in the study.

The Times Higher Education, a weekly magazine based in London, has published a set of Asia University Rankings for 2013 based on the criteria they use for their annual World University Rankings.  In addition to East Asian countries, the rankings include schools in the rest of Asia and in the Middle East.  The top three slots are occupied by the University of Tokyo, the National University of Singapore, and the University of Hong Kong.  Institutions in China (Peking University) and South Korea (Pohang University of Science and Technology) round out the top five.  In fact, universities in countries other than these top performers do not appear on the list until the 14^th slot (National Taiwan University); the highest-ranked Indian university sits at number 30.  The New York Times notes that Japanese institutions were most represented in the top 100, taking nearly a quarter (22%) of the places.

The Asia Society’s Global Cities Education Network (GCEN) released a report earlier this year entitled, “Improving Performance of Low Achieving and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students” by Ben Levin, Professor and Canada Research Chair for the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. The report reviewed the literature on school effectiveness and then focused on strategies used to address low achievement and equity in five school systems, three in the United States (Chicago, Denver and the EdVisons Charter Network) and in two cities in high-performing countries: Seoul, South Korea and Shanghai, China.

The report reviews the literature on school effectiveness, concluding that while family background has a large impact on achievement, schools can indeed make a difference. Research clearly shows that schools with similar demographics can have very different outcomes for students. He cites OECD PISA data (2009) that shows that countries vary greatly in the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds that are successful in school.

Levin claims that a growing body of research supports the idea that changes in school and classroom practices are key to better outcomes. While changes in policies and practices outside the classroom (he cites as examples: governance, finance, accountability, teacher preparation, technology use or school organization) may be helpful, they will not make a difference in student outcomes unless accompanied by changes in the actual classroom. Levin cites his own 2008 book (How to Change 5000 Schools) that lists nine areas of key focus for improving teaching and learning in the classroom:

• High expectations for all students
• Strong personal connections between students and adults
• Greater student engagement and motivation
• A rich and engaging formal and informal curriculum
• Effective teaching practices in all classrooms on a daily basis
• Effective use of data and feedback by students and staff to improve learning
• Early support with minimum disruption for students in need
• Strong, positive relationships with parents
• Effective engagement in the broader community

He also identified key supporting elements to ensure that these practices can take place:

• Engagement and commitment from the adults in the system
• Effective collective processes for educators to continue to improve their practices (often referred to as professional learning communities)
• Aligned, coherent and supportive system policies and practices
• Appropriate allocation of resources

Levin’s studies of the two cities in high performing countries (according to PISA data), Shanghai and Seoul, provide interesting and instructive cases for other jurisdictions.

Shanghai
Shanghai is the largest city in China and has 1.9 million students and 2,875 schools.  Fifty percent of the students are migrants from rural areas.  Levin characterizes Shanghai’s educational challenges as: 1) disparities in quality between urban and rural schools; 2) disparities in education provided to native Shanghai students and migrant students; and 3) the variance between schools attributed to historical conditions and teacher and administrator quality.  In addition, Shanghai’s heavy emphasis on examinations is seen as a challenge for the whole system.

A key priority for Shanghai was ensuring migrant children’s right to an education.  In 2008, the municipal government initiated a three-year compulsory education effort for these children.  The government also focused on improving teaching practice and instituted a web-based teaching and study platform with curriculum resources, research papers and teaching demonstration lessons for teachers to observe and provide feedback.

Shanghai has also made a very deliberate attempt to improve equity among schools.  First, they established a minimum standard for per pupil public spending on schools that resulted in a transfer of funds to rural schools that was used to update facilities and increase teacher salaries.

In addition, since 2002 Shanghai has a policy of transferring teachers and principals from urban schools to high need rural schools and has also transferred rural teachers and principals to urban schools with the expectation that they would return to the rural schools and use their experience to improve them.  In 2005, they also started a program to pair urban and rural districts.  The districts sign three-year agreements to collaborate on teacher professional development and school improvement planning.  There are several other initiatives that involve sister schools and teacher exchanges.

Shanghai has taken this idea of pairing schools a step further, with “commissioned administration”.  This is a program that involves a high performing school taking over the administration of a low performing school for a set time period.  It is hoped that the high performing school transfers some of its management skills and ideas to the low performing schools.  The municipal government funds this.

Finally, Shanghai attempted to move away from a school system that involved “top” schools to a neighborhood school system.  They have not been entirely successful in this effort and now have a compromise system where “sponsorship fees” can be paid by parents to allow their children to attend schools outside their neighborhood.

Seoul
Seoul is a very different case from Shanghai.  It is the largest city in South Korea.  There are 1.2 million students in the city, but only 5 percent are considered to be disadvantaged.  Seoul has almost no minority students, with less than half a percent migrant students.  Most of the countries’ migrant workers live outside of Seoul.

While South Korea does extremely well on international comparisons of education achievement, it is considered a stressful school system with an intense focus on examinations.  Policies in recent years have aimed to shift attention to “competence and creativity” rather than “knowledge regurgitation”.  Another issue has been the emphasis on English language skills, which has put low socioeconomic students who cannot afford tutoring at a disadvantage since tutoring is so widespread in South Korea.

While Seoul’s disadvantaged population is small, the city has still made reducing inequities a priority.   Teachers are assigned to schools on five-year intervals, and high quality teachers are specifically assigned to schools with high populations of disadvantaged students.  Teachers are offered incentives including higher salaries, reduced class sizes, reduced instructional time to teach in these schools, the opportunity to choose the next school they will teach in, and credit toward promotion.  In addition, administrators with strong leadership potential are assigned to schools with at least fifteen percent low-income students.

Seoul also has a School Equalization Policy, which is intended to equalize resources among schools.  Schools that fall into low-income areas are provided with additional resources through the Achievement Improvement Target Schools (AITS) program and the Educational Welfare Investment Priority Schools project (EWIPS).  The AITS program provides additional funds to schools with this designation as well as flexibility in their curriculum and school management, including allowing AITS schools to select a principal independently and principals to choose 20 percent of their teachers.  Schools can choose to use the funds however best fits their needs.  The EWIPS program brings additional services to these schools, including supplementary education, health services, cultural programs and social services.

While the demographics and history of these two cities are quite different, both Shanghai and Seoul have prioritized the issue of equity in education and have directed funding and created innovative programs to address the needs of disadvantaged children and the schools that serve them.  They both see equity as a key to the overall achievement of their education systems.

For more information see: http://asiasociety.org/files/gcen-levin.pdf

Elsewhere in this newsletter, we summarize the paper prepared by the OECD for the recent International Teachers Summit in the Netherlands and the remarks made by Andreas Schleicher in his webinar on the subject.  These documents are well worth reading, as is Vivien Stewart’s account of the event.  Here, I will attempt to share some of the dynamics of the summit.

I did not attend the summit, and so have assembled this account on the basis of conversations with several people who were there.  My purpose is to describe some of the differences in views among the participants, because they are consequential, and reveal much about the direction education policy is likely to take in the coming years.

This was the third in the series of summits, the first two of which were held in New York City at the invitation of United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, invitations extended to the ministers of education and education labor leaders from the top-performing and most rapidly improving countries.  The United States acted as host country for those meetings and Education International (EI) and the OECD were the principal co-sponsors.  The aim was to provide a venue in which the top officials involved in making policy for teachers and teaching in their countries could, aided by analyses provided by the OECD and EI, compare notes on strategy and implementation, and by so doing, further improve their own education systems.  Nothing quite like this had ever happened before.

The first summit was focused on attracting and recruiting high quality secondary school candidates into the profession.  It covered initial teacher education, strengthening professional practice and retention.  There was broad agreement that no nation could have a high quality education system without high quality teachers.  One could feel a palpable sense of excitement among the participants as they reinforced each other’s conviction that a policy focus on teacher quality could yield great dividends and that the nations around the table could learn a lot from each other.  It ended with a call for a second meeting, one that would go deeper on teacher preparation, teacher supply and demand and school leadership.  Subsequent meetings, the planners thought, might similarly focus on other key aspects of policy for teachers.

The second meeting reached the objectives its planners had for it in the realm of leadership, though it came up a little short on the subject of supply and demand.  But the big difference was a difference of tone.  Key differences in policy direction among the participants emerged, differences grounded in different interpretations of the nature of the challenges facing the industrialized nations’ education systems, and the appropriate responses.  The differences in tone became obvious both in exchanges between the participants at the table and later, when the observers had a chance to ask questions of those participants.  There was, in particular, a certain chill in the exchange between U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Sing Kong Lee, the Director of the Singapore’s National Institute of Education, in their exchange on the subject of teacher evaluation and the role of teacher evaluation in the design of accountability systems.  Secretary Duncan appeared to be pressing for some support for the proposition that teacher evaluation—in particular teacher evaluation tied to measured student performance—was an important key to teacher quality.  Sing Kong Lee acknowledged that teacher evaluation was important, but expressed some reservations about the American approach.  There were echoes of this difference at other points during the discussion at the table and again, in somewhat more strident tones, when the observers joined in the discussion.  Though many in the room nodded their heads when Sing Kong Lee spoke on this topic, it was clear that Duncan was not alone in his view that countries interested in improving student outcomes needed strong accountability systems, and that teacher evaluation systems tied to student performance should be part of those systems, but it was just as clear that the labor leaders, teachers in the audience and many ministers were very wary of such systems.

Toward the end of the second summit, the ministers and labor leaders gathered for separate lunches.  Both gatherings acknowledged that the issue of teacher evaluation and appraisal had become the “elephant in the room.”  To the extent that teacher evaluation is tied to promotions, retention, incentives, rewards and so on, such discussions can easily lead to confrontations with the teachers unions.  But it was not just fear of confrontations between governments and unions that was at play here.  Many of the ministers had considered and rejected the idea of basing policy in any important way on tough accountability systems focused on teacher evaluation because they did not think such management strategies would enable them to recruit and retain the kind of high quality professionals they wanted.

Thus, this issue appeared to engage issues of policy, management and strategy central to the work of everyone.  Andreas Schleicher, realizing that the great promise of the summits could be squandered if they did not deal with this issue, pressed those present to make the “elephant in the room” the focus of the next summit.  Rather than trying to push it into a corner, he wanted to deal with it head on.  EI agreed.

Some of the experts and observers in the room argued that teacher evaluation should not be the central topic of the third summit, that it was but one component among many in a high-performing system.  But Schleicher and others agreed that this set of issues was so central that it needed to be dealt with head on and the decision was made to focus the third summit on teacher evaluation and appraisal.

That decision would put great pressure on the OECD to come up with a paper setting the stage for the meeting that all the attendees would regard as a fair point of departure for the discussion.  The planners agreed on the following lens for that paper:

• How should teacher evaluation and appraisal be defined and who should define it?
• What processes and techniques should be used?
• What can research tell as about the impact of teacher evaluation and appraisal?

And thus the stage was set for the third summit.

I was not there, and could not in any case get inside the heads of those who were, but, at this distance am very much inclined to agree with what I take to be Schleicher’s strategy.  Shoving this issue under the rug would have doomed the summits.  Ministers would have drifted away if the discussions were inhibited by very important issues that could not be discussed.  The alternative was to try to frame the issues in such a way that they could be discussed.  This was the path that was chosen.  It was broadly agreed that teacher evaluation and appraisal is very important and that it could be effective only in systems also designed to:

• Make teaching an attractive profession,
• Provide very high-quality initial teacher education,
• Create a school management system in which teachers could act as autonomous professionals within a collaborative culture, and
• Engage teachers in developing the evaluation system.

And that was frame with which OECD and EI opened the third summit.

This is a very sensible approach.  It could potentially provide a roadmap leading to sound policy that would also provide an opportunity for all parties to claim victory, but it would have been too much to expect that it would relieve all the tensions with which the second summit ended.

In the eyes of several observers, no one at the table at the third summit was advocating that teacher evaluation and appraisal be used to weed out bad teachers.  And everyone agreed that teachers both needed and wanted feedback.  But, with that off the table, there was still tension between those who are most comfortable with the use of evaluation for professional growth and development, on the one hand, and those who see it as a vital tool in the design and implementation of tough-minded accountability systems on the other.  And, in the middle, were those who were naturally inclined to the position apparently so well articulated by Andreas Schleicher at the meeting, namely that teacher evaluation is best thought of as an important component of a much larger system built around a conception of teachers as highly capable professionals, not as cogs in a Tayloristic management design.

That vision assumes that the criteria against which teachers are being judged is not limited to student performance on basic skills in a narrow range of subjects but on their ability to help students succeed against the full range of outcomes now widely referred to as 21st century skills, many of which are difficult if not impossible to measure.  In Tayloristic systems, everyone assumes that management will assess the workers in any way they see fit, usually according to fairly simplistic criteria; in professional environments, the direction of accountability is at least as much to one’s colleagues as to one’s superiors in the organizational structure.  So who is to devise the criteria for judging teachers and who is to decide whether an individual teacher meets them?  In blue collar environments, all workers are regarded as equal, if not interchangeable.  But, in a professional environment, the professionals acquire increasing responsibility, authority and compensation as they demonstrate increasing competence and skill.  Perhaps, as nations move toward conceptions of teachers and teaching grounded in the idea of teacher as professional, the idea of teacher evaluation and appraisal should be inextricably connected to the development of formalized career ladders for teachers.

The third summit did indeed address these and other issues.  This made for some tough conversations.  It became very clear that it was going to be hard to resolve these issues without some real trust among the parties, both at this table, and, by implication, within the countries represented.

Nonetheless, the people I talked with about the summit came away encouraged.  The honesty of the conversation, the fact that what had at the preceding meeting been the “elephant in the room” had now been addressed and that there was substantial consensus on many points was a relief to many who had feared going into the meeting that it might end badly.

That it did not is no doubt in part the result of the good will of those who came.

But new cracks emerged.  Among the rules set by the conference organizers is one that says that a country cannot be represented at all unless it is represented by the top education official (usually the minister of education) and the top teachers union official.  But, especially for the Asian nations, there is a strict limit to the number of out-of-country trips officials can make, often no more than two a year.  If a minister more senior than the education minister calls a meeting on the date of the summit, the education minister must cancel the trip to the summit.  Under the current rules, this means that the country is not formally represented and for that reason, a number of jurisdictions that had been invited to the third summit attended in a participating observer status.

The rule could, of course, be abandoned.  But that could easily lead to the summit not being a summit of top officials with policy-making authority, but rather a meeting of functionaries.  No one wants that.

There is another problem.  It is important to the host country to be able to invite observers, people—mostly educators—who are interested in the proceedings and want to express their views on the issues being discussed by the delegates.  But this desire for what has become something of a public fishbowl can inhibit the desire of the organizers of the summits to have a frank discussion among the delegates.  The frankness of the discussion is one of the big attractions of the meetings for the delegates.  The openness of the meetings is a big draw for the host countries.  This potential conflict of goals did not loom large when the summits were first conceived, but, now that the conversation has begun to tread on sensitive issues, it has become clear that some way must be found to resolve the tension between the desire for openness and the need for some measure of privacy.

Lastly, as in so many other international organizations, there are tensions with respect to which nations are invited to sit around the table.  The original conception was to include both top performers (on the PISA rankings) and the countries whose education systems were improving the fastest.  But, if Asian top performers drop out because education ministers are not able to attend, the summit could get to be a meeting dominated by countries that are not among the top performers, and, if that happens, the top performers who remain may decide not to come, and then the summit ceases to be a summit.

These are tough challenges, but they are neither unprecedented among such international meetings nor are they, in principle, insurmountable.  The three meetings that have taken place thus far have served as a unique venue for the people on whose shoulders rest the fundamental redesign of the world’s leading education systems to exchange information, share views and challenge each other’s conception of the right policies and strategies.  That is a very worthwhile function.  I very much hope the organizers are successful as they seek a path through this thicket.

From 2006 to 2011 the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), the organization that produces the TIMMS and PIRLS international assessments, worked with teacher education programs in seventeen countries to administer a survey to determine the depth of mathematics knowledge and skills of future teachers in those countries.  The study also assessed the quality assurance measures each nation has in place for recruiting and training teachers.  The seventeen countries that participated in this Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) were Botswana, Canada (four provinces), Chile, Georgia, Germany, Malaysia, Norway, Oman (lower-secondary teacher education only), the Philippines, Poland, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Spain (primary teacher education only), Switzerland (German-speaking cantons), Taiwan, Thailand, and the United States (public schools only).

The survey included a test of mathematics content knowledge of teachers in training in the last year of their primary- and lower-secondary teacher education programs.  The subdomains used to develop the test were derived from the subdomains used in the assessment frameworks for IEA’s Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) given every 4 years to students at grades 4 and 8 in more than 60 countries.  A different test was administered to students training to be primary teachers from the test given to students training to be lower-secondary teachers in order to reflect the level of mathematics they will eventually teach.

The charts below show the scaled mean score for teachers from each country, for primary teachers in Chart 1 and lower-secondary teachers in Chart 2.  Canada is not included in either chart as the number of responses from that country did not meet the sample size requirements for TEDS-M.

While not all countries represented in these charts participated in TIMSS 2011, it is clear that top TIMMS performers, such as Singapore and Taiwan, also did well on this measure of future teachers’ math content knowledge at both primary and secondary levels.

Along with the assessment gauging future teachers’ mathematics content knowledge, TEDS-M conducted a survey of teacher training programs in the countries studied to see what quality assurance procedures are in place for recruitment and selection of future teachers.  This study looked at three criteria for quality assurance in the recruitment and selection of future teachers: 1) The extent to which states control enrollment into teacher training programs, 2) The attractiveness and status of primary and secondary teaching as a profession, and 3) High selection requirements for entry into teacher training programs.  Quality assurance procedures from each country were ranked Strong, Moderately Strong or Limited.

The chart below demonstrates how each country scored for each category, according to the criteria developed by the TEDS-M study.  Among the countries that responded to the survey, only two countries were rated strong in all three categories: Taiwan and Singapore, both of which came out at the top of the league tables in the most recent administration of TIMSS Mathematics in 4th and 8th grade.  The United States, meanwhile, rated low on all three measures of quality assurance for recruitment and selection of teachers.

The results of the TEDS-M survey clearly show a large gap in future teachers’ mathematical content knowledge between countries that typically top the league tables in student performance on international tests, like Taiwan and Singapore, and low performing countries.  Top performing countries also have rigorous quality assurance measures for recruiting and training new teachers.  The findings of the TEDS-M survey also suggest that the diversity in teacher recruitment and training procedures represents a policy continuum, which can provide countries working to improve teacher quality with examples of systems that are working hard to improve the mathematics knowledge and skills of their teaching force.  The TEDS-M survey considered other factors in teacher training programs as well, including future teachers’ beliefs about mathematics learning and self-reported past performance in mathematics.  We encourage you to read the full report here.

Education Equity

The issue of educational equity is one that is important to policymakers in all top-performing nations, but the situation in China is unique.  Shanghai has one of the best education systems in the world, but it is an anomaly in a country that is also characterized by a sprawling rural populace without many of the benefits of Shanghai’s system.  As recently as a few years ago in China, not all children had access to nine years of compulsory education, though that changed at the end of 2011.  China’s government has been working to redress this gap, and an article at China.org quotes Chinese Education Minister Yuan Guiren as saying that “[China has] made a lot of progress in improving fairness in education in recent years … My dream is to ensure that we can … provide education for all people without discrimination and cultivate every person in this nation to become a talent.”  A great deal of their policy and financial focus has been directed towards poor, minority, female and rural students over the past five years.

Despite Shanghai’s great strengths in education, policymakers and educators are concerned there, too, with a different equity issue.  Unlike in the rest of China, where female students may have less access to education than male students, in Shanghai, female students are outperforming male students fairly significantly.  In 2008, girls made up more than 60 percent of the top scorers on the gaokao, China’s university entrance examination, up from about 34 percent in 1999.  As a response to this dramatic shift in performance, The Japan Times reports that some Shanghai schools have created classes for boys only, hoping learning in a single-gender environment will help to boost male students’ confidence and improve their performance.

In China’s Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, there is concern over the equity of the education provided to students from ethnic minorities.  In that region, almost all schools are required to teach all of their classes in Cantonese; this requirement has been in place since 1997.  The New York Times reports that this policy has been detrimental to students who do not speak Cantonese fluently.  As a response, the government has opened “designated schools” in which classes are taught in English and the student body is 95 percent ethnic minority.  However, many feel that the students attending these schools are at a disadvantage due to their separation (both physically and linguistically) from mainstream society.

Education Funding

Following the release of the Review of Funding for Schooling (better known as the “Gonski Report”) in Australia last year, both the federal government and the states have been working to reach agreement on what school funding will look like going forward.  The report proposed a uniform system of funding schools across Australia, with a base funding amount augmented by a school-specific “loading” to address economic, cognitive and physical disadvantages among the student body.  However, the premier of the state of Victoria has rejected this plan, preferring instead to propose his own system.  The Age has the full story.  Other states, too, have rejected the Gonski proposals.  In Queensland, the Education Minister has announced that they will be developing their own funding plan, while Tasmania has emerged as the first state with a Labor government (the same party that is in power in the federal government) to reject the government’s plans.

Nearby in New Zealand, a recently released study from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research found that, according to a survey of the country’s principals, secondary schools are often struggling financially.  Principals reported budgetary deficits, with a majority stating that their finances were worse in 2012 than they were the previous year.  However, the Ministry of Education rejected the report’s findings, with a staffer contending, “schools are adequately funded to deliver the curriculum so that all students are able to learn and achieve.”  Read more at the Otago Times.

China, meanwhile, has been working to increase funding for schooling as part of their overarching strategy to improve the system and create both greater equity and improved student performance.  An article on Xinhuanet reports that China has been increasing education spending since 2009, with an investment totaling nearly US$5 billion over the past four years.  Four percent of GDP is about the same, proportionally, as what the OECD countries spend on average on education each year; top performing systems such as Australia, Finland and the Netherlands also spend about 4% of their GDP on education. 4-Traders reports that the government plans to increase education spending by 9.3% in 2013 and to focus on educating rural students.

Student Pressure

Most of the top-performing East Asian education systems are known for the the extensive hours students spend studying outside of class, often to prepare for university entrance exams.  The Japan Times reports that students in that country are attending cram schools, or juku, earlier than ever before.  Whereas in the past students began attending juku in their teenage years, now it is becoming increasingly common among elementary and even preschool students.  However, there does seem to be a degree of ambivalence on the part of parents: while many feel that they should not have to pay for private tutoring in addition to regular schooling, they often turn to juku in order to ensure that their children are not falling behind their peers.

In China, by contrast, aware that immense pressure on students is often not conducive to a student’s health, many provinces are making strides in changing the culture of “cram.”  Beijing, in particular, is leading the pack in developing policies focused on reducing student stress in an education system where tests are a central element of schooling.   The Global Times reports that after March 19, primary schools in that city will face limitations on testing and homework, and secondary schools will be prohibited from ranking students based on exam scores.  However, the article also reports that parents are not necessarily on board with these changes.  One parent pointed out that as long as the gaokao, China’s university entrance exam, dominates a student’s academic prospects, the system is unlikely to change. The Shanghai Daily has also recently covered the tension between the government efforts to relax education in the primary grades and parents’ concerns about their children’s futures, while Xinhuanet reports that China will be launching a national campaign to ease stress and move towards more comprehensive evaluations of student performance.

Teacher Quality

Both Australia and the Netherlands have produced new policy plans for improving the quality of their teaching forces in the past month.  In the Netherlands, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science released Working in Education 2012, a policy document that calls for turning schools into professional organizations where teachers would have access to attractive career paths.  The government’s recommendations for improving teacher quality, to be introduced by 2016, include developing a competency document for each teacher that describes their skills and the activities designed to maintain and improve them, implementing a peer review system for teachers, and introducing performance-related pay pilots.

In Australia, both the state and federal governments are concerned with the issue of teacher quality.  In New South Wales, the Education Minister has announced that there will be a new minimum entry standard for teacher education programs.  The Australian reports that teacher candidates would need scores of at least 80 percent in three subjects on the high school leaving exams, including in English.  Another component of the new quality measures is an introduction of a literacy and numeracy test that teacher candidates must pass while they are completing their degree.  The federal government has also announced plans to require literacy and numeracy tests and an assessment interview for students entering teaching programs.  The Education Minister of New South Wales has stated that his state’s plan does not conflict with the federal plan, but would hold teacher candidates to a higher standard than the federal plan.

Early Childhood Education

In Singapore and Shanghai, the government and parents are increasingly focused on early childhood education (ECE).  Singapore plans to spend more than US$2.4 billion on preschool education in the next five years, which doubles their current investment, writes Channel News Asia.  In Shanghai, parents are so eager to enroll their students in early childhood programs that some have begun signing their children up for these programs on the day they are born.  According to the Global Times, however, this demand for preschool has created a boom in the private ECE sector.  This has led to concerns about the quality of the teaching staff and the programs offered, and calls for improved government oversight.

In order to successfully evaluate teachers, education systems first must work with key stakeholders to define what it means to be a good teacher and then develop clear standards for the profession, according to a new background report released by the OECD in advance of the 2013 International Summit on the Teaching Profession.  The report, Teachers for the 21st Century: Using Evaluation to Improve Teaching, provides an analysis of how the countries studied evaluate their teachers by identifying the elements of teacher performance that are most frequently appraised, the tools used in teacher evaluation and the ways in which evaluation results inform teaching and learning.

During a webinar which provided an overview of the report’s findings, Andreas Schleicher, Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD’s Secretary-General, emphasized that teacher evaluation by itself will not significantly affect student learning, but should be considered as part of a larger set of strategies: teaching must be an attractive career choice, high quality teacher education programs must be available to future teachers, teachers should be granted professional autonomy once they enter the classroom, effective in-service professional development opportunities must be provided and teachers must be active participants in the development of any teacher evaluation system.

Why Evaluate Teachers?
According to the report, teacher evaluations are mainly conducted for two reasons  — to improve teaching and learning and to provide accountability.  Formative evaluations are used to provide teachers with meaningful feedback that can inform profession development.  Summative evaluations can be used as the basis of accountability systems focused on individual teachers and are usually linked to some type of consequence for teachers such as career decisions or salary changes.

While many countries use evaluations for both summative and formative purposes, the report authors point out that the approach used for each should be quite different.  For example, if the goal of the evaluation is to improve teaching practices, then self-evaluations makes sense because teachers are more likely to admit their faults with the expectation that providing this information will lead to effective decisions about their developmental needs and future training opportunities.  However when the purpose is accountability and teachers face potential consequences concerning their career or salaries, self-evaluations do not work.  Summative evaluations need to have a strong external component, such as an accredited external evaluator, and a more formal process to ensure fairness. And, formative evaluations need to be more context-based, taking into account the unique circumstances surrounding the teacher’s history and the school’s setting.

What Elements Are Evaluated?  
During the webinar, Schleicher commented that education systems cannot improve what they cannot define.  Therefore, he said, standards that define what teachers need to know and be able to do are essential to developing effective evaluations systems.  The report emphasizes the importance of involving teachers in developing standards for the profession.  The process used to develop national teacher standards in Australia included a consultation phase that involved all key education stakeholders including teachers, teacher associations, teacher educators, employers, unions and regulatory authorities.  Similarly, in New Zealand, the professional body for teachers led the process of defining standards for the profession with the extensive involvement of teachers, employers and teacher unions.

The report found that the elements of teacher performance that are most frequently evaluated are related to planning and preparation, instruction, the classroom environment and professional responsibilities. Teacher evaluations could also take into account working in teams and managing and sharing leadership responsibilities.  In New Zealand, for example, teaching standards call for appraising professional relationships and values and responsiveness to diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Evaluation Methods
The report found that the most common methods used to evaluate teachers include classroom observations, teacher portfolios, self-evaluations and performance goals set by the individual teacher in agreement with school management.  Almost all countries use classroom observations to some degree.  As the figure below shows, an average of over 70 percent of high school teachers reported that classroom observations were considered to be of “high or moderate importance” in the teacher evaluations or the feedback they received.  However in using classroom observations as part of teacher evaluation, some experts advise avoiding announced classroom observations, because they do not provide an authentic experience of a teacher’s day-to-day practice.

In some countries, teachers must take tests to assess their general knowledge, but only two of the countries studied in the report, Mexico and Chile, use teacher tests to determine career advancement or dismissal.  A few countries also use surveys of students and parents as one element of gauging teacher competence.

Speaking to a point that is very controversial, the report makes it quite clear that it is challenging to identify the specific contribution that a given teacher makes to a student’s performance.  Student learning is largely influenced by student’s innate abilities, motivations and behaviors and the support students receive from their family, peer group and school.  And students are influenced not only by their current teacher, but also by their former teachers.  The report explains that while value-added models can control for a student’s previous results and have the potential to identify an individual teacher’s contribution to student performance, there is wide consensus in literature that these models should be used only in addition to other evaluation measures.  The report also contends that using student results as an evaluation instrument is likely to be more relevant for whole-school evaluations than for individual teacher evaluations.

Delaware is featured in the report for their work on incorporating student outcomes into teacher evaluations.  The state’s system calls for teachers to use three measures of student progress including performance on state tests, test results on an instrument other than the test used for state accountability and goals for student progress developed by the teacher.  During the 2011-2012 school year, Delaware engaged hundreds of teachers in developing a wide-ranging library of resources that supports implementation of the new policy.

While there is no consensus on the right types of evaluation methods to use to evaluate teachers, the report makes it clear that using several methods is essential to drawing a comprehensive picture of teachers’ abilities.  The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is one of the most sophisticated analyses to-date on how evaluation methods can be used to identify the skills that make teachers effective.  The findings stress that assigning equal weights to multiple measures creates a more accurate assessment of teacher effectiveness than other models in which one measure is given a greater weight over others.

Who Conducts Teacher Evaluations?
While this varies across countries, the most common bodies that conduct teacher evaluations include inspectorates, professional teacher organizations, unions, school leaders and peer teachers.  The report recognizes the importance of using multiple evaluators to assess teacher performance to provide different perspectives.  For example, while external, highly trained evaluators assess teacher performance as accurately as school heads or principals, school leaders have the benefit of being more aware of variables in the particular school context that may affect a teacher’s performance.  On the other hand, some researchers have found that while principals may be able to successfully identify the high- and low-performers, they are unable to distinguish between teachers in the middle of the performance distribution.  Regardless of who is conducting the evaluation, the report notes that, “the effectiveness of appraisals crucially depends on whether evaluators have the knowledge and skills to evaluate teachers reliably in relation to established criteria,” so it is very important that all evaluators receive proper training.

How Are Evaluation Results Used?  
The results from teacher evaluation systems are used in a variety of ways including informing teacher practice; designing professional development opportunities that address teacher shortcomings; establishing rewards and consequences based on evaluation results; and developing lines of communication so the information gathered can inform education policy.

Results from a 2008 teacher survey found that over 40 percent of teachers reported that they did not receive suggestions for improving their practice after an evaluation and 44 percent agreed that teacher evaluations were conducted merely to fulfill an administrative requirement.  During the webinar, Schleicher said that it is very important for teachers to see teacher evaluations as a basis for professional support and career development.

The report also found that of the countries studied, very few use teacher evaluations to reward high-performing teachers with salary increases.  In the chart above, of the countries surveyed only Chile, Korea and Mexico have these types of policies in place.  When countries do use teacher evaluation results to reward teachers, few provide teachers with career advancement opportunities.  Because the organizational structure of schools in many OECD countries is typically flat, with few opportunities for teachers to be promoted or to gain increased responsibilities, the report recommends that education systems should look to high-performers such as Singapore for guidance in using teacher evaluation for career advancement.  This city-state has established a robust appraisal system that is linked to defined career ladders.  Singapore has created career structures at all school levels providing a teacher with the opportunity to advance to master teacher status or move into administration or research and policy.  And as Singaporean teachers move up the career ladder, they are rewarded with higher compensation levels.

The report, Teachers for the 21st Century, is largely based on two prior OECD reports: the Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes, a 2009 study that involved 24 countries and looked at the various components of evaluation and assessment strategies that countries use, and the latest edition of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), published in 2008. To access the new report visit:
http://www.oecd.org/site/eduistp13/TS2013%20Background%20Report.pdf.

In their September 2012 Global Employment Outlook, the International Labour Organization (ILO) drew particular attention to the plight of the young worker worldwide.  They project that the global youth unemployment rate (youth being defined as between the ages of 15 and 24) will climb from 12.7 percent in 2012 to 12.9 percent by 2017.  This is in contrast to the overall unemployment rate, which is expected to remain steady worldwide at 6 percent between 2012 and 2017.  The projected rates of youth unemployment vary, of course, by region.  In East Asia, the youth unemployment rate is projected to increase to 10.4 percent by 2017, up from 9.5 percent, while in the developed economies and the European Union, the rate is actually projected to decline from 17.5 percent in 2012 to 15.6 percent in 2017.  However, the latter figure is not actually cause for celebration – the report notes this is “principally because discouraged young people are withdrawing from the labor market and not because of stronger hiring activity among youngsters.”

We turn to additional ILO data to see what the picture looks like in some of the countries with top-performing education systems, to see if the strength of the primary and secondary systems mitigates to some degree the proportion of young people who are struggling to find work (Figure 1).  The results are somewhat surprising.  Finland, widely acknowledged as having one of the best primary and secondary education systems in the world, also has the highest unemployment rate for people aged 15 to 19 years, and one of the highest unemployment rates for people aged 20 to 24 according to the ILO data.  Singapore and the Netherlands, which have strongly integrated vocational and technical pathways available to students before the age of 18, on the other hand (and unsurprisingly), have quite low youth unemployment rates.

Figure 1

But before jumping to conclusions, it is important to dig deeper into how countries define youth unemployment, because this in and of itself can impact how well a country appears to be doing in terms of moving young people into the workforce.  For the chart above, the ILO definition of “unemployed” included people who were not in paid employment, were available for employment, and were seeking employment.  The ILO points out that these measures are difficult to compare across countries because education systems vary widely, and in some countries a young person may be considered “employed,” for example, if they are engaging in a vocational training program part-time.  In another country, the labor force may be considered as including only the youth who have dropped out of secondary school or who have earned a secondary degree.  This may result in inflated rates of “unemployment” in some countries, for example, Nordic countries, that have more modular vocational and post-secondary education programs and other strong supports for young people, resulting in young people pursuing a combination of part-time training, employment, or other activities such as international travel before settling into a career.

Fortunately, there is another international measure that allows us to compare the proportion of young people who are struggling to enter the workforce or the education sector.  That is the percent of youth not in employment, education or training, often abbreviated as NEET.  The OECD provides data on the percent of NEET youth in most of its member countries; below, we have again shown the data for the top performers (Figure 2).  The chart provides information for three different categories of young people: youth who are unemployed (that is, looking for work), and not in education or training; youth who are inactive (that is, not looking for work), and not in education or training; and the NEET rate, which includes youth who are either unemployed or inactive, and not in education or training.  The NEET rate is represented by the total length of the bar on the chart, as it is a combination of the two other measures.

Figure 2

The Netherlands, which has one of the lowest rates of youth unemployment by ILO measures, also has a very low NEET rate.  Notably, just 1.5 percent of youth in the Netherlands who are not in education or training and are actively seeking work are unable to find jobs.  This is just over 25 percent of the overall OECD rate of 5.8 percent, and significantly smaller than the EU27 (European Union) rate of 6.6 percent.  Denmark and Finland, two Nordic countries which, by overall youth unemployment measures, do not look particularly good, also have very low NEET rates.  These low rates are likely due to the fact that these countries, and particularly the Netherlands and Denmark, have very strong school-to-work pipelines, with multiple pathways for all types of students.  Students in these countries have access to various workplace learning experiences and apprenticeships, as well as a close relationship between industry and these training programs.  On the other end of the spectrum, the United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom all have high NEET rates in addition to their high youth unemployment rates, suggesting that job training programs or pathways into the workforce in these countries are lacking.

One concern, however, is the possibility of a growing connection between youth unemployment rates and youth NEET rates.  The ILO points out in their Global Employment Outlook that as new economic sectors grow and old sectors decline, people who were either employed in or being trained for jobs in the old sectors will face the loss of these jobs with a sense of discouragement, meaning that NEET rates will rise following the rise in unemployment rates.  This is why it is so important to have education connected to current workplace skill requirements, and particularly, to ensure that vocational and technical education programs are linked closely to industry, so that youth are being prepared for the jobs of the future.

Earlier this month, the Center for International Education Benchmarking introduced a new feature on its web site.  The Study Guide is intended to provide readers with a weekly summary of headlines from the top-performing education systems in the world.  This month’s International Reads highlights some of the most important current issues in the news.

Teachers.  In Japan, changes to teachers’ retirement packages have caused many teachers to think about retiring early before the changes go into effect.  Japan education officials are struggling to figure out a work-around to ensure that students are not left without a teacher for the remainder of the school year, according to The Mainichi.  A Valentine’s Day strike was held by educators in Victoria, Australia in protest of the pay package offered by the state—a modest 2.5 percent a year plus performance-based pay.  The Australian Education Union is demanding a 12 percent raise over three years with no performance-based pay.  But on the issue of improving the quality of the pool entering teaching, the teacher’s union and the government are on the same side—recently, Education Union federal president Angelo Gavrielatos issued a statement supporting the government’s initiative to raise the quality of students entering the teaching profession.  In Ontario, newly elected Education Minister Liz Sandals is facing teacher dissatisfaction.  Last fall, legislation was passed banning teacher strikes in the province.  In January, the new law was used to impose a contract on public secondary school teachers.  In response, teacher unions have asked their members to refrain from supervising extracurricular activities, which they see as outside their regular duties.  Sandals said her first order of business is to ensure that new teacher contracts are the result of negotiation, not legislation.

Early Childhood Education.  In Japan, government officials are considering offering free pre-school to children ages 3-5, in an effort to ease the financial burden on families, according to Inside Japan.  This proposal comes at the same time that President Obama called for free pre-school for all 4-year-olds at or below 200 percent of the poverty line in the United States during his State of the Union address.  Parents in Hong Kong are focused on another concern — that kindergartens are emphasizing grades and tests too much.  In response, they are leading a movement to shift to kindergartens that emphasize learning through play, according to the South China Morning Post.  And in New Zealand, the Pasifika Education Plan 2013-17 aims to lift Pasifika participation in early childhood education from its current rate of 86.8 percent to 98 percent by 2016, according to Radio New Zealand International.

Post-secondary Education.  A February 3rd editorial in the Japan Times calls for major changes in the country’s university entrance exam system, arguing that the current assessments measure knowledge acquired rather than deeper comprehension, aptitude and potential.  Meanwhile, researchers at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIE) say educational inequality is getting worse, despite the increased number of publicly funded university places.  A recent HKIE study found that students from wealthy families are nearly four times more likely to enroll in a university than those living in poverty.  That’s a much wider gap than 20 years ago.  The Netherlands is looking to the liberal arts model to solve some of their higher education challenges related to a lack of differentiation and excellence.  Inside Higher Ed reports liberal art schools (known there as university colleges), “have had an outsized impact on Dutch higher education policies and practices, inspiring the growing movement toward selective admissions and the development of ‘excellence’ programs within a famously egalitarian higher education system.”

Choice and Charters.  The Education Amendment Bill, introduced last year in New Zealand, would create legal recognition of charter schools there.  However, the Treasury has found evidence that school systems using strongly competitive elements do not produce systematically better student outcomes and other critics are arguing that charter schools will take public money but be free from government scrutiny.  While charter schools are not prevalent in Canada, school competition does exist in the form of four separate publicly funded systems catering to the English and French non-religious and Catholic constituencies of Ontario.  With birth rates in that province on the decline, schools are struggling to keep enrollment levels high. But the schools don’t just compete for students in name only: recently, schools have taken to touting their extracurricular programs in advertisements in local media and attending other schools’ open houses in order to gain an edge.  For more on this story, see the article in The Globe and Mail.

International Benchmarking.  And finally, Shanghai is looking forward to the December publication of the 2012 PISA results to show the world that, once again, they are on top of the international education league tables.  According to Shanghai education officials interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald, “tests recently conducted for the next PISA report…will show Shanghai students have further improved their results and consolidated their lead in the world.”  In the same article, Deputy Director of the OECD Education Division Andreas Schleicher says, “Maybe it’s time to change some of our stereotypes.  What you see today in the school system in Shanghai is what you are going to see in the labour market tomorrow.”  Learn more about the results from the most recent TIMMS and PIRLS international assessments by clicking here.

Check back to our web site on a weekly basis for more education news from the top-performing education systems in the world.