In order to successfully help young people prepare for employment, education providers and employers must open up the lines of communication and become more engaged in each other’s worlds.  In the most innovative and effective school-to-work systems around the globe, it is common for employers to help design post-secondary training curricula or to offer their employees as faculty to training programs.  At the same time, education providers should actively encourage students to spend half their time on a job site and help them secure interview opportunities.

These findings from a McKinsey & Company report published in December are not all that surprising.  In fact, many of the education systems scoring at the top of the international league tables have already reached these conclusions and implemented similar strategies.  After returning from Singapore last year, Marc Tucker recapped what he had observed, writing, “In Singapore, young people not headed to University go either into the upper secondary vocational education system or into one of the polytechnics.  In the upper secondary vocational system, there is no sandwich program alternating time in the workplace with time in school.  [Their experience] is all in school, but the Singaporeans have persuaded the companies to give them the state-of-the-art machines they need in the classrooms (working engines for current model cars, for example, with cutaway engines for the auto mechanics program) and have also persuaded the firms that it is in their interest to regularly cycle the school instructors through their firms to keep their skills up to date.”  This city-state also boasts one of the lowest rates of youth unemployment in the industrialized world.

According to McKinsey, the second common success factor occurs when employers and education providers work with their students early and intensely so the education-to-employment journey is treated as one continuum in which employers commit to hire young people before they are even enrolled in a program and are invested in building their skills.  What the report, Education to Employment: Designing a System that Works, brings to the table is powerful examples of where this is working around the world.  One model of a cohesive school-to-work continuum can be found in China’s Vocational Training Holdings (CVTH), the largest training institute for China’s automotive industry.  This vocational education program establishes and maintains relationships with about 1,800 employers, which provide internship opportunities and “promises to hire”.  The CVTH provides their students with access to a large database that houses information on each of the employers such as company size, how many workers they need, and the type of worker required.  Prior to graduation from CVTH, students take a survey on their ideal job placement situation and are matched to an employer based on their preferences.  The Institute then provides post-graduation support to students for a year if they are not happy with their initial placement.  Within three months of graduation, 80 percent of CVTH graduates are employed and of the students that are not, many of them have exited the job market to pursue higher education degrees.

The report authors surveyed young people, education providers and employers in nine countries including Brazil, Germany, India, Mexico, Morocco, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and the United States.  They found that the road from postsecondary education to employment looks vastly different from one perspective to the next.  While 72 percent of education providers in the survey believe new graduates are ready to take on entry-level positions, fewer than half of young people and employers agreed.  The United States demonstrated one of the widest opinion gaps on this issue with 87 percent of education providers stating that graduates and new hires are adequately prepared for entry-level work and only 49 percent of employers thinking this is the case.

This disconnect is partly explained by the lack of communication between employers, educators and youth.  A third of employers in the surveyed countries said they never communicate with education providers and of those that do, fewer than half say it has proven effective.  Meanwhile, more than a third of educators report that they are unable to estimate the job-placement rates of their graduates.  When surveyed, educators were asked to identify their priorities.  Helping students find jobs after graduation fell to the middle of the list for both private and public education providers.

Young people are also failing to connect the dots with less than half considering the job openings and wage levels of the professions most commonly associated with their selected major.  And while nearly 60 percent of youth view on-the-job training and hands-on learning as the most effective instructional technique, only 24 percent of academic-program graduates and 37 percent of vocational graduates said that they were enrolled in programs that regularly provided these types of experiences.

Another interesting finding is the general low perception of vocational schools.  While the majority of young people believe vocational training is more helpful than an academic track in finding a job, less than half of those surveyed actually enrolled in these types of programs.  Of the nine countries studied, Germany is the only place where students think academic schools and vocational schools are held in equal esteem. Germany and a number of other Northern European and Asian countries, provide young people with high quality post-secondary education and training experiences linked closely to labor market needs.  This experience provides young people with a route to good jobs so it is not surprising that perceptions about vocation training differ when quality systems are in place, students are participating in them, and they are functioning well.

Education to Employment suggests that stakeholders implement three interventions to improve the school-to-work transition.  The first intervention is to collect and disseminate more data to students and parents on career options and training pathways.  Education institutions should offer more information about their job placement rates and their graduates’ career trajectories.  In Singapore, the Ministry of Education requires education providers to take an annual survey of their graduates about six months after graduation to collect data on employment status and salary.

Secondly, the report calls for multiple providers and employers to work together within a particular industry.  As an example, the report references Apprenticeship 2000, an industry-led coalition founded in Charlotte, North Carolina by two German companies, Blum (a hardware fabricator) and Daetwyler (a printing equipment manufacturer).  Blum and Daetwyler wanted to establish a strong pipeline of employees that would have the guaranteed specialized skills they needed.  So using the German apprenticeship model, they worked with a local community college to set-up the program and made it available to qualified high school students and experienced workers.  The employer coalition has grown to include eight members that commit to covering the cost of training and wages of its apprenticeships over a 3.5-year period.  Students who complete the program earn an associates degree in manufacturing technology, bring in $9 an hour while studying and are guaranteed employment upon successful completion of the program.  Member companies agree to a common curriculum, recruit as a group and are forbidden from poaching employees.

The last recommendation is to create “system integrators”, an individual or a group responsible for the high-level view of the fragmented education-to-employment system.  These “system integrators” would be charged with working with education providers and employers to develop skill solutions, gather data and identify and share positive examples.  In Australia, the Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency (formerly known as Skills Australia) serves as the “system integrator” and is responsible for driving greater collaboration between industry providers and the government on workforce development issues.  The agency is responsible for critical functions such as administering the new National Workforce Development Fund to deliver training for high-priority industries and occupations and to conduct skills and workforce research on the quality of jobs and future working life in Australia.

The full report and a number of additional case studies can be found here:
http://www.mckinsey.com/client_service/public_sector/mckinsey_center_for_government/education_to_employment

The European Commission looks across member countries education and training systems and sets new targets for 2020

In a recent publication from November 2012, the European Commission identified new strategic priorities in meeting the education and training goals that have been set for European Union member countries.  This is part of the broader, ongoing Europe 2020 initiative undertaken by the European Commission in which member countries have agreed on growth and improvement targets in the areas of employment, research and development, climate change and energy sustainability, education, and fighting poverty and social exclusion to achieve in the next decade.

The education and training goals provide a glimpse into the arenas that the EU will focus its funding and technical assistance support on in the coming decade.  These include:

• developing and strengthening quality vocational education and training systems that link to the workplace;
• improving the education and training outcomes of students in at-risk groups;
• improving the teaching and learning of 21st century skills;
• helping low-skilled adults acquire usable skills;
• increasing the use of technology in teaching and assessment; and
• improving the teaching profession.

The European Commission also identified priority roles for the EU to take to help their member countries meet these goals.  These include monitoring progress towards these goals in the member countries; creating an apprenticeship alliance across the EU; and creating a European Area for Skills and Qualifications.

Along with setting new goals for 2020, the European Commission also released a country-level analysis that provides a baseline of 27 member countries against the new 2020 goals.  The report also provides descriptions of major policy initiatives and reforms that they plan to implement as they work toward these goals.  You can learn more about the initiative here.

Mining is by far Australia’s biggest industry. But that does not mean that it is Australia’s biggest employer. I learned that once a mine is established, most of the mining is automated. The mining itself is almost completely automated. Automated, driverless trucks deliver the ore produced by the mine to automated trains that deliver it to automated machines that take it from the trains and dump it into largely automated ships which deliver it to Australia’s dominant customer, China.

It might take 3,000 people to build one of these mines and the associated infrastructure, but only 300 to actually operate it. So it makes no sense to build big new towns for the workers who build the mines, because they won’t be there long. So the mining companies fly them in at the beginning of the week and fly them home at the end of the week, maybe hundreds of miles in each direction, for as long as it takes to construct the new mine and related infrastructure, at enormous cost.

In Singapore, I ran into a senior official from Germany who happened to know a lot about vocational education and training in China and about how the Germans are doing business in China. I asked him how companies like Daimler, the makers of Mercedes Benz motorcars, were able to get Chinese workers who were as skilled as the famed German mechanics. Oh, he said, Daimler’s operations are now almost completely automated. The numbers of highly trained mechanics they need is now so small that they can bring in a small crew of trainers from Germany and train all the workers they need themselves.

Besides, he said, Daimler is not making cars in China for export, but only for the China market. The price of making such things in China has been steadily rising, relative to the price of making them in Europe, so it no longer makes sense for Daimler to make cars in China for export.

In 1990, my organization, the National Center on Education and the Economy, issued a report, the introduction to which pointed out that industrial workers in South Korea were working for one tenth of what similarly skilled American workers were making, and those in mainland China were making one one-hundredth of what American workers made. But that is not true anymore. The average wages of American autoworkers have been falling steadily since then and those of similarly skilled Chinese workers have been rising. Wage levels for industrial workers in Shanghai are now around one quarter of those in the United States. And wages are swiftly rising in the interior of China, too.

This is to be expected in a world in which workers on one side of the world are competing directly with workers on the other side of the world, as never before. In such global markets for labor, one can expect that the prices for labor will slowly come into equilibrium, with prices coming down in the high priced countries and rising in the low price countries, for similarly skilled labor. Eventually, one could expect that these prices would be about the same from one country to another for the same skills.

For China, that will mean that their decisive price advantage in world markets will wither and die. The Chinese know that, and know that, increasingly, their growth will have to be internal, the result of their own people getting richer and demanding more goods and services from their own suppliers.

As the difference between the “China price” and the prices charged by other countries for similar goods and services becomes smaller and smaller, the United States will find that it no longer has access to the kinds of very cheap goods that has made Walmart such a success in our country and around the world. So the prices of many things that Americans have now become accustomed to purchasing very cheaply will rise, in some cases steeply. That will mean that a dollar earned by low-skill, low-wage workers in the United States will buy even less than it does now. It is also the case that the return of manufacturing to our shores will continue to pick up, partly because the difference between the cost of their labor and the cost of our labor is narrowing, but also because it is better to have suppliers who are closer than farther away, it is easier to protect intellectual property rights, and, most especially, because labor costs make up less and less of the cost of the product to the customer, because of advancing automation. So the return of manufacturing will be a blessing, but a blessing for fewer and fewer workers.

As the most advanced global companies come out of the Great Recession, many of the jobs they shed will not come back. Many have used their massive cash supplies to purchase the very latest in automated equipment to become more efficient, to automate many jobs that people did before the Great Recession, jobs that will never return. More and more of advanced industrial economy will look like the Australian mining industry. The industries will be healthy, but will employ far fewer people than before. Productivity will be high, but employment will be low. The owners of many firms in those industries will prosper. But the citizens of the countries they conduct operations in will suffer. Income disparities will grow more quickly than at present and the middle of that income distribution will get narrower and narrower as these processes accelerate.

There will be employers in each of those countries who will tell government that the way to be competitive is to keep the price of labor low, to waive environmental regulations because regulations make their products uncompetitive, to cut back on health care and retirement benefits for the same reason. They will argue, in effect, that the only route to competitiveness for those countries is to pollute the environment, endanger public health and lower ordinary workers’ standard of living.

But there is another possibility. You can see it in Singapore. With a combination of determination, persistence and smart policy, the Singaporeans have been investing wisely in their future for half a century. When other countries in the East saw their future in offering cheap labor to global companies, Singapore was trying to figure out how to raise the cost of their labor—and therefore the standard of living of their people—by providing higher educated and better-trained labor. They made life difficult for their low-value added producers and made it very attractive for their high value-added producers. They made very close partners with the world’s leading high tech companies, figured out just what kind of skills they needed most and made sure that they could get those skills in Singapore. They paid very close attention to every segment of their workforce. They built a very high floor under the entire workforce by providing a world-class academic curriculum to all their students and creating a world-class teaching force to teach that curriculum. They built a system of polytechnics as good as any in the world to provide very highly skilled senior technical workers for a wide range of industries. Perhaps most impressive, they created a set of post-secondary vocational schools for the bottom quarter of their students as fine as any I have seen anywhere in the world, with facilities that rival those of many American universities. They turned vocational education and training from a dumping ground into a sought-after alternative that attracts more and more students every year.

And little wonder. Ninety percent of the graduates of their vocational schools have job offers in their chosen fields within six months of graduation. Singapore has one of the lowest rates of youth unemployment in the industrialized world. When I was there, I heard the head of Rolls-Royce Asia (which makes jet engines, not motor cars) explain that they decided to make Singapore their Asia manufacturing headquarters in no small measure because of the high quality of Singapore’s work force.

The distribution of income in the United States and many other advanced industrial countries is getting to look more like an hour glass every day, hollowing out the middle class and endangering their political stability as a result. That is not happening in Singapore, and that is true because Singapore had a strategy for improving the lives of their people, a strategy that married economic policy to education policy in very explicit ways. Singapore has created both a basic education system and a vocational education and training system that can sustain an economy that is shaped not like an hour glass but rather like a flattened diamond, with a big fat middle. Singapore’s population is about five million, right in the range of many American states and some European countries.

Here in the United States, educators and training organizations look to our Bureau of Labor Statistics to produce data about employers’ projected demand for labor as the basis for their own planning. They try, in other words, to produce the profile of skills and knowledge in the workforce that the economy will need. The Singaporeans have not done that. They have imagined the kind of economy they want, the kind of economy that will provide a good income and a decent life and rising standard of living for their population. And they have then worked very hard;mdash;and successfully—to produce a workforce with the skills needed to realize that dream.

In a world in which global employers can get the labor they need anywhere in the world and will seek to get that labor at the lowest possible price, it no longer makes sense for a country to base its education and training policies on projections of companies’ domestic human resources needs. The question should be not what domestic companies want to be more competitive (lower wages, fewer regulations, less restrictive labor practices, less concern about pollution), but what will attract global companies to produce services and goods in your country and pay high wages to the people who do that. Singapore bet that supply would create demand, as long as other government policies were carefully crafted to support its larger aims. Nations need not be helpless in the face of the changing dynamics of the global economy.

Automation is steadily taking over more and more of the routine work done in high wage economies. This is a good thing. What that leaves is interesting, challenging, creative work. Will it do that only for a few people, leaving increasing numbers unemployed or underemployed and desperate, or will these changes lead to full employment economies in which more and more people do interesting, challenging and creative work? The answer to that question does not depend on companies’ projections of what they will need. It depends on public policy, on what the people of a country decide they want for themselves, and it depends on whether a country invests in developing the skills, knowledge and capacity of their people in such a way as to make their country an attractive place to do business for the kinds of global companies that will offer interesting, creative and challenging work to enough people in enough occupations to provide full employment at high wages.

No country will be able to offer that kind of broadly shared prosperity if it is offering first class education and training only to its elites. Singapore realized that it could only get to broadly shared prosperity if it built a first class system of education and training for everyone. They put as much effort—perhaps more—into building their vocational education system as they did into their university system. They built an education and training system that would offer global employers not just highly educated and trained professionals and senior managers but highly trained and educated workers at every level, for all the work that needs to be done, in both manufacturing and services.

When I was in Australia, I was discouraged to hear some of my friends dismissing Singapore’s achievements on the grounds that Singapore is not a “liberal democracy,” just as I have heard some of my friends in the United States dismiss Singapore because its government does not tolerate either drug users or those who throw chewing gum on their sidewalks.

This, in my view, is a kind of cultural arrogance we can ill afford. Singapore is only half a century old. I have met many officials there with degrees from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge whose parents were illiterate and poor. These officials are sophisticated, worldly in their ambitions for themselves and their children. As the conference I was at in Singapore got underway, it featured a band of polytechnic students that included a young man with scarlet hair and others who found other ways of declaring their independence from the cultural commitments of their parents. These young people did not grow up with the sense of existential threat to the very existence of their country that made their parents quite willing to trade restrictions on their political freedoms for the chance to build a decent life for themselves and their children. There is every reason to believe that these young people will find a way to make the transition to liberal democracy just as their parents found a way to build a brilliantly successful economy. Our best hope for China is that the country continues to look to Singapore for inspiration. Many others could learn a thing or two from Singapore if they want a country with broadly shared prosperity, a strong middle class and the kind of freedoms that only a broad and prosperous middle class can guarantee.

Marc Tucker interviews Ray Marshall on the links between immigration policy and education policy.  Marshall is Professor Emeritus and Audre and Bernard Rapoport Centennial Chair in Economics and Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor.  Marshall, a labor economist, is an expert on international education and immigration issues.  Recent publications include 2009’s Immigration for Shared Prosperity: A Framework for Comprehensive Reform and 2011’s Value Added Immigration: Lessons for the United States from Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.  Marshall is Co-Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

Tucker: Why should education policymakers be interested in immigration policy?


Marshall: Education policymakers should pay attention to immigration policy for a number of reasons.  In almost all advanced economies, immigrants will be an increasingly important part of the population and the workforce.  This means that all of these countries will have many students who are also immigrants, depending on the extent to which they rely on immigration to add to their populations and their workforces.  So if schools want to educate all children to a high standard, they will have to pay particular attention to the characteristics of immigrant students.

Countries’ experiences with immigrant students have been very different.  For example, if you have a good immigration selection system as the Canadians do, then you will have immigrants who are strong students.  The Canadians, in fact, claim to have the highest-achieving second-generation immigrant students in the Western world.  Part of that is due to the way they select immigrants, and part of it is due to the vast improvements they have made to their education system since the 1970s.  They understand, when selecting immigrants, that they are choosing future Canadians.

Other countries have immigration policies that are producing large numbers of very hard-to-educate students which has important consequences for the cost of education and for the quality of the national workforce and for those countries’ competitiveness, especially when immigrants will constitute the main source of growth in the national workforce, as will in fact be the case in many industrialized countries.

Tucker: In writing your new book, why did you choose to study the immigration systems in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom?

Marshall: For some time, Canada and Australia have been widely viewed by experts in this arena as setting the benchmark for national immigration policies.  The UK has been catching up rapidly, by building on their experience, and may be ahead of them in some areas.

All three countries had long had policies heavily favoring immigrants who had family connections.  However, the intensive globalization of the economy in the 1980s changed that in Canada and Australia.  When the closed economies of the former Soviet Bloc countries, as well as China and India joined the global economy, they doubled the workforce involved in the global trading system—now about 3 billion workers—almost overnight.  These new workers were suddenly in both direct and indirect competition with workers around the world, including Australia and Canada.  That had a profound significance, because the countries entering the global trading system had very large numbers of well-educated, highly motivated people who could either migrate to the developed countries, or be employed where they were by global firms.  Almost overnight, what had been the globalization of product markets suddenly became the globalization of labor markets.  People with high skills were willing to work for below-market wages.  They were eager to have the standards of living available in industrialized countries, and were willing to work very hard to do that.

When that happened, both Canada and Australia took action.  In a competitive market, wages will tend to converge.  The question was in which direction would the convergence go?  The Australians saw that the most likely outcome would be that their wages would move in the direction of the wages in the low-wage countries.
But the Australians thought there was another possibility, one in which everyone’s positions could improve, but in which wages in the developing countries would improve faster than those in the developed countries.  I call this a “value added competitive strategy,” which was an alternative to a direct cost competitive strategy.  In this model, countries like Australia would not compete on the price of labor, a game they could only lose, but on the quality of their products and services, the productivity of their workforce and their capacity for innovation.  This would earn them a premium in the market, because they were producing things that could not be produced everywhere.  To do that, they needed a world-class education system, but also a value added immigration system in which they would import highly skilled workers to fill jobs that domestic workers could not fill.  That became Australia’s basic strategy.

To do this, they dramatically reduced the proportion of visas allocated for family reunification, and greatly increased the proportion allocated for highly skilled workers and entrepreneurs who had skills not readily available in the Australian marketplace.  They also had to coordinate education policy, workforce development policy, economic policy and immigration policy.  This is important because otherwise what is being done in one area can diminish what is being done in the other areas.

Tucker: What Australia did was very different from what countries like Germany did when they brought in low-skilled guest workers to fill economic gaps.

Marshall: Yes.  The immigration world learned some big lessons from the Bracero program in the United States, which brought in low-skilled Mexican workers for agricultural work, and the German guest worker program.  Low-skill guest workers are never temporary.  It is extremely hard to prevent guest workers from becoming illegal immigrants, especially if there is a vast different in the living conditions in your country and their home country.  Legal low-skill temporary workers quickly become illegal permanent workers because they do not want to go back to the poor conditions in their home country.  Many employers preferred these workers for their hard-to-fill jobs that pay low wages. They make very good workers because they work hard and are scared.

When you have unauthorized workers unable to protect themselves against their employers, or even authorized workers willing to work for low wages, they undercut the wages for all workers in the country.

Tucker:  In Value Added Immigration, you write that the initial response to globalization in Canada and Australia was to establish a minimum level of education required for all immigrants.  Why did they choose this strategy, and why did it fail?

Marshall: They chose this strategy because the economists argued that, with a high level of education, immigrants could adjust to any type of economic environment.  But first Australia and then Canada discovered this was not true.

In the late 1990s, the Australian government made dramatic changes in the system. There was a fairly large burden on their welfare system because they had selected immigrants who were unable to support themselves due to the mismatch between their skills and the skills and characteristics that employers were looking for in the workforce.

Both countries had strong data and research – much better than what is available in many other countries, and were able to use this information to discover which types of immigrants were most likely to succeed in the long run.  They knew they were not importing workers; they were importing future citizens.  What they found after doing a great deal of study was that the most successful immigrants were people who had skills that were in high demand in the economy, and people who had a high command of the language.  There was a direct and strong correlation between the degree of language competence, as measured by an international language test, and how well people did in the economy.  Command of language was most important for highly skilled professionals.

Those who came in with highly skilled family members were much more likely to succeed than those with low-skilled family members.  Age, too, made a lot of difference; it was possible to be either too young or too old to succeed in the economy.

A points system was developed in Canada in the 1960s in which immigrants earned points for various characteristics to allow them entry.  This system was adopted by Australia in 1989, and has since been adopted by several other countries.  The points system is a way to quantitatively calibrate the characteristics that help immigrants be successful in the economy.  That was a valuable selection device for a number of reasons.  First, prospective immigrants could go online and determine whether they were qualified to enter the country.  This decreased the number of applications.

It is also a very flexible system, because if you have too many people immigrating to your country, you simply raise the total score necessary to make a successful application.

It is flexible because it is research-based.  Just this past year, for example, Australia eliminated all points awarded for a master’s degree, because their research showed them that immigrants with a master’s degree turn out to be no better off, economically, than immigrants with only a bachelor’s degree.  So they decided not to award points for that.

The research showed that, if a prospective immigrant had a firm job offer, their chances of success were much greater, so Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom decided to award them a large number of points for that.  But the offer had to be for a job that was first offered to residents of the country, or it had to be on the shortage list.  In the British system, an immigrant needs to have 10 points for command of language, and 10 points for demonstrating that they can support themselves.  You need 70 points overall to be admitted.  If you have a job offer from the shortage list, you automatically get 50 points.

In all countries, however, just being qualified will not get you in.  The test they have all learned to apply is what in Britain they call the “sensibility test.”  That is, they ask whether immigration is the best way to fill that particular vacancy.  They look at employers, and if they are not making a good-faith effort to recruit and retrain domestic workers, they cannot import the immigrant.  That prevents immigration from substituting for the domestic workforce.

Australia now has over 20 years of longitudinal data on the characteristics that help people succeed.  This data shows that, over 10 years, most of the immigrants they have become positive contributors to the economy.  The only ones that fail to do so are the uneducated family members of immigrants – This is particularly true of uneducated parents who come in with skilled immigrants.

Tucker:  We are seeing very severe voter backlash against immigrants in many industrialized countries.  What has been the story in the countries you are describing, those with value-added immigration systems that emphasize high skills in their selection process?

Marshall:  In all of these countries, the population is generally supportive of the immigrant population.  This is largely because the selection system is designed to bring in people with skills that complement the skills of the native population, so the immigrants do not compete with the native population for jobs.  It is also because the immigrants are much less likely to become a drain on the country’s welfare system, because they are much more likely to have jobs and pay taxes.  And it is also because, especially in the cases of Canada and Australia, immigration policy is designed to deal with the kinds of cultural conflict from immigration that is now a burning political issue in Europe.  Canada and Australia require immigrants to pledge that they understand that their new host country has certain values that an immigrant is expected to agree to, knowing that the failure to do so would be a violation of the pledge. Few have ever been penalized for violating it, but the pledge has created an environment in which immigrants respect the rule of law and such values as the equality of men and women, that all creeds and religions are expected to be tolerant of others and so on.

Tucker: In your book, you talk about two stages of temporary workers and how that relates to the higher education system. Can you tell us more about that connection?

Marshall:  One of the best sources of value-added immigrants for any developed nation is the foreign students who come to study in that nation’s higher education system.  This is true both because they are a source of revenue for that country’s education industry, but mainly because they typically come with language proficiency, high skills and strong cultural knowledge.  So they developed a two-track system.  Immigrants could come in through the regular points-based system or another system that allowed people who both earned a degree from an Australian or Canadian university and had the other required characteristics to apply for status as a permanent resident.  But they didn’t want people to use the higher education system as a way to gain permanent residency, so they required such people to go home first and then apply.  Eventually they decided that process was self-defeating if they wanted highly qualified people who knew the language and were familiar with the values and customs.  So they let qualified graduates of their institutions apply directly.  In Canada, such people could get permanent residence without going through the points system, either for skilled workers or students.  At first, they were reluctant to take skilled workers on the basis of their vocational qualifications, but they found those people actually had better economic performance than regular university students so they started taking them.

It is important to view the children of immigrants as future Canadians, Americans, Australians.  You are building your future with those kids.  That’s the reason you need to pay attention to their education and to the selection of their parents.  The United States does not do this and has the lowest level of literacy in our foreign-born population of any OECD country as a result.  We are building future problems for ourselves with such policies.

The countries with value-added immigration policies, unlike our country, are using their immigration system for the same purpose as their education system—to produce a highly educated, highly skilled population that will be able to support themselves and to contribute to increasing the wellbeing of the entire population.  In doing so, they are not only bringing in adults who can contribute personally, but they are also bringing in children who will be far easier to educate to a high standard.  In an era in which all industrialized countries are going to have steadily increasing proportions of immigrants in their populations, immigration policy might be thought of as an extension of both education policy and economic policy.  All three are vital elements of successful competitiveness policies, which will by definition determine whether the incomes of the citizens of the industrialized countries will rise or fall in the years ahead.

Education in a Changing World: Flexibility, Skills and Employability.

The World Bank (2012). Education in a Changing World: Flexibility, Skills and Employability.
In order to provide students with 21st century skills, curriculum and examinations must teach and test teamwork, leadership, and communication skills, according to a new report from the World Bank.  Adding their voice to many recent reports on 21st century skills necessary for individuals to succeed in the global economy, the study reiterates that across the world, employers are seeking individuals who possess a combination of technical and “soft skills”, however many schools are not currently organized to easily facilitate the development of these competencies.

Education in a Changing World: Flexibility, Skills and Employability argues that countries must provide people with the right skills to actively participate in the economy.  These skills include “soft skills” which the report defines as communication skills, creativity, leadership, teamwork, the ability to learn, values and ethics.  The report argues that although the labor market demands “soft skills” as well as subject-area knowledge, most schools are organized only according to disciplines.  Most teachers are focused on examinations and most students prioritize good grades above all else.  And teachers are unequipped to teach “soft skills”.  The report recommends that soft skills be developed and integrated into school curricula and that school systems partner with employers to identify skill gaps.

To develop a 21st century skilled workforce, countries should develop flexible education systems that provide learners with the skills they need in response to changing circumstances.  An adaptable system has the advantage of imparting knowledge and skills when people need them and delivering learning wherever it is convenient.  The report advises countries to determine which part of their education system should offer more flexibility by examining their economic needs.  It defines flexibility as learning opportunities that include formal and non-formal education options, full and part-time programs, a variety of majors in both the technical and vocational fields, classes designed for college age and adult learners, financial subsidies for tuition and scholarships, easily transferrable credits and varied course durations.  Middle-income countries, where the challenge is to increase attendance in tertiary education, may want to provide more flexibility in two-year college programs.  Low-income countries, where the challenge is to increase attendance in secondary education, may want to consider providing more flexibility in their technical and vocational education programs and offering various long- and short-term skills training programs.

Education, the report says, does not take place in isolation from the outside world, but is highly linked to the world of work.  The report argues that education tends to be rigid and conservative while labor markets are fluid and unpredictable.  Effective linkages between the two depend on changes in both sectors.  Therefore, apprenticeship programs must respond to the changing context of the labor market and information and career guidance must be readily available for students, particularly for low-income students who have fewer networks and connections to the labor market.  Part of the responsibility also falls on learners to be realistic in their expectations, prepare themselves with the skills in demand and develop self-learning skills to make themselves more desirable to employers.

While much is known about enrollment and completion rates of students in secondary, vocational and tertiary education in OECD countries, much less is known in developing countries where much of the World Bank’s work takes place.  The report calls for more research in this area as well as more information on the skills and competencies required and valued in the job market in low-income countries.  In particular, the report emphasizes the need for more research on school-to-work transition; stressing the lack of data on whether vocational education contributes more to economic growth than general secondary education.

Teaching and Leadership For the Twenty-First Century: The 2012 International Summit on the Teaching Profession.

Asia Society (2012). Teaching and Leadership For the Twenty-First Century: The 2012 International Summit on the Teaching Profession.
Teaching and Leadership For the Twenty-First Century offers reflections from the 2012 International Summit on the Teaching Profession held in New York City this past March and convened by the U.S. Department of Education.  One of the main themes of the conference was how to create the learning conditions that give the next generation the skills to create the future.  A concern that was echoed by many of the Summit participants is the divide between the ideal of “twenty-first century schools” and the reality of schools today.  A representative from Norway said that schools say they test twenty-first century skills, but really only test basic skills.  This conflict in goals sends mixed messages to teachers about what is expected of their students versus what is valued on examinations for which both teachers and students are held accountable.

Participants also discussed the growing demands on teachers and the resources and training they will need to be effective in instilling twenty-first century skills.  A background report (Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders) prepared in advance of the Summit laid out the key elements on this point that participants discussed: effective school systems need clear standards for what teaching graduates should know and be able to do in each subject, accountability on the part of teacher preparation programs for ensuring teachers have these competencies, more mentoring for new teachers, development of a wider pedagogical repertoire among trainee teachers such as co-operative and inquiry-based learning, greater capacity by teachers to incorporate ICT skills in all coursework, greater facility by teachers in using data to guide instruction, greater understanding of local and global cultures and communities and research skills to diagnose and solve classroom problems based on evidence.

Another overarching issue emerging from the Summit was how to best match teacher supply with demand.  Countries must expand the overall supply of high quality teachers, address shortages in specific subjects, recruit teachers to teach in the neediest areas and work hard to retain teachers over time.  To get there, participants agreed that policy responses are needed at two different levels: improving the general attractiveness of the teaching profession and more targeted approaches to getting teachers into high-need areas.  Installing effective leadership at the school level also emerged as a key issue and countries discussed how they recruit highly qualified leaders, provide systematic and high-quality training to their school leaders and maintain ongoing support and appraisal of principals.  Lastly, Summit participants discussed the importance of building partnerships and support for reform among employers, schools of education, university leaders, the media, parents and students.

At the summit, each participating country offered what they viewed as their top priority, commitment, or action steps to improve the teaching profession in their country.  You can find details by country in the full report.  Finland, for example, “Seeks to develop new collaborative models for school development and teacher education development, change assessment to better meet curricula goals, improve pedagogical use of social media, and participate in an international network for teacher education.”  Japan’s goal is to further advance its efforts at reform of preparation, recruitment, and professional development for its teachers.

Barbara Ischinger, Director of Education at OECD, remarked during the closing session that, “it is clear that learning from other countries, whether through a Summit or through visits to other systems, is an increasingly important learning tool for policymakers and educators.”  A third Summit will be convened by the Netherlands and is scheduled to take place in Amsterdam in 2013.

Delivering School Transparency in Australia: National Reporting Through My School.

OECD. (2012). Delivering School Transparency in Australia: National Reporting Through My School.
Australia’s My School website, launched in 2010, is an innovative school reporting tool that was created as part of Australia’s comprehensive education reform program.  This new report from the OECD, part of their Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education series, provides an analysis of the website, couching their findings in the broader contexts of Australia’s recent education reforms and the general challenges of school reporting and providing school transparency to government and the public.  The bulk of the report provides an overview of Australia’s recent adoption of a national assessment program and the manner in which they created and rolled out the My School website, as well as providing a detailed overview of the types of data available on the website.

The authors conclude that the My School website is a particularly effective national data reporting tool, due largely to certain policy decisions made at its inception.  These included identifying international models in this arena and adapting them to create a model appropriate to the Australian context.  Additionally, the goals and objectives for the design of the system were based on scientific evidence from independent experts.  Another strength of the My School website is that it avoids league tables and instead provides school data in a unique way, only comparing a school to other schools with similar student bodies.  This type of data reporting provides greater insight into school performance and prevents misunderstandings that may arise from more common reporting tools such as rankings and league tables.

The OECD, using data from both their own PISA program and the United States, finds that in general, reporting school-level test scores tends to improve school performance, largely because it provides information to the school community who can then use the information to influence needed changes at the school level.  Other countries struggling with issues of school reporting and transparency may draw some policy lessons from Australia’s experience.  Among these are the need to have strong political leadership, to “articulate a clear case for policy change,” to invest in creating good data and to understand the public interest in access to this type of information.  It is also important to note that My School is an integral part of a set of systemic school reforms, rather than a band-aid applied to the existing system.

The case of Australia makes clear that when it comes to school reporting, the type of data available, and the way it is presented, is more important than simply collecting the data.  Merely ranking a school by its test scores is not enough to determine how that school is performing; instead, being able to see how that school compares to similar schools, how the students compare demographically to other students, and how the students in that school have improved or declined over time, tells us much more.  For more on how the My School website and other Australian education reforms are changing the face of education Down Under, please see our interview with Barry McGaw, Chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, from earlier in the year.

A World-Class Education: Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation (ASCD, 2012)

Vivien Stewart is a mistress of deception.  In A World-Class Education: Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation, she distills a lifetime of astute observation into a slim volume so skillfully written—so easy to read—that the reader is hardly aware of the subtlety of the analysis it contains.  Commissioned by ASCD, an American association of educators, it compares the achievements of a selection of top-performing countries with their American counterparts.  But the book should be no less interesting to educators in other countries seeking to improve their performance, wherever they stand on the international league tables, whatever their position in their country’s education system.

Full disclosure:  Stewart is an old friend and colleague, a member of the Board of Trustees of the organization I head and a member, too, of the International Advisory Board of our Center on International Education Benchmarking, sponsor of Tucker’s Lens.

Books of this sort written by educators and educational researchers tend to focus almost exclusively on education policy and practice narrowly conceived.  But Stewart has done development work in Africa, served with the United Nations and witnessed first hand the rise of Asia over the last couple of decades.  She is very perceptive about education policy and practice, but she has a wider perspective.

Perhaps because that is so, this reader had a sense of history while reading this book that I have not encountered from other books of the same sort.  Stewart paints a picture of profound change—of the sort seen only once in a century, if that—in the education systems of countries all over the globe as they respond to the equally fundamental changes in the global economy.  We see how China, with an education system totally devastated by Mao Tse-Tung, its schools and universities closed, its educators fired and sent to do manual labor in the countryside, determines to telescope a development process that usually takes forty or fifty years, to do whatever it will take to become a front-rank education power on the global stage—and succeeds!  We see how Singapore, on a small island with no resources other than its strategic position astride the route between two giant oceans, with no school system to speak of, riven by ethnic rivalry, despised by its much larger neighbors and poor as a church mouse, nonetheless uses education and job training as the spearhead of its strategy for vaulting into the top ranks of the industrial nations.  And then there is Finland, which, after World War II was a sleepy agricultural nation whose education system lagged far behind that of its much larger neighbors, so used to being in the shadow of Sweden that it was astonished to learn that their country, having ignored the conventional education reform wisdom of its betters for years, had beaten every other European nation in the first PISA rankings and has maintained that position ever since.

What comes through is a story in each case of fierce national determination, a kind of educational hunger that, in each case, transcended political rivalries and was not to be denied.  In each case, we see an absolute conviction, starting at the top and fully shared by the entire polity, that education and high skills hold the key to economic success.  But we also see a moral commitment to shared prosperity, a belief that the key to shared prosperity is a genuinely high level of education for the entire population, and a determination to make sure, as a practical matter, that the policies needed to provide every child with a high quality education are implemented well and implemented in detail.

The point I am making here has to do with the way we read books of this sort.  Both the writers and the readers tend to ask and answer the question: What policies and practices account for the success of the top-performers?  That is a good question and this book does a first rate job of answering it.  What that question misses, however, is another question, which is: What does it take for a country that is not in the front ranks to join those ranks?  The answer to that question does not consist entirely of the answer to the first question.  What comes through clearly in this book is another set of answers having to do with political leadership of the kind that galvanizes action and creates the kind of broad new consensus that is required to uproot long-established arrangements and relationships.  What comes through is the crucial role that international education benchmarking plays in creating for a country a new vision of what might be possible and the confidence among many players that is required to take a chance on abandoning a system with which many players are very comfortable.  What comes through is the need for continuity and stability of political leadership.

It is, I think, no accident that we see in Singapore, Shanghai and Japan (until recently) different versions of one-party rule and in Finland a country in which consensus across party lines is necessary before great actions can be taken on any important issue.  In the case of Ontario Province, in Canada, another of the examples we are shown by Stewart, all the reported progress took place under the leadership of one Premier, who placed education reform at the epicenter of his political agenda.  Whether it was one-party rule, cross-party consensus or the extended leadership of one elected official, what all these cases have in common is political continuity that has lasted long enough to enact and implement major changes in the nature of the entire education system.

In all of these cases, the political leaders involved took the time to mobilize broad public support for their education agendas.  In almost every case, they made their case on the wings of a perceived existential economic threat, or, in the case of the developing countries, an enormous economic opportunity.  Importantly, even in the case of one-party rule, the profound changes in education system design that Stewart reports on were not shoved down the throats of any of these countries.  Stewart shows us how each of these countries, cities and provinces decided on their programs of reform only after making mighty efforts over a long period of time to gain wide input from their professional educators and the public at large.  In every case, professional educators were partners in the reform effort, not the opposition to be overcome in a hostile takeover.

What are we to make of this?  Should we conclude that the countries most likely to lead the next era of education reform are those with one-party rule or consensus-style politics?  If you believe, as I do, that only those countries can achieve the highest incomes, then that would be tantamount to saying that, with the exception of those countries sitting on unusual concentrations of natural resources, the richest countries in the world will be those with one-party rule or consensus-style politics.

The record, I think, shows that it will be harder, but by no means impossible, for countries with rough-and-tumble multiparty politics to scale this ladder.  Those terms would describe Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and, yes, even Ontario, where the Premier who turned things around just began his third four-year term of office.  All are among the world’s top performers.

But none of us should think that following in the footsteps of those countries that now lead the world’s league tables of student achievement is going to be simply a technical matter best left to professional educators.  It simply won’t happen without very effective and often courageous, far sighted political leadership.  Stewart points out that, although the origins of the trajectories that have enabled the leading countries to get where they are began 20 or 30 years ago, their histories show that most were able to make substantial progress in five to ten years, in some cases even less.  In the political world, some progress is needed to get permission to go the next step and major progress is needed to forestall those who want to turn the clock back.  Stewart’s book gives us enough examples showing how political leaders have beat the odds in this way to give heart to those who are flirting with similar commitments in countries in which they can expect rough going.

The toughest case is probably the United States.  For structural reasons that will not be easily changed, the United States is now in the grip of a politics so poisoned as to make consensus on almost any important matter impossible.  In an effort to find agreement in the field of education, the political parties in my country have joined forces around an agenda for education reform that flouts virtually ever principle that informs the successful education strategies of the top-performing countries.

But the United States has been counted out many times in the past, only to succeed in the end.  Though neither presidential candidate has talked much about education in the current campaign, because both are hobbled by their own constituencies in this arena, the public, in one poll after another, has said they believe education to be one of the most important issues facing the country.  There are signs in many quarters that many who have championed either the status quo or radical efforts to destroy the system from the outside are now interested in alternatives.  The United States may be more ready than many believe to adopt the broad agenda Vivien Stewart lays out in this book.

Whether that is true or not, the logic of the book’s underlying story is very powerful.  The future belongs to those countries that display vision and leadership, embrace ambitious standards, commit to broad equity, do everything possible to get and keep high quality teachers, build a system that is both aligned and coherent, set up effective management and accountability systems, motivate their students and adopt a global and future orientation.  We’ll just have to see which countries embrace that message and which do not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of Funding for Schooling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other reports of note:

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

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

NCEE: Can you give us an overview of the history of Australia’s National Assessment and curriculum efforts and what spurred on their development and the decision to create ACARA?

Barry McGaw:Australia has been involved in international studies of student performance since they began in the 1950s; however, the first national surveys of literacy and numeracy occurred in 1976.  The evaluations were sample-based only, a bit like NAEP in the United States.  And then various Australian states introduced sample-based surveys in other curriculum areas.

Barry McGaw

The first assessment of all students across the country in literacy and numeracy occurred in 1990 in New South Wales, which is the largest state in Australia. It was very controversial at the time; particularly with the teachers unions. So, New South Wales began testing all of their students in literacy and numeracy, and then Victoria, the second-largest Australian state, followed, and then other states gradually joined in. Western Australia participated with a really creative set of sample-based surveys that covered their entire curriculum, but only moved to test the entire student cohort when the then-federal Minister of Education made it a condition of federal funding.

By the mid-2000s, the state Ministers of Education decided it would be good to get results expressed in a way that made them comparable across the country. They instituted a process of creating a common scale allowing each state to continue administering its own assessments, but calibrated onto a common scale. After a couple of years, there was some concern about how good the calibration was, and they said, if we’re all testing in order to get the results on a common scale, why don’t we all use the same tests? And so from 2008, the six states and two territories in Australia have all used the same literacy and numeracy tests nationwide, also known as the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).

The next major event occurred in 2007.  During the federal election campaign, the opposition announced that it supported the establishment of a national curriculum in English, Mathematics, Science and History. They won the election at the end of 2007. At the beginning of 2008, they set up an interim national curriculum board. I was appointed chair, with the goal of developing national curriculum in English, Science, Mathematics and History. The government added geography and languages other than English to the curriculum development plans in mid-2008, and then the arts were added later.

At this point, the intention of the federal government was to discuss with the state governments what kind of governance arrangement would be instituted in the longer term for this body. There was some debate about whether it would be set up as a not-for-profit that the ministers collectively owned or a more formal statutory authority of the Australian parliament. The federal minister won out, suggesting that the Council of Ministers (the federal minister and the six state and two territory ministers) would be the policy board for this new body. In late 2008, Australia established the new Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) with responsibility not only for national curriculum development, the national literacy and numeracy assessments, but also the sample-based assessments already underway on a three-yearly cycle for science, civics and citizenship and ICT literacy. Finally the task of public reporting on schools was added to the portfolio.  That work has resulted in the creation of the My School website.

NCEE: You mentioned that these national assessments were controversial with teachers unions. Can you talk a little bit about what their concerns were, and how ACARA was able to address them?

Barry McGaw: The teachers unions were unhappy about the public nature of the reporting and this kind of external assessment. They typically argued that these types of assessments don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about our students. The response was, “you know how your students are doing in relation to one another, but you don’t know how your students stand compared to students across the country.” What typically wins the day in this debate is parents. Parents value information that shows them the bigger picture.  When the My School website came along, suddenly parents are not just getting reports on their own children, but they’re able to see, collectively, for all the students in their school how they’re doing in comparison with other schools. This information can be controversial, but to help on this front, we include information about the circumstances of the school.

Some other countries do what they call value-added analysis. Here is our approach. We obtain measures of students’ background, in particular on their parents’ education and their parents’ occupation. We’re not trying to measure socioeconomic status, we’re trying to measure socio-educational status – what are the benefits that kids get from the occupation and education of their parents as they come to school. We use this information to create an Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage. And then for every school, we look at just 60 schools – 30 schools immediately above it and the 30 immediately below it on that index. These are schools that have got essentially the same kinds of kids. These are the schools that you can learn from, that can challenge you. Now we can show a school another school with kids exactly like theirs that is doing much better. That school can then ask themselves, what policies they might consider that are different from the ones currently being used? What practices could the school adopt that might reproduce the kind of superior performance that you see in the higher performing schools? So that’s essentially the strategy of the My School website. Not only can it assist parents in their choice of schools, but it underpins attempts at school improvement.

NCEE: How are schools and teachers using the data to improve performance?

Barry McGaw: Well, it’s only been produced twice, so we know that within some of the state systems, they’re using it to help schools make these comparisons, but we don’t have much data ourselves on it yet. We know that huge numbers of people look at the site.  States do bring together small groups of schools to look at the data and analyze it. Every school in the country, or ten thousand schools, is in the My School database.

My School website

In terms of test results, we make sure that we only report results for students who were in any given school for each administration of a test for each year it was given. We drop any grade three kids that have gone somewhere else, and we won’t count any grade five kids that have joined you since then, and we’ll compare you with the students in your comparison group of schools with a similar social background, but only in those cases where all of those other schools also have students who were in each school on both occasions. This year, we’re going to provide growth comparisons, which are very interesting and useful, because it begins to give you even further information on what value the schools are adding.

NCEE: Do you plan eventually to use the NAPLAN results to evaluate individual teacher performance in addition to school performance?

Barry McGaw: No. NAPLAN assessments are given only in Grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. It would be very difficult to allocate responsibility for students’ performances or improvements to individual teachers quite apart from the question of how those teaching in grades not tested would be evaluated.

NCEE: Do you see teacher performance as ever becoming a component of the data on the My School website?

Barry McGaw: There are serious discussions going on about how to recognize and reward high-performing teachers but no consideration is being given to reporting on teachers on the My School site.

NCEE: The OECD has recently published a report on evaluation and assessment in Australia (available as a free download from OECD) as part of their international study on these issues. A team of experts visited Australia and observed your system; they made a number of policy observations and suggestions. What did you think about the recommendations that they made for Australia’s system, and are there any that you think the government definitely should implement as you move forward with developing the program?

Barry McGaw: I think it’s a good report. The big thing that we are doing now, as the report pointed out, is developing a strategy for formative assessment. But let me explain where we are first.

The final version of the national curriculum in English, Math, Science and History for kindergarten to grade 10 was adopted last Friday (October 14, 2011), and is now up on the website. It’s quite a historic moment, actually. Already the curriculum is being implemented in the Australian Capital Territory, which is like Washington, DC, because they agreed to the content a year ago. Queensland and South Australia and the Northern Territory will implement next year beginning in January – our school year is the calendar year – and Victoria will have a major pilot in a couple of hundred schools; New South Wales and Western Australia will start in 2013.

What we now have to clarify is the achievement standards. For example, the curriculum states, that, in grade five, in mathematics, these are the things students should have an opportunity to learn. We see our curriculum as a kind of statement of student entitlement. What they should have an opportunity to learn is knowledge, understanding and skills, not just factual stuff.  Then we declare in the achievement standards, if a student has satisfactorily learned this, what will a student be able to do? Those statements can be difficult to interpret in any kind of precise way, so what we are doing now, is putting on the website actual samples of students’ work, produced in response to real classroom tasks with annotations to say this student work meets the standards and why. What we will have up by the end of this year, that is by December 2011, for every achievement standard, is some samples of student work. But then next year, while the curriculum is actually being implemented, we’ll be obtaining a richer set of samples illustrating different levels of achievement at the A, B, C, D and E levels.  The samples of student work will be annotated, for the first time, by teachers across the country, so that we’ll have nationally annotated samples of student work that can move in the direction of getting consistent use of formative assessments across the country.

NCEE: Will that all be available online?

Barry McGaw: Yes, by the end of next year. And the federal government has just put up funds as well to produce some online assessment resources for teachers.

NCEE: Can you expand on why it’s important to have examples of student work when presenting the new curriculum to educators?

Barry McGaw: You will see on the website, that there are statements of achievement standards to give teachers an idea of what students can do, given the opportunity to develop the knowledge, understanding and skills, set out in a particular part of the curriculum. We think that it is difficult to write such statements in a way that is unambiguous for teachers and that it is much more helpful to also provide samples of real student work in response to real tasks created by teachers, but then assessed by a group of teachers from across the country and annotated to provide an explanation for the judgments they make.

Under the previous federal government there was a requirement introduced that all schools report student performance to parents on an A-E (or equivalent) scale. Our annotated samples of students’ work will illustrate performance for each score, A to E, for each subject, each year. We have collected quite a few this year from schools involved in piloting the K-10 English, Mathematics, Science and History curricula, but will collect more during 2012 as some of the states will have already begun full implementation.

The Council of Education Ministers recently approved the K-10 curricula for English, Mathematics, Science and History on October 14th. You can see details of the implementation plans on our website here.

NCEE: You mentioned the necessity of aligning achievement standards with the national curriculum moving forward. Can you clarify where Australia stands with regard to the link between achievement standards and curriculum content? Were national achievement standards developed before the national curriculum?

Barry McGaw: We think that the curriculum should come first as the expression of the goals of education in terms of the learning entitlements of students.  Assessment should follow, shaped by the expectations of student learning.

I recognize that there is a place for ‘assessment-led reform’ where the availability of new forms of assessment can show teachers how to assess learnings that are important but to which they might not attach sufficient significance if they cannot see how to assess them.  In that case, it is still the curriculum and its expectations that come first.

NCEE: While building NAPLAN and the national curriculum, what lessons did you draw from other countries? Are there any countries in particular that you used as a model, and in what ways? What do you see as distinctive about the Australian system?

Barry McGaw: NAPLAN grew out of state-based assessments of literacy and numeracy that began in New South Wales in its then Basic Skills Testing Program in 1990.  The other states followed over the years.  While I was in Paris at the OECD, the Ministers for Education decided that the results should all be expressed on a common scale across the country. The separate tests were equated to achieve this, but then the Ministers decided that it would be better to use common tests.  NAPLAN was the result and the first NAPLAN tests were introduced in 2008. Interestingly, there was no common curriculum behind NAPLAN.  The new test reflected the separate tests that it replaced.

As part of the development of the Australian Curriculum, ACARA was directed also to develop literacy and numeracy continua and then to review and revise NAPLAN as necessary to reflect those continua.  We will time this change on the basis of implementation of the new curriculum with a revised NAPLAN probably to come in 2014.

In our curriculum, we paid attention to practices elsewhere.  Our mathematics curriculum, for example, has been increased in difficulty particularly at the elementary school level on the basis of our analysis of mathematics curricula in Singapore and Finland, two countries that outperform Australia in the international comparisons offered by programs such as OECD’s PISA.

NCEE: We know that the NAPLAN assessments are a combination of multiple choice and short answer questions, and are scored electronically and by trained, independent markers.  How did you arrive at this system – why are they structured in this way?

Barry McGaw: The form of the test was established before responsibility for it was passed to ACARA.  There is a preference in Australia for constructed response questions balanced by cost considerations in favour of machine scoreable responses.  As in PISA, the final choice is based on the two considerations.

NCEE: Many people these days think that it is important to measure creativity and the capacity for innovation. Do you agree? If so, how does NAPLAN (or the other sample tests) measure these things? Are these considerations reflected in the national curriculum?

Barry McGaw: They are important but NAPLAN does not measure them.  They are in our curriculum, embedded in the subject content not as add-on equivalents to additional subjects.  If a teacher wants to focus on creativity, for example, the teacher can apply a filter to the curriculum that will highlight the opportunities that the curriculum in each subject for the school grades of interest to the teacher provides for a focus on creativity. The teacher could use this, for example, in developing an integrating theme through which all the relevant subjects are drawn on.  Such a theme could be followed for some days or weeks.

The opportunities will be expanded as we add additional subjects to the Australian Curriculum.  Development is now well advanced for Geography and the Arts and the rest are following.

NCEE: What are the lessons that other countries trying to build a national assessment system can draw from Australia?

Barry McGaw: First and foremost is to tie assessment to the curriculum. We’ll probably end up making some adjustments to the literacy and numeracy assessments now that the national curriculum has been adopted. What happened historically in Australia was that each of the states developed its own literacy and numeracy assessments, as I said, but did it in relation to their own curriculum. Then they adopted common assessment practices without having adopted a common curriculum. Now we’ve got the common curriculum as well; we just need to make sure that’s aligned, and the developmental sequences are right. One of the big problems is – and I think this is a legitimate criticism of these kinds of assessment programs – that they can narrow the curriculum.  Particularly if you make it really high stakes.  And you can’t make it any more high stakes than putting it on a public website like the My School site. So you start to worry about people gaming the system, encouraging poor performing students to stay at home on the day of the assessment, those kinds of things.

To deal with this, we publish right alongside the school’s performance the proportion of students that were in school on the day assessments were given. So, if there’s any obvious manipulation, or indeed, even if there’s not manipulation, if there’s a low participation rate, that’s evident. There is also the question of whether the system can be gamed by narrowing the school’s teaching focus to what you think might prepare students for a particular form of test. Our view is that the research shows that coaching for tests is effective if what it’s doing is making sure the students are familiar with the test’s format. But it is also the case that if you want to prepare your kids’ literacy skills, the way to do it is through a rich curriculum. Kids learn language in history. They learn language in social science studies. They learn numeracy skills with data representations in geography and other areas of social science as well as in math. They learn it in science. So the best way to develop literacy and numeracy is to have a full and rich curriculum. In Hong Kong they use different forms with different kids in the same class. That’s where we’re heading.

NCEE: Is there anything else you would like to talk about with regard to the report, or the direction the system is going in?

McGaw: I’d like to say something about the curriculum itself, rather than the assessment system. When we got started, we were calling what we did the development of content standards.  I found out from talking to an American journalist that we borrowed that term from you.  I also learned that in the United States you couldn’t talk about national or state curriculum, so you used these words.  What we are doing now is saying that we are developing curriculum or the learning entitlements. We say to schools that by whatever means you teach, this is the knowledge, understanding and skills that your kids are entitled to have the opportunity to acquire. You’ve got to get around the constitutional arrangements in order to do the right thing. Australia has strong constitutional arrangements that say that education is the responsibility of the states, not the commonwealth, not the federal government. So how did we get there? We got there by making it a collaborative arrangement. All of this is decided not by the federal minister; all of this is decided by the six states, two territories and the one federal minister sitting at the table together.

Recent Reports of Note

“Quality Counts 2012: The Global Challenge—Education in a Competitive World,” Editorial Projects in Education, Jan. 12, 2012
This report takes a critical look at the nation’s place among the world’s public education systems, with an eye toward providing policymakers with perspective on the extent to which high-profile international assessments can provide valid comparisons and lessons. It examines effective reform strategies in the US and abroad that have gained traction and may be replicable. And, the report highlights the political and social challenges policymakers will face in improving American education to meet the demands of a 21st-century work force. Learn more here.

Andreas Schleicher, “Chinese Lessons,” OECD Education Today Blog, Oct. 14, 2011
Andreas Schleicher, Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD’s Secretary General and Head of the Indicators and Analysis Division in the Directorate of Education, recently visited China to launch the OECD’s first-ever Chinese edition of Education at a Glance. He blogs about his visit to an experimental school in Shanghai, China’s particularly successful educational Petri dish where potential nationwide reforms are developed and piloted.  Read the full blog post here.

Miller, David C. and Laura K. Warren, “Comparative Indicators of Education in the United States and Other G-8 Countries: 2011,” NCES, October, 2011    
Every two years, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) releases a compendium of statistics intended to enable comparison between the US and the seven other G-8 countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation and the United Kingdom. This report focuses on five topical areas – population and school enrollment, academic performance, contexts for learning, expenditures for education and educational attainment and learning. The statistics are drawn from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and their Indicators of Education Systems (INES). To read the full report, click here.

“Education Indicators in Canada: An International Perspective,” Tourism and the Centre for Education Statistics Division, Sept. 2011
This report is intended to be read alongside the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2011 as an in-depth look at the state of Canadian education. Readers interested in Canada’s education system should note the report’s amendments to OECD data; the report points out, for example, that although the OECD statistics show a smaller gap between teachers’ starting and top of scale salaries in Canada, Canadian teachers actually reach the top of the pay scale in half the time of other OECD countries, suggesting a different interpretation of the OECD data. Another notable statistic is the small correlation between students’ reading performance and socioeconomic status; this correlation is far below the OECD average, perhaps indicating particularly successful management of student class disparity in Canada. To read the full report, click here.

“Thematic Probe: Curriculum specification in seven countries,” International Review of Curriculum and Assessment Frameworks, April 2011
INCA’s Thematic Probe provides curriculum and standards information for Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Scotland, Singapore and South Africa. The information is organized around several questions, as follows: How is the curriculum specified? Are there national standards/expected outcomes? Are curriculum and standards specified and articulated separately or together? Who is responsible for specifying the curriculum? Who is responsible for specifying the standards? How is the curriculum published? Are curriculum components specified locally or nationally? Linked statutory testing – what, when, why? The responses are organized into tables, and provide insight into the links between government control, curricula and standards in some of the top performing countries. To read the full report, click here.