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.

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.