Backtracking from a proposal to do away with the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), the set of examinations that English secondary students take from age 16 on, Education Minister Michael Gove announced February 7 that the government would not establish the EBAC or English Baccalaureate, a plan that had been introduced by him in September.  Under pressure from Ofqual, the body that regulates school qualifications in England, along with teachers unions and school administrators, Gove dropped the plan to allow only one organization to produce exams for each subject instead of allowing many to do so, as has long been the practice.  But he will still push for some of the other elements originally found in his EBAC proposal.  He wants to get rid of coursework (work done on assignments given by teachers and graded by them) and modules (the ability for students to work on small chunks of curriculum and then be tested on those topics).  He wants to give exams at the end of two-years of study in the core subjects instead of at the end of one year, add extension papers in mathematics and science for “the brightest students”, and, most significantly, change the definition of school success when reported to the public through league tables.  The Minister has proposed to get rid of the current league tables where schools are evaluated based on the percentage of students with 5 or more GCSEs scoring at a C or above.  His plan calls for schools to be evaluated on two measures: the percentage of students passing English and mathematics and a report on the progress that students make from year to year in eight GCSE subjects.

In addition to the teachers unions, Ofqual and the school administrators association, the Education Select Committee in Parliament also weighed in against Gove’s proposal.  The Conservative PM that heads the committee argued that if the country were to institute the qualifications system Gove envisioned, which would have given students who did not complete their EBAC a “statement of achievement” rather than a qualification, those students would be given “a badge of failure” hurting less able students rather than helping them.

For more information on EBacc, visit the Department for Education website.  Gove’s latest proposal, which includes a new national curriculum emphasizing the traditional subjects taught in a more structured way, would go into effect in schools in 2015 with the first examinations to be given in 2017.

Some highlights from the conversation follow:

Currently the United Kingdom has a coalition government, which is important context for understanding the education policy environment they find themselves in.  The coalition is made up of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.  According to Sanders, the Conservatives support rigorous standards accompanied by more traditional teaching methods, while the Liberal Democrats are focusing in on social mobility, the achievement differences among different groups of students, why certain cohorts underperform, and how they can close the attainment gap.  With both parties forming a coalition in Parliament, they have worked to develop consensus toward a number of education reforms.

The major reform that the government has recently proposed is abolishing the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education), the qualification that students in England work toward in school from ages eleven to sixteen.  Sanders mentioned that for some time now, there has been a debate about grades on GCSEs going up each year for more and more students.  There has been a question about whether this is because of grade inflation or if these improvements really reflect changes in teaching and outcomes.  England has a number of examination boards, or organizations that deliver the syllabi, curriculum frameworks, examinations and scoring of GCSE examinations to the schools.  They compete with each other by subject and schools can choose which examination board they want to use.  Many in government believe that the competing examination boards are pushing grade scales down and giving schools too much help and leading schools and teachers to choose the easiest “Board” in any given subject for their school so that they can meet their performance goals and do well on league tables.  The government, in order to tackle what it believes is grade inflation, the dumbing down of courses and exams, and to compete with the world’s best, has proposed to reform its examination system.

The government’s solution is to replace the GCSEs with what it is calling the English Baccalaureate Certificate (EBAC).  The new system was announced in September by Education Secretary Michael Gove.  Here are some highlights:

Beginning in the 2015 school year, students will begin new programs of study and then take examinations in 2017 in English, math and science.  These include exams in 7 subtopics: English Language, English Literature, pure math or applied math, biology, chemistry and physics.  Beginning in 2016 new courses will be offered in history, geography and foreign languages with the first exams given in 2018.  To get an EBAC qualification, students will have to succeed in the six core subjects: English, math, two sciences, a foreign language, history or geography.

All students in England will take the new exams, although some students who are struggling may be able to delay taking them until they are 17 or 18 years old and will receive a Certificate of Achievement if they do not meet EBAC standards.  The current A* to G grading system will also be revised and there will no longer be two tiers of exam papers, only one that measures the full ability range.  Coursework, or commonly assessed tasks under controlled conditions, will be phased out in most subjects.  After competing through an open competition, each subject will be provided by one examination board for an initial five- year period.

The new EBAC qualification will be different from the current GCSE in a number of other ways as well.  These include moving away from modular courses, where some courses currently are broken down into smaller units of study that students can take over again if they do not do well, into exams taken only at the end of two years of study.  Tests will be much longer at approximately three hours per exam rather than the current ninety-minute GCSE tests.  There will be a strong focus on grading for spelling, grammar and punctuation.  There will be more emphasis on algebra in math exams and more full-length essays in English.  Six hundred thousand students will be impacted by this new system.

Critics of the government’s EBAC proposal worry that the new system will be a return to the two-tiered system represented by the old O- and A-levels, providing little chance for students that need more help to get it.  They also argue that the move “back to basics” does not reflect the needs of a 21st century economy.  A case in point is that the required EBAC subjects leave out the arts.  Critics say that this will erode England’s creative economy.

Since announcing the new EBAC proposal in September, the government has released a consultation paper laying out, in detail, the proposed changes and is asking for comments from the public.  The consultation paper is available through December 10, 2012 after which some changes may be made to the original proposal.  Not all political parties in England support the move away from GCSEs to EBACs including the Labour Party.  Ultimately, if there is a change in government in England, EBAC plans may not go ahead, but the examination boards are already gearing up for the competitive process to determine who wins each subject.

Though the GCSE’s are used only in the UK, there is an international version of the GCSE’s called the International General Certificate of Education (IGCSE) that is used by high schools all over the world, including, recently, the United States.  Some countries used customized versions of the IGCSE as their national examination system.  Although the changes just described to the GCSE need not change the IGCSE, they may lead to such changes and some countries may choose to make changes in their own system based on the changes in the GCSEs.

So Top of the Class will keep on eye on the progress of the EBAC, its impact on schools in England and continue to report on changes to the EBAC curriculum and assessments that may have implications for other countries.

Starting Strong III: A Quality Toolbox for Early Education and Care provides ECE recommendations for countries in five policy areas including:

• Setting out quality goals and regulations;
• Designing and implementing curriculum and standards;
• Improving teacher qualifications, training and working conditions;
• Engaging families and communities; and
• Advancing data collection, research and monitoring.

In conjunction with the Starting Strong series, the OECD has begun publishing a number of country-specific reports on ECE.  Each of these country reports is organized around one of the policy levers identified above, depending on what the country has prioritized in its ECE agenda.  So far the OECD has released country studies for Finland, the Slovak Republic, United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Korea, Portugal and New Zealand.  We feature Finland, Korea and New Zealand here.  Each is a top performer in the education league tables.

New Zealand and Korea both focused on implementing curriculum standards.  Creating and implementing a common curriculum framework and learning standards is just as important in early childhood education as it is for compulsory education systems.  The framework can ensure quality across different settings and can promote continuity between ECE and primary schooling.  A well laid out curriculum framework with accompanying learning standards can help teachers prepare lessons and give parents direction on how to develop a stimulating home learning environment.

Finland focused on improving qualifications, training and working conditions for ECE professionals.  One of the factors that matters most in early childhood education is the quality of the workforce, measured by their initial education, qualifications and professional development.  The OECD is careful to note that it is not qualifications per se that have an impact on child outcomes, but the ability of better educated staff to create a high-quality learning environment.  Just as in compulsory schools, better working conditions have been shown to improve staff job satisfaction and retention.  The OECD identifies good early childhood education working conditions as high staff-child ratio and low group size, competitive wages and other benefits, reasonable schedules and workloads, a good physical environment and a competent and supportive manager.

So what are the strengths of the early childhood services offered by Korea, Finland and the Netherlands?  New Zealand has created a common, national curriculum framework for early childhood education providers called Te Whāriki in New Zealand.  This document clearly lays out the aims of ECE including what is expected of staff and children at each stage of development along with useful examples.  The curriculum strongly focuses on well-being and learning and emphasizes the importance of tolerance and respect for cultural values and diversity.  The Te Whāriki also provides explicit links to the primary school curriculum, describing what children are expected to do at future levels, how this relates to the experiences in ECE and what activities staff can implement to facilitate a smooth transition. While many countries still use a split system where child care and early education are governed by different ministries or agencies, New Zealand has integrated early childhood education and care under one lead ministry.

Korea, too, chose to focus on curriculum.  This country has created the Standard Child Care Curriculum, which covers children ages zero to five.  Implementation began in 2007 and was revised in 2010 to improve the quality of child care services, extend operating hours to accommodate family needs and strengthen the link between child care and elementary schooling.  In addition to this child care curriculum, Korea has developed a National Kindergarten Curriculum for children ages three to four. Based on research undertaken in 2010, this document provides common standards for organizing and implementing the kindergarten curriculum and places a heavy focus on creativity and character.  In September 2011, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and the Ministry of Health and Welfare developed and launched the Nuri Curriculum for all five-year old children participating in early childhood education and care.  It is focused on five distinct objectives: developing basic physical abilities and establishing healthy and safe routines; learning how to communicate in daily life and developing good practices in language use; developing self-respect and learning how to live with others; developing interest in aesthetics, enjoying the arts and learning how to express yourself creatively; and exploring the world with curiosity and enhancing children’s abilities to solve problems by applying math and science in daily life.  Starting in March 2013, the government has plans to extend this curriculum to three- and four-year olds, which is a step towards streamlining the overall ECE curriculum framework in Korea.

Choosing to focus on the early childhood education and care workforce made sense for Finland, a country that puts a strong emphasis on recruiting, hiring and supporting the ECE workforce.  The qualifications for teaching staff, professional development opportunities and favorable working environments make Finland’s ECE workforce one of the best in the world.  Finland requires ECE teaching staff to have at least some post-secondary education as in the case of New Zealand and Sweden.  Professional development is mandatory and individuals do not have to shoulder the full costs as the government and the employer contribute.  The maximum number of children per early childhood professional in Finland is among the most favorable in the OECD with one staff member to four children ages zero- to three and 1:7 for older children in early childhood education or care.  New Zealand has slightly less favorable minimum ratio standards and Korea, at the other end of the spectrum, allows a 1:25 ratio for four-year olds.

In each of the Quality Matters studies, the featured country is evaluated against how it has responded to a number of challenges that commonly arise in the selected policy area of focus.  In enhancing ECE curriculum, those common challenges include defining goals and content; aligning curriculum for continuous child development; implementing effectively; and evaluating systematically.  Korea has made some progress in tackling these challenges.  To develop the Nuri curriculum the government formed a task force, including stakeholders from early childhood education and childcare sectors and ministry officials, charged with collaborating on the design and content of the curriculum.  To help ease implementation efforts, Korea held large-scale public hearings and seminars before and after announcing the revised versions of the National Kindergarten Curriculum and the Standard Childcare Curriculum.  Twenty thousand ECE professionals were trained in 2011 to implement the Nuri Curriculum in 2012.  The OECD suggests that the country could further enhance quality in its ECE agenda by developing one curriculum for children in the whole ECE range and ensuring that assessment practices meet the aspirations of the curriculum.

New Zealand has also made significant headway in facing these common curriculum challenges, most importantly by covering the entire early childhood education and care age range as an integrated system with one national framework.  The Te Whāriki is developed for children from birth to school entry but, to ensure the framework is age-appropriate, the content of the curriculum is divided into three age groups: infants, toddlers and young children.  To answer the evaluation challenge, New Zealand has implemented the Assessment for Learning, which requires teachers to develop effective assessment practices aligned to the curriculum.  The national government offers regular training on this practice.  The Te Whāriki states that “assessment of children’s learning and development should always focus on individual children over a period of time and staff should avoid making comparisons between children”. The OECD suggests that the Te Whāriki place a greater emphasis on strong communication skills for ECE staff so they can effectively work with colleagues on job issues and with parents on child development issues.

As already mentioned, Finland has made several efforts to answer the common workforce challenges highlighted by the OECD report (improving staff qualifications, securing a high-quality workforce supply, retaining the workforce, workforce development and managing the quality of the workforce in private ECE organizations).  Their responses include their efforts to set minimum qualification standards for ECE staff and to encourage professional development.  Additionally, in the mid 1990s, Finland moved kindergarten teacher education to the university level where classroom teacher training was already established.  Once kindergarten and primary teachers were trained, they were better able to support children’s transition from pre-primary to primary school.  The OECD made several suggestions to Finland.  First they observe that the country does not have licensing renewal requirements in place whereas staff in New Zealand must renew their license every three years.  Second, they recommend further developing leadership and computer skills for ECE staff.  And lastly they point out that Finland’s ECE workforce is highly female and the majority is above the age of forty.  An effort to attract more diverse and younger staff to the field is needed.

Additional country reports are expected for Canada, Japan, Norway and Sweden in late September 2012.  Starting Strong III examines ECE through a broad lens and provides a roadmap for anyone with a role to play in developing ECE policy.

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.

Marc Tucker at GSEHD Event

NCEE in the News
In the The Philadelphia Tribune, Marc Tucker talks about practical steps for bringing the United States in line with the world’s leading education systems. In a guest blog for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Marc Tucker responds to Mike Petrilli’s argument that Asian countries looking to find the source of U.S. innovation should look outside American classrooms.  In his Education Week blog, Top Performers, Marc Tucker reviews the latest report from the Council on Foreign Relations, writes about borrowing best practices and even better policies, explains how governance is a central issue in improving student performance and questions if the nation’s schools and the public are best served by a system in which curriculum materials are available for free from public web sites.

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.