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

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

Figure 1

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

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

Figure 2

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

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

I just finished reading a recent book from Routledge, Teacher Education Around the World, edited by Linda Darling-Hammond and Ann Lieberman.  It is a very rewarding read, full of new information and fresh, insightful analysis.  The editors asked an impressive team of researchers to do chapters on Finland, Singapore, the Netherlands, the UK, Hong Kong and Canada.  Darling-Hammond did the chapter on the United States and the two editors pulled the threads together in the last chapter.

Two things jump out at this reviewer.  The first has to do with the scope of the changes taking place around the world as nation after nation concludes that better teachers are the key to their goals for their students.  The other has to do with the nature of the battle for the souls of policymakers over the best strategy to do that and the way policymakers are responding to the contending forces.  I’ll tackle the latter first and then return to the former.

As Darling-Hammond and Lieberman see it, the policy battle taking place around the globe is being fought between those who believe that the effort to professionalize education has failed and those who believe that that effort has only just begun, that student performance will improve radically only if teaching is converted from a blue-collar occupation into a true profession.  More accurately, perhaps, this battle pits those who believe that teaching can and must have all the attributes of a true profession against those who think it neither can nor should do so.

In a way, this is a battle about who is entitled to wear the badge of the reformer.  Through one lens, reform is converting teaching from an occupation requiring little technical knowledge and expertise into a true profession requiring a good deal of both, and, on the other reform is battling an entrenched education bureaucracy with all the tools that market forces and the entrepreneurial spirit can bring to the revitalization of moribund industries.

To some extent, of course, this battle involves the facts.  The first question here is whether those who want to turn teaching into a true profession are making any progress.  Darling-Hammond, Lieberman and their coauthors paint a detailed picture of changes taking place along a broad front within the professional education community over the last 20 years or so, all designed to raise the quality of the pool of young people from whom new teachers are selected, improve their mastery of the subjects they will teach, help them better understand the way young people grow and develop, learn their craft, and practice that craft under the supervision of first rate teachers until they either become first rate teachers themselves or leave teaching.

All of this makes sense, of course, only if one believes that there is a substantial body of professional knowledge and practice that must be mastered if a raw recruit is to become a good teacher, above and beyond the knowledge of the subject one is going to teach.  If you believe that, then reformers are the people who put in place all the elements needed to turn teaching into a true profession.

One of the most important hallmarks of a true profession is the presence of sound professional standards, so I was particularly interested in the way the authors show how new standards—for entering teacher education institutions, for accrediting teacher education institutions, for licensing teachers, for determining who advances up the newly created career ladders and for awarding certification to advanced professionals—are providing powerful drivers for the whole new system of development of high quality teachers in a growing number of countries.  They point out that, whereas teachers used to advance through their own education and training and sometimes through their subsequent careers on the basis of courses taken, they now advance on the basis of careful, sophisticated assessments of their actual performance, such as those recently developed at Stanford University.

The book shows how the most advanced countries have worked hard to identify and use the best research on the factors that make for great teachers, much of it done in the United States, but also to provide teachers with important research skills, enabling them to constantly improve their own practice in a disciplined way.  They show how a new breed of school is developing around the world that serves as an analogue to the teaching hospital in medicine.  The best of these institutions is clearly changing the university at least as much as the school, resulting in a constant dialogue between clinical faculty and research faculty in which both together create the curriculum for the education and training of new teachers and find a way to blend theory and practice in a way the makes the former come alive and that provides insight into the latter in a much more powerful program of instruction than was previously available at these institutions.

The picture one gets from this book of the broad upgrading of the selection, preparation and support of new teachers is nothing if not varied.  The details of how these countries are going about this transformation are very different, and there is no doubt that that fact will enable us all to learn a lot from the variation.  But the themes are clear.  Teaching is increasingly viewed as a profession like other professions.  That means that:

• there is an important body of professional knowledge and practice to be acquired over a period of years,
• so much discretion is required in its application that the trained professional must be trusted to apply that knowledge with wide discretion in the workplace,
• the work needs to be regulated, but the regulations need to be based on professional standards and those standards must come from the profession itself, and
• the advancement of practice will come only with more and better research, the results of which are incorporated into the training of the professionals and the support provided to the professionals as they constantly seek to improve their practice.

From the point of view of the authors of this volume, that is what it means to be a professional, and turning teachers into true professionals is the only way to create mass education systems capable of educating virtually all students to global standards.

And then there is the other camp.  They see all this as a thinly veiled attempt by a failed bureaucratic establishment to hang on to the old ways.  If teacher educators knew how to or even wanted to improve their appalling performance, they would have done it years ago.  No self-respecting high school student who could get into a first-rate university would choose to go to a school of education, which will let anyone in and provides a program with standards so low that no one ever fails.  This camp is very fond of pointing to actual examples of very highly qualified research scientists willing to become high school teachers in their retirement, but who cannot do so because they do not wish to take the intellectually vacuous courses and mindless tests required by the teacher training institutions and the state to become a teacher.

To the people in this camp, it is obvious that there is no craft of teaching that rises to the level of serious intellectual activity.  What is needed are young people and older people who can demonstrate that they know the subject they are expected to teach and the rest will take care of itself.  The way to get the teachers we need is to break the hammer lock of the establishment on teacher training, and open the training of teachers to anyone or any institution prepared to let the market decide whether their product is worth hiring.  The market, in other words, can bring in strong competition for the established institutions and do what markets do best: drive costs down and quality up.  The people in this camp celebrate Teach for America and its relatives in several other countries, because they have succeeded in bringing some of America’s most capable young people into teaching—if only for a couple of years and in very few classrooms—by requiring only a few weeks of teacher training.  All over the world, the people who hold this view are championing policies that allow many kinds of institutions to train teachers, and reduce the training that new recruits get in the craft of teaching and in the research on student learning to a minimum.  It is, I think, not unreasonable to conclude that the people in this camp do not believe that there is, properly speaking, a profession of teaching, but rather that teaching is an occupation or a calling, but not a profession.

What is particularly interesting about this clash as portrayed in this book is the way this conflict is playing out country by country.  The authors present both Singapore and Finland as wholly in the first camp, with policies that are internally consistent, all of which reflect a commitment to the idea that teaching is and ought to be a profession, for which people are selected as professionals, trained as professionals, supported as professionals and managed as professionals.

But the authors show that, after that, the picture on the ground is much more mixed.  If one end of the dimension line is represented by Finland and Singapore, the other is represented by the United States and the UK.  In between, they show us countries in which both sides of the conflict have won their policy battles.  In those countries, we see a real effort to put in place policy measures intended to build a true profession of teaching right alongside others that make it possible for individuals to minimize or even eliminate the training required to become a licensed teacher, the standards for which are being raised in other statutes on the books of the same country.

One gets the sense that the world is in a race.  On one side are those hoping to strengthen the profession of teaching and, on the other, are those who are seeking to blow up the very institutional structure the former are trying to build.  If those who are trying to professionalize teaching succeed fast enough, they will invalidate the case being made by those who are trying to blow up the establishment.  Because education is an inherently conservative enterprise, they may get the time they need. But, if they take too long to reach their objective, or their methods are sufficiently weakened by the other side along the way, they will lose and those who believe that market forces are all, or almost all, of what is needed may prevail.  And then it will be most interesting to see which countries are most successful in educating their children.

By Marc Tucker

My apologies to Maimonides.  But I would not blame you if you were perplexed about the recent dust-up after the latest PIRLS and TIMSS data came out.  Some of the best-known names in education research worldwide came out with guns blazing, mostly at one-another, in a rapid-fire exchange about what the numbers meant.  I thought some of you might welcome a guide to the shooters and the shots, and a bit of commentary on the profound meaning of it all.

Tom Loveless, the head of the Brown Center at the Brookings Institution jumped on the data to say that they called for a “rethinking of the Finnish miracle success story….If Finland were a state taking the 8^th grade NAEP [the sample survey used in the United States to monitor the progress of American students over time], it would probably score in the middle of the pack.”  Jack Buckley, Commissioner of the National Center for Educational Statistics in the U.S. Department of Education confessed that, “I’ve always been a little puzzled” by the high level of attention paid to Finland.  Well, so much for Finland!

Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein wrote an analysis of the data claiming to show that while reading achievement of American students on PISA was growing between 2000 and 2009, it was falling by an even larger amount in Finland.  Similarly, they said, in math, US students from the lowest social class were also gaining substantially, while scores of comparable Finnish students declined.  “This is surprising,” they said, “because the proportion of disadvantaged students in Finland also fell…” And they go on to say that, by their analysis, the achievement gap between the most and the least advantaged students in the United States is actually smaller than in “similar postindustrial countries, and often only slightly larger than gaps in top-scoring nations.”

Ha!  That means that the withering criticism showered on American schools for their poor performance was totally undeserved.  The problem, if there is a problem, lies not in the schools, poor Horatio, which have been doing a much better job than anyone has given them credit for, but in the enormous disparities in family income that have opened up in American society.  And Finland, according to this analysis, hardly deserves its status as the model that the United States should be adopting.

Not so fast, say Paul Peterson, Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann.  Peterson is at Harvard, Hanushek at Stanford and Woessmann at the University of Munich.  The data, they say, don’t show that at all.  What they actually show is that, even if such corrections are made, American students at the top do not perform anywhere near as well as the students in the top performing countries, or, at least, not such a high proportion of them do.  Things are just as bad as they always said they were, and the need to turn up the heat on the schools to perform up to international standards is as great as ever.

But wait a minute, says Andreas Schleicher.  The Carnoy-Rothstein analysis depends, he said, on a challenge to the methods used by OECD-PISA to do its survey research, and that challenge, says Schleicher, just won’t hold up in court.  To which Carnoy and Rothstein said in reply to the reply, Oh yes it will.

So what is going on here?  Why are all these people so exercised about this data?  What are their agendas anyway?  Who is right and who is wrong?  Why does it matter?  And what does it mean?

I know that research is supposed to go where the evidence leads it and the researcher is only there to record the ineluctable result, without fear or favor.  But the reality is that researchers have values to support and reputations to protect, and their conclusions are more often than not influenced by both their values and the reputations they have established as a result of the policy positions they have taken.  So, perhaps it would help to sketch in the positions taken on the relevant issues by the people I have named.

It should surprise no one that spokespeople for the Brookings Institution and the United States National Center for Educational Statistics should be waiting to pounce on Finland and on the people who have used the Finns’ standing in the international league tables to make a case for using the educational strategies the Finns have embraced.  Both Brookings and a series of U.S. Department of Education research executives, some of whom have gone to Brookings when they left the Department of Education, have been deeply skeptical of international education benchmarking and ardent advocates of what they have described as the “gold standard” of education research, meaning the use of experimental research techniques as the only legitimate way to attribute cause in social research.  It is obviously impossible to randomly assign national “treatments” to national populations in the arena of education, so, from their point of view, all statements that this or that set of policies “causes” these or those national outcomes in the arena of education policy are necessarily suspect.

Brookings and the Peterson, Hanushek, Woessmann team are both strong supporters of charters and the introduction of market forces generally as school reform strategies.  Brookings, as well other Washington-based think tanks, are eager to deflate the recent enthusiasm for international education benchmarking in part because they fear that the close examination of the strategies used by the top-performing countries will show little evidence that charters or market strategies in general are effective strategies for raising student achievement at a national scale.

Peterson, Hanushek and Woessmann each have their own views on what is most important in education reform, but all are advocates of charters and reform agendas based on market forces, and all appear to believe that it will take fear of foreign competitors to put this reform agenda over the top in the United States.  They have also done research that they say supports their claim that market strategies do work in the top-performing countries.  Implicitly, then, they believe, unlike their Brookings colleagues, that it is possible to do rigorous research using comparative data gleaned from these international surveys that attributes cause and from which, therefore, it is possible to draw policy conclusions.  This team of researchers has consistently advanced the view, like my own organization, that economic ruin will be the fate of any nation that fails to hold its own in international education competition, though their prescriptions as to the most effective policy agenda are different from our own, based on the study of pretty much the same data.

But Carnoy and Rothstein come from a very different place.  They believe that the relatively poor performance of American students on the international surveys of student achievement is a function of the large and increasing disparity in incomes among Americans, in absolute terms and in relation to other countries.  They are outraged that organizations like my own and researchers like Peterson, Hanushek and Woessmann hold the schools accountable for poor student performance, when they think the fault lies not in the schools and teachers, but rather in a society that tolerates gross and increasing disparities in income among Americans.  They would have us focus on promoting policies that would result in a fairer distribution of income in the United States.

Which puts them in direct conflict not just with Peterson, Hanushek and Woessmann, but also with Andreas Schleicher, the driver of the whole PISA system at the OECD.  Schleicher’s primary framework for the analysis of the PISA data displays the country data on two axes, one for student achievement on the subjects assessed by PISA and the other for equity, the pattern of the distribution of results from the poorest to the best performers within countries.  Countries with short tails in that distribution are described as having high equity; those with long tails are described as having low equity.  Schleicher points out that the United States just barely escapes being among those countries in the worst quartile on both measures.  Another table in Schleicher’s slide deck shows that, when socio-economic status is held constant, the schools of some nations do a much better job than others of reducing achievement disparities among students.  Carnoy and Rothstein would take American teachers off the hook, saying that the performance of poor and minority students is actually improving, the gap is not so large as was thought, and the performance of poor and minority students in the top performing countries is actually declining.  To the extent there is a problem, it is a problem caused by socio-economic status of the students, not the teachers’ performance.  Schleicher would say, no, that is not so.  Even when we look at students from comparable socio-economic backgrounds, American schools do less to close the gap with the students from more favored backgrounds than schools in most other countries.  They cannot both be right.

So it is no wonder that Carnoy and Rothstein go after Schleicher and his data and methods with hammer and tongs.

So who is right and who is wrong here?  All of the people I have named are competent researchers from well-regarded institutions.  Just as each of these people have their own values and established positions on the relevant policy issues, the same is true of me and the organization with which I am associated.  Our analysis of the dynamics of the global economy strongly suggests that high wage countries like the United States will find it increasingly difficult to maintain their standard of living unless they figure out how to provide a kind and quality of education to virtually all their children that they formally thought appropriate only for a few.  And we also believe that the most likely source of good ideas for strategies that will enable them to do that is the countries that have already done it.  We think that whether the source of poor performance is mainly growing disparities of income or relatively poor performance of the education system, the dynamics of the global economy are unforgiving and countries like the United States do not have the option of saying that the educators can do nothing, that the only thing that will save us is income redistribution.  We do not think that the only way to learn what strategies are likely to work is research methods derived from the experimental sciences.  Indeed, we think that the record clearly shows that American business recovered from a devastating assault from Japanese firms in part by inventing and using the very method—industrial benchmarking—that we and others are now using in the field of education.

To me, the most important conclusion to be drawn from the debate whose contours I have just rather roughly outlined is that now, for the first time in the United States, the international surveys of student achievement really matter.  That is a big, big change.  It was not the case before that advocates of the most hotly debated education reforms in the United States felt that they needed to take the data from these surveys seriously, to defend their positions or to advance them.  Clearly, they do now.

The second point is that the data from the international surveys is being used to make points not about peripheral issues, but central issues.  It really matters whether the cause of the United States’ relatively low standing in the international league tables is income disparities among the students’ families or poor education in the schools.  It really matters whether or not countries like Finland have important lessons for the rest of the world.  It matters whether the survey methods being used by the organizations that design and administer them bear up to scientific scrutiny or not.  And, lastly, it also matters whether the methods used by those who do research comparing the effects of different policies and practices on student achievement in multiple countries have enough scientific merit to justify their use by policy makers to make national policy. These are consequential questions.  This is the first time that we have seen a sustained debate by some of America’s leading scholars on these matters.  It is not likely to be the last, and that appears to herald an era in which, for the first time in the United States, international surveys of student achievement are likely to take a prominent place in the public debate about education policy.
You may be wondering where I come out on the welter of claims and counterclaims I described above.  Now that I have laid my analytical framework on the table along with those of the other analysts, you are in a position to apply the same dose of skepticism to my conclusions as I urged you to apply to the others.   My take on the data we now have in hand is more or less as follows.

First, the usual note of caution.  One snapshot does not a movie make.  We should not declare a trend before we have more than one data point.  So we might want to see whether the changes in rankings suggested by the recent PIRLS and TIMSS data hold up over time.

Second, as many have pointed out, TIMSS and PIRLS put the accent on measuring how students do on what amounts to a consensus curriculum.  Did they learn what international experts think they should have been taught in the subjects they assess?  PISA measures the capacity of students to apply what they have learned in the classroom to proxies for real-world problems of the sort they might actually encounter outside the classroom.  I have a strong preference for the latter goal over the first, which mainly comes from an experience I had years ago, when Archie Lapointe, the director at that time of the Young Adult Literacy Survey, told me the following.  The survey asked the young people surveyed to add a column of figures and take a percentage of the result. Almost all could do it.  It also asked the same respondents to take a restaurant check, add up the items, get a total and calculate a tip.  Very few could do it.  Like Alfred North Whitehead, I have very little use for what he called “inert knowledge.”

Third, we need to keep in mind that the fine-grained distinctions in the rankings, for most countries that are near one another, are not statistically significant.  What we should really be paying attention to is the groupings of countries in the rankings, when countries are grouped in such a way that the measured differences among the groups are statistically significant.  If you look at it from this perspective, what we see is the United States still has a long way to go before the vast majority of its students score in the front ranks of performance at many grade or age levels in many subjects, which is how I would define top performers.

Fourth, I think it is pretty clear from the OECD data that smaller proportions of American students score in the higher deciles of performance on the PISA tests, and more in the lower deciles than is the case for students from the top-performing countries.  If that is true, then it cannot also be true that the United States would do as well as the top-performing countries if only the poor, Black and Hispanic students were taken out of the rankings, as many American teachers and some policymakers maintain.  It is also clear from the OECD-PISA analysis, as I pointed out above, that, when the data are corrected for students’ socio-economic status, American schools are less effective than the schools of most of the countries measured at closing the gap between these students and students with higher socio-economic status.

This, of course, is not where Carnoy and Rothstein come out, but I think Andreas Schleicher won the battle between him, on the one hand, and Carnoy and Rothstein on the other.  But don’t take my word for it.  Read the claims and arguments made by both sides carefully.  There is a lot at stake in this conflict.

So, what then are we to make of the fact that, if Massachusetts, North Carolina and Florida were countries, they would have done very well indeed in the most recently released rankings?

The case of Florida, I think, is pretty straightforward.  The Florida Center for Reading Research, administered by Florida State University, is one of the nation’s leading centers for reading research.  Its methods are widely admired throughout the United States.  The state of Florida has managed to leverage this research program and its key figures to produce widespread implementation throughout the state of the methods advocated by the Center.  We can see the results in the PIRLS fourth grade reading results.  The question, of course, is what effect, if any, this will have on student performance in the upper grades as the students who have benefitted from these programs mature through the years.  That story has yet to be told.

In North Carolina, we are looking at a program of education reform that began with Governor Terry Sanford, whose first term as governor began in 1961.  Sanford’s unrelenting emphasis on improving education in the state laid the base for Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., who served as governor from 1977 to 1985 and again from 1993 to 2001, making him the longest serving governor in the state’s history.  Through that whole period, he never lost his focus on education as the key to the state’s economic growth, and, during that period, North Carolina showed more progress on student achievement as measured by the National Assessment of Education Progress than any other state in the United States.  Hunt’s agenda for education reform was profoundly affected by what he was learning about the strategies adopted by the top-performing countries in the world.  Like them, he focused on teacher quality, high quality instructional systems and early childhood education.  North Carolina was among the very first states in the United States to send delegations of key state policy-makers abroad to study the top performers.

Massachusetts is a similar story.  In this case the first phase of the reforms were driven by the business community, organized by Jack Rennie, a very successful businessman who worked hard to organize that community, and Paul Reville a public policy analyst.  They played the key role in pushing the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 through the legislature.  The Act provided hundreds of millions in new funding for the schools in exchange for explicit performance standards for students, set to international benchmarks and carefully drawn curriculum frameworks, also set to international benchmarks; a new comprehensive assessment system set to the standards and curriculum frameworks; much tougher standards for getting to be a teacher, intended to greatly ratchet up teachers’ command of the subjects they intended to teach, and a system to disclose student performance, school by school, with results reported by student subgroups, so that poor performance by these subgroups would not be hidden in the average scores for the school.  Right after the Act was passed, David Driscoll, until then the Deputy Commissioner of Education, was made Commissioner and remained in that position for ten years.  Under Driscoll’s leadership, Massachusetts, despite a great deal of pressure to do so, never backed off of its decision to set and to maintain internationally benchmarked standards, for both student performance and teacher certification.  After Driscoll left, the new governor created a new position in state government, to provide leadership to all the parts of government concerned primarily with education at all levels.  He filled that position with Paul Reville.  Between them, Driscoll and Reville provided the same kind of strength and continuity of leadership that Governor Hunt provided in North Carolina, and for a very similar agenda, an agenda that is in many respects consistent with our own analysis of the strategies used by the top performing nations to get to the top of the league tables.

You may or may not agree with my analysis of the kerfuffle over the release of the TIMSS and PIRLS results.  You may or may not agree with my explanation for the rise of Florida, Massachusetts and North Carolina on the PIRLS and TIMSS league tables.  But, in any case, I urge you to look at the contending papers, and come to your own conclusions.  All of us could benefit greatly from a long, loud, contentious effort to define what it means to be educated, and to better understand why some nations are more successful than others at educating the vast majority of their young people to whatever standard they choose.

* This is a second version of the original post for this month.  We misstated the conclusions presented by Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein in the report described in this newsletter.  We believe we have stated those conclusions accurately here, and apologize to the authors for the error.

For the record, however, the version of the Carnoy-Rothstein conclusions that we based our first statement on was itself based on the version of the report that Carnoy and Rothstein originally released, which claimed that their re-estimate of United States PISA scores would result in the United States ranking 4^th among OECD countries in reading, and 10^th in math, a major revision upwards of the US PISA rankings.  In their most recent version of their report, released last week, Rothstein and Carnoy revised these numbers downward somewhat to 6^th in reading and 13^th in math, but, as the post points out, even these numbers are contested.

In December, the results of the 2011 administration of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) were published in three separate reports, each examining international performance in reading (at the fourth grade level), math (at the fourth and eighth grade levels) and science (at the fourth and eighth grade levels).  These assessments provide a picture of international student performance in the years before a student reaches the age of 15, which is the age at which students take the OECD’s Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA).  However, there are some central differences between the TIMSS/PIRLS and PISA assessments.  Michael Martin, the Co-Executive Director of the TIMSS and PIRLS Study Center at Boston College, notes that while PISA is intended to measure a student’s general skills in the arenas of reading, math and science, TIMSS and PIRLS are more focused on content mastery.  Additionally, Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, has pointed out that the countries participating in both assessments do vary – the TIMSS and PIRLS groups are smaller and represent a mixture of countries at different levels of economic development as compared to the participants in PISA.

Because of the differences between the assessments, the countries that are in the top ten or fifteen of the TIMSS and PIRLS rankings are somewhat different than the top performers on the last incarnation of PISA in 2009.  While league tables of the top countries based on their average scores always garner the most press when the results of international assessments are released, we decided to take a more in-depth look at what level of proficiency students in the top fifteen countries are actually reaching in these subjects.

The IEA has established four “international benchmarks” on their score scale for these assessments.  While the score scale for both PIRLS and TIMSS runs from 0-1000, the vast majority of scores fall between 300 and 700.  The IEA has identified a score of 400 as the “low” international benchmark, indicating that students at this score point have been educated to a “basic” level.  Beyond that, there is a score of 475, or “intermediate;” a score of 550, or “high,” and a score of 625, or “advanced.”  Below, we have plotted the percent of students at each benchmark in the top fifteen countries on the 2011 administration of PIRLS and TIMSS.  This is useful when thinking about the top performers, because it shows, in a clearer way perhaps than the average scale score, what students in each country are really able to do.

In the fourth grade PIRLS reading assessment, a student who reaches the “low” international benchmark is able to “locate and retrieve an explicitly stated detail” in a literary text, and “locate and reproduce explicitly stated information … at the beginning of the text” in an informational text.  By contrast, at the “advanced” international benchmark, students are able to “integrate ideas and evidence across a text,” and “distinguish and interpret complex information from different parts of a text,” among other skills.

The chart above, like the others to follow, is organized from top to bottom in the order of average scale score.  However, the average scale score does not always correlate to the highest percentage of students reaching the “advanced” benchmark in each country.  In this case, it does not, though Hong Kong does have the highest proportion of students meeting either the “high” benchmark or “advanced” benchmark – 67 percent – while in the United States, just 56 percent of students meet those levels.  The tail of students either meeting the “low” benchmark or not meeting a benchmark is also significantly smaller in the top three countries – Hong Kong, the Russian Federation, and Finland (7, 8 and 8 percent, respectively), than in the majority of the other countries.  This more specific data on student performance is useful in terms of thinking about a country’s overall performance, because it gives a clearer sense, potentially, of the equity of the school system, and the ability of the system to educate all students – or any students – to high levels.  It also demonstrates that there are clear differences in student performance between the top handful of countries and the rest of the countries rounding out the top ten or fifteen.

For fourth grade math, in order to reach the “low” benchmark, a student must be able to demonstrate “basic mathematical knowledge,” such as adding and subtracting integers and being able to recognize familiar shapes.  At the “advanced” benchmark, a student must have an understanding of how to apply their knowledge, for example, by solving word problems with multiple steps, and they must show some understanding of more difficult concepts like fractions and decimals.

In the case of TIMSS fourth grade math, the percent of students reaching the “advanced” benchmark does correlate to the country’s average scale score, at least for the top six performers.  This chart indicates very clearly how well the East Asian countries do compared to the rest of the world in instilling advanced-level math skills in their students, even at an early age, with about a third of students or more reaching the “advanced” benchmark in Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, and an overwhelming majority reaching either the “advanced” or “high” benchmarks in all cases.  These countries also have the smallest proportions of students who failed to meet the most basic level.  By contrast, starting with Northern Ireland, which is in sixth place in the overall league table in this subject, the other countries have higher proportions of students failing to reach at least the “intermediate” benchmark, and generally much lower proportions of students reaching the “advanced” benchmark.

In eighth grade math, students at the “low” benchmark “have some knowledge of whole numbers and decimals, operations, and basic graphs.”  At the “advanced” level, students are able to demonstrate many mathematical skills, such as solving linear equations, reasoning with geometric figures, and expressing generalizations algebraically.

The pattern in proficiency seen in the TIMSS fourth grade math results is continued in the TIMSS eighth grade math results.  Andreas Schleicher from the OECD and US Education Secretary Arne Duncan have commented on the drop in math and science skills from fourth grade to eighth grade in the United States, and the data bears this out.  In fourth grade, 47 percent of American students met either the “high” or “advanced” benchmarks; in eighth grade, just 30 percent of students did.  Furthermore, twice as many American students – 8 percent – failed to meet any benchmarks in eighth grade than in fourth grade.  In Singapore, however, the number of students meeting the “advanced” or “high” benchmark holds steady at 78 percent in both grades, and the other East Asian countries also do not lose any substantial ground.  Taiwan increases the number of students at the “advanced” level from 30 percent in fourth grade to about half (49 percent) in eighth grade.

In fourth grade science, students at the “low” benchmark “show some elementary knowledge of life, physical and earth sciences,” and “demonstrate knowledge of some simple facts … interpret simple diagrams, complete simple tables, and provide short written responses to questions requiring factual information.”  At the “advanced” benchmark, students can “apply knowledge and understanding of scientific processes … and show some knowledge of the process of scientific inquiry.”  Additionally, “they have a beginning ability to interpret results in the context of a simple experiment, reason and draw conclusions from descriptions and diagrams, and evaluate and support an argument.”

On the TIMSS fourth grade science assessment, the East Asian countries do not dominate in terms of student proficiency at the “advanced” benchmark as completely as they do in math, although perennial top performers South Korea and Singapore still top the list in this measure.  Fewer students overall, across the board, seem to have reached the “advanced” benchmark in science as compared to reading and math.  The United States seems to have a particular problem in this subject, with 19 percent of students either failing to meet any benchmark or only meeting the “low” benchmark.

At the eighth grade level in science, students meeting the “low” benchmark are expected to “recognize some basic facts from the life and physical sciences,” and can display this knowledge by “interpret[ing] simple diagrams, complet[ing] simple tables, and apply[ing] basic knowledge.  Students at the “advanced” level can “communicate an understanding of complex and abstract concepts in biology, chemistry, physics and earth sciences.”  They also “understand basic features of scientific investigation … [and] combine information from several sources to solve problems and draw conclusions, and … provide written explanations to communicate scientific knowledge.”

Like in fourth grade science, overall, there seem to be fewer students who reach the “advanced” benchmark across the board.  The United States sees a 5 percent decline in the number of students reaching the “advanced” benchmark from fourth to eighth grade, and a four percent decline in students reaching the “high” benchmark.  This is compounded by a large jump in the percent of students who either do not meet any benchmarks (7 percent compared to 4 percent) or meet only the “low” benchmark (20 percent compared to 15 percent) – more than a quarter of all US students, in fact.

A separate, but equally interesting, set of data from the 2011 PIRLS results is the level of proficiency of students in two types of reading – literary and informational – as compared to a country’s overall score.  Debates over the value of each type of reading as emphasized in a curriculum have been raging for some time now, and while the PIRLS data does not solve this debate, it does provide interesting new fodder to the discussion.

The chart above depicts the overall average reading score on PIRLS, which is administered to fourth grade students, for the top fifteen systems on that assessment, as well as the average score on the literary reading tasks and on the informational reading tasks.  The top performing countries (Hong Kong, the Russian Federation, Finland and Singapore) all have average informational reading scores that are higher than or equal to their overall reading score, with literary reading scores somewhat lower than or equal to both the overall score and the informational score.  By contrast, the United States, Northern Ireland, Denmark, Ireland, Canada and England all display the opposite trend – literary reading scores that are higher, often statistically significant, than either their informational reading scores or their overall scores.  There is also, in the case of the United States, Ireland and Northern Ireland, a statistical significance in the difference between the lower informational reading score and the overall score.

This suggests that informational reading may, in fact, help aid a student’s overall reading skills, at least as measured by the PIRLS assessment.  It is notable that several East Asian countries, including Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, all of which traditionally do very well in the math and science assessments, also have students who perform better on informational reading tasks than on literary reading tasks.  In the case of Hong Kong and Singapore, this results in a very high overall score.  In Taiwan, the informational reading score is extremely high compared to the literary reading score, and actually fairly comparable to Singapore’s informational reading score.  However, in this case the literary reading score of Taiwan’s students brings the overall score down, suggesting a need for balance.  In terms of balance, Finland seems to have gotten this just right; the informational, literary and overall scores are indistinguishable from one another, and are all very high.

The top 10 countries according to the indicators are:

1.    Finland
2.    South Korea
3.    Hong Kong
4.    Japan
5.    Singapore
6.    United Kingdom
7.    Netherlands
8.    New Zealand
9.    Switzerland
10.    Canada

Unlike other recent indices, China was not ranked, nor was the province of Shanghai.  Australia is ranked 13th, and the US is ranked 17th.  Also unlike other league tables, the United Kingdom ranks high.  This is surprising given their average performance on international tests of student performance.  The diagram below shows how the top ten countries in the EIU index overlap with the ten top performers in the OECD Program for International Student Assessment and the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) education indices of health and compulsory education and higher education and training.

The report, like the Early Childhood Education report recently released by the Economist Intelligence Unit (Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world), involved interviews with several experts in the field, including Chester Finn, Eric Hanushek, Lee Sing Kong, Andreas Schleicher and Ludger Woessmann.

The authors draw a few conclusions from their work – the central being that teacher quality and national culture surrounding education are two factors that do have a very big impact on the success of an education system.  They point out that the two top systems – Finland and South Korea – have extraordinarily different systems in many ways, particularly in regard to their approaches to testing and hours students spend studying (both in the classroom and out), but both countries put a lot of effort into creating a top-notch teaching force, and both countries consider education to be among the highest priorities.  This finding is consistent with Surpassing Shanghai, NCEE’s analysis of the common elements found in the top performing countries.  Surpassing Shanghai found a number of other reasons for strong student performance including aligned instructional systems, investment in early childhood education, and more.  To see those findings, click here.

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.

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.

Tony Mackay, Executive Director of the Centre for Strategic Education

This month, the International Advisory Board welcomed Tony Mackay as their newest member. Mackay is the Executive Director of the Centre for Strategic Education, Melbourne, Australia and Deputy Chair of Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). He also holds the title of Chair of the recently announced Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership; immediate Past President of the Australian Curriculum Studies Association; Board Director of the Australian Council for Educational Research; Board Member of the University of Melbourne, Graduate School of Education; and Australian College of Educators 2006 medallist.

On May 11, Jane Williams of Bloomberg Radio interviewed Dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University Mari Koerner, NCEE President Marc Tucker, and President of the AFT Randi Weingarten about improving teacher training and pay.  In a special report in this month’s Washington Monthly, editor in chief Paul Glastris talks with Tucker, Robert Schwartz of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Susan Traiman, former director of public policy at the Business Roundtable, about why CEOs’ interest and engagement in school reform has waned over the past decade. The Philadelphia Inquirer interviews Tucker about Surpassing Shanghai and teacher quality. In a recent op-ed in the Atlantic, Tucker argues that the problems with our nation’s healthcare system are very similar to the challenges facing our national education system.

Also in the Atlantic, Michael Fullan, professor emeritus at the Ontario Institutes for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto and member of the CIEB Advisory Board, explains what the United States can learn from Ontario about education. And on a spin on the same topic, in a guest blog post for the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet, Pasi Sahlberg, director general of Finland’s Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation and member of the CIEB Advisory Board, explains what the United States can’t learn from Finland about education.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sahlberg: I totally agree with what you said.

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

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

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

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

Stewart: Do you use student achievement at all?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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