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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An interview with Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at the Institute of Education, University of London, on his paper entitled Optimizing Talent: Closing Educational and Social Mobility Gap Worldwide, published last year at the Salzburg Global Seminar in Austria.

Marc Tucker:  In your paper, you start out making an argument that today’s children are more intelligent than their parents and their grandparents and you combine that with an argument that the quality of teaching in government-funded schools appears to be higher than that in private schools in most wealthy countries.  Can you tell us more about the research on both points?

Dylan Wiliam:  The first argument draws on the work of psychologist James Flynn (the Flynn effect), an American living and working in New Zealand.  He found that IQ tests need to be re-benchmarked every decade, because IQs are rising, about 3 to 4 points every ten years.  So IQ norms are rising, and people are getting smarter in ways we may not entirely realize.  The average would be around 110 or 115 if we didn’t adjust it.  It has risen 15 points since World War II.  This is occurring on some tests more than others; arithmetic scores have gone up very little while spatial scores and problem-solving scores are increasing substantially.  Maybe young people aren’t using their intelligence today as well as they could be but there is evidence that they are smarter.

Tucker:  Most American teachers think about intelligence in the way they were taught to – it is a function of the genes.  Is the gene pool changing, or do we have a different idea now about what these tests are measuring?

Wiliam:  Research in genetics shows that the nature vs. nurture debate is essentially an irrelevant question.  Interestingly, what you find in that debate is the estimate depends on the variation in environment.  It is an unstable question unless you can calibrate the differences in environment, which no one can do.  Secondly it is a question of epigenetics—the study of changes in gene activity that do not involve alterations to the genetic code but still get passed down to at least one successive generation.  What we are seeing is that certain genes get switched on or switched off depending on the experience we have.  For example, there is one gene that if you have two long forms, nothing happens but if you have two short forms the likelihood of getting depression increases in an abusive environment but the likelihood decreases in a healthy environment.  So what we understand now is that the nature vs. nurture debate is completely irrelevant because different environments switch on or switch off different genes.

The plasticity of IQ is much greater than was previous imagined.  There were some experiments with orphans from Romania and they had extraordinary cognitive deficits when they were in the orphanages, but rich environments helped them to catch up very quickly.  Supportive environments really do help make-up for a lot early on.

Environments vary quite a lot.  Many people are familiar with the Hart and Risley study, Meaningful Differences: An average three-year old from a professional-class family would have accumulated experience with almost 45 million words while an average three-year old from a welfare family would have accumulated experience with about 13 million words, resulting in a 30 million word gap.  A child from a working class house that is in the top ten percent of cognitive development will be overtaken by a child from a middle class house that is in the bottom ten percent of cognitive development by age six. So there are extraordinary differences in the environment that make any kind of speculation about genetics questionable.

I have a goal that we should magnify the impact of genetic effects on IQ because if we give all students a rich environment, then the only difference would be in genetics.  The important thing is that high quality environments do seem to make a big difference.  There are debates about things like Head Start—IQs go up while in the program and decline when they leave that environment, but if they learn to read while in the program, those skills are there for life.

There is the argument that what you do with the talents you have is more important than the actual talents you have.  Teaching kids about delayed gratification, persistence, how to apply themselves— these things are important and we are finding they can be learned.  My conclusion is that there is almost certainly a genetic component to IQ, but we can’t change it so we shouldn’t worry about it and it’s probably not that important.

Tucker:  Your second proposition is that when you take everything as equal, public schools do better than private. Can you explain that in more detail?

Wiliam:  The 2006 OECD data shows that in most countries, kids in private schools outperformed kids in state schools.  In some countries, the gaps are quite large.  But the most extraordinary thing was they had a lot of background about the educational background of the students and have complied an index of socioeconomic deprivation.  When you control for the socioeconomic status of the student and the schools, there is not a single country in PISA where kids in private schools outperform kids in public schools because you are removing group effects.  The effects of the private schools outcomes are peer effects.  So if you’re a parent and can afford to send your kid to a private school you probably should because the teacher may not be good but the peer group is.

Once you control for these things, school effects are small.  By the time kids are 8-years old, one year’s progress is about .4 of a standard deviation.  So the average achievement made by one student in a cohort is very small compared to the overall spread of achievement in a cohort.  The range of achievement within a cohort is ten times the average progress made by a cohort a year.

The consequence is that the differences between students are typically much larger than people imagine, and it’s hardly surprising that any differences in school effects gets swamped by this.  And the second thing is that teacher quality is one of the most important variables in the system, and if teachers are randomly distributed through the system, it diminishes school effects.  For all these reasons, school effects are quite small.  That explains why reform efforts based on changing the kinds of schools available to students are ineffective, because even if the schools are good, they are not making that much of an effect.  That is because teacher quality appears to be randomly distributed across the system.

Tucker:  In the United States, where teachers have more choice about where they teach than in other countries, what you see is teachers with more seniority and experience choosing the higher status and easier positions within a school, and teachers with better reputations preferring to teach in a school with more advantaged students.  So you would expect to see better teachers teaching in schools with more advantaged students – a systematic bias toward having good teachers in more advantaged schools and bad teachers in less advantaged schools.

Wiliam:  It might be true, but it might also be the other way around.  The fact is, those teachers with seniority may not be any better than the others.  Teachers with seniority may be able to migrate to easier to staff schools, but they aren’t likely to be any better – those decisions are made on things only weakly related to teacher quality, like experience.  So it doesn’t distort the system.

Tucker:  Your logic line begins by saying, in effect, that kids’ intelligence is steadily improving and we have every reason to believe that public schools are at least as good as private ones, so you ask, why are employers so unhappy?  And the answer is because the dynamics of the global economy are changing their requirements.

Wiliam:  People haven’t really understood how rapidly the world of work is changing, because it has happened incrementally.  In the 1980s, being able to type in bold on a word processer would increase a secretary’s salary by 25 percent, now, we expect 7-year olds to be able to do that.  What we see is an extraordinary increase in the types of skills that people are expected to have.  More jobs are being automated, so the number of jobs that can be done without basic literacy and numeracy skills has decreased.

People forget how much more skilled people are today then they were 25 or 30 years ago, let alone 50 years ago.  There is an extraordinary destruction of jobs by automation.  Before you were basically renting your physical strength to the employer.  A factory may still be the world’s largest manufacturer but it employs way less people.  What are left are the jobs that not easily automated or off-shored. There are quite a lot of manual jobs that will never be off-shored—Hairdressing and taxi driving will always be required locally.  Middle jobs such as appraising someone’s eligibility for a mortgage – that used to be a skilled job.  Now, computers can do that more reliably, cheaper and quicker.

Tucker:  I always use the example of sail making, it used to be a skilled job, but now there are algorithms that will calculate every single panel in a sail as well as the measurements of the entire sail and it will tell you the conditions you can use that sail and when it will break. And it will also cut and sew the sail automatically.  As long as the work is routine, it’s automatable.

Wiliam:  Routine cognitive jobs turned out to be easy to automate.  And they are often easier to automate than routine manual jobs because computers are simpler than robots.  Shelf stocking is still done by human beings because they can still do it cheaper than a robot.  In the auto industry, there is a woman who does a job for $25,000 a year, whereas a robot arm can do the job for $100,000 a year.  As soon as the robot arm is cheaper than the worker, she will no longer have a job.  This is the race between education and technology, as described by Claudia Goldin from Harvard.  The world of work is destroying jobs faster than we can up-skill.  We have been walking up the down escalator in the past and have been able to make progress but now the escalator is speeding up and we may fall behind.  We need to walk faster and improve our schools faster in order to progress.

America is wealthy enough to give everyone in the country a very high standard of living by redistributing the current wealth.  This will not happen.  If you are a teacher in school today you should be preparing your student for a world where the redistribution doesn’t take place as well as if it did take place—in other words, we have to prepare them for the world we will think will unfold as well as the one we hope will unfold.

Tucker:  At the end of your essay, you make the point that the job of schools used to be to identify talent and let it move to the top.  Now, schools have to be talent incubators or talent factories – we can’t just identify it, we have to create it.  What does that mean in terms of what schools look like?  How do educators have to redefine the task?  What does this change look like?

Wiliam: The talent refinery model held that some kids can learn, and others can’t, and you have to figure out the ones that you should invest time in.  In contrast, the talent factory model holds that every kid has to achieve at a high level.  And many people say that that’s an impossible goal.  I think more good things will happen if we assume that’s achievable than if we assume it isn’t achievable.  I’m not saying there aren’t differences between students – there are huge differences.  So we need a school that is designed to minimize the impact of those differences, rather than to maximize them.  Giving them more time, bringing them in for weekend tutoring – the idea that the school will do whatever it takes to make sure that every child has a reasonable shot at getting reasonable proficiency in the desired subjects.  In high school, we have that model already in athletics.  A high school football coach doesn’t just cancel the season if they only have six good players; they take the students they have and make them the best football players they can be.  We need to translate that into the academic equivalent.

Some highlights from the conversation follow:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathrin Hoeckel, Policy Analyst at the OECD

In May 2012, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its much-anticipated Skills Strategy, a major new initiative aimed at helping governments improve their economies through comprehensive skills policies.  Kathrin Hoeckel, a Policy Analyst at the OECD, worked closely on the strategy and its accompanying report, Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Lives: A Strategic Approach to Skills Policies.  Betsy Brown Ruzzi, Director of the Center on International Education Benchmarking, recently spoke with Hoeckel about the scope of the project, its implications for education and workforce issues, and next steps for countries interested in implementing the report’s recommendations.

Betsy Brown Ruzzi: There is a strong consensus around the world that investing in human capital is a major key to economic success.  The new OECD Skills report was designed to help countries committed to this goal.  Can you give us a brief summary of what the report recommends to policymakers around the world working on investing in their people?

Kathrin Hoeckel: The aim of the Skills Strategy report was to boost development in economic and social terms.  We approached this topic from a number of angles including education, labor and economics.  We examined the issue through three pillars.  First, how economies can develop the right skills, that is, how to ensure the education system produces good quality skills that are needed and makes them available to everyone.  Second, how economies can encourage people outside of the labor market, for example, women or older workers, to participate.  And lastly, how economies use the skills of their labor force, in other words, how they ensure that the jobs that people are in match their skills so there are not a lot of over-skilled or under-skilled people filling jobs.

Brown Ruzzi: Perhaps we can look at the first pillar more closely.  The report suggests that countries gather and use intelligence on the demand for skills.  Can you describe how countries can go about this today?  Are there any countries with particularly good systems for doing this?

Hoeckel: First, countries need to determine the demands of their labor markets. There are a number of countries that have developed sophisticated systems to assess these skills and extrapolate future needs.  Australia has a system to gather data on labor market needs, particularly job vacancies, as well as the Monash University system that is able to help project what the workforce needs will be in the future.  A number of countries, like the UK, work with user surveys from employers; the surveys provide information on recruiting and employers’ plans for the future.  However, OECD is cautious about relying too heavily on future projections of economic needs, because there are limitations to the usefulness of projections given unforeseen changes in the economy.

In addition to collecting data on labor market needs now and in the future, countries need to align the demand for skills and the education system.  Countries that have strong vocational education systems with strong participation from employers are more likely to quickly adapt and respond to the needs of the labor market.  These countries, for example, Germany, Switzerland and Australia, actively involve employers in educating and training their workforce and that leads to a better match between what employers need and the skills their workers have.

Brown Ruzzi: Our own research shows that some countries rely mostly on projections from employers with respect to their future skill requirements.  In those countries, demand will lead supply.  But others make policy decisions about what sort of economy they want for their country and base their projections at least in part on these decisions.  In these countries, supply will produce demand.  Can you name examples of countries that use these different approaches?  What combination of these approaches would you use?  Why?

Hoeckel: Shaping the demand is a major part of the skills strategy, because just having a match between skills and jobs might not be enough to drive an economy forward.  In a local labor market, if there are only low skilled employees doing low wage jobs, it will be impossible to raise the standard of living and the economy will stagnate.  There are a lot of context variables to take into consideration in order to move production up the value chain, such as industrial policy, innovation policy and the promotion of entrepreneurship.  A country that has made major progress on this front is South Korea.  South Korea’s economy was at the level of Ghana’s a few decades ago, but aggressive industrial and human capital policies allowed it to jump to the front of the line in the OECD.  They set ambitious goals regarding what they wanted the country to look like and what industries to invest in, and they provided the human capital to develop these industries to reach higher economic standards.  This required a comprehensive approach, including industrial policies and education policies that run parallel with labor market needs.  However, one thing to always keep in mind is that education policy always lags behind many other areas since it takes time to educate future workers to meet the needs of the new economy.

Brown Ruzzi: The report also recommends that countries design efficient and effective education and training systems.  What strategies should countries use to do this?

Hoeckel: Strategies depend on the country.  But in general, the education and training system should always be of a high quality that delivers not just qualifications but people with strong, comprehensive basic skills.  Another general rule is that you have to include employers in the entire process of building up and running an education system.  If the world of work and learning are too detached, then you won’t get good results.  It is also important to have an inclusive education system.  During the last decades, most countries have focused their attention on raising tertiary graduation rates, but these can distract from fundamentals including insuring a minimum education for all.  We see through our research that the largest problem that many countries face is helping the people with the most limited skills; they struggle in the labor market throughout their life unless they have basic skill levels.  If you look at the whole cross section of people, over a lifetime, it is very costly to educate everyone to a minimum level, but if you compare that to what a country must invest in the welfare system and other costs that might be required to support individuals if they do not have a minimum education, it looks like education is the better investment.

Brown Ruzzi: Raising the quality of education and promoting equity in educational opportunities is another recommendation in the report.  Singapore is a good example of a country that found out years ago that the bottom quartile of its students could not function at a level high enough to succeed in their vocational education system, and they redesigned their system so that they both raised the academic standards for their vocational education system and, at the same time, greatly raised the proportion of the students in the bottom quartile who could meet their standards.  Do you know of other countries that have done this?

Hoeckel: A number of countries have made major improvements here.  One concrete example is a non-OECD member, Brazil.  It is a country that has made large increases in enrollment at the lower levels of education but this also holds true for secondary and post-secondary education.  The trend today is looking at enrollment numbers and the targets you have for getting diplomas.  That is what they initially did in Brazil, but then they realized that while young people were graduating with qualifications, they did not necessarily have the right skills.  To combat this problem, Brazil greatly increased the number of highly qualified teachers, invested in the general infrastructure of their compulsory schools, and put in place financial incentives for poorer students to attend school.  But quality increases cost more.  Finland raised the standards of its least achieving students by adding an instructor to help these students as soon as they find out they are struggling.  It is a huge investment that pays off, as compared to making struggling students repeat a grade, which research shows does not work.

Brown Ruzzi: Another policy lever the report discusses is putting skills to effective use by increasing the demand for high-level skills.  This seems to be quite a task given the economic downturn in many parts of the world; however, it seems to be the real secret to economic success in the 21st century.  What did your report say about unlocking the secret of creating high value-added jobs?

Hoeckel: This is the key ingredient, but also the most difficult area to tackle.  For example, I just visited Spain, and they are struggling economically.  They have a fairly well educated workforce but not enough work.  But there are things countries can do to promote product innovation, innovations in work organization and workforce innovation.  In this arena employers and trade unions must be deeply involved.  For example, in the UK they have a number of incentive funds for innovation, encouraging employers to better use the skills of their staff.  In Northern Italy, private and public actors have invested jointly in a skills hub where local employers work closely with a polytechnic where their people are trained, where they do product research whose results are given back to employers to improve production, and where they provide free training to the unemployed.  This is a very local effort but in that local economy, it has led to moving production up the value chain.  A lot of bottom-up initiative is required, but government can help by providing incentives and an environment where innovation can flourish.

Figure 1.2: Source: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Lives: A Strategic Approach to Skills Policies, Page 23

Brown Ruzzi: Even in the economic downturn, companies across the globe report that they have a shortage of either technical workers or a shortage of workers with high-level math, science, technology or engineering skills, or both.  (See Figure 1.2 above)  What does the Skills report say about this issue to countries that want to help their employers match people with jobs?

Hoeckel: This is an interesting phenomenon—How can you have skills shortages at the same time as high unemployment?  One thing to keep in mind here is that employers always complain about not being able to find the right people with the right skills.  Often there are not really shortages, but the working conditions and pay may be so low that people just don’t want the jobs offered.  Others decide to stay at home if the pay is low and working conditions are bad, particularly if they have good government benefits.  There is always a group of employers with true shortages because of cyclical changes where the education system is not fast enough to provide people with the skills they need.  In Australia, for example, when mining boomed, they needed to recruit outside the country to fill the job vacancies.

If you want to solve this problem through the education system, there are some countries that have retrained older workers in the areas where they need people, for example in the care industry.  But obviously education is always a slow process.  Employers are faster than government in seeing these changes.  That is why we suggest that employers become part of the whole process in designing education systems, because they can be faster in terms of forecasting their skills needs.

Brown Ruzzi: As part of the report, you wrote about early findings from a new OECD survey that will measure the skills of adults in the labor force in member countries.  The survey is called PIACC and results from the first global application will be available in October 2013.  Can you tell us a little more about the early findings of the new PIACC survey that OECD has developed to directly measure skills of adults?

Hoeckel: The survey is about the working age population (ages 16-64) and is being carried out in most of the OECD member countries and in some non-OECD member countries.  It includes responses from 5,000 individuals and looks at foundational skills such as reading, writing, problem solving and math.  It looks at the level and distribution of these skills.  We already see at this early stage in the results that in some countries the share of people not even reaching the minimum level of skills needing to operate in today’s economy and society is quite high.  I am sure to some this will be a shock.

If you look at distribution by level of qualification, the current proxy for human capital, you can see that it is a poor measure.  For example, the level and distribution of skills of people with a tertiary degree in one country is very similar to those with an upper secondary qualification in anotherquality varies across countries.  As the report points out, people acquire skills through work and other experiences and can also lose those skills if they don’t use them.  And, the older you get, the more skills you lose.  But this curve doesn’t have the same slope in all countries.  This means we can do something about it.  The extent to which people use skills in the workplace has something to do with the steepness of this curve, and we can figure out what countries and companies are doing to maintain these skills.  Another thing that is going to be interesting as we get the results from PIACC is the extent to which skills match or don’t match the requirements of your job.  We have observed that the higher your skills and the better the match, the more you will earn and the more training you will receive.

Brown Ruzzi: How do you see countries using the results from the PIACC survey in their skills policy?

Hoeckel: We hope that some of the results will be so striking that countries will wake up.  The issue of low skilled workers is pretty clear:  if countries see that one- third of their adult population is not reaching the minimum skill level, they might do something about it such as investing in adult education, promoting life long learning, and working on preventing high school dropouts.  We need to understand that training someone at the beginning of their working life is not enough; constantly maintaining and extending training should be the goal.  Our message is not just to governments, but to employers and individuals alike.

Brown Ruzzi: The report argues that countries around the world need to create a national skills policy. How is OECD helping their members do this?

Hoeckel: The whole point of the skills strategy is not just to look at skills and education, but to have a strategic approach and look at everything as a system.  There are so many elements that mutually influence each other: whether you are well matched with your job has an impact on your further skills acquisition. These issues are usually handled in different parts of government.  We want to encourage countries to adopt a strategic view.  In the future, starting with the framework we have laid out in the report, we will work with individual countries, offering a menu of options.  As a first step, we will offer a basic assessment using the framework to look at a given countries strengths and weaknesses.  Next, the OECD can help bring all of the key stakeholders together to discuss these issues and come up with joint solutions.  Third, the OECD can help countries take their strategy to an action level.  Our contribution as outsiders is that we can take a step back, take a look at things and put the right people in contact.  Once we have the PIACC data, we will be able to provide even more in the way of contributions to these countries skills strategies.

Singapore skyline

In 2011, Singapore was ranked the best country in the world to do business by the World Bank and was also ranked first in the world in investment potential in the 2011 Business Environment Risk Intelligence report.  Singapore receives high marks from both the World Economic Forum (ranked second in global competitiveness) and INSEAD (ranked third in their global innovation index).  Working hard to be the center for commerce in Southeast Asia, Singapore’s business leaders understand that the education system must produce a workforce that can keep up with global demands to continue as a top performer economically and to continue to enjoy a rising standard of living for its citizens.

During a recent trip to Singapore, CIEB Director Betsy Brown Ruzzi along with NCEE President Marc Tucker and CIEB Advisory Board member Vivien Stewart, met with a group of business leaders from a variety of industries in Singapore.  Each are on the front lines of managing the recruitment, hiring, training and evaluation of the Singapore workforce in their particular industry.  All have had experience not just in Singapore, but in a number of other countries in Asia and around the world, building human capital systems for their companies.  They shared their thoughts about how Singapore’s education system affects hiring practices, what they have observed about how Singapore’s workforce compares to that of other countries, and how Singapore is innovating in order to remain globally competitive.

Among the companies participating in this business roundtable was a global organization that employs 127,000 people worldwide with 1,700 employees based in Singapore.  In that company, ninety-five percent of the Singaporean workforce is recruited directly out of university, with the company providing them with the training they will need to be promoted from within.  That company also told us that they maintain a global selection standard when vetting future employees.  Their employees are made up of sixty-one different nationalities in Singapore alone.  They told us that they are able to attract the best from around the world, because people are willing to move to Singapore.  Singapore, they said, “…has a good infrastructure for foreign workers and their families, with international schools and assistance with moving to and from the country”.  It helps a lot, they said, that Singapore is an English-speaking nation and provides all of the modern conveniences and amenities these employees might want.  They told us that they seek out people with intelligence, people skills and agility for their firm.

Another corporate leader we talked with from the services side of the economy employs a local workforce of 9,000 people, seventy percent of which are Singaporean.  She told us that the Singapore government prefers local hires and has imposed a quota on foreign hires.  This poses some problems for the company, because Singaporeans do not generally like shift work, and so they look to the Philippines and China for functions requiring this type of work.  She said that they are working very hard to figure out how to make service-industry work more attractive to Singapore’s job candidates.

Another business leader whose firm sources, develops and trains talent to match employer requirements in Singapore and across the world including Australia, Japan, Africa and the United States works with Fortune 500 companies who have offices in Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia.  He told us that many research and development groups have been moving to Asia in order to produce locally driven innovations.  Asian populations are growing, and they have different needs from Western populations.  There is fierce competition for international business between China, Singapore and Hong Kong.  Although international companies do not see Singapore as a big consumer market due to its fairly small population, the talent it can offer makes it a big draw.  The competition between Hong Kong, China and Singapore is based on business leadership, legal infrastructure and the ecosystem of suppliers.  Right now, he said, Singapore is ahead in all of these respects.  Even the mining industry is considering establishing a base in Singapore, because they need access to the banking system and to the kind of talent Singapore can provide.  Singapore can be used as a hub for that industry, with buyers and sellers based there and refiners nearby.  He added, “Singapore is also attractive because of the language abilities of its population.  Many customers are from places like Indonesia.  Singaporeans are more likely to speak their languages than people in Hong Kong or Shanghai, for example.”

A representative from the finance industry, whose global firm has its South East Asian headquarters in Singapore, said that its workforce is very mobile – employees often move around the world over the course of their careers.  When recruiting employees, they target students from the Ivy League as well as top universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore.  Their priority is to keep their employees for the long term, and to that end, they have a talent reassignment program to help employees remain employed during economic downturns.  In this particular company, many of its employees are from the United States and the United Kingdom who want to work in Singapore because of the strong market, compared to the economy in their home countries.  However, at the same time, she told us that her company is trying to decrease costs and has realized that they can hire local talent for the jobs traditionally reserved for expatriates, without having to spend money on the benefits expatriates require.  Singapore, she said, also has advantageous tax policies for corporations; corporations are taxed at a rate of 17 percent, as compared to 32 percent in China.

One member of the group mentioned that consumption and growth is stabilizing in markets like Western Europe and North America, while Latin America, China, India and Vietnam all have large populations and growing consumer bases.  Those different markets require different innovations due to culture and resource availability.  In his company they want to create an environment where the business can grow with local talent, and particularly people with high skills and the ability to meet future needs.  Singapore, he said, is in a unique position, competing with Hong Kong and Shanghai as an emerging East Asian business hub, as compared to places like Seoul and Tokyo, which have reached a plateau.  The Singaporean government has thought ahead to attract international business by providing excellent infrastructure.  He sees Singapore as a well-oiled machine, particularly in the realms of finance and commodities.  He told us that it is the number one country for bright people who have the ability to think ahead, plan and orchestrate development, and it is unique in Asia.  While not perfect, Singapore is much more advanced in these respects than anywhere else.  His company is moving one of its largest manufacturing units to Singapore to base the business close to the fast-growing Asian market.

“The talent in Singapore is as good as in any other market that we work in,” said another business leader.  “While workers in Korea tend to be good with analytics, employees in Singapore are good at operating with discipline, rigor, depth and follow-through.  Recent university graduates are top-notch, and creativity has really picked up in the last ten years.  However, the younger generation is missing drive, which is really present among workers in China.  This seems to become a problem as any economy strengthens.  The biggest employment challenge in Singapore, though, is volume.  Singapore is a small country with a workforce of only about four million people and 40,000 new graduates a year.  There is also competition from foreign workers, since a lot of companies bring in employees from other countries.”  Comparing Singapore’s workers to those of other countries, he classified them as, “having strong power of mind — intellectual capacity — and strong collaborative skills, with slightly weaker agility and leadership skills.  In Japan, China and Hong Kong, power of mind is very high, and in Korea, agility is very high.  In the United States, intellectual power is ok, but agility and leadership skills are very high.”

The service industry representative talked to us about the local talent in Singapore as “…having strong project management and multi-tasking skills.  They work hard; people in Japan, China and Korea may work longer hours than Singaporeans, but can be less productive.  Their weakness is in their aversion to doing shift work, and their high expectations for what they should be doing can be an issue.  They tend to expect immediate promotions, and are less willing to take on less challenging positions or to do administrative work, but this is an issue with all high growth, developed economies.”

In our discussion about the Singapore education system’s contribution to the Singapore economy, one member of the group said, “The streaming system in Singapore’s schools can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The students who are considered the best and the brightest get a disproportionally high investment from educators, and generally are groomed to go into government.  Due to the high levels of early investment in their education, these students are some of the best in the world.  But we see a big drop when we begin to look at the middling and lower-level students, who are the ones who go into middle and lower management jobs.  The system would be better off investing in traits like risk-taking and creativity.”

Another company told us that they hire a small number of graduates from Singapore’s polytechnics.  These hires have good qualifications, although that company generally prefers university graduates.  He mentioned that some polytechnic students use that experience as a steppingstone to university, and after graduation are often hired for management positions.  One of the other company representatives at our meeting said that her company hires a large number of employees from polytechnics, and gives them 18 months of training after graduation.  The government, she said, has recently been working to raise the status of polytechnics by promoting them as a good route to universities and careers.

As we finished up our meeting, one business leader summed the conversation up by saying, “Singapore will continue to reinvent itself.  Over time, it hopes to become a headquarters hub for international business and for research and development centers, and it will continue on the path to becoming a leisure and entertainment destination.  It is easy to attract people to work in Singapore, and though entrepreneurialism is weak, creativity among workers is on the rise and will continue to grow.”  “Singapore is branding itself as an education hub now, too,” said another member of the group.  “Asians from other countries are choosing Singapore for their studies, and there are numerous agreements and institutions in place to facilitate this development.  In terms of creativity, the government has been making strides in this arena, and opened up the entertainment, art and culture scenes to attract creative types.”

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.

Vivien Stewart, Senior Advisor for Education at Asia Society, a member of the Center on International Education Benchmarking Advisory Board, and author of A World-Class Education: Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation, spoke with Top of the Class about her latest trips to Singapore and Shanghai, both educational top-performers. While in Singapore and Shanghai, Stewart had the opportunity to visit schools and universities and meet with ministry officials in order to discuss how these systems are tackling challenges such as educational equity and how they plan to continue innovating and evolving to meet the exponential pace of change in the world.  Stewart shares what she learned with Top of the Class.

Top of the Class: Can you broadly outline which of the central features of Singapore’s education system you think have driven their excellent performance?

Stewart: Singapore is clearly a major global success story, having transformed itself from third-world to first-world status in fifty years. I was struck by a number of political and educational policies and practices that have driven the development of this high-performing education system, but let me just mention three.

First, Singapore leaders across the board share a palpable consensus about the centrality of human resources to economic development and the building of a multi-cultural nation.  Recognizing that human resources are their only natural resources, there is an urgent focus on human capital development and education is Singapore’s “core business.”

The strong link between its education and economic development goals is achieved through close communication between the Economic Development Board, the Manpower Ministry, and the Ministry of Education, and by rotation of ministers between departments.  This linkage has made investment in education a central priority, has led to the development of high-quality math and science education and world-class technical education, and has kept education dynamic and open to change rather than being tied to the past.

Second, teacher and principal quality is extremely high. In order to attract the best possible people into teaching, Singapore aligns initial salaries to those of other college graduates like engineers and lawyers, has a high-quality teacher preparation program, has established a set of career paths for teachers and uses a variety of bully pulpits to promote recognition of the value of teaching to the nation. The career paths are rooted in significant professional development and premised on performance as measured by serious multi-faceted evaluations. Highly accomplished teachers can earn as much as a principal. Singapore has also created a system for developing the pipeline of school leaders through early identification and nurturing of talent.

Third, every critical element of the system – from curriculum to assessment, teacher training, financing, student support, and staffing of the Ministry are aligned around the twin goals of excellence and equity.

Top of the Class: As you mentioned, Singapore is now a world leader in technical education for students at the secondary level.  How did they build such a strong vocational system, and how does it function now?

Stewart: In the 1960s and 70s, Singapore’s vocational and technical training programs were focused on quickly providing basic skills to workers who were faced with entering an entirely new and different labor market. Although the government’s priority in education in the 1960s was to expand primary and secondary education, Singapore’s first vocational institute was created in 1964.  At that time, only about 15 percent of students opted for vocational or technical education as opposed to mainstream academic education, as it was not seen as a desirable option. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Singapore created several new vocational institutes as well as an Industrial Training Board (ITB). The ITB became a locus for central oversight, allowing the entire vocational education system to become both centralized and formalized. Singapore also partnered with several multinational corporations in the 1970s to create “Joint Government Training Centres” to directly provide skilled workers to the industries that most needed them. In the 1980s, economic restructuring dictated a change in vocational education, and the Singapore government established a Continuing Education and Training program to re-train and re-skill much of the workforce to meet changing economic needs.

In the early 1990s, the Singapore Economic Development Board decided that in order to attract new kinds of industry to Singapore, they needed a highly skilled workforce specific to these desired fields.  At the same time, they needed to rehabilitate the poor image of vocational and technical education in order to make it an attractive option.  In order to do so, they organized the Institute for Technical Education (ITE) and developed a workforce qualification system, completely revamping the previous vocational/technical curriculum.  They developed courses in new industries and consolidated existing technical colleges into three mega-campuses with physical and technological facilities comparable to the best universities.  All three campuses of ITE offer business, information and communication technology (ICT), and engineering but each campus also has special programs and the west campus, that I visited this time, has a school of hospitality to serve the burgeoning luxury tourism industry.  Every course has close ties to industry including the most modern multinational corporations. This keeps the courses up-to-date, the equipment modern, and internships readily available.  To combat prejudice against less academically inclined students, the ITE carried out a major marketing campaign for its “hands-on, minds-on, hearts-on” type of learning.

Twenty-five percent of students in grades 10-14 are now in the ITE after their ten years of general education.   It is designed to serve the bottom quarter of students in terms of school achievement.  Whereas in the United States, the bottom 25 percent of students drop out of high school, in Singapore, 90 percent of the bottom 25 percent of students graduate from ITE and get jobs and Singapore has the lowest youth unemployment rate in the region.  The ITE has helped Singapore to adapt rapidly to the very open global economy and it now runs internal training programs for companies as well.

Top of the Class: Singapore’s education system was built with an eye always on Singapore’s place in the global economy.  As the economy continues to grow and evolve, what does Singapore plan for the education system going forward?

Stewart: Singapore has built a strong  “academic knowledge transmission” type of education system, characterized by high standards and considerable social mobility. But as Singapore seeks to move from manufacturing to becoming a leader in the global knowledge economy, the challenge is to make its education more student–centered and oriented towards a more holistic range of 21st century outcomes and values, including self-direction, critical thinking, active citizenship and global awareness.

To produce these “future-ready” Singaporeans, the education system is broadening its curriculum to include more emphasis on arts and physical education and on integrating inquiry methods and ICT into schools. The system is also developing a portfolio of schools, each with its own character, and encouraging schools to become centers of innovation.  For example, it has replaced its past centrally directed inspectorate system with a school excellence/self-improvement model based on European experience and on the Malcolm Baldrige awards. At the higher education level, Singapore is both expanding graduate level training in critical fields such as biomedical sciences, information technology and chemical engineering and introducing liberal arts into its undergraduate programs.

Top of the Class: What challenges lie ahead for Singapore?

Stewart: Singapore certainly has its challenges.  For example, a side effect of examination pressure (derived from the importance that the Singapore system places on exam performance) is massive tutoring outside of schools and a level of streaming that many Americans would not agree with.  The examination system maintains high standards but is also a constraint on innovation.  And while Singapore has significantly closed its achievement gaps and focused on bringing up the lowest achievers, there is still a correlation between socio-economic status and achievement (although far less than in many other countries).  But Singapore educators are not resting on their past achievements.  Singapore is now revamping its curriculum, teacher training and assessments to encourage the development of the kind of high-skilled, creative knowledge workers they believe are needed for the 21st century.

Top of the Class: How did your visit to Shanghai compare to your visit to Singapore?

Stewart: Singapore is a relatively small system and you are able to connect to each of the parts of a very well-managed system in a short period of time, but the scale of Shanghai, a city of 22 million people, makes that impossible.  Discussions during this most recent visit to Shanghai focused primarily on their approach to turning around low-performing schools, the teaching profession in China, and how Chinese education is changing to meet the demands of a global knowledge economy.

Top of the Class: Can you give us a brief overview of how Shanghai’s education system has changed in the last 30 years?

Stewart: Shanghai has had forty years of educational expansion and improvement.  In the 1970s and 1980s, the focus was on expanding access rapidly to basic education  (Don’t forget that schools had been closed during the Cultural Revolution).  Then in the 1990s, the focus shifted to quality.  A major curriculum reform effort, piloted in Shanghai and then spread around the country, broadened the curriculum beyond its traditional focus on math and science to include more arts, humanities and languages, and initiated the move towards more active forms of pedagogy.  A major emphasis was also placed on upgrading the quality of teachers and trying to reduce examination pressure.  Shanghai abolished its end-of-primary school examinations and moved to a system of choice among neighborhood schools.  Efforts to close the gap between low- and high-performing schools also began in this period. Since 2000, there has also been a big expansion of higher education opportunities in Shanghai and in 2006, Shanghai began administering the PISA assessment to all 15-year-olds as part of its efforts to encourage a more applied and problem-solving kind of learning.

Top of the Class: Shanghai is at the forefront of addressing educational equity issues in cities in China, a country where educational quality is highly variable.  How are they addressing low-performing schools, particularly given that such a large number of students in Shanghai are the children of migrant workers?

Stewart: Recognizing the huge socio-economic differences in Shanghai, in part due to this enormous migration to the city from rural areas, Shanghai has focused in recent years on improving lower-performing schools.  The essential strategy is to get principals and teachers from high-performing schools working with weaker schools on management, school culture and teaching quality.  This can take a variety of forms.  A principal of a successful school can be asked to manage several schools, not just one.  Schools in a geographic area may be formed into clusters to share teaching resources and best practices.  Under the “empowered management” policy, a high-performing school, including entities outside the Shanghai public system, can receive funds from the Education Commission to improve the management and teaching in a low-performing school.  Teachers from the lower-performing school may spend time observing in the higher-performing school and principals and lead teachers from the high-performing school will spend time each week in the weaker school.  These administrators are granted two-year contracts for approximately $500,000; these are awarded initially by the Commission and may be extended if performance improves.  So far, Shanghai has had three, two-year rounds of such “empowered administration,” involving about 60 weaker schools.  If a school does not improve after this intensive support, the Commission can close or restructure it.

Top of the Class: What do you find interesting about the teaching profession in Shanghai?

Stewart: Teaching is traditionally a respected profession in China but since Shanghai is the major commercial center of China, there is great competition for educated talent.  So to attract high-quality people into teaching, the Education Commission has raised salaries and academic requirements for entering teachers and provides early admission to universities for people who want to teach. Once in schools, there is a career ladder of beginning, middle and senior lead teachers. Shanghai follows the Chinese tradition of apprenticeship in which the schools’ master teachers mentor, observe and meet weekly with newer teachers. All teachers have several open classrooms each year so that other teachers can observe and learn from them. Shanghai also follows the Chinese tradition of teacher research; there is a teaching and research panel of 900 members throughout the city, where senior teachers work on improvement of practice and through which innovations can be disseminated across the system.

Top of the Class: Where does Shanghai go from here?

Stewart: First, let me discuss where China is going overall.  China has a 2020 National Education Plan, which was drafted with online input from millions of people. The Plan aims to make upper secondary education universal; to reduce the gap between richer urban and poorer rural areas and between top and weaker schools; to reduce examination pressure by diversifying the university entrance examination; and to expand higher education enrollment to 40 percent of an age cohort.  It seems possible that in a few years, China might be graduating a higher proportion of a high school cohort than many other countries and, of course, the numbers are immensely larger. Shanghai, which is the leading city in China for education, has its own 2020 plan within this framework, with a   major emphasis on making higher education widely accessible. The Education Commission, which is responsible for higher education as well as elementary and secondary, is therefore focused on the challenges of financing and of faculty recruitment.

Top of the Class: What did you learn on this trip about China’s education challenges?

Stewart: Despite its impressive educational developments, China faces huge challenges as it tries to turn its enormous population from a burden into an asset.  The gap between the poorer rural areas and the increasingly affluent cities is a significant cause of political unrest and the massive migration to the cities poses serious challenges to city school systems. (Not all cities have attempted to integrate migrant students into city schools as Shanghai has). Very large class sizes also make less didactic teaching practices more difficult to achieve.   The national university entrance examination (the “bad master”) is another obstacle, and this university-developed examination is at odds with the goals of curriculum reform to promote creativity and critical thinking.  The government is trying to reduce the influence of the exam by allowing provinces to develop their own and to experiment with allowing some students to enter university by alternate routes.  But the belief in examinations as the guarantor of meritocracy is very strong and this examination cult means that high schools are very exam-focused and that students, while working hard, are spending a great deal of time with tutors on preparation and memorization for exams.  Finally, as the system expands at breakneck speed, there are problems with capacity at every level, from the shortage of English teachers to the lack of well-trained faculty for the new universities.

Top of the Class: Taking into account your many visits to Singapore and Shanghai, what do you think are the highest priority lessons for other nations trying to improve their education systems?

Stewart:  We have to recognize that education policies always need to be adapted to suit different cultural, political and economic contexts, but high-performing countries around the world, which differ significantly on these dimensions, do seem to have some common success factors.

First, the Singapore government has built a highly successful education system by creating a policy infrastructure that drives performance-through high standards, early intervention, and aligned curriculum, instruction, and assessment-and by building the capacity of educators to deliver high-quality education in every school.  While the small size and tightly coupled nature of the education system may make it less relevant to larger countries, Singapore is the size of many small countries, smaller states or provinces in larger countries, and some larger cities, so its practices could be examined through that lens.  These systems could ask themselves in what form they could develop their own version of the long-term vision and leadership that has driven Singapore to the top.

There is a balance in every system between top-down policies and local school autonomy. When systems have weak or highly uneven performance, more centralized policies may be needed to raise standards and reduce inequities, but when systems have higher performance levels and strong capacity at the school level, greater autonomy for school innovation becomes the norm combined with mechanisms for diffusing innovation across schools.

Second, Singapore has built one of the world’s best human resource development systems. Given the centrality of teaching and school leadership to the quality of any education system, a key question for systems wanting to improve is how can different levels of government work together to raise the image, quality, professional training and effectiveness of the teaching profession and of school leadership?

Third, Singapore has leveraged the connection between education and economic development to create jobs, raise education and skill levels and drive per capita GDP to first world levels. And in today’s world, when many jobs can move anywhere there is an internet connection, developing stronger connections between education and economic development, closing the gap between the skills needed for high-wage jobs and the output of the education system, and reimagining technical education for the 21st century as Singapore has done would also seem to be essential to future prosperity.

Shanghai also demonstrates the importance of a serious, long-term vision for education.  And both Singapore and Shanghai have used international benchmarking as a tool for continuous improvement, sending not just policymakers but also principals and teachers to study international best practices   A key question for any country is how can its policies encourage uniformly high standards, commitment to equity, alignment and coherence while also encouraging flexibility for innovation and continuous learning rather than mere adherence to the letter of the law?

Singapore and Shanghai are two strong examples of commitment to large-scale educational improvement in both the short- and long-term, and countries looking to improve various aspects of their own education systems, from vocational and technical training to issues of equity and access, can draw some strong lessons from these two cases.

School Profile: Zhabei No. 8 Middle School, Shanghai

By Vivien Stewart

The Zhabei district of Shanghai is a lower income area with poor educational performance. In 1994, Liu Jinghai became the principal of Zhabei District School No 8, a school that had been among the poorest performing in the district but has now leaped to the head of the pack. Mr. Liu applied a strategy that he called ‘success’ education that he had developed through many years as a researcher.  His approach is based on the observation that low-performing students have no confidence in their ability to succeed, a situation made worse by the examination pressures in schools in China. In addition, teachers in these schools lack belief in their ability to be successful with such students.  His strategy is to offer students a wide range of curricula and extra-curricular activities so that they can find a talent and a passion to increase their confidence; to systematically raise the quality of teaching; and to regularly connect to parents.  This success education program has transformed the school, greatly improving its ranking in the district and increasing the number of secondary school graduates who go on to higher education to 80 percent. The school has subsequently helped to turn around ten other low-performing schools in Shanghai.

I had an opportunity to observe a music class and a math class and to have a discussion with Principal Liu and several teachers and students.  The classes I observed had very well-organized lessons with clear objectives and a variety of classroom activities. Students were intensely focused, with no time wasted, and other teachers were observing the lesson.  Believing that effective teachers have a very clear idea of what they want to teach and how and that all people learn through imitation, the school tries to make the hidden characteristics of good teaching visible to others. The emphasis is on helping younger teachers to develop strong fundamentals of good teaching practice. Once they have mastered the discipline of good lessons, then they can innovate.   New teachers arrive in schools knowing educational theory but not how to deal with the individual needs of students, what points of a lesson to emphasize and how to effectively convey the most difficult concepts.  Each teacher has a mentor teacher who observes classes, helps with the lesson and checks that every student in the class is engaged.   All teachers of a particular subject are part of a teachers’ study group and work together on lesson plans and cross-observe each other’s lessons.

Since 2005, Zhabei School has worked with ten other “weak” or “rural” schools under Shanghai’s “empowered administration” policy.  Under this policy, the successful school receives funds from the Shanghai Education Commission to improve the weaker schools. Believing that the fundamental problem in these schools is that administrators believe their teachers are weak while the teachers believe their students are weak, Zhabei applies its ‘success for all” methods of finding and encouraging students’ different talents and self-confidence and working with teachers to increase the effectiveness of their instruction.  Teachers come to Zhabei Middle School to shadow effective teachers and Zhabei teachers and the principal go to the low-performing school to improve school management, culture and instruction.  Zhabei has also created an E-Learning platform to enable the school to support teachers at a distance. Principal Liu reported that all ten of the schools showed improvement in the first year.

School Profile: Tampines Elementary School, Singapore

By Vivien Stewart

This school is in a working class neighborhood and is the first community school in Singapore, integrated into the community and open to the community after hours. It is one of a portfolio of different types of schools, each with its own character, that Singapore is trying to create. Its mission is that its pupils should be “enriched beyond limits, and loved beyond measure.” The goals of the school-excellence, self-directed learners, physical and aesthetic excellence and creativity-are expressions of the 21st century competencies that Singapore schools are trying to inculcate.  The school employs holistic assessment across seven domains-cognitive, aesthetic, physical, creative, technological, socio-emotional, moral-mental, and leadership. A lot of emphasis was placed on the support of teams of effective teachers and on the need to engage the hearts of learners before engaging their minds.  A black box theatre donated by the community, for example, allowed the use of drama to encourage self-confident speaking in both English and Chinese.

New Book: Nancy Hoffman, Schooling in the Workplace: How Six of the World’s Best Vocational Education Systems Prepare Young People for Jobs and Life. Harvard Education Press, Nov. 2011

On the shelf with literature on education there is a wealth of books and articles on higher education issues but little on the possibilities for the large group of young people who do not opt for an academic education.  This seems out of balance considering the growing rate of the challenges faced by the latter group as they transition from school into meaningful employment and careers.  The present knowledge based economy places new and much larger demands on our workforce regarding skills, competences, and attitudes. This deepens the gap between the world of school and the world of work, and if we include the impact of the present economic crisis the result is a chilling increase in unemployed youth and school dropouts.

Fortunately, in recent years a growing number of articles and books on this “forgotten” group have been published. Multilateral organizations like the OECD and the European Commission have conducted a lot of recent research and policy initiatives such as setting ambitious multilateral targets. This has been followed up by national targets to reduce school drop-out rates and increase completion rates, but a lot still remains to be done.

Nancy Hoffman’s new book is extremely refreshing in this context. Hoffman combines her life experience working to increase the number of low-income and at-risk young people that finish education with her very recent participation in OECD-reviews of VET (Vocational Education and Training) systems among member states. She states that the book is “written out of a desire to provoke discussion in the United States about features of strong vocational education systems.” Another important quality of the book is that it contains an abundance of facts, issues and lessons for educators, policy makers, business leaders and politicians all over the world.

Hoffman profiles six very different countries in the book: Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands. However, experience from other countries is included in the analysis too. Instead of tedious presentations of the different countries’ systems the book is organized around anticipated questions “that thoughtful and knowledgeable U.S. readers have about vocational education in Europe and Australia” such as: How can countries ensure that VET is broad based and not preparation for a narrow trade? How can countries incentivize firms to engage them in educating young people? What kinds of intermediary organizations do the strongest VET systems employ to liaise between young people, employers, schools, and the state? What kind of pedagogy is relevant in the workplace? How do countries serve struggling young people and those at risk of dropping out of school and being excluded from the labor market? And is there a risk that early tracking results in the replication of social class structures?

By carefully defining fundamental concepts, Hoffman avoids misunderstandings due to different usages of the terms, i.e., What is the difference between certificates, certifications, and licenses? And what is the difference between work-based learning and workplace learning? In my opinion this is crucial in order to communicate features of fundamentally different systems across borders. In addition, Hoffman includes two “Journal Essays” as chapters in the book. One is her own reflections on visits to Swiss companies and their training programs for apprentices; a chapter giving the reader a sense of the young people’s views, aspirations, and experiences. The other essay presents observations and reflections on the German dual system by Harvard professor Robert B. Schwartz.

Hoffmann is by no means arguing for specific solutions in the U.S. case. She has a very clear view of the dissimilarities, flaws and shortcomings of the different systems in play. She offers critiques for the well functioning systems and a clear outline of the different solutions addressing the same national and global challenges. Her attitude is not “they’re good, we’re failing, or vice versa”. Rather, she has one very consistent argument – here cited with one of her many striking statements and in concordance with OECD conclusions – namely that “workplace learning “has compelling attractions” both for young people and for employers; indeed, done well, it appears to be the best way for the majority of young people to prepare for the world of work.”

One of the important contributions of the book is the focus on the upper secondary completion agenda and the national targets for graduation. One of Hoffmann’s conclusions is that in the VET countries, the goal is not to get young people to complete upper secondary school, but rather the higher ambition of engaging them in learning for jobs. Apprenticeships and workplace learning can offer possibilities that schools cannot provide. This important message deserves to be considered by policy makers worldwide.

The final chapter looks at the possibilities for the United States. Hoffman presents a number of promising initiatives and policy developments and offers some reflections on what it would take to improve the designs of the high school and community college programs.

In closing, I enthusiastically endorse Hoffman’s final suggestion to the reader: “Buy a plane ticket to one of the strong VET countries, talk to employers, see young people at work, and decide for yourself whether the system performs as described here.”  Before you travel, I whole-heartedly recommend that you read this book.