Education Equity

The issue of educational equity is one that is important to policymakers in all top-performing nations, but the situation in China is unique.  Shanghai has one of the best education systems in the world, but it is an anomaly in a country that is also characterized by a sprawling rural populace without many of the benefits of Shanghai’s system.  As recently as a few years ago in China, not all children had access to nine years of compulsory education, though that changed at the end of 2011.  China’s government has been working to redress this gap, and an article at China.org quotes Chinese Education Minister Yuan Guiren as saying that “[China has] made a lot of progress in improving fairness in education in recent years … My dream is to ensure that we can … provide education for all people without discrimination and cultivate every person in this nation to become a talent.”  A great deal of their policy and financial focus has been directed towards poor, minority, female and rural students over the past five years.

Despite Shanghai’s great strengths in education, policymakers and educators are concerned there, too, with a different equity issue.  Unlike in the rest of China, where female students may have less access to education than male students, in Shanghai, female students are outperforming male students fairly significantly.  In 2008, girls made up more than 60 percent of the top scorers on the gaokao, China’s university entrance examination, up from about 34 percent in 1999.  As a response to this dramatic shift in performance, The Japan Times reports that some Shanghai schools have created classes for boys only, hoping learning in a single-gender environment will help to boost male students’ confidence and improve their performance.

In China’s Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, there is concern over the equity of the education provided to students from ethnic minorities.  In that region, almost all schools are required to teach all of their classes in Cantonese; this requirement has been in place since 1997.  The New York Times reports that this policy has been detrimental to students who do not speak Cantonese fluently.  As a response, the government has opened “designated schools” in which classes are taught in English and the student body is 95 percent ethnic minority.  However, many feel that the students attending these schools are at a disadvantage due to their separation (both physically and linguistically) from mainstream society.

Education Funding

Following the release of the Review of Funding for Schooling (better known as the “Gonski Report”) in Australia last year, both the federal government and the states have been working to reach agreement on what school funding will look like going forward.  The report proposed a uniform system of funding schools across Australia, with a base funding amount augmented by a school-specific “loading” to address economic, cognitive and physical disadvantages among the student body.  However, the premier of the state of Victoria has rejected this plan, preferring instead to propose his own system.  The Age has the full story.  Other states, too, have rejected the Gonski proposals.  In Queensland, the Education Minister has announced that they will be developing their own funding plan, while Tasmania has emerged as the first state with a Labor government (the same party that is in power in the federal government) to reject the government’s plans.

Nearby in New Zealand, a recently released study from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research found that, according to a survey of the country’s principals, secondary schools are often struggling financially.  Principals reported budgetary deficits, with a majority stating that their finances were worse in 2012 than they were the previous year.  However, the Ministry of Education rejected the report’s findings, with a staffer contending, “schools are adequately funded to deliver the curriculum so that all students are able to learn and achieve.”  Read more at the Otago Times.

China, meanwhile, has been working to increase funding for schooling as part of their overarching strategy to improve the system and create both greater equity and improved student performance.  An article on Xinhuanet reports that China has been increasing education spending since 2009, with an investment totaling nearly US$5 billion over the past four years.  Four percent of GDP is about the same, proportionally, as what the OECD countries spend on average on education each year; top performing systems such as Australia, Finland and the Netherlands also spend about 4% of their GDP on education. 4-Traders reports that the government plans to increase education spending by 9.3% in 2013 and to focus on educating rural students.

Student Pressure

Most of the top-performing East Asian education systems are known for the the extensive hours students spend studying outside of class, often to prepare for university entrance exams.  The Japan Times reports that students in that country are attending cram schools, or juku, earlier than ever before.  Whereas in the past students began attending juku in their teenage years, now it is becoming increasingly common among elementary and even preschool students.  However, there does seem to be a degree of ambivalence on the part of parents: while many feel that they should not have to pay for private tutoring in addition to regular schooling, they often turn to juku in order to ensure that their children are not falling behind their peers.

In China, by contrast, aware that immense pressure on students is often not conducive to a student’s health, many provinces are making strides in changing the culture of “cram.”  Beijing, in particular, is leading the pack in developing policies focused on reducing student stress in an education system where tests are a central element of schooling.   The Global Times reports that after March 19, primary schools in that city will face limitations on testing and homework, and secondary schools will be prohibited from ranking students based on exam scores.  However, the article also reports that parents are not necessarily on board with these changes.  One parent pointed out that as long as the gaokao, China’s university entrance exam, dominates a student’s academic prospects, the system is unlikely to change. The Shanghai Daily has also recently covered the tension between the government efforts to relax education in the primary grades and parents’ concerns about their children’s futures, while Xinhuanet reports that China will be launching a national campaign to ease stress and move towards more comprehensive evaluations of student performance.

Teacher Quality

Both Australia and the Netherlands have produced new policy plans for improving the quality of their teaching forces in the past month.  In the Netherlands, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science released Working in Education 2012, a policy document that calls for turning schools into professional organizations where teachers would have access to attractive career paths.  The government’s recommendations for improving teacher quality, to be introduced by 2016, include developing a competency document for each teacher that describes their skills and the activities designed to maintain and improve them, implementing a peer review system for teachers, and introducing performance-related pay pilots.

In Australia, both the state and federal governments are concerned with the issue of teacher quality.  In New South Wales, the Education Minister has announced that there will be a new minimum entry standard for teacher education programs.  The Australian reports that teacher candidates would need scores of at least 80 percent in three subjects on the high school leaving exams, including in English.  Another component of the new quality measures is an introduction of a literacy and numeracy test that teacher candidates must pass while they are completing their degree.  The federal government has also announced plans to require literacy and numeracy tests and an assessment interview for students entering teaching programs.  The Education Minister of New South Wales has stated that his state’s plan does not conflict with the federal plan, but would hold teacher candidates to a higher standard than the federal plan.

Early Childhood Education

In Singapore and Shanghai, the government and parents are increasingly focused on early childhood education (ECE).  Singapore plans to spend more than US$2.4 billion on preschool education in the next five years, which doubles their current investment, writes Channel News Asia.  In Shanghai, parents are so eager to enroll their students in early childhood programs that some have begun signing their children up for these programs on the day they are born.  According to the Global Times, however, this demand for preschool has created a boom in the private ECE sector.  This has led to concerns about the quality of the teaching staff and the programs offered, and calls for improved government oversight.

Earlier this month, the Center for International Education Benchmarking introduced a new feature on its web site.  The Study Guide is intended to provide readers with a weekly summary of headlines from the top-performing education systems in the world.  This month’s International Reads highlights some of the most important current issues in the news.

Teachers.  In Japan, changes to teachers’ retirement packages have caused many teachers to think about retiring early before the changes go into effect.  Japan education officials are struggling to figure out a work-around to ensure that students are not left without a teacher for the remainder of the school year, according to The Mainichi.  A Valentine’s Day strike was held by educators in Victoria, Australia in protest of the pay package offered by the state—a modest 2.5 percent a year plus performance-based pay.  The Australian Education Union is demanding a 12 percent raise over three years with no performance-based pay.  But on the issue of improving the quality of the pool entering teaching, the teacher’s union and the government are on the same side—recently, Education Union federal president Angelo Gavrielatos issued a statement supporting the government’s initiative to raise the quality of students entering the teaching profession.  In Ontario, newly elected Education Minister Liz Sandals is facing teacher dissatisfaction.  Last fall, legislation was passed banning teacher strikes in the province.  In January, the new law was used to impose a contract on public secondary school teachers.  In response, teacher unions have asked their members to refrain from supervising extracurricular activities, which they see as outside their regular duties.  Sandals said her first order of business is to ensure that new teacher contracts are the result of negotiation, not legislation.

Early Childhood Education.  In Japan, government officials are considering offering free pre-school to children ages 3-5, in an effort to ease the financial burden on families, according to Inside Japan.  This proposal comes at the same time that President Obama called for free pre-school for all 4-year-olds at or below 200 percent of the poverty line in the United States during his State of the Union address.  Parents in Hong Kong are focused on another concern — that kindergartens are emphasizing grades and tests too much.  In response, they are leading a movement to shift to kindergartens that emphasize learning through play, according to the South China Morning Post.  And in New Zealand, the Pasifika Education Plan 2013-17 aims to lift Pasifika participation in early childhood education from its current rate of 86.8 percent to 98 percent by 2016, according to Radio New Zealand International.

Post-secondary Education.  A February 3rd editorial in the Japan Times calls for major changes in the country’s university entrance exam system, arguing that the current assessments measure knowledge acquired rather than deeper comprehension, aptitude and potential.  Meanwhile, researchers at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIE) say educational inequality is getting worse, despite the increased number of publicly funded university places.  A recent HKIE study found that students from wealthy families are nearly four times more likely to enroll in a university than those living in poverty.  That’s a much wider gap than 20 years ago.  The Netherlands is looking to the liberal arts model to solve some of their higher education challenges related to a lack of differentiation and excellence.  Inside Higher Ed reports liberal art schools (known there as university colleges), “have had an outsized impact on Dutch higher education policies and practices, inspiring the growing movement toward selective admissions and the development of ‘excellence’ programs within a famously egalitarian higher education system.”

Choice and Charters.  The Education Amendment Bill, introduced last year in New Zealand, would create legal recognition of charter schools there.  However, the Treasury has found evidence that school systems using strongly competitive elements do not produce systematically better student outcomes and other critics are arguing that charter schools will take public money but be free from government scrutiny.  While charter schools are not prevalent in Canada, school competition does exist in the form of four separate publicly funded systems catering to the English and French non-religious and Catholic constituencies of Ontario.  With birth rates in that province on the decline, schools are struggling to keep enrollment levels high. But the schools don’t just compete for students in name only: recently, schools have taken to touting their extracurricular programs in advertisements in local media and attending other schools’ open houses in order to gain an edge.  For more on this story, see the article in The Globe and Mail.

International Benchmarking.  And finally, Shanghai is looking forward to the December publication of the 2012 PISA results to show the world that, once again, they are on top of the international education league tables.  According to Shanghai education officials interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald, “tests recently conducted for the next PISA report…will show Shanghai students have further improved their results and consolidated their lead in the world.”  In the same article, Deputy Director of the OECD Education Division Andreas Schleicher says, “Maybe it’s time to change some of our stereotypes.  What you see today in the school system in Shanghai is what you are going to see in the labour market tomorrow.”  Learn more about the results from the most recent TIMMS and PIRLS international assessments by clicking here.

Check back to our web site on a weekly basis for more education news from the top-performing education systems in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The OECD’s A Skills Beyond School Review series is currently also being conducted in Austria, Egypt, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, England and the United States with case studies of Florida, Maryland, and Washington state.  Each review follows a standard methodology with the selected country preparing a background report and the OECD team making two visits to the country to discuss important issues with a number of stakeholders.  In addition to this work, the OECD is preparing a range of analytical studies on issues such as access and career guidance and counseling.  The complete body of work will conclude with a comparative report offering key policy messages for all OECD countries expected to be issued at the end of 2012.

In Denmark, postsecondary VET education takes the form of two different programs ⎯ academy profession (AP) degree programs and professional bachelor degree programs.  AP programs are short-cycle higher education programs that typically take about two-years to complete.  Admission is based on qualifications comparable to a Danish high school leaving certificate.  The AP program provides students with analytical and professional skills relevant for employment in businesses or industries.  The program also qualifies graduates for further studies within the same field at the university level.  Along with class work, a minimum three-month work placement and the submission of a project paper are required for graduation.  Most programs are offered at academies of professional higher education, which are independent organizations, separate from universities.  However current legislation outlines that prior to 2015, each academy should decide if they want to remain independent, in which case they will then have to transfer their bachelor programs to a higher education institution or merge with a higher education institution.  As of 2009, almost 19,000 students were registered in AP programs, which is a substantial increase from 2000 when nearly 13,000 students were enrolled.

Professional bachelor programs in Denmark require three to four and half years of study and are equivalent to a university bachelor degree with a stronger focus on professional practice.  The majority of the program takes place at a higher education institution and prepares students with theoretical knowledge and an understanding of how to apply theory to professional practice.  Along with all required coursework, a minimum six-month work placement and the submission of a project paper are required for graduation.  Admission to these programs is based on student performance on high school leaving examinations and other factors such as minimum grades.

A Skills Beyond School Review of Denmark identifies a number of strengths for this country’s postsecondary VET system including the mandatory, well-structured workplace training that outlines clear learning goals.  They also note Denmark’s effective policies to incentivize institutions to help students stay in school through graduation such as the school funding system, which funds institutions according to program completion numbers.  Additional laws are in place to encourage students to stay in school, for example, education institutions are required to refer students that wish to dropout to regional guidance centers and municipalities are legally required to make contact with and offer guidance to young people that are unemployed and not enrolled in school at least twice a year up until age 19.  Another impressive element of Denmark’s VET system is a parallel adult education system.  Over 40 percent of adults participate in formal and/or non-formal education each year and can expect to receive 1,794 hours of instruction during their working life, which is one of the highest levels across the OECD.  Lastly the OECD points out that both the employers and the employees are very engaged in planning, designing and steering the VET system.

In South Korea, postsecondary VET accounts for 30 percent of higher education enrollment and is provided by both junior colleges and polytechnics.  The junior colleges enroll over 50 times more students than polytechnics.  However their admission processes are not very selective and some institutions can struggle to fill their rosters.  Ninety-five percent of junior colleges are private, and government funding accounts for less than 10 percent of total junior college income.  Completion of these programs typically takes two years although three-year and four-year degrees are offered in a number of fields such as engineering.  While the difference in wages between junior college and high school graduates has been decreasing over the past 30 years, there is still a benefit in terms of employment.  The polytechnic schools, on the other hand, are public and access is more selective.  These schools typically offer one- and two-year degrees in technical fields such as electronics, mechanical engineering or telecommunications.  In addition, polytechnics offer shorter programs for employed and unemployed individuals as well as retired military serviceman.  A strength of South Korea’s VET system is the ease with which students can apply credits from VET programs toward a university degree.  Currently about half of junior college graduates continue in the university program.  This can present challenges as the vocational programs and university programs do not align their programs of study, so many junior college graduates are unprepared for the university-level work.

A Skills Beyond School Review of Korea finds a skills mismatch between VET options and labor market needs.  The reviewers make a number of suggestions on this front: convene a national body of key stakeholder groups, including businesses, to lead the development and regular updating of standards and qualifications based on the skill demands in the South Korean economy and make recommendations to ensure students are trained in these important areas.  The reviewers also suggest making transparent standards for VET programs through the development of common, national standards and assessments.  Another recommendation is to improve quality assurance in junior colleges by basing funding allocations and accreditation status on the quality of the training provided.  Lastly, the reviewers suggest that South Korea work to improve career information available to prospective students and that junior colleges make workplace training mandatory.  It is important to note that most of the OECD’s recommendations are focused on the junior colleges, which unlike the polytechnics do not have a strong link to workforce priorities.  The point of building a national framework for VET is crucial so all programs meet the same standards and the value of the each qualification or degree is clear to prospective employers as well as students.

In both of these country reports, workplace training is stressed as a key part of students’ vocational education experiences; not only does it benefit students but it can also serve to substantially enhance relationships between VET providers and employers.  Other key elements of high-performing systems seem to be the high status of these programs and the flexibility for VET students to apply what they have learned and move on to university qualifications.  The quality of the teaching staff is also not to be overlooked.  High quality vocational education and training requires instructors with solid pedagogical skills as well as expertise in the field they are teaching.  This means teachers must have professional development opportunities available within the system.

The Credibility and Value of International Education and Training Qualifications

The European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP), the European Union’s reference centre for vocational education and training, released a new report on International Qualifications in June 2012.  The report looks at a variety of education and training qualifications, diplomas, certificates and licenses that are awarded outside the jurisdiction of any one country.  The authors try to develop a typology for these qualifications and analyze their credibility and value in the labor market.  The qualifications they consider are as diverse as: a certificate for seafarers, the Association of Montessori International primary certificate, Cisco certifications and airplane pilot licenses.  Their typology includes five categories for describing each: purpose (what the qualification is for); type (how complete and how durable the qualification is); coverage (where the qualification can be used); competent body (who awards the qualification); and currency value (what the qualification can be exchanged into).  They look at the case of Welding in more detail where cooperation among different bodies has yielded defacto international standards, driven by the need for safety and quality in this occupation.  The report suggests that while national qualifications are becoming easier to evaluate for quality because of the development of national qualifications frameworks, international qualifications are becoming harder to value because of the lack of any international organizing structure and the new need to align them with national frameworks.  The authors believe that international qualifications will only maintain relevance with the transparency that comes from an overall system for cataloguing and monitoring the quality of these qualifications.

Many countries, of course, have fully elaborated systems of occupational skills standards.  Some have systems less robust and some, like the United States, still have no national occupational skill standards framework.  Those that do have been working to find ways to develop cross walks among their standards systems to make it possible for people certified in one system to have their skills recognized in others.  As the global economy continues to globalize, the pressures to rationalize these systems will increase.   As the pace of technological change increases and work organization changes as a consequence, it will be more and more challenging to make sure that skill standards systems lead and do not follow these changes.

How the Netherlands Successfully Support Child Well-Being 

In July 2012, Every Child Counts published The Netherlands Study: Learning from the Netherlands to improve outcomes for New Zealand’s children.  Every Child Counts is a collaboration of New Zealand-based nonprofits as well as UNICEF and Save the Children that was organized in 2004 as a watchdog for children’s advocacy in the country.  Rowe Davies Research, a New Zealand firm, prepared the report.

The authors were asked to analyze the policies in the Netherlands that contribute to its high levels of child well-being at relatively lower costs than many other OECD nations that achieve similarly high levels of child well-being.  The report notes that the programs in the Netherlands for children are more systemic and widespread than in New Zealand and that New Zealand is currently spending half of what the Netherlands spends on children overall, according to OECD numbers.

The report attributes the Netherlands success to nation-wide programs of support for parents and young children, including a targeted health service for all children from 0-19 delivered by local health centers that ensures preventative care and health education for all youth and also has a significant on-line support aspect; a broad system of free pre- and post-natal care for mothers that includes assistance with basic household chores that relate to the health of the mother and baby; a dramatic increase in childcare since the 2005 Dutch Childcare Act with parents, government and employers splitting the costs overall and subsidies available for lower-income parents; generous housing support for low-income parents with one in three Dutch citizens receiving some housing support; a means-tested childcare allowance and a mandatory 16-week paid parental leave policy; and a youth care agency in each locality to coordinate all youth services and provide a single point of contact.

Based on the lessons from the Netherlands, the report recommends that New Zealand consider the following investments:

• Expand parent support and education programs;
• Expand child care services;
• Develop services to deal with post-natal depression;
• Expand care before and afterschool for children whose parents work;
• Increase parental leave to 18 weeks and widen the eligibility to parents with less stable work histories; and
•   Increase the availability and quality of state funded housing for low-income parents, and add programming to housing to increase social mobility.

They also suggest some longer-term strategies:

• Adapting child digital files so that they can be used to store health information;
• Adopting national indicators of child wellbeing and monitoring new policies by how well they move the country towards these indicators; and
• Continuing dialogue with the Netherlands, as the two countries share many characteristics and are likely to learn from one another.

The report cautions that, in the face of global economic woes, the Netherlands is considering austerity measures that threaten to dismantle some elements of the system just described.  It also points to some of the ways that the Netherlands family and child services could be improved that echo issues in many other countries and systems: increasing professional development for family and child workers, encouraging more collaboration among agencies, better integrating funding streams.  The challenge will be to see how the Netherlands continues to develop and prioritizes investments in children in more difficult economic times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OECD Education Working Papers. (2012), “Immigrant Status and Secondary School Performance as Determinants of Post-Secondary Participation: A Comparison of Canada and Switzerland.”

The authors of an OECD paper on Immigrant Status and Secondary School Performance as Determinants of Post-Secondary Participation set out to find out what accounts for the difference in education attainment among immigrants in these two countries.

Up to 50 percent of the participation gap between immigrant students in Canada and Switzerland can be accounted for by immigration policies in those countries.  Canada has what the OECD calls a “highly managed” immigration system.  This form of managed immigration is designed to attract highly skilled and educated immigrants, many from Asian countries.  Because these immigrants are highly educated, they have high aspirations for their children’s education and they can provide their children with an environment that is very conducive to high student achievement.

Switzerland’s immigration system is a different story.  Prior to the early 2000s, people immigrating to Switzerland tended to be lower-skilled workers from developing countries.  Although this has changed somewhat in the last decade due to the European Union’s free movement of labor (with an increasing number of highly skilled immigrants arriving from places like France and Germany), it means that Canada and Switzerland have very different immigrant populations, particularly with regard to socioeconomic status and education backgrounds.

But what accounts for the other 50 percent of the difference in attainment?  Another major contribution is the design of the education system itself.  Our own benchmarking tells us that Swiss students are tracked at a very early age, starting at the sixth or seventh grade, into roughly three steams: an upper school track with demanding courses targeted at university attendance, an intermediate track and a third track offering very basic courses.  Only three percent of students from the basic track enter post-secondary education by age 23 compared to 30 percent of those in the upper track.  Students with a migrant background are overrepresented in the lower tracks, which impacts their later opportunities.  After compulsory education, students move to upper-secondary school, which is also very heavily segmented and affects students’ opportunities to attend university.  Canadian immigrant students attend comprehensive high schools where tracking is largely avoided, and immigrants who need to learn English are provided with early opportunities to learn the native language at all levels of the system.

So not only do Swiss migrant children tend to come from lower-income, lower skilled and less educated families, but those children are shunted early on into ability tracks where expectations for their performance are lower and they are given a less challenging curriculum.  It is hardly surprising that they do not do as well as the average Swiss youngster and do not progress as far with their formal education.

Canadian immigrant children, on the other hand, tend to come from well-educated, higher income families with above average expectations for their children and more cultural resources to offer them as they are growing up.  These kids are in classrooms where the expectations for all children are high and the curriculum is challenging.  Given all this, and the presence in the midst of a large proportion of children from Asian families in which the drive for school achievement and the willingness to work very hard in school is especially high, it is not surprising that the children of Canadian immigrant families do even better than the average Canadian student.  You can think of this analysis as a four-cell matrix, one dimension of which is immigration policy and the other dimension of which is school structure.  The high attainment cell is the one marked “Immigration policy favors high skill immigrants/education policy favors high expectations for all students and provides support for all students to achieve at high levels.”

One last thing of note about the design of the Swiss education system compared to the Canadian system:  the Swiss streaming system makes it possible for students to leave education at the end of secondary school and have fairly favorable job market prospects.  In Canada, this is not the case.  Students generally need some postsecondary education in order to acquire skills that will serve them well in the workforce.  So this last item also contributes to the lower participation rate in post-secondary education in Switzerland.

Attainment, of course, is not everything.  Switzerland has one of the world’s most successful vocational and technical education systems, and that system is the one that recruits from the students in the lower streams.  So, as always, it is most important for a country to think carefully about what it wants from its education system.  But, whatever a country’s goals are, this report raises questions for other countries about both immigration policy and school structure that are very important.

OECD. (June 2012), “Are Large Cities Educational Assets or Liabilities?”
Inner-city school students perform differently depending on the country context.  In most OECD member countries, students in large urban areas (defined as cities with over one million inhabitants) outperform students in rural areas by the equivalent of more than one year of education, according the latest PISA in Focus.  In fact, students in urban areas in countries such as Portugal and Israel, countries that typically perform around the OECD average, perform on par with students in Singapore.  And students in Poland’s big cities compare favorably with students in Hong Kong.

However in Belgium, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the performance of students in large urban areas drags down overall country scores.
The OECD suggests this might be because students in these countries do not have the advantages associated with students living in large urban centers in other countries.  Instead, students living in cities in these countries must deal with high poverty, language barriers, or lack of a two-parent support system.

The study goes on to say that countries succeeding in educating their urban students to high levels should be focused on educating non-urban students to the same high standards.  Countries whose urban students underperform should use big cities’ advantages such as a richer cultural environment and more attractive professional workplaces to recruit better quality teachers.  They should also determine how students can tap into other advantages such as increased school choice and a wider variety of job prospects.

New report from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research

New Zealand Council for Educational Research. (June 2012). “Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching  a New Zealand perspective.”
Education systems must be built around the learner instead of the learner being required to fit into the system, according to a new report commissioned by the New Zealand Ministry of Education.  Supporting future-oriented learning and teacher  a New Zealand perspective, prepared by researchers at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, identifies six emerging principles for future learning as well as describing how these principles are currently expressed in New Zealand educational thinking and practice.

The report challenges educators to use current resources for learning (time, teachers, technology, etc.) and new resources to customize students’ learning experiences.  The report recognizes diversity as a strength for a future-oriented learning system, something to be actively fostered.  In order to cultivate 21st century skills, citizens need to be educated to understand diversity and possess the ability to work with people from various cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds as well the ability to think between, outside, and beyond past paradigms.  Thirdly, the Council emphasizes a shift from student learning focused on acquiring knowledge to student learning focused on developing capabilities to work with knowledge.  The authors write, “From this point of view, disciplinary knowledge should be seen, not as an end in itself, but as a context within which students’ learning capacity can be developed.”  A fourth key principle identified in the report is rethinking the traditional roles or “scripts” followed by learners and teachers.  If the goal of schooling is no longer to just transmit knowledge, then educators must be cognizant of how their roles should be re-envisioned to best support every learner’s potential. The report prioritizes a culture of continuous learning for teachers and educational leaders and an education system that is designed to incorporate what is known about adult learning and cognitive development.  Lastly, the report authors recommend building a wider school community that takes advantage of new kinds of partnerships and relationships.  Students must not only learn from their teachers but from other people, with specific kinds of expertise, knowledge or access to learning opportunities that exist in real-world context.

Ben Jensen, School Education Program Director for Australia’s Grattan Institute

Jensen, Ben. “Pupil power: time to ditch teacher bonuses and focus on student learning,” The Conversation, May 17 2012.
Ben Jensen, School Education Program Director for Australia’s Grattan Institute, author of the recent Catching up: learning from the best school systems in East Asia, and recent CIEB interviewee, recently published an opinion piece in The Conversation about teacher bonuses.  Jensen argues that teacher bonuses are the wrong way forward in education reform.  Jensen contends that because teacher bonuses are so often dependent on student test scores, and test scores are only a partial and often unreliable measure of teachers’ work, bonuses are not based on what truly identifies an effective teacher.  In addition, Jensen contents that newer and more data-driven measures of teacher effectiveness like those currently being promoted by policymakers in the United States such as value-added measures are also problematic, because they do not identify the “practices that most increase student learning”.  To that end, the Grattan Institute produced a report in 2011 outlining how teacher appraisal could be approached.  They recommend using at least four of the following methods, all of which provide feedback on student learning, to assess how well a teacher is performing: peer observation and collaboration; 360-degree assessment; parent surveys; student performance and assessments; direct observation of classroom teaching and learning; student surveys; external observation; and self-assessment.  It is not just teacher evaluations that focus too much on the teacher and not enough on student learning, Jensen argues.  Teacher education, professional development, and debates around teaching career structures are all guilty of the same misdirected attention.  In his article, Jensen note that, “in most examples of teacher bonus reforms around the world, the impact on students has been negligible, and in some cases the negative impact on teachers has negatively affected school improvements.”  He goes on to say that, “Singapore is the only high-performing country that still uses a teacher bonus scheme, but the bonuses are a single component of what has been broader school reform.”

Learning Beyond Fifteen: Ten Years After PISA finds that the largest gains in reading achievement typically occur during compulsory education. But the study shows that many adolescents who leave high school with relatively low reading comprehension greatly improve their reading ability and some of these students can close the gap altogether.

The study examines reading gains of Canadian youth between the ages of 15 and 24.  The report uses data that Canada collected from the PISA assessment of 15-year- olds (PISA-15) in 2000, the first time the test was administered.  The test was given to 30,000 students across all ten Canadian provinces.  In 2009, when the original PISA-15 students were 24 years old, a subset of the cohort took the PISA exam again (PISA-24).

The report also takes into account information from Canada’s Youth in Transition Survey (YITS), developed to analyze education and labor-market outcomes of Canadian youth.  The survey collected data from the PISA-15 respondents and their parents at the time they took their initial PISA test at age 15.  Every two years thereafter, the survey also collected information from students about their education and employment experiences, their life choices, and their attitudes.  In 2009, when the surveyed students were 24 years old, a subset of the cohort completed a PISA reassessment.

Overall, there was a clear improvement in reading performance among all the students that were reassessed for the Learning Beyond Fifteen study, with the average reading score increasing 57 points from 2000 to 2009, which is equivalent to the difference in average proficiency scores for 15-year-olds in Canada and their counterparts in countries like Croatia, Israel, and Austria.  To put it in another context, the learning gains were equal to roughly one school year in Canada.  In 2000, 21.4 percent of Canadian 15-year-olds scored below proficiency Level 3 on the PISA scale, which indicates an ability to locate multiple pieces of information, make links between different parts of text, and relate it to familiar everyday knowledge.  By 2009, 7 percent of the test takers still scored below proficiency Level 3.

OECD (2012). Learning Beyond Fifteen: Ten Years After PISA

Examining the reading proficiency gains by demographic characteristics, Learning Beyond Fifteen finds that by age 24, women continue to outperform men by a slightly smaller margin than they did when they were 15 years old.  In almost all participating OECD countries, girls outperform boys in reading by a large margin.  The participating Canadian women achieved an average increase of 50 points in reading performance during the nine-year period, while males achieved an average increase of 63 points.  Similar to many other subgroups, the poorer-performing groups acquired reading skills at a quicker pace than the better-performing groups, but were still not able to close the achievement gap entirely.

This was the case when examining reading gains by family socio-economic background.  The evidence suggests that students from disadvantaged homes continue to have lower scores at age 24 than their more advantaged peers (by a difference of 50 percentage points).  A similar pattern was found for Canadian French speakers versus English speakers and rural students versus urban students, with French speakers and rural students narrowing but not completely closing the achievement gap by the time they were age 24.

What was quite interesting in this report is that twenty-four-year-olds with an immigrant background fully bridged the gap in reading performance.  These students scored an average of 524 points in PISA-15 while those born in Canada averaged 545 points.  In PISA-24, all students, regardless of their birthplace, averaged around 600 points.  Students born outside of Canada improved 77 score points from the time they were 15 years old until they were 24 years old, an improvement equivalent to more than one proficiency level on the PISA reading scale.  The authors point out that these results demonstrate that the appropriate integration policies can help to reduce, if not eliminate, differences in student performance, at least for immigrants in Canada.

OECD (2012). Learning Beyond Fifteen: Ten Years After PISA

The report finds, not surprisingly, that participation in some form of post-secondary education is consistently and substantially related to growth in reading skills between ages 15 and 24.  For example, students with a university degree at age 24 had an average score of 652 points in PISA-24, while those students with only a high school education at age 24 had an average score of 564 points, almost 100 points lower than college graduates.  When those same college graduates took the test at age 15, they had averaged 596 points on PISA, a score still substantially above the scores attained nine years later by those students that had not obtained any formal education beyond high school.

Students who spent four or more years in a higher education institute between ages 15 and 24 but did not complete a degree, still showed improvements in skills that were similar to or greater than (70 points or more) those skills observed among young people who did complete a college degree.

On the other hand, students that were poor performers at age 15 and entered the labor market soon after compulsory education tended to continue to be poor-performers at age 24 with their general rate of improvement being relatively modest.

This report also took a look at the factors that relate to improvements in reading skills when students were 15 to age 24.  From childhood to age 15, the report study finds that the strongest influences on reading proficiency are parents and the home environment along with the quality of teachers and the classroom-learning environment.  When students are older, the degree of control they feel over their life is strongly related to improvements in reading.   Independence and the capacity to make individual life choices is generally related to larger improvements in reading performance, particularly if it is coupled with participation in post-secondary education.

Young people who had the advantage of a supportive learning environment up until age 15 showed relatively slower learning improvements as they made their transition to independence.  On the other hand, those students that did not succeed in their school, made greater improvements if they experienced a life change, for example changing the status of their relationship (from single to married) or moving out of their parents’ home.

Other Reports of Note
Education Week Quality Counts 2012. “Canada Musters Resources to Serve Diverse Student Needs.”
This article, part of Education Week’s special 2012 Quality Counts edition focused on “The Global Challenge for Education,” examines Canada’s commitment to equality in its public schools, and particularly the provinces’ ability to provide a high quality education for their most at-risk students by managing school funding at the provincial, rather than the local, level.  Although Canada has a higher immigrant population and a higher proportion of students living in poverty than many other OECD countries, they have been able to integrate these students into mainstream classrooms while still giving them targeted support both in the classroom and out, with some districts even providing subsidized health services like vision and hearing screenings.  In addition to the article, Education Week has made a video, produced for the Quality Counts release event, as well as audio from the live event.

OECD. (May 2012). “Does performance-based pay improve teaching?”
Performance-based pay for teachers is a hot topic in many countries.  So this month’s PISA in Focus will be of interest to many of our readers.  The authors explain that,  “A look at the overall picture tells us that there is no relationship between average student performance in a country and the use of performance-based pay schemes.”  But in countries with comparatively low teacher salaries (less than 15 percent above GDP per capita), student performance tends to be better when performance-based pay systems are in place, while in countries where teachers are relatively well paid (more than 15 percent above average GDP per capita), the opposite is true.  So for countries that do not have the resources to pay all of their teachers well, it is worth having a look at the experience of those countries that have introduced performance-based pay schemes.  This finding, of course, is consistent with our own finding in Surpassing Shanghai that relatively poor countries just starting out on the economic development curve that cannot afford to pay their teachers developed world salaries will tend to use Tayloristic management schemes because their teachers will not have the professional skills required to succeed in a professional work environment.  Conversely, the same Tayloristic management methods won’t work when a country is employing highly educated and trained teachers.  Put another way, blue-collar work organization is appropriate for relatively low-skilled teachers and for use in the early stages of economic development, but professional norms of work organization are needed as a country moves up the economic development ladder and begins to employ highly educated and trained teachers.  Only the latter are likely to produce world-class high quality, high equity education systems.

International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Attainment. (2012). “Policy, Practice and Readiness to Teach Primary and Secondary Mathematics in 17 Countries: Findings from the IEA Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M).”
Using findings from the 2008 Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M), this report examines country-level policies related to the preparation of future mathematics teachers, how these policies impact the participating countries’ teacher education programs and instructional practices, and the implications of these polices and practices for student learning. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Attainment (IEA) published initial results from the TEDS-M study in 2009. The participating countries include Botswana, Canada (four provinces), Chile, Taiwan, Georgia, Germany, Malaysia, Norway, Oman (lower-secondary teacher education only), the Philippines, Poland, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Spain (primary teacher education only), Switzerland (German-speaking cantons), Thailand, and the United States.  According to Policy, Practice and Readiness to Teach Primary and Secondary Mathematics in 17 Countries, the countries that best prepare math teachers have implemented a number of common practices including rigorous math instruction for all high school students, including potential teachers; teacher-preparation programs that are highly selective and demanding; and an attractive profession with excellent pay, benefits and job security.  According to this study, Taiwan and Singapore top the list of the countries that do the best job of preparing math teachers and Russia also scored highly.  Poland, Switzerland and Germany did well but this is partially explained by their reliance on specialist teachers in the lower-grades.  The United States generally finished below this group but above other countries that scored below the international average.

OECD Education Working Papers. (May 2012). “School Funding Formulas: Review of Main Characteristics and Impacts.”
This working paper provides a literature review on school funding formulas across OECD countries.  It examines what kinds of school formula funding schemes exist and how they are used, in particular, for promoting the needs of socially disadvantaged pupils and how school formula funding systems perform according to equity and efficiency standards.  The paper discusses the difficulties of striking the right balance in school funding formulas between more or less weight given to local differences.  For example, when funding formulas give more consideration to the local costs of education and other local specificities, this can lead to more convoluted and obscure formula designs.  The authors also focus on the challenges of measuring how much it costs to educate students with a given background to a pre-defined standard and ensuring school autonomy while making sure funding is spent on what it was intended for.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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