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

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

Figure 1

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

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

Figure 2

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

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

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.

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.”

A World-Class Education: Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation (ASCD, 2012)

Vivien Stewart is a mistress of deception.  In A World-Class Education: Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation, she distills a lifetime of astute observation into a slim volume so skillfully written—so easy to read—that the reader is hardly aware of the subtlety of the analysis it contains.  Commissioned by ASCD, an American association of educators, it compares the achievements of a selection of top-performing countries with their American counterparts.  But the book should be no less interesting to educators in other countries seeking to improve their performance, wherever they stand on the international league tables, whatever their position in their country’s education system.

Full disclosure:  Stewart is an old friend and colleague, a member of the Board of Trustees of the organization I head and a member, too, of the International Advisory Board of our Center on International Education Benchmarking, sponsor of Tucker’s Lens.

Books of this sort written by educators and educational researchers tend to focus almost exclusively on education policy and practice narrowly conceived.  But Stewart has done development work in Africa, served with the United Nations and witnessed first hand the rise of Asia over the last couple of decades.  She is very perceptive about education policy and practice, but she has a wider perspective.

Perhaps because that is so, this reader had a sense of history while reading this book that I have not encountered from other books of the same sort.  Stewart paints a picture of profound change—of the sort seen only once in a century, if that—in the education systems of countries all over the globe as they respond to the equally fundamental changes in the global economy.  We see how China, with an education system totally devastated by Mao Tse-Tung, its schools and universities closed, its educators fired and sent to do manual labor in the countryside, determines to telescope a development process that usually takes forty or fifty years, to do whatever it will take to become a front-rank education power on the global stage—and succeeds!  We see how Singapore, on a small island with no resources other than its strategic position astride the route between two giant oceans, with no school system to speak of, riven by ethnic rivalry, despised by its much larger neighbors and poor as a church mouse, nonetheless uses education and job training as the spearhead of its strategy for vaulting into the top ranks of the industrial nations.  And then there is Finland, which, after World War II was a sleepy agricultural nation whose education system lagged far behind that of its much larger neighbors, so used to being in the shadow of Sweden that it was astonished to learn that their country, having ignored the conventional education reform wisdom of its betters for years, had beaten every other European nation in the first PISA rankings and has maintained that position ever since.

What comes through is a story in each case of fierce national determination, a kind of educational hunger that, in each case, transcended political rivalries and was not to be denied.  In each case, we see an absolute conviction, starting at the top and fully shared by the entire polity, that education and high skills hold the key to economic success.  But we also see a moral commitment to shared prosperity, a belief that the key to shared prosperity is a genuinely high level of education for the entire population, and a determination to make sure, as a practical matter, that the policies needed to provide every child with a high quality education are implemented well and implemented in detail.

The point I am making here has to do with the way we read books of this sort.  Both the writers and the readers tend to ask and answer the question: What policies and practices account for the success of the top-performers?  That is a good question and this book does a first rate job of answering it.  What that question misses, however, is another question, which is: What does it take for a country that is not in the front ranks to join those ranks?  The answer to that question does not consist entirely of the answer to the first question.  What comes through clearly in this book is another set of answers having to do with political leadership of the kind that galvanizes action and creates the kind of broad new consensus that is required to uproot long-established arrangements and relationships.  What comes through is the crucial role that international education benchmarking plays in creating for a country a new vision of what might be possible and the confidence among many players that is required to take a chance on abandoning a system with which many players are very comfortable.  What comes through is the need for continuity and stability of political leadership.

It is, I think, no accident that we see in Singapore, Shanghai and Japan (until recently) different versions of one-party rule and in Finland a country in which consensus across party lines is necessary before great actions can be taken on any important issue.  In the case of Ontario Province, in Canada, another of the examples we are shown by Stewart, all the reported progress took place under the leadership of one Premier, who placed education reform at the epicenter of his political agenda.  Whether it was one-party rule, cross-party consensus or the extended leadership of one elected official, what all these cases have in common is political continuity that has lasted long enough to enact and implement major changes in the nature of the entire education system.

In all of these cases, the political leaders involved took the time to mobilize broad public support for their education agendas.  In almost every case, they made their case on the wings of a perceived existential economic threat, or, in the case of the developing countries, an enormous economic opportunity.  Importantly, even in the case of one-party rule, the profound changes in education system design that Stewart reports on were not shoved down the throats of any of these countries.  Stewart shows us how each of these countries, cities and provinces decided on their programs of reform only after making mighty efforts over a long period of time to gain wide input from their professional educators and the public at large.  In every case, professional educators were partners in the reform effort, not the opposition to be overcome in a hostile takeover.

What are we to make of this?  Should we conclude that the countries most likely to lead the next era of education reform are those with one-party rule or consensus-style politics?  If you believe, as I do, that only those countries can achieve the highest incomes, then that would be tantamount to saying that, with the exception of those countries sitting on unusual concentrations of natural resources, the richest countries in the world will be those with one-party rule or consensus-style politics.

The record, I think, shows that it will be harder, but by no means impossible, for countries with rough-and-tumble multiparty politics to scale this ladder.  Those terms would describe Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and, yes, even Ontario, where the Premier who turned things around just began his third four-year term of office.  All are among the world’s top performers.

But none of us should think that following in the footsteps of those countries that now lead the world’s league tables of student achievement is going to be simply a technical matter best left to professional educators.  It simply won’t happen without very effective and often courageous, far sighted political leadership.  Stewart points out that, although the origins of the trajectories that have enabled the leading countries to get where they are began 20 or 30 years ago, their histories show that most were able to make substantial progress in five to ten years, in some cases even less.  In the political world, some progress is needed to get permission to go the next step and major progress is needed to forestall those who want to turn the clock back.  Stewart’s book gives us enough examples showing how political leaders have beat the odds in this way to give heart to those who are flirting with similar commitments in countries in which they can expect rough going.

The toughest case is probably the United States.  For structural reasons that will not be easily changed, the United States is now in the grip of a politics so poisoned as to make consensus on almost any important matter impossible.  In an effort to find agreement in the field of education, the political parties in my country have joined forces around an agenda for education reform that flouts virtually ever principle that informs the successful education strategies of the top-performing countries.

But the United States has been counted out many times in the past, only to succeed in the end.  Though neither presidential candidate has talked much about education in the current campaign, because both are hobbled by their own constituencies in this arena, the public, in one poll after another, has said they believe education to be one of the most important issues facing the country.  There are signs in many quarters that many who have championed either the status quo or radical efforts to destroy the system from the outside are now interested in alternatives.  The United States may be more ready than many believe to adopt the broad agenda Vivien Stewart lays out in this book.

Whether that is true or not, the logic of the book’s underlying story is very powerful.  The future belongs to those countries that display vision and leadership, embrace ambitious standards, commit to broad equity, do everything possible to get and keep high quality teachers, build a system that is both aligned and coherent, set up effective management and accountability systems, motivate their students and adopt a global and future orientation.  We’ll just have to see which countries embrace that message and which do not.

Photo from the 2011 International Summit on the Teaching Profession

I left the second International Summit on the Teaching Profession not at all sure of what I had learned.  But, after a few days to sort it out, there is quite a lot.  Here it goes —

1.    Swiftly broadening goals

I was struck by the way many of the top-performing countries talked about their goals for their students.  Singapore is a good example.  Lee Sing Kong, the Director of Singapore’s National Institute of Education and a member of the Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB) Advisory Board, explained that the small country’s vision statement for its education system was completely overhauled recently.  They reminded themselves that what they do in education is for the learner, their needs, their interests, and not simply to cover the content.  They said they wanted to help their students achieve understanding of essential concepts and ideas, not just dispense information.  They want to prepare their students for the test of life, not just for tests.  They said they want to focus on teaching the whole child, on nurturing them holistically across domains, not on the subjects per se.  They want to teach their students the values, attitudes and mindsets that will serve them well in life, and not only how to score good grades on exams.

Shinichi Yamanaka, Deputy Minister of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, said that thirty years ago, when the economy shifted from mass production to high-value-added manufacturing and customized production, Japan decided that it had to overhaul its education system away from rote learning and toward the growth and development of the autonomous individual.  He said this was an enormous undertaking and, thirty years later, Japan is still figuring out how to accomplish it.

Zhang Minxuan, a key leader of Shanghai’s drive to the top of the education league tables, said that for more than a millennium, the Chinese people believed that if you could recite 300 famous poems, you could be a poet.  This led to the Chinese commitment to a regime of exams based on memorization and rote learning.  But, he said, they do not believe that anymore.  Their priorities are on thinking, problem-solving, preparing Chinese students to live in a highly integrated global environment and cultivating individual talent.

Mrs. Cherry Tse, the Permanent Secretary for Education for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, said that young people are now being exposed to masses of data on a scale not imagined by their parents and much now depends on being able to help them sort out the real information from “the crap.”  They need, as never before, to be “discerning,” to live and work effectively in a state of constant flux.  She worried that educators live in a sort of cocoon that will make it hard for them to prepare students for such a world.  Part of this worry comes from her belief that it is more important than ever for students in Hong Kong and elsewhere to develop a strong sense of empathy for people in other parts of the world, especially for those who are less fortunate.  The schools, she said, are not changing as fast as society, and that must be fixed.

Note that there is no mention in this litany of the importance of learning to read, to write and to have basic mathematical literacy.  This much is assumed.  Which is to say that the aim of education in the world’s leading mass education systems is no longer simply to provide basic literacy.  As these statements witness, the aim has now gone far beyond that to embrace what were, through the 20th century, the aims for only the elite.

2.    A focus on the distance between rhetoric and reality—or—between the political leaders and the teachers in the classrooms

I can hear you now dismissing the sentiments just expressed as the usual talk of politicians—vague aspirations that have little impact on what actually happens in classrooms.  Which leads to my second observation.  The very same people who made the observations just reported also worried about the distance between rhetoric and reality, which had the effect of making me believe that these people were expressing genuine ambitions for their education systems, ambitions they intended to make good on, to the best of their ability.  Some examples:

A representative of Norway pointed out that “we say we value 21st century skills but we test basic skills.  We are not testing what we say is most important.  I understand that the politicians need data for their purposes, but we need to be careful that their needs do not distort and distract from what is best for our students.”

A representative from New Zealand said, “We want our students to be capable, confident, creative and innovative, but all we measure is the first of these.  Some nations around this table put high stakes only on the first of these and some put high stakes only on language and math.”

Please note this last.  The international meetings I have gone to over the years have been models of politeness.  Statements of this sort are never made.  Because they are never made, the underlying issues are never raised, much less addressed.  But it did not end there.

3.    A focus on implementation

Mrs. Cherry Tse, from Hong Kong, said that it is now crucially important to align the goals of the system designers and managers [the government] with the goals of all the other participants, not least the teachers.  She mused about the difficulty of knowing whether government is doing the right (that is the moral) thing, and said that this is why it is so important to have a very inclusive discussion involving many stakeholders about the purposes of education to create as broad a consensus on that point as possible.

Kai-ming Cheng, one of the conference rapporteurs and a member of the CIEB Advisory Board, who is from Hong Kong, noted that the distance between the goals driving the system managers and the teachers tended to moderate in well-managed systems and be much larger and more problematic in systems that are not so well managed.

Ben Jensen, Director of the school education program at the Grattan Institute in Australia, observed that the expressed goals of many poor-performing national education systems are often very like those of successful systems.  He wondered whether what distinguishes the successful systems from the less successful systems might be the care and planning they put into implementation of their policies.  That is, he wondered whether it is execution, not intention, that separates the successful from the unsuccessful.

I am a veteran of many, many years of meetings at which senior representatives of national education systems have droned on and on, hour after hour about the virtues of their education systems and the wisdom of their plans.  This meeting was very different.  The room was full of people for whom their goals were not just rhetorical expressions of windy aspirations but statements of aims they knew to be very difficult to achieve that they were nevertheless working overtime to turn into reality.  They were quick to acknowledge their frustrations and concerns about their own plans.  They knew and quickly acknowledged the distance between their rhetoric and the reality on the ground.  They recognized that the only way they could bridge that gap was by paying far more attention in the future than they had in the past to the importance of execution, of making real changes happen on a very large scale on the ground in their schools.  And they were determined to pull that off.  They knew it would take a long time.  They came to this meeting to learn everything they could from their colleagues in other countries that would help them achieve their goals back home.

That was exhilarating.  And gave me more hope than I have had in some time.

I leave my readers around the world to ask themselves how their country fits into this account of the conversation at the second International Summit on the Teaching Profession.  How broad is your discussion of goals for students?  Can you assume that they will get the basic skills they need?  Or is that still an issue in your country?  Has your country really made the commitment to provide to all students the skills formerly thought appropriate only for a small elite?  Is your country’s education system still held captive to a high stakes accountability system driven by high stakes tests of the basic skills?  Is there a broad and deep consensus on a real 21st century conception of the goals of education?  Does your country acknowledge the distance between the aims of the designers and managers of the system and its teachers?  How large is that distance?  Does your country put as much energy and commitment into designing and carefully executing sound plans to implement your reform agenda as it does into its development, or does the old rhetoric fade into obscurity as the new rhetoric arrives to take its place?

There are many different measures of teacher pay, from a strict comparison of actual salaries in USD PPP, to percentage of per capita GDP, to a comparison of teachers’ salaries with those of workers in other fields with the same level of education in a given country.  Looking at international comparisons of teachers’ salaries and workers in the same country with the same level of education, we find that across the board in top-performing countries, teachers make about what their counterparts with a similar amount of education make.  This is particularly true for upper secondary teachers, and in the Netherlands and Finland, these teachers actually make more than other similarly-educated workers.  Across the OECD as a whole, the proportion is smaller; upper secondary teachers make just over 80 percent of what other workers make, while primary and lower secondary teachers fall shy of the 80 percent mark.  In the United States, by contrast, upper secondary teachers make just over 60 percent of what similarly-educated workers make, while primary and lower secondary teachers make even less.  Other benefits aside, it is clear that providing teachers who could go elsewhere with comparable salaries does help to retain high-quality candidates.

It is difficult to discuss teachers’ salaries without a broader discussion of the overall cost of education systems, particularly because teachers’ salaries tend to represent a majority of the spending in most education systems.  Last month, the OECD posed the question of whether money buys strong performance on PISA in one of their “PISA in Focus” briefs.  What they found was that it is not how much a country spends, but how they spend it, that correlates to higher PISA scores.  They found that once countries spend more than  $35,000 on total student expenses from the ages of 6 to 15, any additional money spent does not seem to pay off in student performance.

One of the highest-spending countries, the United States, has one of the lowest average PISA reading scores, whereas Shanghai and New Zealand, economies which both spend less than half of what the United States spends on individual students, have far better student performance. However, there is clear correlation between investment in teachers’ salaries and PISA performance. Countries in which teachers have higher purchasing power, as measured by their salaries as a proportion of GDP, also tend to have much higher student performance on PISA, as indicated by the second chart.

In many of the countries, and notably in Korea, lower secondary, mid-career teachers are paid, on average, more than the average GDP per capita.  However, while in Korea teachers are paid twice the GDP per capita, they are paid only about 80 percent of what similarly-educated workers in other fields are paid, suggesting that while teachers are paid very well compared to the average worker, their pay is still some distance from that of the highest status professionals.  Overall, the data would suggest that nations that want a first class teaching force need to be prepared to pay enough to take compensation “off the table” as a major consideration for talented young people making career decisions, but need not pay at the top of the professional scale.