Elsewhere in this newsletter, we summarize the paper prepared by the OECD for the recent International Teachers Summit in the Netherlands and the remarks made by Andreas Schleicher in his webinar on the subject.  These documents are well worth reading, as is Vivien Stewart’s account of the event.  Here, I will attempt to share some of the dynamics of the summit.

I did not attend the summit, and so have assembled this account on the basis of conversations with several people who were there.  My purpose is to describe some of the differences in views among the participants, because they are consequential, and reveal much about the direction education policy is likely to take in the coming years.

This was the third in the series of summits, the first two of which were held in New York City at the invitation of United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, invitations extended to the ministers of education and education labor leaders from the top-performing and most rapidly improving countries.  The United States acted as host country for those meetings and Education International (EI) and the OECD were the principal co-sponsors.  The aim was to provide a venue in which the top officials involved in making policy for teachers and teaching in their countries could, aided by analyses provided by the OECD and EI, compare notes on strategy and implementation, and by so doing, further improve their own education systems.  Nothing quite like this had ever happened before.

The first summit was focused on attracting and recruiting high quality secondary school candidates into the profession.  It covered initial teacher education, strengthening professional practice and retention.  There was broad agreement that no nation could have a high quality education system without high quality teachers.  One could feel a palpable sense of excitement among the participants as they reinforced each other’s conviction that a policy focus on teacher quality could yield great dividends and that the nations around the table could learn a lot from each other.  It ended with a call for a second meeting, one that would go deeper on teacher preparation, teacher supply and demand and school leadership.  Subsequent meetings, the planners thought, might similarly focus on other key aspects of policy for teachers.

The second meeting reached the objectives its planners had for it in the realm of leadership, though it came up a little short on the subject of supply and demand.  But the big difference was a difference of tone.  Key differences in policy direction among the participants emerged, differences grounded in different interpretations of the nature of the challenges facing the industrialized nations’ education systems, and the appropriate responses.  The differences in tone became obvious both in exchanges between the participants at the table and later, when the observers had a chance to ask questions of those participants.  There was, in particular, a certain chill in the exchange between U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Sing Kong Lee, the Director of the Singapore’s National Institute of Education, in their exchange on the subject of teacher evaluation and the role of teacher evaluation in the design of accountability systems.  Secretary Duncan appeared to be pressing for some support for the proposition that teacher evaluation—in particular teacher evaluation tied to measured student performance—was an important key to teacher quality.  Sing Kong Lee acknowledged that teacher evaluation was important, but expressed some reservations about the American approach.  There were echoes of this difference at other points during the discussion at the table and again, in somewhat more strident tones, when the observers joined in the discussion.  Though many in the room nodded their heads when Sing Kong Lee spoke on this topic, it was clear that Duncan was not alone in his view that countries interested in improving student outcomes needed strong accountability systems, and that teacher evaluation systems tied to student performance should be part of those systems, but it was just as clear that the labor leaders, teachers in the audience and many ministers were very wary of such systems.

Toward the end of the second summit, the ministers and labor leaders gathered for separate lunches.  Both gatherings acknowledged that the issue of teacher evaluation and appraisal had become the “elephant in the room.”  To the extent that teacher evaluation is tied to promotions, retention, incentives, rewards and so on, such discussions can easily lead to confrontations with the teachers unions.  But it was not just fear of confrontations between governments and unions that was at play here.  Many of the ministers had considered and rejected the idea of basing policy in any important way on tough accountability systems focused on teacher evaluation because they did not think such management strategies would enable them to recruit and retain the kind of high quality professionals they wanted.

Thus, this issue appeared to engage issues of policy, management and strategy central to the work of everyone.  Andreas Schleicher, realizing that the great promise of the summits could be squandered if they did not deal with this issue, pressed those present to make the “elephant in the room” the focus of the next summit.  Rather than trying to push it into a corner, he wanted to deal with it head on.  EI agreed.

Some of the experts and observers in the room argued that teacher evaluation should not be the central topic of the third summit, that it was but one component among many in a high-performing system.  But Schleicher and others agreed that this set of issues was so central that it needed to be dealt with head on and the decision was made to focus the third summit on teacher evaluation and appraisal.

That decision would put great pressure on the OECD to come up with a paper setting the stage for the meeting that all the attendees would regard as a fair point of departure for the discussion.  The planners agreed on the following lens for that paper:

• How should teacher evaluation and appraisal be defined and who should define it?
• What processes and techniques should be used?
• What can research tell as about the impact of teacher evaluation and appraisal?

And thus the stage was set for the third summit.

I was not there, and could not in any case get inside the heads of those who were, but, at this distance am very much inclined to agree with what I take to be Schleicher’s strategy.  Shoving this issue under the rug would have doomed the summits.  Ministers would have drifted away if the discussions were inhibited by very important issues that could not be discussed.  The alternative was to try to frame the issues in such a way that they could be discussed.  This was the path that was chosen.  It was broadly agreed that teacher evaluation and appraisal is very important and that it could be effective only in systems also designed to:

• Make teaching an attractive profession,
• Provide very high-quality initial teacher education,
• Create a school management system in which teachers could act as autonomous professionals within a collaborative culture, and
• Engage teachers in developing the evaluation system.

And that was frame with which OECD and EI opened the third summit.

This is a very sensible approach.  It could potentially provide a roadmap leading to sound policy that would also provide an opportunity for all parties to claim victory, but it would have been too much to expect that it would relieve all the tensions with which the second summit ended.

In the eyes of several observers, no one at the table at the third summit was advocating that teacher evaluation and appraisal be used to weed out bad teachers.  And everyone agreed that teachers both needed and wanted feedback.  But, with that off the table, there was still tension between those who are most comfortable with the use of evaluation for professional growth and development, on the one hand, and those who see it as a vital tool in the design and implementation of tough-minded accountability systems on the other.  And, in the middle, were those who were naturally inclined to the position apparently so well articulated by Andreas Schleicher at the meeting, namely that teacher evaluation is best thought of as an important component of a much larger system built around a conception of teachers as highly capable professionals, not as cogs in a Tayloristic management design.

That vision assumes that the criteria against which teachers are being judged is not limited to student performance on basic skills in a narrow range of subjects but on their ability to help students succeed against the full range of outcomes now widely referred to as 21st century skills, many of which are difficult if not impossible to measure.  In Tayloristic systems, everyone assumes that management will assess the workers in any way they see fit, usually according to fairly simplistic criteria; in professional environments, the direction of accountability is at least as much to one’s colleagues as to one’s superiors in the organizational structure.  So who is to devise the criteria for judging teachers and who is to decide whether an individual teacher meets them?  In blue collar environments, all workers are regarded as equal, if not interchangeable.  But, in a professional environment, the professionals acquire increasing responsibility, authority and compensation as they demonstrate increasing competence and skill.  Perhaps, as nations move toward conceptions of teachers and teaching grounded in the idea of teacher as professional, the idea of teacher evaluation and appraisal should be inextricably connected to the development of formalized career ladders for teachers.

The third summit did indeed address these and other issues.  This made for some tough conversations.  It became very clear that it was going to be hard to resolve these issues without some real trust among the parties, both at this table, and, by implication, within the countries represented.

Nonetheless, the people I talked with about the summit came away encouraged.  The honesty of the conversation, the fact that what had at the preceding meeting been the “elephant in the room” had now been addressed and that there was substantial consensus on many points was a relief to many who had feared going into the meeting that it might end badly.

That it did not is no doubt in part the result of the good will of those who came.

But new cracks emerged.  Among the rules set by the conference organizers is one that says that a country cannot be represented at all unless it is represented by the top education official (usually the minister of education) and the top teachers union official.  But, especially for the Asian nations, there is a strict limit to the number of out-of-country trips officials can make, often no more than two a year.  If a minister more senior than the education minister calls a meeting on the date of the summit, the education minister must cancel the trip to the summit.  Under the current rules, this means that the country is not formally represented and for that reason, a number of jurisdictions that had been invited to the third summit attended in a participating observer status.

The rule could, of course, be abandoned.  But that could easily lead to the summit not being a summit of top officials with policy-making authority, but rather a meeting of functionaries.  No one wants that.

There is another problem.  It is important to the host country to be able to invite observers, people—mostly educators—who are interested in the proceedings and want to express their views on the issues being discussed by the delegates.  But this desire for what has become something of a public fishbowl can inhibit the desire of the organizers of the summits to have a frank discussion among the delegates.  The frankness of the discussion is one of the big attractions of the meetings for the delegates.  The openness of the meetings is a big draw for the host countries.  This potential conflict of goals did not loom large when the summits were first conceived, but, now that the conversation has begun to tread on sensitive issues, it has become clear that some way must be found to resolve the tension between the desire for openness and the need for some measure of privacy.

Lastly, as in so many other international organizations, there are tensions with respect to which nations are invited to sit around the table.  The original conception was to include both top performers (on the PISA rankings) and the countries whose education systems were improving the fastest.  But, if Asian top performers drop out because education ministers are not able to attend, the summit could get to be a meeting dominated by countries that are not among the top performers, and, if that happens, the top performers who remain may decide not to come, and then the summit ceases to be a summit.

These are tough challenges, but they are neither unprecedented among such international meetings nor are they, in principle, insurmountable.  The three meetings that have taken place thus far have served as a unique venue for the people on whose shoulders rest the fundamental redesign of the world’s leading education systems to exchange information, share views and challenge each other’s conception of the right policies and strategies.  That is a very worthwhile function.  I very much hope the organizers are successful as they seek a path through this thicket.

By Marc Tucker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some highlights from the conversation follow:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marc Tucker interviews Ray Marshall on the links between immigration policy and education policy.  Marshall is Professor Emeritus and Audre and Bernard Rapoport Centennial Chair in Economics and Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor.  Marshall, a labor economist, is an expert on international education and immigration issues.  Recent publications include 2009’s Immigration for Shared Prosperity: A Framework for Comprehensive Reform and 2011’s Value Added Immigration: Lessons for the United States from Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.  Marshall is Co-Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

Tucker: Why should education policymakers be interested in immigration policy?


Marshall: Education policymakers should pay attention to immigration policy for a number of reasons.  In almost all advanced economies, immigrants will be an increasingly important part of the population and the workforce.  This means that all of these countries will have many students who are also immigrants, depending on the extent to which they rely on immigration to add to their populations and their workforces.  So if schools want to educate all children to a high standard, they will have to pay particular attention to the characteristics of immigrant students.

Countries’ experiences with immigrant students have been very different.  For example, if you have a good immigration selection system as the Canadians do, then you will have immigrants who are strong students.  The Canadians, in fact, claim to have the highest-achieving second-generation immigrant students in the Western world.  Part of that is due to the way they select immigrants, and part of it is due to the vast improvements they have made to their education system since the 1970s.  They understand, when selecting immigrants, that they are choosing future Canadians.

Other countries have immigration policies that are producing large numbers of very hard-to-educate students which has important consequences for the cost of education and for the quality of the national workforce and for those countries’ competitiveness, especially when immigrants will constitute the main source of growth in the national workforce, as will in fact be the case in many industrialized countries.

Tucker: In writing your new book, why did you choose to study the immigration systems in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom?

Marshall: For some time, Canada and Australia have been widely viewed by experts in this arena as setting the benchmark for national immigration policies.  The UK has been catching up rapidly, by building on their experience, and may be ahead of them in some areas.

All three countries had long had policies heavily favoring immigrants who had family connections.  However, the intensive globalization of the economy in the 1980s changed that in Canada and Australia.  When the closed economies of the former Soviet Bloc countries, as well as China and India joined the global economy, they doubled the workforce involved in the global trading system—now about 3 billion workers—almost overnight.  These new workers were suddenly in both direct and indirect competition with workers around the world, including Australia and Canada.  That had a profound significance, because the countries entering the global trading system had very large numbers of well-educated, highly motivated people who could either migrate to the developed countries, or be employed where they were by global firms.  Almost overnight, what had been the globalization of product markets suddenly became the globalization of labor markets.  People with high skills were willing to work for below-market wages.  They were eager to have the standards of living available in industrialized countries, and were willing to work very hard to do that.

When that happened, both Canada and Australia took action.  In a competitive market, wages will tend to converge.  The question was in which direction would the convergence go?  The Australians saw that the most likely outcome would be that their wages would move in the direction of the wages in the low-wage countries.
But the Australians thought there was another possibility, one in which everyone’s positions could improve, but in which wages in the developing countries would improve faster than those in the developed countries.  I call this a “value added competitive strategy,” which was an alternative to a direct cost competitive strategy.  In this model, countries like Australia would not compete on the price of labor, a game they could only lose, but on the quality of their products and services, the productivity of their workforce and their capacity for innovation.  This would earn them a premium in the market, because they were producing things that could not be produced everywhere.  To do that, they needed a world-class education system, but also a value added immigration system in which they would import highly skilled workers to fill jobs that domestic workers could not fill.  That became Australia’s basic strategy.

To do this, they dramatically reduced the proportion of visas allocated for family reunification, and greatly increased the proportion allocated for highly skilled workers and entrepreneurs who had skills not readily available in the Australian marketplace.  They also had to coordinate education policy, workforce development policy, economic policy and immigration policy.  This is important because otherwise what is being done in one area can diminish what is being done in the other areas.

Tucker: What Australia did was very different from what countries like Germany did when they brought in low-skilled guest workers to fill economic gaps.

Marshall: Yes.  The immigration world learned some big lessons from the Bracero program in the United States, which brought in low-skilled Mexican workers for agricultural work, and the German guest worker program.  Low-skill guest workers are never temporary.  It is extremely hard to prevent guest workers from becoming illegal immigrants, especially if there is a vast different in the living conditions in your country and their home country.  Legal low-skill temporary workers quickly become illegal permanent workers because they do not want to go back to the poor conditions in their home country.  Many employers preferred these workers for their hard-to-fill jobs that pay low wages. They make very good workers because they work hard and are scared.

When you have unauthorized workers unable to protect themselves against their employers, or even authorized workers willing to work for low wages, they undercut the wages for all workers in the country.

Tucker:  In Value Added Immigration, you write that the initial response to globalization in Canada and Australia was to establish a minimum level of education required for all immigrants.  Why did they choose this strategy, and why did it fail?

Marshall: They chose this strategy because the economists argued that, with a high level of education, immigrants could adjust to any type of economic environment.  But first Australia and then Canada discovered this was not true.

In the late 1990s, the Australian government made dramatic changes in the system. There was a fairly large burden on their welfare system because they had selected immigrants who were unable to support themselves due to the mismatch between their skills and the skills and characteristics that employers were looking for in the workforce.

Both countries had strong data and research – much better than what is available in many other countries, and were able to use this information to discover which types of immigrants were most likely to succeed in the long run.  They knew they were not importing workers; they were importing future citizens.  What they found after doing a great deal of study was that the most successful immigrants were people who had skills that were in high demand in the economy, and people who had a high command of the language.  There was a direct and strong correlation between the degree of language competence, as measured by an international language test, and how well people did in the economy.  Command of language was most important for highly skilled professionals.

Those who came in with highly skilled family members were much more likely to succeed than those with low-skilled family members.  Age, too, made a lot of difference; it was possible to be either too young or too old to succeed in the economy.

A points system was developed in Canada in the 1960s in which immigrants earned points for various characteristics to allow them entry.  This system was adopted by Australia in 1989, and has since been adopted by several other countries.  The points system is a way to quantitatively calibrate the characteristics that help immigrants be successful in the economy.  That was a valuable selection device for a number of reasons.  First, prospective immigrants could go online and determine whether they were qualified to enter the country.  This decreased the number of applications.

It is also a very flexible system, because if you have too many people immigrating to your country, you simply raise the total score necessary to make a successful application.

It is flexible because it is research-based.  Just this past year, for example, Australia eliminated all points awarded for a master’s degree, because their research showed them that immigrants with a master’s degree turn out to be no better off, economically, than immigrants with only a bachelor’s degree.  So they decided not to award points for that.

The research showed that, if a prospective immigrant had a firm job offer, their chances of success were much greater, so Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom decided to award them a large number of points for that.  But the offer had to be for a job that was first offered to residents of the country, or it had to be on the shortage list.  In the British system, an immigrant needs to have 10 points for command of language, and 10 points for demonstrating that they can support themselves.  You need 70 points overall to be admitted.  If you have a job offer from the shortage list, you automatically get 50 points.

In all countries, however, just being qualified will not get you in.  The test they have all learned to apply is what in Britain they call the “sensibility test.”  That is, they ask whether immigration is the best way to fill that particular vacancy.  They look at employers, and if they are not making a good-faith effort to recruit and retrain domestic workers, they cannot import the immigrant.  That prevents immigration from substituting for the domestic workforce.

Australia now has over 20 years of longitudinal data on the characteristics that help people succeed.  This data shows that, over 10 years, most of the immigrants they have become positive contributors to the economy.  The only ones that fail to do so are the uneducated family members of immigrants – This is particularly true of uneducated parents who come in with skilled immigrants.

Tucker:  We are seeing very severe voter backlash against immigrants in many industrialized countries.  What has been the story in the countries you are describing, those with value-added immigration systems that emphasize high skills in their selection process?

Marshall:  In all of these countries, the population is generally supportive of the immigrant population.  This is largely because the selection system is designed to bring in people with skills that complement the skills of the native population, so the immigrants do not compete with the native population for jobs.  It is also because the immigrants are much less likely to become a drain on the country’s welfare system, because they are much more likely to have jobs and pay taxes.  And it is also because, especially in the cases of Canada and Australia, immigration policy is designed to deal with the kinds of cultural conflict from immigration that is now a burning political issue in Europe.  Canada and Australia require immigrants to pledge that they understand that their new host country has certain values that an immigrant is expected to agree to, knowing that the failure to do so would be a violation of the pledge. Few have ever been penalized for violating it, but the pledge has created an environment in which immigrants respect the rule of law and such values as the equality of men and women, that all creeds and religions are expected to be tolerant of others and so on.

Tucker: In your book, you talk about two stages of temporary workers and how that relates to the higher education system. Can you tell us more about that connection?

Marshall:  One of the best sources of value-added immigrants for any developed nation is the foreign students who come to study in that nation’s higher education system.  This is true both because they are a source of revenue for that country’s education industry, but mainly because they typically come with language proficiency, high skills and strong cultural knowledge.  So they developed a two-track system.  Immigrants could come in through the regular points-based system or another system that allowed people who both earned a degree from an Australian or Canadian university and had the other required characteristics to apply for status as a permanent resident.  But they didn’t want people to use the higher education system as a way to gain permanent residency, so they required such people to go home first and then apply.  Eventually they decided that process was self-defeating if they wanted highly qualified people who knew the language and were familiar with the values and customs.  So they let qualified graduates of their institutions apply directly.  In Canada, such people could get permanent residence without going through the points system, either for skilled workers or students.  At first, they were reluctant to take skilled workers on the basis of their vocational qualifications, but they found those people actually had better economic performance than regular university students so they started taking them.

It is important to view the children of immigrants as future Canadians, Americans, Australians.  You are building your future with those kids.  That’s the reason you need to pay attention to their education and to the selection of their parents.  The United States does not do this and has the lowest level of literacy in our foreign-born population of any OECD country as a result.  We are building future problems for ourselves with such policies.

The countries with value-added immigration policies, unlike our country, are using their immigration system for the same purpose as their education system—to produce a highly educated, highly skilled population that will be able to support themselves and to contribute to increasing the wellbeing of the entire population.  In doing so, they are not only bringing in adults who can contribute personally, but they are also bringing in children who will be far easier to educate to a high standard.  In an era in which all industrialized countries are going to have steadily increasing proportions of immigrants in their populations, immigration policy might be thought of as an extension of both education policy and economic policy.  All three are vital elements of successful competitiveness policies, which will by definition determine whether the incomes of the citizens of the industrialized countries will rise or fall in the years ahead.

Sharon Lynn Kagan

An interview with Sharon Lynn Kagan, Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Early Childhood and Family Policy, Co-Director of the National Center for Children and Families and, Associate Dean for Policy at Teachers College, Columbia University and Professor Adjunct at Yale University’s Child Study Center.

Marc Tucker:  Over the years, you’ve travelled all over the world, consulting with governments on early childhood education issues.  Have you seen an increased interest in developed and developing countries in early childhood education recently, and, if so, what do you think has spurred this interest?

Sharon Lynn Kagan:  Unequivocally I have seen growing interest in early childhood education.  Countries all around the globe have been motivated by the results of the neuroscience research showing how the course of development of children’s brains in the early years has irrevocable effects in school and later in life, by the research showing how much money is saved in the long run by governments that invest in early childhood education and by the evaluation research that shows strong academic gains for children who have had early childhood education as compared to those who don’t.  Countries, in other words, are much more aware than they used to be that early childhood education is a social investment that has unusually strong returns.

One of the most interesting things I have observed lately is the growing instances of western countries sending emissaries from business and industry to other countries to speak about the benefits of investing in early childhood education at forums sponsored by organizations like the World Bank and UNESCO.  Academics and other intellectual leaders are doing much the same thing. It is clear that all these efforts are paying off in greatly increased government interest in early childhood education all over the world.

Tucker:  In the United States, until fairly recently, a substantial fraction of adult women were full-time homemakers.  However, as the economy tightened up and more women began to enter the workforce to bring in a second income, that meant that the person who would traditionally provide full-time childcare at home could no longer do so.  This shift appears to be occurring in Asia now.  Do you think this could also be another reason for the rise in government-provided early childhood education?

Kagan:  I do think it is true that this is happening in many countries, but I do not think it is as strong a motivator as the data on the effects of early childhood education.  The most potent motivator has been the neuroscience research, which has revealed that a large proportion of brain development occurs by the age of five.  Social and economic shifts are certainly a factor in the expansion of early childhood education worldwide, but less so than the research.

Tucker:  As countries are beginning to focus on developing early childhood education systems, what shape are these systems taking?

Kagan:  Early childhood education systems are contingent on several different variables.  First, the amount of money a country wants to invest.  Second, the capacity for development and the infrastructure a country has in place.  In some countries, there are limited teacher training facilities and limited regulatory bodies.  These countries are often more interested, therefore, in developing community-based and informal programs.  In countries where there is already an infrastructure in place, they are more likely to move toward formal, center-based programs. The nature of the investments made are based on the context in that country.

Tucker:  Talk, if you will, about the process that governments go through in formulating policy on early childhood education.  Can you characterize these stages?

Kagan:  It is an iterative process.  It begins with governmental awareness of the importance of early childhood education, and the importance of making these investments.  The second step is understanding what already exists in both the formal and informal markets in any given country, since early childhood education frequently takes place in informal markets.  The third step is developing a broad-based, long-term plan.  Often, external experts are called in to help with this step, particularly in countries without a lot of infrastructure already in place.  You’re right in thinking that this all happens incrementally.  Once there is a plan, countries begin to bite off pieces of it that make sense in that context.  The pieces are different depending on the country.  Some begin with infrastructure development, some begin with teacher training, or data and monitoring systems.  In other countries, they think that process is too slow and immediately go out into villages and communities and begin to establish centers.  After gaining awareness of the importance of early childhood education and developing a plan, the steps vary based on the country.

The one thing that is happening with less frequency than I would like is a serious approach to the evaluation of the impact of these programs.  Because money is short, and countries want to maximize the amount of services they can offer, they tend to invest less than they should in evaluation.

Tucker:  Can you characterize what elements need to be in place if a country is to have a world class early childhood education system?

Kagan:  Patience is the most important.  It will not happen overnight. They need at the outset a set of guidelines or principles that reflect the national heritage and national values and priorities of the country, but at the same time serve to guide early educators toward a clear set of goals.  Second, they need to focus on building a professionally competent workforce.  The third component is equitably dispersed, quality facilities, so there are not uneven service patterns in which some children are well-served and have easy access, and others poorly served with little access.  Lastly, they need to figure out how to provide sustained government support.  I’ve observed that, in all countries where the core elements have been put in place, there is strong public support for the program and governments are able to make a sustained commitment.

Tucker:  What kind of institutional and regulatory structures are required to create this type of system?

Kagan:  The number one requirement is a training capacity so you have people who can do the work well.  The second is very clear standards and expectations for what both teachers and children should know and be able to do.  The third is a routinized monitoring system that allows for chronicling the performance of the programs in a child-sensitive way – a whole accountability apparatus needs to be developed.  The most successful countries also find ways to build in mechanisms for parent and community engagement.  Early childhood education is very much a part of the community, and segregating from other community functions does the families a disservice.

Tucker:  If you were designing an early childhood education system, how would you think about the balance between play and cognitive development?

Kagan:  I feel very strongly about this, because it is a false dichotomy.  Play is the pedagogy; play is the means by which children learn.  All programs need a large amount of time for children to explore through play.  By play, I do not mean letting children mill around aimlessly, but guided play, intentional play, so there is meaning derived from what they perceive as play.  There also needs to be very clear specifications about content.  To that end, I strongly believe that standards are a very clear way of delineating what we want children to know and be able to do.  But this can be centered on a play-based pedagogy.

Tucker:  Speaking of standards, how do you think about the staff quality in early childhood education systems?  Do you think that the people delivering early childhood education should have the same kinds of qualifications as compulsory school teachers?  How should countries set the standards for the people who will staff their early childhood education systems?

Kagan:  I actually think being an early childhood teacher takes more knowledge and energy than being a primary or secondary school teacher.  In addition to content, these teachers need to understand child development and child psychology, and they have to deal with parents, so they really need to be deeply knowledgeable about many domains of development.  I would love to see early childhood teachers globally trained to the level of primary and secondary teachers.  But I also think that the strategies used to train primary and secondary teachers are not necessarily relevant to early childhood teachers.  For early childhood teachers, we need to use interactive technology, reflective practice, and competency-based assessments.  I am really hoping for new, very inventive approaches to teacher professional education and development.  I believe that this learning should be ongoing, and I am a big proponent of peer learning and reflective practice.  I don’t think many professional teacher training programs have those qualities yet.

Tucker:  Do you see significant differences in national approaches to early childhood education in East Asia, Australasia and Europe?

Kagan:  Two decades ago, I would have said yes.  A decade ago, I would have said maybe.  Now, I am seeing much more agreement.  In some countries, under different political regimes than those now in place, there was a tendency to educate young children for performances, and a preference for heavily didactic techniques.  But the changes in Asia, and the countries in the former Soviet Union, as well as increased access to information through the new media, have led to a much more universal acceptance of theories of early childhood pedagogy that support play as an approach to instruction.

Tucker:  The countries that are behind the curve often have fewer high-quality people than they need.  How do countries train people at an affordable cost, on a clear timeline?

Kagan:  This is a universal dilemma that affects high-quality early childhood education around the globe.  I do think the use of interactive technology has to be marshaled more effectively.  We need to embrace technology as a normal part of teacher education.  At the micro level, for example, one of the things a training program could do is film teachers and use the film to help them reflect on their practice.  Using these types of technology can make training more widely accessible.  There are people in the United States who are working on this.  I think we can expect a lot of progress in this arena in the next couple of years.

Tucker:  I would like to share with you a modest analytical framework and ask you if it corresponds to your experience. Imagine three cells.  In the first is Western and Northern Europe, where women have been going into the workforce in large numbers for some time now.  These countries also have a larger-than-average proportion of national resources controlled by the government.  Those countries have been ahead of the curve worldwide with respect to early childhood education provision.  Another cell, East Asia, is at the other end of that dimension line.  In most of those countries, women have been slower to enter the paid workforce than in Europe and North America.  They are also cultures in which a woman’s status is measured more by her children’s success than in Europe and North America, so women spend more time with their children and provide the rough equivalent of what is provided in early childhood education programs in Europe.  And finally, I would characterize the United States and some other western-oriented societies as being somewhere in the middle, but having the strengths of neither.  They have neither the amount of personal support of the mother at home, nor the level of institutional support, so children are at a disadvantage with respect to both.  Do you think this is an accurate characterization of the relative positions of these three parts of the world with respect to early childhood education?

Kagan:  I think that holds a lot of water, but it does not account for third-world countries.  We have women all over the world who are “in the labor force,” but are not earning money, and that’s actually the majority of the world.  But I do think your analysis is right.

Tucker:  The Economist Intelligence Unit recently did a special report on early childhood education, a report in which you played a key role as an advisor.  What, in your view, is the significance of this report from the Economist?

Kagan:  I think the fact that the Economist Intelligence Unit elected to focus on early childhood education in the recent survey, Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world, is nothing short of a landmark breakthrough.  They do not usually focus on these issues.  They did an excellent job with their analysis, it demonstrates the increased support for these issues, and it will bring this subject to a new audience.

Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world

At the outset, the report’s authors take care to point out the differences between preschool and childcare.  They point out that there is a growing understanding of the importance of the developmental phase of a child’s life between the ages of three and six, as well as research indicating that preschool programs help with child development and school readiness and serve to help level the playing field among children of different socioeconomic backgrounds.  At the same time, enrolling a child in preschool has been shown to save money on schooling down the road, as children with a strong preschool foundation are less likely to need remediation or to repeat a grade.  Another economic benefit of preschool programs is that they facilitate female participation in the workforce.  The report cites James Heckman’s work on the economic benefits of preschool education; he has found that government investment in preschool yields an annual return of 7 to 10 percent in the form of lifetime wages.  Preschool also yields other lifetime social benefits such as reduced crime rates, lower welfare and education costs, and increased workforce productivity.  Thus the report, and the index used to measure the strength of early childhood education systems, takes the perspective that a universally available, high-quality preschool system is the goal that governments should be working toward.

The index is broken down into four main categories: social context, availability, affordability and quality.  These are weighted and the scores in each category are combined to make up the final score for each country.  Quality carries the most weight, and accounts for 45 percent of the final score.  Availability and affordability each account for 25 percent of the final score, and social context accounts for the final 5 percent.  Within each category, there are several sub-categories indicating how the authors of the report arrived at the final score for each category.  Social context measures the prevalence of malnutrition, the under-five mortality rate, the DPT immunization rate, the gender inequality index and the adult literacy rate of each country.  Availability measures the preschool enrollment ratio at age five or six and for the relevant age group, early childhood development and promotion strategy, and the legal right to preschool education.  Affordability measures the cost of private preschool programs, government spending on preschool education, available subsidies for underprivileged families, and subsidies for preschools that encourage including underprivileged children.  The quality category is comprised of the teacher-student ratio, average preschool teachers’ wages, curriculum guidelines, the training of preschool teachers, health and safety guidelines, data collection mechanisms, the links between preschools and primary schools, and parental involvement and parent education programs.  The scores for each country are derived from a combination of quantitative data and “unique qualitative assessments.”

By these measures Nordic countries fare best, and European countries in general tend to outperform Asian, North American, Latin American and African countries.  The report explains the predominance of Europe in the top 20 countries on the league table (16 of the top 20 places, in fact) by pointing out that, “it is culturally and politically accepted in Europe that the government will assume a significant role in delivering preschool education.”  Thus, the top countries are all countries that have, for the most part, been investing in preschool education for decades: Finland, Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands.  New Zealand and South Korea round out the top ten performers.  In addition to finding that Europe commands the majority of places at the top of the league table, the report finds that the average income per person in any given country correlates strongly with the overall ranking – rich countries perform better than poor countries, for the most part, even within Europe.  That being said, there are several countries, including the United States, Japan, Canada and Australia, that are ranked in the middle of the pack, despite being wealthy.  Many of these countries, while having some very high-quality preschools according to the index, do not have good policies in place to ensure fair and equal access to these programs, thereby accounting for their relatively poor performance.

Of course, the authors acknowledge that every country has its own particular challenges in achieving a universal, high-quality preschool system.  Some have a diverse population made up of students of varying language, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.  Others may suffer from lack of funding.  Still others have large proportions of the population living in rural areas where it is difficult to establish programs.  Less wealthy countries typically have to make a choice between expanding access and improving quality at the outset, and, when that is the case, find that it is particularly important to educate parents on the importance of both early child development and early learning.

The report provides policy recommendations in the areas of both access and quality.  In terms of access, the authors and the experts interviewed recommend putting a system of subsidies into place, either in the form of “demand-side” subsidies (money or vouchers flowing directly to families) or “supply-side” subsidies (funds provided directly to preschools to incentivize enrolling children who cannot otherwise afford to attend).  Although most of the top-performing countries generally pursue supply-side policies because the government provides universal preschool, the authors find that many countries might find it feasible to use a combination of supply and demand strategies to ensure access.

On the quality side of things, the report recommends several important policy changes: improving teacher training and teacher quality, establishing clear curriculum guidelines, managing the transition between preschool and primary school, improving teacher-student ratios, increasing parental involvement, having clear health and safety guidelines in place, and collecting data with “robust data collection mechanisms.”  Teacher quality is perhaps the most centrally important component of providing quality preschool education, and varies widely from country to country, with Finland requiring a bachelor’s degree (many preschool teachers also have master’s degrees) and other countries hiring “literally anybody who is physically able and interested in working with children.”

This report makes clear that in order to establish a quality preschool education system, it must be treated, for the most part, like the primary and secondary education system, with the same types of policy levers and quality assurance mechanisms.  Indeed, the report often relies on well-established primary and secondary best practices in order to draw policy recommendations for early childhood education.  The authors mention, for example, Finland and South Korea’s practices of recruiting teachers from the top of the high school cohort, suggesting that this is a way to manage quality (though they do point out that this is not strictly enforced in either country when it comes to choosing preschool teachers).  They suggest working to build a profession able to attract high-quality recruits by compensating preschool teachers at a fair and living wage, reducing the teacher-student ratio to make the job more attractive, and establishing regulations and specific skill sets that are required of teachers in order to enter and remain in the profession.  They furthermore suggest working to build strong leadership in preschools, which would further contribute to the sense of preschool teaching as a profession while also encouraging the leaders to serve as innovators in the field.  Apart from improving teacher quality, putting curriculum guidelines and learning expectations into place can help bring lower-quality teachers up to a higher standard, and help all preschools provide the type of education expected of them.  Ultimately, the report’s authors and the interviewed experts argue, when funds are limited, human capital development—that is, the preparation of the preschool teachers—must absolutely be prioritized over things like technology and infrastructure.  However, one policy to “improve” early childhood education programs—using standardized tests to measure student performance and holding teachers accountable based on the test scores—which has been growing in favor in countries like the United States is not part of any of the recommendations found in the report, nor is it a tool used by any of the top performers.

It is interesting to note where the world’s top performers in primary and secondary education fall in this ranking, given that preschool is increasingly seen as an important foundation for high student performance in later years.  Four of the top primary and secondary performers crack the top ten in this early childhood education league table, with Finland ranked first, the Netherlands eighth, New Zealand ninth and South Korea tenth.  Hong Kong, Japan, Canada, Australia and Singapore are in the middle of the pack, rated at nineteenth, twenty-first, twenty-sixth, twenty-eighth, and twenty-ninth, respectively.  China fares very poorly, ranked just three steps up from the bottom.  It is interesting to note that Asian countries fare, by this ranking, generally worse than their European and commonwealth counterparts.  It is telling to compare the quality rankings to the overall rankings.  When looking at quality alone, several of the top-performing Asian countries actually fare much better.  South Korea is ranked tenth, Hong Kong eleventh, and Japan thirteenth.

We wonder whether the relatively low rankings of the Asian countries is a function of the perspective from which the data was gathered and analyzed.  More women have been in paid employment outside the home in Northern Europe than in Asia for decades now.  No doubt, that fact goes a long way toward explaining why Asia has not developed anything like the infrastructure for supporting very young children outside the home that Europe now has.  That fact by itself does not mean that children are less well cared for, but it does mean that the observer will see less formal infrastructure there for taking care of very young children.  But women are now entering the paid workforce in Asia in greater numbers than previously and the governments in those countries may find that they are more interested in European-style policies in this arena than was previously the case.

As workforce demographics change and the importance of early childhood education shifts away from daycare alone, we may see some countries, already performing well in quality measures, begin to climb the overall rankings.  Singapore, clearly, as evidenced both by this report and another recent report from the Lien Foundation, Vital Voices for Vital Years, has begun to invest a great deal of support into improving the quality of preschool education, perhaps because Singapore has long encouraged the entry of women into the paid workforce.  As they improve, it seems clear that countries will need to follow, for the most part, a roadmap set by the top performers in primary and secondary education.  At the same time, they will need to take into account some of the important differences at this life-stage, including the need for increased parental involvement outside of school, and quality healthcare for young children.

Or do we?  Consider the typical list of  “21st century skills”:  Problem Solving, Creativity, Leadership, Collaboration, Adaptability, Initiative, Critical Thinking, Learning to Learn, Agility, Innovation, Communication, and, of course, Technological Literacy.  What’s interesting about this list is that, except for the last item, Technological Literacy, all of these goals were important to the headmasters and faculty of Harrow, Eton and Rugby—the great British “public” schools at the close of the 19th century and the opening of the 20th.  These schools were responsible for training that era’s “masters of the universe,” the people who would be responsible for running the British Empire.  They needed people who could operate independently, if necessary, who could apply what they had learned to problems no one had anticipated, who could come up with innovative solutions to those problems, who would be good team members, who could lead, who could communicate well, and so on, right through the list.  Back in those days, though, it was clear to everyone involved that much of it would be learned at school but outside the classroom— on the playing fields and by the student as he negotiated the informal, but formidable, social structure of the institution.  Not least important were the values they wanted those institutions to inculcate.  “Its not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game that counts.”  If course, it did matter whether you won or lost, but your standing in society would depend in some measure on how you did it.

What is most important about the skills they were after is that they were reserved for—and, in some respects, actually defined by—the British elite.  They were not for the hoi polloi.  Far less was expected of the ordinary British students and the schools that prepared them.  What is truly remarkable about the typical list of 21st century skills is not their content—it is a very old list—but the fact that the countries that are now leading the PISA league tables expect all their students, not just an elite, to master them, and have more or less completely redesigned their education systems to that end.

But the matter does not rest there.  For some years now, employers in the world’s advanced economies have been complaining that the graduates they get do not measure up to their needs.  Correctly surmising that educators have not understood how dramatically the terms of global business competition have changed the nature of their human resources requirements, they have pursued the not unreasonable idea that they might get a better response if they could only produce a more accurate and detailed list of their requirements.  And thus was born a growing number of efforts to define 21st century skills.

In my mind, these efforts have not so much defined a new set of skills as make explicit the sorts of skills that have always been expected of most elites, but were never codified in this way.  That’s actually very important, because we are here discussing the nature of the demands now being placed, for the first time, on mass education systems.  Countries in the past have always been willing to spend a lot to educate their elites, because they have been so small, and because it has often been the elites themselves that shelled out the money for the education of their own children for this purpose.  This time, it is different.  It is for everyone, it is the public’s money, most of the children who will now have to meet these standards will be harder to educate but there will be no more money than there was before to educate them.  So it is now very important to spell out what society is trying to achieve, and to spell it out in a way that can guide the legions of ordinary teachers who will now be expected to do for ordinary youngsters what only elite teachers were expected to do for elite students before, so that students all over a country will have access to the same opportunities.

But it turns out to be not simply a matter of writing down on paper what the faculty of the English public schools were trying to accomplish.  Elite higher education institutions communicated informally with elite secondary school heads what they were looking for and the heads recommended the graduates who they thought would be most suitable as undergraduates at their elite institutions.  They did not need to spell out the skills nor did they need to have tests that had been proven to be valid and reliable.  Back in those days, there was no organized education research establishment, and there were certainly no cognitive scientists, psychometricians and professional test makers.  So now we have the advantage of science as we go about formulating the skills graduates will need as they enter the workforce and take up their duties as citizens and family members.  And we also have the advantage of a very active business community, as well as private foundations, and government, which have collectively been willing in many cases to fund research intended to produce empirically-derived descriptions of the needed skills.

We’ve been at this awhile.  In 2009, the OECD published a Working Paper on “21st Century Skills and Competencies For New Millennium Learners in OECD Countries.”  The authors, Katerina Ananiadou and Magdalean Claro, gathered together all the definitions of 21st century skills they could find and sent out a survey instrument to the OECD countries asking them whether they were incorporating such skills in their education policies.  Only 16 countries returned the survey form.  Most said that their country’s policies addressed most of the items on the list in some way, usually in the context of an overall revision of their national or state or provincial curriculum.  But virtually all said that they were not measuring the acquisition of most of the mentioned skills in any systematic way, or any way at all, except to the extent that school inspectors chanced to take them into account in the course of their visits.  Apart from skills related to the use of information technology, they reported, schools of education were not training prospective teachers in the development of these skills.  And, though there was mention of these skills in official documents, the terms were not well defined or specific. It seems that not much was happening as the first decade of the new millennium was coming to a close.

But before 2009 was out, the situation changed dramatically.  A consortium formed by three of the world’s leading technology companies—Cisco, Intel and Microsoft—announced that they were partnering with Singapore, Finland, Australia and the United States to create a serious research and development program to identify the 21st century skills with the specificity necessary to produce very high quality web-based assessments of them.  This Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills program (now known by its acronym ATC21S) would be based at the University of Melbourne in Australia and headed by Barry McGaw, formerly the director of the education program at the OECD (McGaw has since retired and the program is now headed by Patrick Griffith).  Costa Rica and the Netherlands have since been added to the ranks of participating countries.  Several other world class universities, in addition to the University of Melbourne, have also been added to the roster of participants, as have several commercial developers.  Leading academics were involved in specifying the 21st century skills to the detail needed to use them to drive a serious research and development program intended to result in high quality curriculum and assessments.  The decision was made by the participants to focus the research and development program on two arenas:  ICT Literacy for Learning and Collaborative Problem Solving.  The first round of piloting those materials is now complete and more is under way.

The reader will note that the choice of these two arenas meant that the research and development would focus not just on what the relevant skills are, and how to teach them and how to assess them, but, in particular, how to teach them and how to assess them using technology.  The participants clearly believe that technology opens up possibilities for enriching teaching and assessment in ways that are not possible without the technology and are out to demonstrate the validity of that belief.  The assessments are performance-based and are designed to model the kind of instruction that will enable students to do well on them.  For a more detailed overview of the ATC21S program, see this video of Patrick Griffith.  To get a feel for the kind of instructional materials being prepared by the project, see this video.  To get access to the papers prepared by leading academics to support the work of the ATC21S consortium, look here.

The ATC21S effort initially involved more than 250 researchers worldwide in the process of defining 21st century skills.  In the end, they organized them into four categories, as follows:

Ways of Thinking: Creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and learning

Ways of Working: Communication and collaboration

Tools for Working: Information and communications technology and information literacy

Skills for Living in the World: Citizenship, life and career and personal and social responsibility

The faculty at Eaton, Harrow and Rugby would have been very much at home with the first, second and fourth of these, and perhaps the second part of the third as well.

The ATC21S acknowledged its debt to a number of other initiatives that preceded it, including the Partnership for 21st Century Skills in the United States, which partnered American firms with American states to develop a list of skills which the partner states then drew on as they developed their academic standards; and the work of the Lisbon Council in the European Union.  And they also acknowledged the work of several groups which had focused more narrowly on defining needed skills in the arena of information technology and communications, including the International Society for Technology in Education and the Educational Testing Service in the United States.

But by far the most interesting contribution to this nascent field in recent times has been a contribution of the National Research Council of the National Academies in the United States, the report of an NRC panel chaired by Jim Pellegrino titled “Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century.”  You can download a brief on the report and a PDF of the prepublication version and order a printed final report here.

The report acknowledges right at the outset that “…these dimensions of human competence…have been valuable for many centuries….The important difference across time may lie in society’s desire that all students attain levels of mastery—across multiple areas of skill and knowledge—that were previously unnecessary for individual success in education and the workplace.”  The Committee identified three broad rubrics under which it organized the relevant skills, as follows:

The Cognitive Domain: Of which there are three clusters—cognitive processes and strategies; knowledge; and creativity.  Included here are critical thinking, information literacy, reasoning and argumentation and innovation.

The Intrapersonal Domain: Of which there are again three clusters—intellectual openness; work ethic and conscientiousness; and positive core self-evaluation.   These include competencies like flexibility, initiative, appreciation for diversity and metacognition.

The Interpersonal Domain:  Of which there are two clusters—teamwork and collaboration; and leadership.  Included here are communication, collaboration, responsibility and conflict resolution.

Pellegrino and company acknowledge that there is not very much research showing a causal relationship between these skills and the kinds of adult outcomes that the societies interested in 21st century skills are hoping for, but they point out that the research that is available points in that direction.  And, of course, they gently suggest that more research on this subject would be useful (there are many calls for more research).

The Committee uses the term “deeper learning” to describe what it is mainly after, the ability to take what is learned in one situation and apply it to new situations.  And they call this process “transfer.”  They then go on to say that deeper learning often involves shared learning and interactions with other people.  Deeper learning is used by the individual to develop expertise in a particular domain of knowledge or performance.  The product of deeper learning is transferable knowledge, including the knowledge of how, when and why to apply this knowledge to answer questions and solve problems.  All of this knowledge is structured around fundamental principles of the content area and their relationships, not lists of facts and procedures.  This, it seems to me, is a very important point.  We hang our knowledge on the conceptual structures of the disciplines, and it is in the process of understanding those structures and learning how both to hang new knowledge on them and use them to understand new situations that we come to be able to solve new and complex problems.  This is why rote learning of facts and procedures is not enough, indeed why it is not the heart of the matter.

But the Committee makes it very clear that it is a great mistake to think about the 21st Century Skills as hanging out there by themselves, to be taught as if they were freestanding subjects.  No, no, it says.  They play out differently for different disciplines and the only way to teach them successfully is in the context of the disciplines.

For those who might have thought that the job was nearly done when the 21st Century Skills have been described, the Committee puts that thought to rest.  Standards documents will need to be thoroughly revised to reflect this much broader range of skills subject by subject.  New curricula will have to be written.  Most important, perhaps, the programs of teachers colleges will have to be completely rethought and new approaches to student assessment will have to be developed, because we now have the tools to assess  only a very small part  of what we need to be assessing and, not least, because assessment always drives what teachers do in the classroom, and, in this age of assessment-driven accountability, if the assessments do not skillfully assess what we now want our students to be able to do, we won’t teach it and the students are not likely to be able to do it.

All of which brings me back to where I began.  These are not new skills.  What is new is the determination of a growing number of nations to teach them to all of their students.  Even though these are not new skills, they will not be widely found among a nation’s students unless the education system of that country, taken as whole, is driven by standards, curriculum, assessments and teacher education systems fundamentally different from those that were previously used to drive that country’s mass education system.  Some nations are well down that road.  Others, like my own, are largely at the beginning of it.  The Pellegrino report provides some very useful insights into the research that can be used to do that, the research that still needs to be done, and the scale and nature of the task ahead.  That is a very useful contribution.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.