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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

In their recent report published in February of this year, the Grattan Institute examined the school systems of several East Asian countries with a view towards drawing policy recommendations from what they learned for Australia. In the report, titled Catching Up: Learning from the best school systems in East Asia (and featured in last month’s International Reads) the authors look to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Korea and Singapore and focus particularly on teacher education, professional development, and approaches to learning. It is the combination of these factors, the authors believe, that produces such impressive results whenever their students are compared to their counterparts in other countries on international assessments such as PISA.

One of the most striking findings in this report is the rate at which students in Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Korea are learning as compared to their counterparts in the United States, the United Kingdom and, of course, Australia. Using the conversion rates utilized by Thompson et al. in their 2010 ACER publication, Challenges for Australian education: results from PISA 2009: the PISA 2009 assessment of students’ reading, mathematical and scientific literacy (based on OECD analysis of PISA score levels and student competencies), the authors of Catching Up were able to produce a table demonstrating how many months ahead students in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea were compared to students in the US, the UK, Australia and the EU21. A difference in reading of 39 points represents a full year of difference in learning; the number is similar in math (41 points) and in science (38 points). Thus the difference in student learning between the 2009 PISA top performer (Shanghai) and the bottom performer (Kyrgyzstan) is six to six and a half years of learning in all three subjects.

What emerges from viewing the PISA scores in this way is it shows how far ahead students in Shanghai are, even compared to their top-performing East Asian counterparts. In mathematics, students in Shanghai are more than two and a half years ahead of the average OECD student, with students in Singapore and Hong Kong about a year behind them. Students in the UK and the US, on the other hand, lag a few months behind the average OECD student. In science, again, students in Shanghai have a huge leg up on most others: they are nearly two years ahead of the average OECD student and at least half a year ahead of the other top performers, whereas in the UK, students have just a tiny advantage over the average OECD student, while the United States remains average. Finally, in reading, Shanghai is still the frontrunner by far, but the overall gaps are smaller. Students in Shanghai are “only” about a year and a half ahead of the average OECD student, and again about half a year ahead of the next-best top performer. The United States performs better, by a handful of months, than the average OECD student, while the UK is approximately on par with average.

A common perception about education in Asian countries is that students – and particularly teenagers like those tested in PISA – spend the vast majority of their time either in school or in “cram schools” in order to compete for spots at selective universities. While it is certainly true that the culture of “cram schools” persists in these countries, the authors of Catching Up argue that it is not the extra hours spent studying that lead to these massive gaps in student achievement between East Asian countries and other OECD countries. Instead, these gaps emerge from “effective education strategies that focus on implementation and well-designed programs that continuously improve learning and teaching” (12), which are in place in the top performing countries. As evidence for this statement, they point to Hong Kong, which leaped from 17th place in PIRLS to 2nd place in just five years. Cram schools and Confucian values, they contend, cannot explain that rise.  Neither can system size; although Hong Kong and Singapore are relatively small (Singapore has just under half a million students while Hong Kong has about 700,000), South Korea has 7.2 million students and is also a top performer. Rather, Hong Kong, like Singapore and other rapidly-improving East Asian countries, took it upon itself to implement a series of effective and well thought out reforms with a focus on teacher education, teacher professionalism, and funding equity to get to the top of the pack.

Photo from the 2011 International Summit on the Teaching Profession

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

1.    Swiftly broadening goals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.    A focus on implementation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

School Profile: Zhabei No. 8 Middle School, Shanghai

By Vivien Stewart

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

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

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

School Profile: Tampines Elementary School, Singapore

By Vivien Stewart

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