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

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

Figure 1

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

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

Figure 2

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

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

I just finished reading a recent book from Routledge, Teacher Education Around the World, edited by Linda Darling-Hammond and Ann Lieberman.  It is a very rewarding read, full of new information and fresh, insightful analysis.  The editors asked an impressive team of researchers to do chapters on Finland, Singapore, the Netherlands, the UK, Hong Kong and Canada.  Darling-Hammond did the chapter on the United States and the two editors pulled the threads together in the last chapter.

Two things jump out at this reviewer.  The first has to do with the scope of the changes taking place around the world as nation after nation concludes that better teachers are the key to their goals for their students.  The other has to do with the nature of the battle for the souls of policymakers over the best strategy to do that and the way policymakers are responding to the contending forces.  I’ll tackle the latter first and then return to the former.

As Darling-Hammond and Lieberman see it, the policy battle taking place around the globe is being fought between those who believe that the effort to professionalize education has failed and those who believe that that effort has only just begun, that student performance will improve radically only if teaching is converted from a blue-collar occupation into a true profession.  More accurately, perhaps, this battle pits those who believe that teaching can and must have all the attributes of a true profession against those who think it neither can nor should do so.

In a way, this is a battle about who is entitled to wear the badge of the reformer.  Through one lens, reform is converting teaching from an occupation requiring little technical knowledge and expertise into a true profession requiring a good deal of both, and, on the other reform is battling an entrenched education bureaucracy with all the tools that market forces and the entrepreneurial spirit can bring to the revitalization of moribund industries.

To some extent, of course, this battle involves the facts.  The first question here is whether those who want to turn teaching into a true profession are making any progress.  Darling-Hammond, Lieberman and their coauthors paint a detailed picture of changes taking place along a broad front within the professional education community over the last 20 years or so, all designed to raise the quality of the pool of young people from whom new teachers are selected, improve their mastery of the subjects they will teach, help them better understand the way young people grow and develop, learn their craft, and practice that craft under the supervision of first rate teachers until they either become first rate teachers themselves or leave teaching.

All of this makes sense, of course, only if one believes that there is a substantial body of professional knowledge and practice that must be mastered if a raw recruit is to become a good teacher, above and beyond the knowledge of the subject one is going to teach.  If you believe that, then reformers are the people who put in place all the elements needed to turn teaching into a true profession.

One of the most important hallmarks of a true profession is the presence of sound professional standards, so I was particularly interested in the way the authors show how new standards—for entering teacher education institutions, for accrediting teacher education institutions, for licensing teachers, for determining who advances up the newly created career ladders and for awarding certification to advanced professionals—are providing powerful drivers for the whole new system of development of high quality teachers in a growing number of countries.  They point out that, whereas teachers used to advance through their own education and training and sometimes through their subsequent careers on the basis of courses taken, they now advance on the basis of careful, sophisticated assessments of their actual performance, such as those recently developed at Stanford University.

The book shows how the most advanced countries have worked hard to identify and use the best research on the factors that make for great teachers, much of it done in the United States, but also to provide teachers with important research skills, enabling them to constantly improve their own practice in a disciplined way.  They show how a new breed of school is developing around the world that serves as an analogue to the teaching hospital in medicine.  The best of these institutions is clearly changing the university at least as much as the school, resulting in a constant dialogue between clinical faculty and research faculty in which both together create the curriculum for the education and training of new teachers and find a way to blend theory and practice in a way the makes the former come alive and that provides insight into the latter in a much more powerful program of instruction than was previously available at these institutions.

The picture one gets from this book of the broad upgrading of the selection, preparation and support of new teachers is nothing if not varied.  The details of how these countries are going about this transformation are very different, and there is no doubt that that fact will enable us all to learn a lot from the variation.  But the themes are clear.  Teaching is increasingly viewed as a profession like other professions.  That means that:

• there is an important body of professional knowledge and practice to be acquired over a period of years,
• so much discretion is required in its application that the trained professional must be trusted to apply that knowledge with wide discretion in the workplace,
• the work needs to be regulated, but the regulations need to be based on professional standards and those standards must come from the profession itself, and
• the advancement of practice will come only with more and better research, the results of which are incorporated into the training of the professionals and the support provided to the professionals as they constantly seek to improve their practice.

From the point of view of the authors of this volume, that is what it means to be a professional, and turning teachers into true professionals is the only way to create mass education systems capable of educating virtually all students to global standards.

And then there is the other camp.  They see all this as a thinly veiled attempt by a failed bureaucratic establishment to hang on to the old ways.  If teacher educators knew how to or even wanted to improve their appalling performance, they would have done it years ago.  No self-respecting high school student who could get into a first-rate university would choose to go to a school of education, which will let anyone in and provides a program with standards so low that no one ever fails.  This camp is very fond of pointing to actual examples of very highly qualified research scientists willing to become high school teachers in their retirement, but who cannot do so because they do not wish to take the intellectually vacuous courses and mindless tests required by the teacher training institutions and the state to become a teacher.

To the people in this camp, it is obvious that there is no craft of teaching that rises to the level of serious intellectual activity.  What is needed are young people and older people who can demonstrate that they know the subject they are expected to teach and the rest will take care of itself.  The way to get the teachers we need is to break the hammer lock of the establishment on teacher training, and open the training of teachers to anyone or any institution prepared to let the market decide whether their product is worth hiring.  The market, in other words, can bring in strong competition for the established institutions and do what markets do best: drive costs down and quality up.  The people in this camp celebrate Teach for America and its relatives in several other countries, because they have succeeded in bringing some of America’s most capable young people into teaching—if only for a couple of years and in very few classrooms—by requiring only a few weeks of teacher training.  All over the world, the people who hold this view are championing policies that allow many kinds of institutions to train teachers, and reduce the training that new recruits get in the craft of teaching and in the research on student learning to a minimum.  It is, I think, not unreasonable to conclude that the people in this camp do not believe that there is, properly speaking, a profession of teaching, but rather that teaching is an occupation or a calling, but not a profession.

What is particularly interesting about this clash as portrayed in this book is the way this conflict is playing out country by country.  The authors present both Singapore and Finland as wholly in the first camp, with policies that are internally consistent, all of which reflect a commitment to the idea that teaching is and ought to be a profession, for which people are selected as professionals, trained as professionals, supported as professionals and managed as professionals.

But the authors show that, after that, the picture on the ground is much more mixed.  If one end of the dimension line is represented by Finland and Singapore, the other is represented by the United States and the UK.  In between, they show us countries in which both sides of the conflict have won their policy battles.  In those countries, we see a real effort to put in place policy measures intended to build a true profession of teaching right alongside others that make it possible for individuals to minimize or even eliminate the training required to become a licensed teacher, the standards for which are being raised in other statutes on the books of the same country.

One gets the sense that the world is in a race.  On one side are those hoping to strengthen the profession of teaching and, on the other, are those who are seeking to blow up the very institutional structure the former are trying to build.  If those who are trying to professionalize teaching succeed fast enough, they will invalidate the case being made by those who are trying to blow up the establishment.  Because education is an inherently conservative enterprise, they may get the time they need. But, if they take too long to reach their objective, or their methods are sufficiently weakened by the other side along the way, they will lose and those who believe that market forces are all, or almost all, of what is needed may prevail.  And then it will be most interesting to see which countries are most successful in educating their children.

In December, the results of the 2011 administration of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) were published in three separate reports, each examining international performance in reading (at the fourth grade level), math (at the fourth and eighth grade levels) and science (at the fourth and eighth grade levels).  These assessments provide a picture of international student performance in the years before a student reaches the age of 15, which is the age at which students take the OECD’s Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA).  However, there are some central differences between the TIMSS/PIRLS and PISA assessments.  Michael Martin, the Co-Executive Director of the TIMSS and PIRLS Study Center at Boston College, notes that while PISA is intended to measure a student’s general skills in the arenas of reading, math and science, TIMSS and PIRLS are more focused on content mastery.  Additionally, Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, has pointed out that the countries participating in both assessments do vary – the TIMSS and PIRLS groups are smaller and represent a mixture of countries at different levels of economic development as compared to the participants in PISA.

Because of the differences between the assessments, the countries that are in the top ten or fifteen of the TIMSS and PIRLS rankings are somewhat different than the top performers on the last incarnation of PISA in 2009.  While league tables of the top countries based on their average scores always garner the most press when the results of international assessments are released, we decided to take a more in-depth look at what level of proficiency students in the top fifteen countries are actually reaching in these subjects.

The IEA has established four “international benchmarks” on their score scale for these assessments.  While the score scale for both PIRLS and TIMSS runs from 0-1000, the vast majority of scores fall between 300 and 700.  The IEA has identified a score of 400 as the “low” international benchmark, indicating that students at this score point have been educated to a “basic” level.  Beyond that, there is a score of 475, or “intermediate;” a score of 550, or “high,” and a score of 625, or “advanced.”  Below, we have plotted the percent of students at each benchmark in the top fifteen countries on the 2011 administration of PIRLS and TIMSS.  This is useful when thinking about the top performers, because it shows, in a clearer way perhaps than the average scale score, what students in each country are really able to do.

In the fourth grade PIRLS reading assessment, a student who reaches the “low” international benchmark is able to “locate and retrieve an explicitly stated detail” in a literary text, and “locate and reproduce explicitly stated information … at the beginning of the text” in an informational text.  By contrast, at the “advanced” international benchmark, students are able to “integrate ideas and evidence across a text,” and “distinguish and interpret complex information from different parts of a text,” among other skills.

The chart above, like the others to follow, is organized from top to bottom in the order of average scale score.  However, the average scale score does not always correlate to the highest percentage of students reaching the “advanced” benchmark in each country.  In this case, it does not, though Hong Kong does have the highest proportion of students meeting either the “high” benchmark or “advanced” benchmark – 67 percent – while in the United States, just 56 percent of students meet those levels.  The tail of students either meeting the “low” benchmark or not meeting a benchmark is also significantly smaller in the top three countries – Hong Kong, the Russian Federation, and Finland (7, 8 and 8 percent, respectively), than in the majority of the other countries.  This more specific data on student performance is useful in terms of thinking about a country’s overall performance, because it gives a clearer sense, potentially, of the equity of the school system, and the ability of the system to educate all students – or any students – to high levels.  It also demonstrates that there are clear differences in student performance between the top handful of countries and the rest of the countries rounding out the top ten or fifteen.

For fourth grade math, in order to reach the “low” benchmark, a student must be able to demonstrate “basic mathematical knowledge,” such as adding and subtracting integers and being able to recognize familiar shapes.  At the “advanced” benchmark, a student must have an understanding of how to apply their knowledge, for example, by solving word problems with multiple steps, and they must show some understanding of more difficult concepts like fractions and decimals.

In the case of TIMSS fourth grade math, the percent of students reaching the “advanced” benchmark does correlate to the country’s average scale score, at least for the top six performers.  This chart indicates very clearly how well the East Asian countries do compared to the rest of the world in instilling advanced-level math skills in their students, even at an early age, with about a third of students or more reaching the “advanced” benchmark in Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, and an overwhelming majority reaching either the “advanced” or “high” benchmarks in all cases.  These countries also have the smallest proportions of students who failed to meet the most basic level.  By contrast, starting with Northern Ireland, which is in sixth place in the overall league table in this subject, the other countries have higher proportions of students failing to reach at least the “intermediate” benchmark, and generally much lower proportions of students reaching the “advanced” benchmark.

In eighth grade math, students at the “low” benchmark “have some knowledge of whole numbers and decimals, operations, and basic graphs.”  At the “advanced” level, students are able to demonstrate many mathematical skills, such as solving linear equations, reasoning with geometric figures, and expressing generalizations algebraically.

The pattern in proficiency seen in the TIMSS fourth grade math results is continued in the TIMSS eighth grade math results.  Andreas Schleicher from the OECD and US Education Secretary Arne Duncan have commented on the drop in math and science skills from fourth grade to eighth grade in the United States, and the data bears this out.  In fourth grade, 47 percent of American students met either the “high” or “advanced” benchmarks; in eighth grade, just 30 percent of students did.  Furthermore, twice as many American students – 8 percent – failed to meet any benchmarks in eighth grade than in fourth grade.  In Singapore, however, the number of students meeting the “advanced” or “high” benchmark holds steady at 78 percent in both grades, and the other East Asian countries also do not lose any substantial ground.  Taiwan increases the number of students at the “advanced” level from 30 percent in fourth grade to about half (49 percent) in eighth grade.

In fourth grade science, students at the “low” benchmark “show some elementary knowledge of life, physical and earth sciences,” and “demonstrate knowledge of some simple facts … interpret simple diagrams, complete simple tables, and provide short written responses to questions requiring factual information.”  At the “advanced” benchmark, students can “apply knowledge and understanding of scientific processes … and show some knowledge of the process of scientific inquiry.”  Additionally, “they have a beginning ability to interpret results in the context of a simple experiment, reason and draw conclusions from descriptions and diagrams, and evaluate and support an argument.”

On the TIMSS fourth grade science assessment, the East Asian countries do not dominate in terms of student proficiency at the “advanced” benchmark as completely as they do in math, although perennial top performers South Korea and Singapore still top the list in this measure.  Fewer students overall, across the board, seem to have reached the “advanced” benchmark in science as compared to reading and math.  The United States seems to have a particular problem in this subject, with 19 percent of students either failing to meet any benchmark or only meeting the “low” benchmark.

At the eighth grade level in science, students meeting the “low” benchmark are expected to “recognize some basic facts from the life and physical sciences,” and can display this knowledge by “interpret[ing] simple diagrams, complet[ing] simple tables, and apply[ing] basic knowledge.  Students at the “advanced” level can “communicate an understanding of complex and abstract concepts in biology, chemistry, physics and earth sciences.”  They also “understand basic features of scientific investigation … [and] combine information from several sources to solve problems and draw conclusions, and … provide written explanations to communicate scientific knowledge.”

Like in fourth grade science, overall, there seem to be fewer students who reach the “advanced” benchmark across the board.  The United States sees a 5 percent decline in the number of students reaching the “advanced” benchmark from fourth to eighth grade, and a four percent decline in students reaching the “high” benchmark.  This is compounded by a large jump in the percent of students who either do not meet any benchmarks (7 percent compared to 4 percent) or meet only the “low” benchmark (20 percent compared to 15 percent) – more than a quarter of all US students, in fact.

A separate, but equally interesting, set of data from the 2011 PIRLS results is the level of proficiency of students in two types of reading – literary and informational – as compared to a country’s overall score.  Debates over the value of each type of reading as emphasized in a curriculum have been raging for some time now, and while the PIRLS data does not solve this debate, it does provide interesting new fodder to the discussion.

The chart above depicts the overall average reading score on PIRLS, which is administered to fourth grade students, for the top fifteen systems on that assessment, as well as the average score on the literary reading tasks and on the informational reading tasks.  The top performing countries (Hong Kong, the Russian Federation, Finland and Singapore) all have average informational reading scores that are higher than or equal to their overall reading score, with literary reading scores somewhat lower than or equal to both the overall score and the informational score.  By contrast, the United States, Northern Ireland, Denmark, Ireland, Canada and England all display the opposite trend – literary reading scores that are higher, often statistically significant, than either their informational reading scores or their overall scores.  There is also, in the case of the United States, Ireland and Northern Ireland, a statistical significance in the difference between the lower informational reading score and the overall score.

This suggests that informational reading may, in fact, help aid a student’s overall reading skills, at least as measured by the PIRLS assessment.  It is notable that several East Asian countries, including Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, all of which traditionally do very well in the math and science assessments, also have students who perform better on informational reading tasks than on literary reading tasks.  In the case of Hong Kong and Singapore, this results in a very high overall score.  In Taiwan, the informational reading score is extremely high compared to the literary reading score, and actually fairly comparable to Singapore’s informational reading score.  However, in this case the literary reading score of Taiwan’s students brings the overall score down, suggesting a need for balance.  In terms of balance, Finland seems to have gotten this just right; the informational, literary and overall scores are indistinguishable from one another, and are all very high.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mining is by far Australia’s biggest industry. But that does not mean that it is Australia’s biggest employer. I learned that once a mine is established, most of the mining is automated. The mining itself is almost completely automated. Automated, driverless trucks deliver the ore produced by the mine to automated trains that deliver it to automated machines that take it from the trains and dump it into largely automated ships which deliver it to Australia’s dominant customer, China.

It might take 3,000 people to build one of these mines and the associated infrastructure, but only 300 to actually operate it. So it makes no sense to build big new towns for the workers who build the mines, because they won’t be there long. So the mining companies fly them in at the beginning of the week and fly them home at the end of the week, maybe hundreds of miles in each direction, for as long as it takes to construct the new mine and related infrastructure, at enormous cost.

In Singapore, I ran into a senior official from Germany who happened to know a lot about vocational education and training in China and about how the Germans are doing business in China. I asked him how companies like Daimler, the makers of Mercedes Benz motorcars, were able to get Chinese workers who were as skilled as the famed German mechanics. Oh, he said, Daimler’s operations are now almost completely automated. The numbers of highly trained mechanics they need is now so small that they can bring in a small crew of trainers from Germany and train all the workers they need themselves.

Besides, he said, Daimler is not making cars in China for export, but only for the China market. The price of making such things in China has been steadily rising, relative to the price of making them in Europe, so it no longer makes sense for Daimler to make cars in China for export.

In 1990, my organization, the National Center on Education and the Economy, issued a report, the introduction to which pointed out that industrial workers in South Korea were working for one tenth of what similarly skilled American workers were making, and those in mainland China were making one one-hundredth of what American workers made. But that is not true anymore. The average wages of American autoworkers have been falling steadily since then and those of similarly skilled Chinese workers have been rising. Wage levels for industrial workers in Shanghai are now around one quarter of those in the United States. And wages are swiftly rising in the interior of China, too.

This is to be expected in a world in which workers on one side of the world are competing directly with workers on the other side of the world, as never before. In such global markets for labor, one can expect that the prices for labor will slowly come into equilibrium, with prices coming down in the high priced countries and rising in the low price countries, for similarly skilled labor. Eventually, one could expect that these prices would be about the same from one country to another for the same skills.

For China, that will mean that their decisive price advantage in world markets will wither and die. The Chinese know that, and know that, increasingly, their growth will have to be internal, the result of their own people getting richer and demanding more goods and services from their own suppliers.

As the difference between the “China price” and the prices charged by other countries for similar goods and services becomes smaller and smaller, the United States will find that it no longer has access to the kinds of very cheap goods that has made Walmart such a success in our country and around the world. So the prices of many things that Americans have now become accustomed to purchasing very cheaply will rise, in some cases steeply. That will mean that a dollar earned by low-skill, low-wage workers in the United States will buy even less than it does now. It is also the case that the return of manufacturing to our shores will continue to pick up, partly because the difference between the cost of their labor and the cost of our labor is narrowing, but also because it is better to have suppliers who are closer than farther away, it is easier to protect intellectual property rights, and, most especially, because labor costs make up less and less of the cost of the product to the customer, because of advancing automation. So the return of manufacturing will be a blessing, but a blessing for fewer and fewer workers.

As the most advanced global companies come out of the Great Recession, many of the jobs they shed will not come back. Many have used their massive cash supplies to purchase the very latest in automated equipment to become more efficient, to automate many jobs that people did before the Great Recession, jobs that will never return. More and more of advanced industrial economy will look like the Australian mining industry. The industries will be healthy, but will employ far fewer people than before. Productivity will be high, but employment will be low. The owners of many firms in those industries will prosper. But the citizens of the countries they conduct operations in will suffer. Income disparities will grow more quickly than at present and the middle of that income distribution will get narrower and narrower as these processes accelerate.

There will be employers in each of those countries who will tell government that the way to be competitive is to keep the price of labor low, to waive environmental regulations because regulations make their products uncompetitive, to cut back on health care and retirement benefits for the same reason. They will argue, in effect, that the only route to competitiveness for those countries is to pollute the environment, endanger public health and lower ordinary workers’ standard of living.

But there is another possibility. You can see it in Singapore. With a combination of determination, persistence and smart policy, the Singaporeans have been investing wisely in their future for half a century. When other countries in the East saw their future in offering cheap labor to global companies, Singapore was trying to figure out how to raise the cost of their labor—and therefore the standard of living of their people—by providing higher educated and better-trained labor. They made life difficult for their low-value added producers and made it very attractive for their high value-added producers. They made very close partners with the world’s leading high tech companies, figured out just what kind of skills they needed most and made sure that they could get those skills in Singapore. They paid very close attention to every segment of their workforce. They built a very high floor under the entire workforce by providing a world-class academic curriculum to all their students and creating a world-class teaching force to teach that curriculum. They built a system of polytechnics as good as any in the world to provide very highly skilled senior technical workers for a wide range of industries. Perhaps most impressive, they created a set of post-secondary vocational schools for the bottom quarter of their students as fine as any I have seen anywhere in the world, with facilities that rival those of many American universities. They turned vocational education and training from a dumping ground into a sought-after alternative that attracts more and more students every year.

And little wonder. Ninety percent of the graduates of their vocational schools have job offers in their chosen fields within six months of graduation. Singapore has one of the lowest rates of youth unemployment in the industrialized world. When I was there, I heard the head of Rolls-Royce Asia (which makes jet engines, not motor cars) explain that they decided to make Singapore their Asia manufacturing headquarters in no small measure because of the high quality of Singapore’s work force.

The distribution of income in the United States and many other advanced industrial countries is getting to look more like an hour glass every day, hollowing out the middle class and endangering their political stability as a result. That is not happening in Singapore, and that is true because Singapore had a strategy for improving the lives of their people, a strategy that married economic policy to education policy in very explicit ways. Singapore has created both a basic education system and a vocational education and training system that can sustain an economy that is shaped not like an hour glass but rather like a flattened diamond, with a big fat middle. Singapore’s population is about five million, right in the range of many American states and some European countries.

Here in the United States, educators and training organizations look to our Bureau of Labor Statistics to produce data about employers’ projected demand for labor as the basis for their own planning. They try, in other words, to produce the profile of skills and knowledge in the workforce that the economy will need. The Singaporeans have not done that. They have imagined the kind of economy they want, the kind of economy that will provide a good income and a decent life and rising standard of living for their population. And they have then worked very hard;mdash;and successfully—to produce a workforce with the skills needed to realize that dream.

In a world in which global employers can get the labor they need anywhere in the world and will seek to get that labor at the lowest possible price, it no longer makes sense for a country to base its education and training policies on projections of companies’ domestic human resources needs. The question should be not what domestic companies want to be more competitive (lower wages, fewer regulations, less restrictive labor practices, less concern about pollution), but what will attract global companies to produce services and goods in your country and pay high wages to the people who do that. Singapore bet that supply would create demand, as long as other government policies were carefully crafted to support its larger aims. Nations need not be helpless in the face of the changing dynamics of the global economy.

Automation is steadily taking over more and more of the routine work done in high wage economies. This is a good thing. What that leaves is interesting, challenging, creative work. Will it do that only for a few people, leaving increasing numbers unemployed or underemployed and desperate, or will these changes lead to full employment economies in which more and more people do interesting, challenging and creative work? The answer to that question does not depend on companies’ projections of what they will need. It depends on public policy, on what the people of a country decide they want for themselves, and it depends on whether a country invests in developing the skills, knowledge and capacity of their people in such a way as to make their country an attractive place to do business for the kinds of global companies that will offer interesting, creative and challenging work to enough people in enough occupations to provide full employment at high wages.

No country will be able to offer that kind of broadly shared prosperity if it is offering first class education and training only to its elites. Singapore realized that it could only get to broadly shared prosperity if it built a first class system of education and training for everyone. They put as much effort—perhaps more—into building their vocational education system as they did into their university system. They built an education and training system that would offer global employers not just highly educated and trained professionals and senior managers but highly trained and educated workers at every level, for all the work that needs to be done, in both manufacturing and services.

When I was in Australia, I was discouraged to hear some of my friends dismissing Singapore’s achievements on the grounds that Singapore is not a “liberal democracy,” just as I have heard some of my friends in the United States dismiss Singapore because its government does not tolerate either drug users or those who throw chewing gum on their sidewalks.

This, in my view, is a kind of cultural arrogance we can ill afford. Singapore is only half a century old. I have met many officials there with degrees from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge whose parents were illiterate and poor. These officials are sophisticated, worldly in their ambitions for themselves and their children. As the conference I was at in Singapore got underway, it featured a band of polytechnic students that included a young man with scarlet hair and others who found other ways of declaring their independence from the cultural commitments of their parents. These young people did not grow up with the sense of existential threat to the very existence of their country that made their parents quite willing to trade restrictions on their political freedoms for the chance to build a decent life for themselves and their children. There is every reason to believe that these young people will find a way to make the transition to liberal democracy just as their parents found a way to build a brilliantly successful economy. Our best hope for China is that the country continues to look to Singapore for inspiration. Many others could learn a thing or two from Singapore if they want a country with broadly shared prosperity, a strong middle class and the kind of freedoms that only a broad and prosperous middle class can guarantee.

It is almost as if one could forego benchmarking trips elsewhere because you will find it all in Singapore.  That is true in the sense that you will find that Singapore has researched it, considered it and adapted it, but you are not likely to find the thing itself, because adaptation is not adoption.  Everything is made use of.  Nothing is replicated.

Ngee Ann Polytechnic

A few examples will do.  The purpose of this trip was to benchmark Singapore’s vocational and technical education system.  So these examples will be drawn from that arena.  But I could just as easily have drawn them from any other aspect of their education and training system.

Years ago, Singapore decided as it was developing its own vocational education system that it needed to have a system of occupational skill standards.  When I asked about that, they said that they had taken the methodology for developing their occupational skill standards from the American DACUM process for occupational job analysis and curriculum development and had borrowed the organization structure for involving industry in the development of skill standards from the Europeans.

But my organization, the National Center on Education and the Economy, has researched national occupational skill standards systems for years.  We long ago came to the conclusion that, notwithstanding their obvious value for getting students and training organizations to focus on the skills that industries feel they need, such systems have a very serious downside.  There is no point in having such systems unless industry drives the development of the standards.  The whole idea is to have standards that reflect industry needs.  The easiest way to do that is ask industry associations to take the lead in developing the standards. But, if you do that, you get a standard for average practice, which is almost always, by definition, behind leading edge practice.  When you set average practice as a standard, it takes a long time to change that standard.  The effect is to train young people for a standard that is more and more behind the times, making it less likely that industry leaders will be able to get people who can do the work the way they need to have it done.  They might be better off in a country with no skills standards.  So, you can see that national occupational skills standards can be an enormous advantage, but they can also be a deadly trap.

When we asked the leaders of Singapore’s polytechnics what they thought about these observations, they laughed and said that they, too, had come to the same conclusions.  So the government listened to what the industry groups had to say, but considered it only as advice, not as the last word, and felt free to change the standards that emerged from these processes if they felt that the standard needed to be changed to make Singapore more competitive, more in line with the most effective forms of work organization, better positioned to use the latest technologies, better aligned with the needs and practices of the world’s leading firms.  That is the essence of smart adaptation.

Ngee Ann Polytechnic Library

Here’s another one.  The Singaporeans looked hard at the famous German dual system of vocational education.  When we talked to them, they told is that the dual system is among the most important of the innovations they brought to Singapore.  But the dual-system, alternating formal education in school with on-the-job training in the workplace, is the primary upper-secondary education system for young Germans headed directly into the workforce.  In Singapore, young people not headed to University go either into the upper secondary vocational education system or into one of the polytechnics.  In the upper secondary vocational system, there is no sandwich program alternating time in the workplace with time in school.  It is all in school, but the Singaporeans have persuaded the companies to give them the state-of-the-art machines they need in the classrooms (working engines for current model cars, for example, with cutaway engines for the automechanics program) and have also persuaded the firms that it is in their interest to regularly cycle the school instructors through their firms to keep their skills up to date.  The Singaporeans figured out that, without the long European guild tradition to back it up, the German dual system would not work in Singapore.  Where they do use the apprenticeship system was in their adult education system, for employed workers who already had a firm attachment to the sponsoring firm.  Another smart adaptation.

Economic Development Board logo

In the late 1970’s, the Singaporean Economic Development Board (EDB), the nerve center of economic development strategy in Singapore, persuaded Germany and France to set up, at their own expense, several state-of-the-art vocational institutes in Singapore.  This was very similar to the move made in the 1960s by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s then prime minister, when he persuaded several leading nations to set up high-powered institutes of technology in India, on the model of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  The vocational institutes in Singapore were to be upper secondary schools.  One of the top officials at the EDB insisted that these new schools be set up as “factory schools,” that is, that they look as much as possible like the very kinds of work environments the students would work in when they graduated, and the training in the school would be based on the production of actual advanced manufacturing systems produced under contract to local firms, with the students doing most of the work required to build those systems.  The foreign countries and the foreign firms they partnered with to build and staff these schools were persuaded by the EDB to build them in part by important economic concessions offered by the Board but also by the argument that students trained on the machines provided by these countries and firms would be inclined to order them when they joined the staffs of Singapore firms as foremen and supervisors.  The faculty members in these schools were required to take paid sabbaticals every few years, during which time they were expected to get an assignment anywhere in the world on the staff of one of the world’s leading technology firms.  On that person’s return, he or she was expected to update the school’s curriculum on the basis of what had been learned.  In this way, the schools’ curriculum was constantly refreshed, always reflecting the global state of the art.  So Singapore had a constant supply of young people coming into their firms in mid-level technical positions who were very well versed in the latest factory automation and microelectronics manufacturing techniques.  Was this benchmarking?  Not of the traditional sort, but the spirit was certainly there.  It was a remarkably effective and efficient system for constantly bringing back to Singapore the very best manufacturing technologies in the world, and making sure that Singapore could offer a workforce very well versed in those technologies.  We had learned about the German-Singapore Institute and its French mates on our first trip to Singapore in 1989.  What we learned this time was that Singapore had since built an entire system of world-class polytechnics on this model.  When we talked with a group of Singaporean employers toward the end of our visit, it was clear that they place a very high value on the skills, knowledge and attitudes that the graduates of these polytechnics bring to their firms.

Again and again, I found myself very impressed by the quality of thought that had gone into the continually evolving design of the Singaporean education and training system.  I am choosing my words carefully here.  The keyword is “design.”  Everywhere one looks, one sees thoughtful designs of the kind that a very good engineer would create.  This was true of each subsystem and of the system as a whole.  And, indeed, when we asked about how the system was managed, this attention to systems design was reflected in the answer.  The organization of the system as a whole included features designed to assure that managers of all related parts of the system were in constant touch with one another, and that nothing was done that would affect the functioning of the larger system without close consultation with the managers of the adjoining system functions, both vertically in the system and horizontally as well.

This is no accident.  When I first discovered that the Economic Development Board is the nerve center of the Singapore government, during our first trip in 1989, I also discovered that the staff of the EDB was made up mostly not of economists but of engineers.  Economists tend to be analysts, but engineers are system designers.  This orientation came naturally to them.

But there was a related point that seemed no less important to me.  When Lee Kuan Yew took the helm in Singapore, even before Singapore gained its independence, he was determined to use economic development to lever his destitute little group of islands into a standard of living for his people far above what it was when Singapore was birthed.  And he believed that could only be accomplished by smart, honest, uncorrupted government officials.  He decided that he would have to attract to government the smartest people he could find in Singapore, so his policy was to provide people in government compensation comparable to what they would get for comparable jobs in private industry.  He identified the very top high school students and offered to pay for their education at institutions like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge if they would agree to come back and serve in his government.

It is those people who were responsible for vaulting Singapore from a tiny impoverished dot on the map in 1965 to its current status as one of the most successful economies in the world.  And today, this practice continues.  Leaders in government agencies in Singapore, including the Ministry of Education and its sub-agencies, are some of the most knowledgeable and forward-thinking education leaders we have met anywhere.

Many observers have likened Singapore not to a nation but to a large corporation.  This is partly because one does not see here the usual play of partisan politics and partly because the usual play of partisan politics has been replaced by a kind of rationale planning and attention to execution that is more characteristic of a well-managed corporation than of a liberal democracy.  That said, however, this is a nation that believes in government, in the capacity and legitimacy of government to lead.

And that, of course, could contain the seeds of a big problem for Singapore.  Countries and organizations with very strong leadership are often countries and organizations where everyone stands around waiting for the top to tell them what to do.  In today’s world, that is the death knell of economic competitiveness.  It is entirely plausible that the very instrument that enabled Singapore to climb to the top could be the instrument of its failure to compete in a world in which economic leadership is increasingly a function of innovation and entrepreneurship from below, not instructions from on high.

Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam

So I was especially happy to learn before we left for Singapore that we had managed to get some time with Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam.  In 2005, when Shanmugaratnam was Education Minister, he delivered a speech in which he commented on a trip he had just taken with several Ministry of Education officials to Japan. Japan, he said, had come to the same conclusion that the Singaporean government had come to, namely, that the future belonged to countries whose workforces could invent the future, could out-create and out-innovate their competition.  And the Japanese and the Singaporeans were in agreement on the kinds of changes that would be necessary in their schools to meet this challenge.  But, he said, the Japanese had imposed these changes from the top down, and there was no buy-in from the schools.  That would not happen in Singapore.  The goal would be reached with leadership from the schools, and support from the top, or as he put it, there would be “top-down support for bottom-up initiatives.”  For government to achieve its objectives, it would have to change the way it worked, in a pretty fundamental way.

I am telling this story in part because it says something very important about one small country’s route to top performance, but I am also telling it because it says something about the process of benchmarking.  Shanmugaratnam and his team learned something very important in Japan, but they did not copy it, just as they had earlier learned very important things from Germany and the United States, but did not copy them.  It is too early to tell whether Singapore will be able to make the deep cultural shifts that are needed to reach the goals they set for themselves a few years ago, and it is also too early to tell whether the Japanese will succeed in reaching similar goals, but it is, I think, a sure bet that Singapore’s deeply ingrained, almost reflexive, habit of constantly checking to see how their peers are responding to the neverending changes in the global competitive environment and then thinking hard about the implications of what they find for their own actions has served them very well over and over again as they have made their way to first world status.  It is a very powerful learning system.

Singapore skyline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.