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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And thus the stage was set for the third summit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From 2006 to 2011 the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), the organization that produces the TIMMS and PIRLS international assessments, worked with teacher education programs in seventeen countries to administer a survey to determine the depth of mathematics knowledge and skills of future teachers in those countries.  The study also assessed the quality assurance measures each nation has in place for recruiting and training teachers.  The seventeen countries that participated in this Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) were Botswana, Canada (four provinces), Chile, Georgia, Germany, Malaysia, Norway, Oman (lower-secondary teacher education only), the Philippines, Poland, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Spain (primary teacher education only), Switzerland (German-speaking cantons), Taiwan, Thailand, and the United States (public schools only).

The survey included a test of mathematics content knowledge of teachers in training in the last year of their primary- and lower-secondary teacher education programs.  The subdomains used to develop the test were derived from the subdomains used in the assessment frameworks for IEA’s Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) given every 4 years to students at grades 4 and 8 in more than 60 countries.  A different test was administered to students training to be primary teachers from the test given to students training to be lower-secondary teachers in order to reflect the level of mathematics they will eventually teach.

The charts below show the scaled mean score for teachers from each country, for primary teachers in Chart 1 and lower-secondary teachers in Chart 2.  Canada is not included in either chart as the number of responses from that country did not meet the sample size requirements for TEDS-M.

While not all countries represented in these charts participated in TIMSS 2011, it is clear that top TIMMS performers, such as Singapore and Taiwan, also did well on this measure of future teachers’ math content knowledge at both primary and secondary levels.

Along with the assessment gauging future teachers’ mathematics content knowledge, TEDS-M conducted a survey of teacher training programs in the countries studied to see what quality assurance procedures are in place for recruitment and selection of future teachers.  This study looked at three criteria for quality assurance in the recruitment and selection of future teachers: 1) The extent to which states control enrollment into teacher training programs, 2) The attractiveness and status of primary and secondary teaching as a profession, and 3) High selection requirements for entry into teacher training programs.  Quality assurance procedures from each country were ranked Strong, Moderately Strong or Limited.

The chart below demonstrates how each country scored for each category, according to the criteria developed by the TEDS-M study.  Among the countries that responded to the survey, only two countries were rated strong in all three categories: Taiwan and Singapore, both of which came out at the top of the league tables in the most recent administration of TIMSS Mathematics in 4th and 8th grade.  The United States, meanwhile, rated low on all three measures of quality assurance for recruitment and selection of teachers.

The results of the TEDS-M survey clearly show a large gap in future teachers’ mathematical content knowledge between countries that typically top the league tables in student performance on international tests, like Taiwan and Singapore, and low performing countries.  Top performing countries also have rigorous quality assurance measures for recruiting and training new teachers.  The findings of the TEDS-M survey also suggest that the diversity in teacher recruitment and training procedures represents a policy continuum, which can provide countries working to improve teacher quality with examples of systems that are working hard to improve the mathematics knowledge and skills of their teaching force.  The TEDS-M survey considered other factors in teacher training programs as well, including future teachers’ beliefs about mathematics learning and self-reported past performance in mathematics.  We encourage you to read the full report here.

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.

Sharon Lynn Kagan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony Mackay, Executive Director of the Centre for Strategic Education

This month, the International Advisory Board welcomed Tony Mackay as their newest member. Mackay is the Executive Director of the Centre for Strategic Education, Melbourne, Australia and Deputy Chair of Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). He also holds the title of Chair of the recently announced Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership; immediate Past President of the Australian Curriculum Studies Association; Board Director of the Australian Council for Educational Research; Board Member of the University of Melbourne, Graduate School of Education; and Australian College of Educators 2006 medallist.

On May 11, Jane Williams of Bloomberg Radio interviewed Dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University Mari Koerner, NCEE President Marc Tucker, and President of the AFT Randi Weingarten about improving teacher training and pay.  In a special report in this month’s Washington Monthly, editor in chief Paul Glastris talks with Tucker, Robert Schwartz of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Susan Traiman, former director of public policy at the Business Roundtable, about why CEOs’ interest and engagement in school reform has waned over the past decade. The Philadelphia Inquirer interviews Tucker about Surpassing Shanghai and teacher quality. In a recent op-ed in the Atlantic, Tucker argues that the problems with our nation’s healthcare system are very similar to the challenges facing our national education system.

Also in the Atlantic, Michael Fullan, professor emeritus at the Ontario Institutes for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto and member of the CIEB Advisory Board, explains what the United States can learn from Ontario about education. And on a spin on the same topic, in a guest blog post for the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet, Pasi Sahlberg, director general of Finland’s Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation and member of the CIEB Advisory Board, explains what the United States can’t learn from Finland about education.

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.