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.

In order to successfully evaluate teachers, education systems first must work with key stakeholders to define what it means to be a good teacher and then develop clear standards for the profession, according to a new background report released by the OECD in advance of the 2013 International Summit on the Teaching Profession.  The report, Teachers for the 21st Century: Using Evaluation to Improve Teaching, provides an analysis of how the countries studied evaluate their teachers by identifying the elements of teacher performance that are most frequently appraised, the tools used in teacher evaluation and the ways in which evaluation results inform teaching and learning.

During a webinar which provided an overview of the report’s findings, Andreas Schleicher, Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD’s Secretary-General, emphasized that teacher evaluation by itself will not significantly affect student learning, but should be considered as part of a larger set of strategies: teaching must be an attractive career choice, high quality teacher education programs must be available to future teachers, teachers should be granted professional autonomy once they enter the classroom, effective in-service professional development opportunities must be provided and teachers must be active participants in the development of any teacher evaluation system.

Why Evaluate Teachers?
According to the report, teacher evaluations are mainly conducted for two reasons  — to improve teaching and learning and to provide accountability.  Formative evaluations are used to provide teachers with meaningful feedback that can inform profession development.  Summative evaluations can be used as the basis of accountability systems focused on individual teachers and are usually linked to some type of consequence for teachers such as career decisions or salary changes.

While many countries use evaluations for both summative and formative purposes, the report authors point out that the approach used for each should be quite different.  For example, if the goal of the evaluation is to improve teaching practices, then self-evaluations makes sense because teachers are more likely to admit their faults with the expectation that providing this information will lead to effective decisions about their developmental needs and future training opportunities.  However when the purpose is accountability and teachers face potential consequences concerning their career or salaries, self-evaluations do not work.  Summative evaluations need to have a strong external component, such as an accredited external evaluator, and a more formal process to ensure fairness. And, formative evaluations need to be more context-based, taking into account the unique circumstances surrounding the teacher’s history and the school’s setting.

What Elements Are Evaluated?  
During the webinar, Schleicher commented that education systems cannot improve what they cannot define.  Therefore, he said, standards that define what teachers need to know and be able to do are essential to developing effective evaluations systems.  The report emphasizes the importance of involving teachers in developing standards for the profession.  The process used to develop national teacher standards in Australia included a consultation phase that involved all key education stakeholders including teachers, teacher associations, teacher educators, employers, unions and regulatory authorities.  Similarly, in New Zealand, the professional body for teachers led the process of defining standards for the profession with the extensive involvement of teachers, employers and teacher unions.

The report found that the elements of teacher performance that are most frequently evaluated are related to planning and preparation, instruction, the classroom environment and professional responsibilities. Teacher evaluations could also take into account working in teams and managing and sharing leadership responsibilities.  In New Zealand, for example, teaching standards call for appraising professional relationships and values and responsiveness to diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Evaluation Methods
The report found that the most common methods used to evaluate teachers include classroom observations, teacher portfolios, self-evaluations and performance goals set by the individual teacher in agreement with school management.  Almost all countries use classroom observations to some degree.  As the figure below shows, an average of over 70 percent of high school teachers reported that classroom observations were considered to be of “high or moderate importance” in the teacher evaluations or the feedback they received.  However in using classroom observations as part of teacher evaluation, some experts advise avoiding announced classroom observations, because they do not provide an authentic experience of a teacher’s day-to-day practice.

In some countries, teachers must take tests to assess their general knowledge, but only two of the countries studied in the report, Mexico and Chile, use teacher tests to determine career advancement or dismissal.  A few countries also use surveys of students and parents as one element of gauging teacher competence.

Speaking to a point that is very controversial, the report makes it quite clear that it is challenging to identify the specific contribution that a given teacher makes to a student’s performance.  Student learning is largely influenced by student’s innate abilities, motivations and behaviors and the support students receive from their family, peer group and school.  And students are influenced not only by their current teacher, but also by their former teachers.  The report explains that while value-added models can control for a student’s previous results and have the potential to identify an individual teacher’s contribution to student performance, there is wide consensus in literature that these models should be used only in addition to other evaluation measures.  The report also contends that using student results as an evaluation instrument is likely to be more relevant for whole-school evaluations than for individual teacher evaluations.

Delaware is featured in the report for their work on incorporating student outcomes into teacher evaluations.  The state’s system calls for teachers to use three measures of student progress including performance on state tests, test results on an instrument other than the test used for state accountability and goals for student progress developed by the teacher.  During the 2011-2012 school year, Delaware engaged hundreds of teachers in developing a wide-ranging library of resources that supports implementation of the new policy.

While there is no consensus on the right types of evaluation methods to use to evaluate teachers, the report makes it clear that using several methods is essential to drawing a comprehensive picture of teachers’ abilities.  The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is one of the most sophisticated analyses to-date on how evaluation methods can be used to identify the skills that make teachers effective.  The findings stress that assigning equal weights to multiple measures creates a more accurate assessment of teacher effectiveness than other models in which one measure is given a greater weight over others.

Who Conducts Teacher Evaluations?
While this varies across countries, the most common bodies that conduct teacher evaluations include inspectorates, professional teacher organizations, unions, school leaders and peer teachers.  The report recognizes the importance of using multiple evaluators to assess teacher performance to provide different perspectives.  For example, while external, highly trained evaluators assess teacher performance as accurately as school heads or principals, school leaders have the benefit of being more aware of variables in the particular school context that may affect a teacher’s performance.  On the other hand, some researchers have found that while principals may be able to successfully identify the high- and low-performers, they are unable to distinguish between teachers in the middle of the performance distribution.  Regardless of who is conducting the evaluation, the report notes that, “the effectiveness of appraisals crucially depends on whether evaluators have the knowledge and skills to evaluate teachers reliably in relation to established criteria,” so it is very important that all evaluators receive proper training.

How Are Evaluation Results Used?  
The results from teacher evaluation systems are used in a variety of ways including informing teacher practice; designing professional development opportunities that address teacher shortcomings; establishing rewards and consequences based on evaluation results; and developing lines of communication so the information gathered can inform education policy.

Results from a 2008 teacher survey found that over 40 percent of teachers reported that they did not receive suggestions for improving their practice after an evaluation and 44 percent agreed that teacher evaluations were conducted merely to fulfill an administrative requirement.  During the webinar, Schleicher said that it is very important for teachers to see teacher evaluations as a basis for professional support and career development.

The report also found that of the countries studied, very few use teacher evaluations to reward high-performing teachers with salary increases.  In the chart above, of the countries surveyed only Chile, Korea and Mexico have these types of policies in place.  When countries do use teacher evaluation results to reward teachers, few provide teachers with career advancement opportunities.  Because the organizational structure of schools in many OECD countries is typically flat, with few opportunities for teachers to be promoted or to gain increased responsibilities, the report recommends that education systems should look to high-performers such as Singapore for guidance in using teacher evaluation for career advancement.  This city-state has established a robust appraisal system that is linked to defined career ladders.  Singapore has created career structures at all school levels providing a teacher with the opportunity to advance to master teacher status or move into administration or research and policy.  And as Singaporean teachers move up the career ladder, they are rewarded with higher compensation levels.

The report, Teachers for the 21st Century, is largely based on two prior OECD reports: the Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes, a 2009 study that involved 24 countries and looked at the various components of evaluation and assessment strategies that countries use, and the latest edition of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), published in 2008. To access the new report visit:
http://www.oecd.org/site/eduistp13/TS2013%20Background%20Report.pdf.

Pasi Sahlberg, Director General of CIMO at the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture; Vivien Stewart, Senior Advisor for Education at the Asia Society; and Lee Sing Kong, Director of the National Institute of Education in Singapore

On March 9, 2012, Vivien Stewart, Senior Advisor for Education at the Asia Society, conducted a roundtable discussion on teacher quality issues with Lee Sing Kong, Director of the National Institute of Education in Singapore and Pasi Sahlberg, Director General of the National Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation (CIMO) at the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. All participants are members of the CIEB Advisory Board. The conversation focused on teacher education, professional development, evaluation, career ladders, and more.

Stewart: The issue of teacher quality is central to high quality education systems. Since Singapore and Finland are seen as having very high quality education systems that are producing high quality teachers, and since the two of you have been centrally involved in these developments, I want to talk to you today about the key reasons for your systems’ success and how other countries might learn from you both.

There are some general descriptions of how Singapore and Finland have developed high quality teachers in a number of publications.  What I want to try and do today is to get underneath those descriptions a bit.  So I guess the first question is where to begin in developing a high quality teaching force?  What do you do first, or do you do everything at once? Are there certain barriers and ways to overcome those barriers?

Sahlberg: I think one of the things that certainly everybody believes is that teachers need to have a high quality higher education experience; an academic and research based education in the universities that is competitive to degrees and academic programs available if they chose law or medicine or engineering. But this is not enough because if we don’t have, at the same time, a profession and working conditions comparable with other high quality professions, young people won’t choose to become teachers.

For example, Sweden and Finland have a very different situation in terms of selecting young people for teacher training.  In Sweden’s education schools, there is one applicant for every position – there is no competition, anybody who wants to can go there. At the same time, the education systems are very similar.  So there has to be something in the teachers’ working conditions in the two countries that is playing a major role here. In Sweden, school choice, privatizing education, testing and increased bureaucracy in the schools are often mentioned as things that prevent teaching from being the kind of profession where teachers can exercise what they have been trained to do.  So what I’m saying here is, we need to think about having good, high quality education and training procedures, and at the same time we need to make sure that the teaching in the school and within the school system is something where teachers can exercise this professionalism and that teachers are not blamed and shamed for the things that they are not actually responsible for.

Lee: I totally agree with Pasi, but in Singapore the situation is slightly different from Finland, from the angle of respect for the teaching profession.  Personally, I believe that in Finland, teachers are very well respected, and so you immediately are able to draw the best into teaching and then of course you provide them with the training, and by providing the best conditions in the school you help also to retain them and give them the satisfaction of what being a professional teacher is all about.  But in Singapore, we addressed a slightly different situation.

In 1991, if I had six vacancies for teaching, I only had five applications, and at that time, the respect for the teaching profession was not really high.  As an outcome, the best candidates did not necessarily want to go into teaching.  So we made a shift in the mid-90s, looking at three things in order to help the teaching profession evolve. The first was putting in place conditions that really raise the prestige and respect for the teaching profession. Then step two was providing whoever entered the teaching profession with the best training – in other words, not only giving them a good foundation of knowledge, but building in them a professionalism that allowed them to look upon themselves as professionals in the pursuit of preparing the future of the nation. Third, we worked on retaining them. In order to do this, the working conditions of teachers must be well looked after. Over the years we noticed that other demands slowly creep onto the teacher’s portfolio. They may have to do certain administrative work, they may have to do certain extracurricular activities and a lot of this puts a heavy toll on the teacher.  So what do we do?  I think the Minister of Education in Singapore, very wisely, began to look at ways of how to avoid these extracurricular demands on the teacher so that they ease their workload and then again concentrate on the core business of educating and mentoring the children.

I believe that it is through this series of measures that the prestige of teaching has been raised, and a conducive environment for employee retention has been established.  From the mid-90s to now, the quality of the Singapore teaching force slowly progressed and evolved to what it is today.  But it does take time to really evolve the quality teaching force.

Stewart: I think both Singapore and Finland are seen as having strong and thoughtful teacher preparation programs, whereas I think in the majority of countries there is a lot of criticism and dissatisfaction with the nature of teacher preparation programs; their relevance, their rigor.  So, if you had to pick three things about the Finnish and the Singaporean teacher preparation programs that you feel are the most important in producing effective teachers, what would you emphasize?

Sahlberg: I think the first characteristic of the Finnish teacher education system, where the program normally takes about five years, is that from day one, students are guided and encouraged to develop their pedagogical thinking.  In other words, there is a focus on thinking about why they teach and how they teach and what it takes to be a teacher. I think the second strong element of the Finnish way of educating teachers, including primary school teachers, is the way we combine theory and practice.  This is done by having teacher training schools attached to universities, and the practical training is very closely integrated into the normal teacher training program.  This combination of theory and practice is a typical and often-mentioned strong point of Finnish teacher education. The third feature, and this comes very close to the nature of teaching and working as a teacher in Finland, is the idea of creativity as part of the work of all teachers here.  I think Finnish teacher education is systematically trying to encourage teachers to be creative educators, rather than educating them towards only one way of teaching.  This is of course relevant because the way our schools operate, teachers have a great degree of autonomy and teachers are rewarded not according to their level of educating people to the standard, but by how they are able to find new ways of teaching and alternative ways of arranging work in the classrooms and schools, and that’s why this creative, open minded aspect of growing as a teacher is a very normal and typical part of teacher education in Finland.

Stewart: If I may add a fourth, I think one of the things that is striking about Finnish primary schools is the way teachers deal with children when they are behind. Teachers seem to have a very extensive repertoire of ways of thinking about and dealing with that, in addition to then having teachers who have even more training helping them. Is that something that all primary teachers get that prepares those teachers to deal with the whole range of students in the classroom?

Sahlberg: Yes, exactly.  Particularly in our primary schools, but in all schools really, we have tried to create a situation where all the teachers have the responsibility of making sure that everybody will have equal opportunities to be successful and no child is left behind in our school system.  This means that in teacher education everybody has to gain the knowledge and understanding and skills related to special education so that they can understand and diagnose and deal with the issues, both psychological and social, in the classroom.

Stewart: And one final question  are all the institutions that train teachers in Finland seen as being of comparably high quality?  In the US and in other countries, there are widely varying standards and perceptions of the quality of teacher training institutions.

Sahlberg: It really doesn’t make any difference which university or school of education you go to in Finland. The Ministry of Education in Finland oversees universities, teacher education departments and teacher licensing.  No matter where you graduate from, you are always a qualified teacher.  The teacher education curriculum in all of our universities is pretty much the same.  The teacher education programs have the same requirements and the same academic rigor throughout the country.

Stewart: Singapore only has one teacher training institution, the National Institute of Education.

Lee: I think in Singapore, if you ask me for the three most important parts of teacher education, they are encapsulated in the model of teacher education that we have developed based on values, skills and knowledge.  The values that we inculcate in our student teachers are that as a teacher, the heart of the work is learning.  The learning in class can come in various forms, have various profiles, but we know that every child can learn.  Some may be fast learners, some may be slow, but it’s just a matter of a different approach to help the slower learners do well.

That is the first set of values. The second set of values is teacher professionalism.  In initial teacher preparation programs, we have a limited amount of time and we cannot equip the teacher with all the professional knowledge and practice that he or she needs.  Upon graduating, a beginning teacher must continue to learn and to evolve through professional development to upgrade their skills, upgrade their knowledge, and improve their professionalism as a teacher. We always have described this like a carpenter with a toolbox.  When you first go to the tool shop you bring an empty box, then you fill it up with all the different tools.  When you encounter a particular job, you take out the right tool. Likewise, we equip the teachers with the repertoire of pedagogical tools so that when he or she encounters a group of students with a certain learning profile, he takes the right tool to address that learner.

And the third key area is knowledge.  Domain knowledge of the discipline that they teach is critical, because as the literature and research have highlighted, those teachers with good subject knowledge can adopt the right tools to truly engage and enthuse the students.

So these are three key areas of importance that we look at in initial teacher preparation, but they must also evolve because teacher education programs must be able to equip teachers and prepare them to be relevant to the current landscape. If the teacher is not relevant to the learners that they are dealing with, be it in terms of the knowledge they teach or be it in terms of the tools that they use, then I think the impact of that teacher’s teaching will be minimal.

Stewart: I know that the National Institute of Education has recently undergone a review of its teacher education program within the last couple of years.  What was the impetus to that revision?  What were the things that you felt needed to change?

Lee: There are quite a few things that have undergone this review, including the curriculum, planning and implementation.  First, we looked at the value system and found that values needed to go beyond being learner-centered and teacher-centered, but also include the idea of a professional community where teachers understand that there is value in engaging the community as a whole and sharing with one another best practices and experiences, so that the whole profession can grow.

In terms of the curriculum, there were a few changes.  The first change was to provide a better coherence and interconnection of the modules that the student teachers engage in.  Every teacher education program has a set of modules and activities.  We have brought greater coherence by developing a map of the whole program so that when the teacher looks at the whole program structure and the activities and the theories behind them, they are able to see a bigger picture of how they all relate to each other.

The third change is exactly what Pasi spoke about, the improved relationship between theory and practice. We strengthened the partnership between the National Institute of Education and the schools in order to prepare the next generation of teachers.  We engage senior teachers to mentor student teachers, and throughout the process, we have added varied interactions between the experienced teachers and the student teachers, in terms of skills, practice and theory, all of which tie in with the program map in terms of the understanding of how modules relate to activities.  The student teachers are able to understand that when they do something in the classroom, they are translating a particular theory into practice and they also understand which practices they are strong in and which they are weak in and they then work with their mentors to improve those practices.

The next change is the introduction of the e-portfolio.  This is a tool that we use to encourage very strong reflection on the part of the student teacher.  Student teachers sit down with their mentor teacher to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the lesson that they taught, and then the student teacher has the opportunity to reflect on that feedback and channel their reflections in the e-portfolio, which contains a track record of the practices, the experiences, the discussions and the reflections of the student teacher.  The student teachers then use the information from the e-portfolio to identify areas of improvement and work with professors at the university or their school-based mentors.

We have had very positive feedback from our student teachers who are using this new e-portfolio program.

Stewart: Pasi, you said that working conditions was the second part of the answer to how to have a high quality teaching profession.  The term working conditions means different things to different people; sometimes it’s sort of a code word for salaries, and for other people it means additional time for professional development or for others, a leadership role in the school.  When you talk about professional working conditions in Finnish schools, what are the key elements?

Sahlberg: It’s a very important question, Vivien.  In the Finnish context, when we’re speaking about professional working conditions or respectful working conditions, we of course include all of the things that you said, but I would say that three things come before others.

One of them is that we have paid a particularly close attention in Finland to the fact that teachers have a considerable amount of authority and power to determine the actual curriculum that they use.  In other words, teachers need to be able to make decisions regarding not only the methods of teaching, but also the content, the sequencing and the entire arrangement of their own teaching.

Then the second one, of course, is the actual execution of these teaching plans in class by teachers so that they have both autonomy and also professional responsibility for their work as part of the collective community of teachers in their own schools and in the wider community.  I think teachers in Finland feel that they are doing something together and that they really have control over what they do.  Control is not coming from any authority, or principal, or the ministry or government.  Teachers have control over their own teaching.

Then the third element of this professional working condition issue is being able to decide about assessment and evaluation in their work.  There are naturally two elements here.  One is student assessment – reporting and assessing how well their own students are learning in the school and reporting this to parents.  Then, being part of a professional community that evaluates the work of the school and again collectively, together with the principal, deciding how this will be reported.

People should not think that that there is total freedom in Finland to do all these things.  I think we have been quite successful in designing, over the last 30 years, national frameworks for the curriculum, evaluation and monitoring policies that enable teachers to use their knowledge and skills and there are not really too many complaints or arguments regarding this situation.  I think Finland has also been rather lucky in the sense that this whole process has created a situation where there is a great deal of trust within the education community and the society as a whole; meaning that there is confidence in public education.

Stewart: The level of trust in Finland is very striking, and so for people coming from countries that have a different cultural milieu, it’s hard to imagine.  It seems very attractive but it’s kind of hard to imagine how to get to a place where there is that level of trust in the profession.  Do you have any thoughts about that?

Sahlberg: Oh yes, because this is one of the most often asked questions when people come to Finland from other countries.  I always warn people that you have to look at the whole country and the society.  The culture in Finland is very much built on the same idea of trust; it’s not only education where we have a lot of trust, but it’s the entire society where we typically have a very wide degree of trust among people.   This is because of many things.  For example, we are fairly equal in terms of wealth.  There is a fairly low level of crime and that of course increases the level of trust within the society.

At the same time, I also believe that there are many things that can be done to enhance trust within an education system because when I started to teach about 25 years ago, we had all sorts of centrally issued regulations, directives and orders and were forced to behave in a certain way.  So, we have been handing over the decision power including curriculum planning, textbook selection, student assessment and special education, and many other things, to teachers at schools, which has gradually also increased and strengthened the feeling of trust in many ways in our society.

Lee: If I may make a comment here, trust will need time to develop, and trust between the teacher and the parents or between society and the teaching profession must be built up based on mutual respect.  That’s why I think this respect can grow when we begin to celebrate the goodness of teachers.  If the society continues to bash teachers for failing to do this or failing to do that, and pushes all the responsibility onto the shoulders of teachers, I think that will continue to depress the image of the teaching profession.  When the teaching profession continues to decline, the trust between the society and the profession, or the parents and the teachers will also decline.  Do you agree, Pasi?

Sahlberg: I totally agree with what you said.

Stewart: Coming to the issue of teacher working conditions in Singapore, it’s obviously somewhat different from Finland.  I think one of the striking things, looking at Singapore from the outside, is the career ladders for teachers and increasing salary levels when teachers add additional skills as a way to keep people motivated, improving their work, and keeping them in the profession.  I was wondering if you could talk a little about that.  I’d be interested in what the criteria are for promotion, who develops them, who decides and on what basis?

Lee: I think in Singapore the teaching profession, like all other professions, is dealing with a very young generation of new teachers.  In fact, in Singapore the median age of teachers is only 33 years old.  The baby boomers have retired and therefore there is a big group of young teachers coming in, and they are a very different generation of people. Younger generation teachers, like in other professions, expect recognition and strong encouragement.  After two or three years in the profession, they expect at least to be recognized in terms of a promotion.  So that’s why in Singapore, the Ministry of Education has developed three tracks for teachers: the leadership track, the teaching track and a specialist track.  We have also included many intermediate steps as compared to in the past so there are more opportunities for young teachers to be promoted.  So that will help in terms of retaining teachers in the profession.

Now, how do we evaluate teachers?  The Ministry of Education has developed a framework and called it EPMS, the Enhanced Performance Management System.  Within this management system framework, we lay out very transparent criteria for teachers at each stage of their career: what kind of competencies we expect and what level of responsibility we impose at each level related to attitude, a teacher’s perspective on teaching, how they manage student learning and their values including believing every child can learn.  We have defined these criteria for beginning teachers through professional teachers.  Every year, when the principal and the vice-principal as well as the head of the teacher’s department come together to appraise the teacher, the teacher’s own feedback is also taken into consideration.  For example, if a teacher says, “Look, I fell somewhat short in this area of this competency and I would like to go for professional development,” the principal will be able to see the value that this teacher places on improving their professional practice and skills.  So a lot of these criteria are captured within the EPMS framework which is very transparent for the teachers and done by a group, not by one individual so there is a greater chance that the evaluation results and promotion decisions will be accepted.

One very clear part of the framework is that we do not assess teachers based on student achievement in the classroom. We don’t do that.  We look at teachers from a professional development angle in terms of competency, acquisition of knowledge and skills, practice and professionalism.

Stewart: Do you use student achievement at all?

Lee: If it is included at all it will be as a passing comment; that your professionalism perhaps could be further looked at simply because currently your group of students are not improving as expected.  One good thing, or rather a controversial thing, is that we stream students into various streams so therefore the expectation of how the student performs in each of the classrooms is clear.  Let’s say a teacher teaches students that are less academically inclined, and the student performance is not good.  You can look at other factors as contributing to why the students are not learning rather than just place the total responsibility on the teacher.

Stewart: Pasi, how is teacher evaluation thought about in Finland?

Sahlberg: Most of the teacher evaluations that we do in Finland are done at the school level by the school principal and teachers themselves, so we don’t really have too much discussion about formal teacher evaluation in the country.  It’s very much decentralized within the system to the level of the school and it’s a very important part of every principal’s work.  When principals are prepared to work as the leaders of the schools, this is an important part of their training and responsibilities at the moment.

Stewart: But it’s up to them how they design it?  There isn’t a standard template that they use?

Sahlberg: No, we don’t have standards for teacher behavior or teacher evaluation, so it’s up to each and every principal.  I think the closest to a standard that we have is that we encourage every principal to have regular development conversations with their staff, where they go through how the teachers are working and where the areas of further development may be and what they find difficult and so on, but principals may do this in very different ways. It always includes classroom observations as well, so the principals are expected to go and see what’s going on in the classroom so that they can really talk about what’s going on in teachers’ work, but this is not the kind of a standardized form of evaluation as it is in many other places.  Since we don’t have the data on student achievement that could be used at the level of individual teachers, we’re not really even talking about that when evaluating teachers.

Stewart: Let me ask you each one final question.  Looking to the future in Finland and Singapore, what do you see as the key challenges to maintaining a high quality teaching profession?

Sahlberg: This is a critical question for Finland.  For the last 20 years, we have been able to attract the most motivated and talented young people into teaching.  We don’t really need much improvement in this situation because this is as good as the situation can get in terms of teachers in general, but I think many, if not most, of the challenges are coming from the changing nature of Finnish society.  We are now, for the first time, hearing quite worrying signals, particularly from young teachers, that many of them find it difficult to manage classrooms where diversity is becoming more and more visible, not only because of the increasing immigration, but also because of increased levels of child poverty, although they are still very low compared to other countries.  We have more single or no parent pupils in our school system.  It’s really changing the whole nature of working as a teacher, where the education and upbringing of children is becoming more central to the teachers’ work, rather than just teaching knowledge and skills as it used to be.  So this is something that we are really thinking about; how do we alter the teacher education program so that we have more time for classroom management to make sure that the young teachers can do what they want to do.  On the other hand, if we are able to maintain these professional working conditions that are really attractive at the moment for many young people, I think we will be able to still maintain teaching as a popular profession, but we need to be alert to this and not to rely on the past.

The financial issues in Finland are another challenge for the entire system of education and it’s immediately reflecting on teachers. We have several municipalities that are running the schools with serious public funding challenges, which means the class sizes tend to increase and resources in these schools are decreasing.  So, there are many things that are changing the situation very quickly and there are some dark clouds, so to speak, here in Finland.  But I’m still optimistic, but we need to continue to work hard.

Stewart: And Sing Kong, what do you see as the challenges to maintaining Singapore’s high quality teaching profession?

Lee:  There are actually four very prominent key challenges I think Singapore has to address in the future.  I think number one, like what Pasi said, is the growing diversity of students in the classroom; not just from different cultural and religious backgrounds, but also a range of students from different socio-economic backgrounds.  So these are issues teachers must confront and they’re not even issues that I think a professional teacher is able to manage.  Therefore, we have to constantly provide different kinds of support to teachers. We’re still deliberating and still debating as to how to give teachers the kind of support that will enable them to manage more diverse classrooms in the future.  That’s the first challenge.  The second challenge is literally the fast-changing demands of the 21st century landscape, especially what employers want and how we can prepare our students to face the future.  There is so much uncertainty about the future.  We have to really plan not just from the point of view of the teaching profession, but also the curriculum.  The third is that parents are much more educated than in the past.  It is a very different thing to work with parents who are less educated than with parents who are well-educated.  They question the professionalism of the teacher at times and such questioning can put pressure on the teacher.  So how do we address the issues of some irrational and unreasonable parents?  How do we work with parents to really mitigate these issues of putting pressure on the teachers and to create a greater partnership?  The fourth challenge, like what Pasi said, is competition for resources.  When industries continue to evolve and grow, I think it is a continual challenge to really upgrade or improve and evolve the teaching profession to be on par with the others, so that we can continue to attract the better ones into the profession, and retain them. I think this challenge is real and somewhat a competition for resources.  It’s going to also aggravate the problem of retention.

Stewart: Thank you both very much for your time.  It was a really good discussion that others can learn quite a lot from on the issue of teacher quality.

NCEE: Can you give us an overview of the history of Australia’s National Assessment and curriculum efforts and what spurred on their development and the decision to create ACARA?

Barry McGaw:Australia has been involved in international studies of student performance since they began in the 1950s; however, the first national surveys of literacy and numeracy occurred in 1976.  The evaluations were sample-based only, a bit like NAEP in the United States.  And then various Australian states introduced sample-based surveys in other curriculum areas.

Barry McGaw

The first assessment of all students across the country in literacy and numeracy occurred in 1990 in New South Wales, which is the largest state in Australia. It was very controversial at the time; particularly with the teachers unions. So, New South Wales began testing all of their students in literacy and numeracy, and then Victoria, the second-largest Australian state, followed, and then other states gradually joined in. Western Australia participated with a really creative set of sample-based surveys that covered their entire curriculum, but only moved to test the entire student cohort when the then-federal Minister of Education made it a condition of federal funding.

By the mid-2000s, the state Ministers of Education decided it would be good to get results expressed in a way that made them comparable across the country. They instituted a process of creating a common scale allowing each state to continue administering its own assessments, but calibrated onto a common scale. After a couple of years, there was some concern about how good the calibration was, and they said, if we’re all testing in order to get the results on a common scale, why don’t we all use the same tests? And so from 2008, the six states and two territories in Australia have all used the same literacy and numeracy tests nationwide, also known as the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).

The next major event occurred in 2007.  During the federal election campaign, the opposition announced that it supported the establishment of a national curriculum in English, Mathematics, Science and History. They won the election at the end of 2007. At the beginning of 2008, they set up an interim national curriculum board. I was appointed chair, with the goal of developing national curriculum in English, Science, Mathematics and History. The government added geography and languages other than English to the curriculum development plans in mid-2008, and then the arts were added later.

At this point, the intention of the federal government was to discuss with the state governments what kind of governance arrangement would be instituted in the longer term for this body. There was some debate about whether it would be set up as a not-for-profit that the ministers collectively owned or a more formal statutory authority of the Australian parliament. The federal minister won out, suggesting that the Council of Ministers (the federal minister and the six state and two territory ministers) would be the policy board for this new body. In late 2008, Australia established the new Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) with responsibility not only for national curriculum development, the national literacy and numeracy assessments, but also the sample-based assessments already underway on a three-yearly cycle for science, civics and citizenship and ICT literacy. Finally the task of public reporting on schools was added to the portfolio.  That work has resulted in the creation of the My School website.

NCEE: You mentioned that these national assessments were controversial with teachers unions. Can you talk a little bit about what their concerns were, and how ACARA was able to address them?

Barry McGaw: The teachers unions were unhappy about the public nature of the reporting and this kind of external assessment. They typically argued that these types of assessments don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about our students. The response was, “you know how your students are doing in relation to one another, but you don’t know how your students stand compared to students across the country.” What typically wins the day in this debate is parents. Parents value information that shows them the bigger picture.  When the My School website came along, suddenly parents are not just getting reports on their own children, but they’re able to see, collectively, for all the students in their school how they’re doing in comparison with other schools. This information can be controversial, but to help on this front, we include information about the circumstances of the school.

Some other countries do what they call value-added analysis. Here is our approach. We obtain measures of students’ background, in particular on their parents’ education and their parents’ occupation. We’re not trying to measure socioeconomic status, we’re trying to measure socio-educational status – what are the benefits that kids get from the occupation and education of their parents as they come to school. We use this information to create an Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage. And then for every school, we look at just 60 schools – 30 schools immediately above it and the 30 immediately below it on that index. These are schools that have got essentially the same kinds of kids. These are the schools that you can learn from, that can challenge you. Now we can show a school another school with kids exactly like theirs that is doing much better. That school can then ask themselves, what policies they might consider that are different from the ones currently being used? What practices could the school adopt that might reproduce the kind of superior performance that you see in the higher performing schools? So that’s essentially the strategy of the My School website. Not only can it assist parents in their choice of schools, but it underpins attempts at school improvement.

NCEE: How are schools and teachers using the data to improve performance?

Barry McGaw: Well, it’s only been produced twice, so we know that within some of the state systems, they’re using it to help schools make these comparisons, but we don’t have much data ourselves on it yet. We know that huge numbers of people look at the site.  States do bring together small groups of schools to look at the data and analyze it. Every school in the country, or ten thousand schools, is in the My School database.

My School website

In terms of test results, we make sure that we only report results for students who were in any given school for each administration of a test for each year it was given. We drop any grade three kids that have gone somewhere else, and we won’t count any grade five kids that have joined you since then, and we’ll compare you with the students in your comparison group of schools with a similar social background, but only in those cases where all of those other schools also have students who were in each school on both occasions. This year, we’re going to provide growth comparisons, which are very interesting and useful, because it begins to give you even further information on what value the schools are adding.

NCEE: Do you plan eventually to use the NAPLAN results to evaluate individual teacher performance in addition to school performance?

Barry McGaw: No. NAPLAN assessments are given only in Grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. It would be very difficult to allocate responsibility for students’ performances or improvements to individual teachers quite apart from the question of how those teaching in grades not tested would be evaluated.

NCEE: Do you see teacher performance as ever becoming a component of the data on the My School website?

Barry McGaw: There are serious discussions going on about how to recognize and reward high-performing teachers but no consideration is being given to reporting on teachers on the My School site.

NCEE: The OECD has recently published a report on evaluation and assessment in Australia (available as a free download from OECD) as part of their international study on these issues. A team of experts visited Australia and observed your system; they made a number of policy observations and suggestions. What did you think about the recommendations that they made for Australia’s system, and are there any that you think the government definitely should implement as you move forward with developing the program?

Barry McGaw: I think it’s a good report. The big thing that we are doing now, as the report pointed out, is developing a strategy for formative assessment. But let me explain where we are first.

The final version of the national curriculum in English, Math, Science and History for kindergarten to grade 10 was adopted last Friday (October 14, 2011), and is now up on the website. It’s quite a historic moment, actually. Already the curriculum is being implemented in the Australian Capital Territory, which is like Washington, DC, because they agreed to the content a year ago. Queensland and South Australia and the Northern Territory will implement next year beginning in January – our school year is the calendar year – and Victoria will have a major pilot in a couple of hundred schools; New South Wales and Western Australia will start in 2013.

What we now have to clarify is the achievement standards. For example, the curriculum states, that, in grade five, in mathematics, these are the things students should have an opportunity to learn. We see our curriculum as a kind of statement of student entitlement. What they should have an opportunity to learn is knowledge, understanding and skills, not just factual stuff.  Then we declare in the achievement standards, if a student has satisfactorily learned this, what will a student be able to do? Those statements can be difficult to interpret in any kind of precise way, so what we are doing now, is putting on the website actual samples of students’ work, produced in response to real classroom tasks with annotations to say this student work meets the standards and why. What we will have up by the end of this year, that is by December 2011, for every achievement standard, is some samples of student work. But then next year, while the curriculum is actually being implemented, we’ll be obtaining a richer set of samples illustrating different levels of achievement at the A, B, C, D and E levels.  The samples of student work will be annotated, for the first time, by teachers across the country, so that we’ll have nationally annotated samples of student work that can move in the direction of getting consistent use of formative assessments across the country.

NCEE: Will that all be available online?

Barry McGaw: Yes, by the end of next year. And the federal government has just put up funds as well to produce some online assessment resources for teachers.

NCEE: Can you expand on why it’s important to have examples of student work when presenting the new curriculum to educators?

Barry McGaw: You will see on the website, that there are statements of achievement standards to give teachers an idea of what students can do, given the opportunity to develop the knowledge, understanding and skills, set out in a particular part of the curriculum. We think that it is difficult to write such statements in a way that is unambiguous for teachers and that it is much more helpful to also provide samples of real student work in response to real tasks created by teachers, but then assessed by a group of teachers from across the country and annotated to provide an explanation for the judgments they make.

Under the previous federal government there was a requirement introduced that all schools report student performance to parents on an A-E (or equivalent) scale. Our annotated samples of students’ work will illustrate performance for each score, A to E, for each subject, each year. We have collected quite a few this year from schools involved in piloting the K-10 English, Mathematics, Science and History curricula, but will collect more during 2012 as some of the states will have already begun full implementation.

The Council of Education Ministers recently approved the K-10 curricula for English, Mathematics, Science and History on October 14th. You can see details of the implementation plans on our website here.

NCEE: You mentioned the necessity of aligning achievement standards with the national curriculum moving forward. Can you clarify where Australia stands with regard to the link between achievement standards and curriculum content? Were national achievement standards developed before the national curriculum?

Barry McGaw: We think that the curriculum should come first as the expression of the goals of education in terms of the learning entitlements of students.  Assessment should follow, shaped by the expectations of student learning.

I recognize that there is a place for ‘assessment-led reform’ where the availability of new forms of assessment can show teachers how to assess learnings that are important but to which they might not attach sufficient significance if they cannot see how to assess them.  In that case, it is still the curriculum and its expectations that come first.

NCEE: While building NAPLAN and the national curriculum, what lessons did you draw from other countries? Are there any countries in particular that you used as a model, and in what ways? What do you see as distinctive about the Australian system?

Barry McGaw: NAPLAN grew out of state-based assessments of literacy and numeracy that began in New South Wales in its then Basic Skills Testing Program in 1990.  The other states followed over the years.  While I was in Paris at the OECD, the Ministers for Education decided that the results should all be expressed on a common scale across the country. The separate tests were equated to achieve this, but then the Ministers decided that it would be better to use common tests.  NAPLAN was the result and the first NAPLAN tests were introduced in 2008. Interestingly, there was no common curriculum behind NAPLAN.  The new test reflected the separate tests that it replaced.

As part of the development of the Australian Curriculum, ACARA was directed also to develop literacy and numeracy continua and then to review and revise NAPLAN as necessary to reflect those continua.  We will time this change on the basis of implementation of the new curriculum with a revised NAPLAN probably to come in 2014.

In our curriculum, we paid attention to practices elsewhere.  Our mathematics curriculum, for example, has been increased in difficulty particularly at the elementary school level on the basis of our analysis of mathematics curricula in Singapore and Finland, two countries that outperform Australia in the international comparisons offered by programs such as OECD’s PISA.

NCEE: We know that the NAPLAN assessments are a combination of multiple choice and short answer questions, and are scored electronically and by trained, independent markers.  How did you arrive at this system – why are they structured in this way?

Barry McGaw: The form of the test was established before responsibility for it was passed to ACARA.  There is a preference in Australia for constructed response questions balanced by cost considerations in favour of machine scoreable responses.  As in PISA, the final choice is based on the two considerations.

NCEE: Many people these days think that it is important to measure creativity and the capacity for innovation. Do you agree? If so, how does NAPLAN (or the other sample tests) measure these things? Are these considerations reflected in the national curriculum?

Barry McGaw: They are important but NAPLAN does not measure them.  They are in our curriculum, embedded in the subject content not as add-on equivalents to additional subjects.  If a teacher wants to focus on creativity, for example, the teacher can apply a filter to the curriculum that will highlight the opportunities that the curriculum in each subject for the school grades of interest to the teacher provides for a focus on creativity. The teacher could use this, for example, in developing an integrating theme through which all the relevant subjects are drawn on.  Such a theme could be followed for some days or weeks.

The opportunities will be expanded as we add additional subjects to the Australian Curriculum.  Development is now well advanced for Geography and the Arts and the rest are following.

NCEE: What are the lessons that other countries trying to build a national assessment system can draw from Australia?

Barry McGaw: First and foremost is to tie assessment to the curriculum. We’ll probably end up making some adjustments to the literacy and numeracy assessments now that the national curriculum has been adopted. What happened historically in Australia was that each of the states developed its own literacy and numeracy assessments, as I said, but did it in relation to their own curriculum. Then they adopted common assessment practices without having adopted a common curriculum. Now we’ve got the common curriculum as well; we just need to make sure that’s aligned, and the developmental sequences are right. One of the big problems is – and I think this is a legitimate criticism of these kinds of assessment programs – that they can narrow the curriculum.  Particularly if you make it really high stakes.  And you can’t make it any more high stakes than putting it on a public website like the My School site. So you start to worry about people gaming the system, encouraging poor performing students to stay at home on the day of the assessment, those kinds of things.

To deal with this, we publish right alongside the school’s performance the proportion of students that were in school on the day assessments were given. So, if there’s any obvious manipulation, or indeed, even if there’s not manipulation, if there’s a low participation rate, that’s evident. There is also the question of whether the system can be gamed by narrowing the school’s teaching focus to what you think might prepare students for a particular form of test. Our view is that the research shows that coaching for tests is effective if what it’s doing is making sure the students are familiar with the test’s format. But it is also the case that if you want to prepare your kids’ literacy skills, the way to do it is through a rich curriculum. Kids learn language in history. They learn language in social science studies. They learn numeracy skills with data representations in geography and other areas of social science as well as in math. They learn it in science. So the best way to develop literacy and numeracy is to have a full and rich curriculum. In Hong Kong they use different forms with different kids in the same class. That’s where we’re heading.

NCEE: Is there anything else you would like to talk about with regard to the report, or the direction the system is going in?

McGaw: I’d like to say something about the curriculum itself, rather than the assessment system. When we got started, we were calling what we did the development of content standards.  I found out from talking to an American journalist that we borrowed that term from you.  I also learned that in the United States you couldn’t talk about national or state curriculum, so you used these words.  What we are doing now is saying that we are developing curriculum or the learning entitlements. We say to schools that by whatever means you teach, this is the knowledge, understanding and skills that your kids are entitled to have the opportunity to acquire. You’ve got to get around the constitutional arrangements in order to do the right thing. Australia has strong constitutional arrangements that say that education is the responsibility of the states, not the commonwealth, not the federal government. So how did we get there? We got there by making it a collaborative arrangement. All of this is decided not by the federal minister; all of this is decided by the six states, two territories and the one federal minister sitting at the table together.

Recent Reports of Note

“Quality Counts 2012: The Global Challenge—Education in a Competitive World,” Editorial Projects in Education, Jan. 12, 2012
This report takes a critical look at the nation’s place among the world’s public education systems, with an eye toward providing policymakers with perspective on the extent to which high-profile international assessments can provide valid comparisons and lessons. It examines effective reform strategies in the US and abroad that have gained traction and may be replicable. And, the report highlights the political and social challenges policymakers will face in improving American education to meet the demands of a 21st-century work force. Learn more here.

Andreas Schleicher, “Chinese Lessons,” OECD Education Today Blog, Oct. 14, 2011
Andreas Schleicher, Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD’s Secretary General and Head of the Indicators and Analysis Division in the Directorate of Education, recently visited China to launch the OECD’s first-ever Chinese edition of Education at a Glance. He blogs about his visit to an experimental school in Shanghai, China’s particularly successful educational Petri dish where potential nationwide reforms are developed and piloted.  Read the full blog post here.

Miller, David C. and Laura K. Warren, “Comparative Indicators of Education in the United States and Other G-8 Countries: 2011,” NCES, October, 2011    
Every two years, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) releases a compendium of statistics intended to enable comparison between the US and the seven other G-8 countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation and the United Kingdom. This report focuses on five topical areas – population and school enrollment, academic performance, contexts for learning, expenditures for education and educational attainment and learning. The statistics are drawn from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and their Indicators of Education Systems (INES). To read the full report, click here.

“Education Indicators in Canada: An International Perspective,” Tourism and the Centre for Education Statistics Division, Sept. 2011
This report is intended to be read alongside the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2011 as an in-depth look at the state of Canadian education. Readers interested in Canada’s education system should note the report’s amendments to OECD data; the report points out, for example, that although the OECD statistics show a smaller gap between teachers’ starting and top of scale salaries in Canada, Canadian teachers actually reach the top of the pay scale in half the time of other OECD countries, suggesting a different interpretation of the OECD data. Another notable statistic is the small correlation between students’ reading performance and socioeconomic status; this correlation is far below the OECD average, perhaps indicating particularly successful management of student class disparity in Canada. To read the full report, click here.

“Thematic Probe: Curriculum specification in seven countries,” International Review of Curriculum and Assessment Frameworks, April 2011
INCA’s Thematic Probe provides curriculum and standards information for Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Scotland, Singapore and South Africa. The information is organized around several questions, as follows: How is the curriculum specified? Are there national standards/expected outcomes? Are curriculum and standards specified and articulated separately or together? Who is responsible for specifying the curriculum? Who is responsible for specifying the standards? How is the curriculum published? Are curriculum components specified locally or nationally? Linked statutory testing – what, when, why? The responses are organized into tables, and provide insight into the links between government control, curricula and standards in some of the top performing countries. To read the full report, click here.