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.

OECD Education Working Papers. (2012), “Immigrant Status and Secondary School Performance as Determinants of Post-Secondary Participation: A Comparison of Canada and Switzerland.”

The authors of an OECD paper on Immigrant Status and Secondary School Performance as Determinants of Post-Secondary Participation set out to find out what accounts for the difference in education attainment among immigrants in these two countries.

Up to 50 percent of the participation gap between immigrant students in Canada and Switzerland can be accounted for by immigration policies in those countries.  Canada has what the OECD calls a “highly managed” immigration system.  This form of managed immigration is designed to attract highly skilled and educated immigrants, many from Asian countries.  Because these immigrants are highly educated, they have high aspirations for their children’s education and they can provide their children with an environment that is very conducive to high student achievement.

Switzerland’s immigration system is a different story.  Prior to the early 2000s, people immigrating to Switzerland tended to be lower-skilled workers from developing countries.  Although this has changed somewhat in the last decade due to the European Union’s free movement of labor (with an increasing number of highly skilled immigrants arriving from places like France and Germany), it means that Canada and Switzerland have very different immigrant populations, particularly with regard to socioeconomic status and education backgrounds.

But what accounts for the other 50 percent of the difference in attainment?  Another major contribution is the design of the education system itself.  Our own benchmarking tells us that Swiss students are tracked at a very early age, starting at the sixth or seventh grade, into roughly three steams: an upper school track with demanding courses targeted at university attendance, an intermediate track and a third track offering very basic courses.  Only three percent of students from the basic track enter post-secondary education by age 23 compared to 30 percent of those in the upper track.  Students with a migrant background are overrepresented in the lower tracks, which impacts their later opportunities.  After compulsory education, students move to upper-secondary school, which is also very heavily segmented and affects students’ opportunities to attend university.  Canadian immigrant students attend comprehensive high schools where tracking is largely avoided, and immigrants who need to learn English are provided with early opportunities to learn the native language at all levels of the system.

So not only do Swiss migrant children tend to come from lower-income, lower skilled and less educated families, but those children are shunted early on into ability tracks where expectations for their performance are lower and they are given a less challenging curriculum.  It is hardly surprising that they do not do as well as the average Swiss youngster and do not progress as far with their formal education.

Canadian immigrant children, on the other hand, tend to come from well-educated, higher income families with above average expectations for their children and more cultural resources to offer them as they are growing up.  These kids are in classrooms where the expectations for all children are high and the curriculum is challenging.  Given all this, and the presence in the midst of a large proportion of children from Asian families in which the drive for school achievement and the willingness to work very hard in school is especially high, it is not surprising that the children of Canadian immigrant families do even better than the average Canadian student.  You can think of this analysis as a four-cell matrix, one dimension of which is immigration policy and the other dimension of which is school structure.  The high attainment cell is the one marked “Immigration policy favors high skill immigrants/education policy favors high expectations for all students and provides support for all students to achieve at high levels.”

One last thing of note about the design of the Swiss education system compared to the Canadian system:  the Swiss streaming system makes it possible for students to leave education at the end of secondary school and have fairly favorable job market prospects.  In Canada, this is not the case.  Students generally need some postsecondary education in order to acquire skills that will serve them well in the workforce.  So this last item also contributes to the lower participation rate in post-secondary education in Switzerland.

Attainment, of course, is not everything.  Switzerland has one of the world’s most successful vocational and technical education systems, and that system is the one that recruits from the students in the lower streams.  So, as always, it is most important for a country to think carefully about what it wants from its education system.  But, whatever a country’s goals are, this report raises questions for other countries about both immigration policy and school structure that are very important.

OECD. (June 2012), “Are Large Cities Educational Assets or Liabilities?”
Inner-city school students perform differently depending on the country context.  In most OECD member countries, students in large urban areas (defined as cities with over one million inhabitants) outperform students in rural areas by the equivalent of more than one year of education, according the latest PISA in Focus.  In fact, students in urban areas in countries such as Portugal and Israel, countries that typically perform around the OECD average, perform on par with students in Singapore.  And students in Poland’s big cities compare favorably with students in Hong Kong.

However in Belgium, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the performance of students in large urban areas drags down overall country scores.
The OECD suggests this might be because students in these countries do not have the advantages associated with students living in large urban centers in other countries.  Instead, students living in cities in these countries must deal with high poverty, language barriers, or lack of a two-parent support system.

The study goes on to say that countries succeeding in educating their urban students to high levels should be focused on educating non-urban students to the same high standards.  Countries whose urban students underperform should use big cities’ advantages such as a richer cultural environment and more attractive professional workplaces to recruit better quality teachers.  They should also determine how students can tap into other advantages such as increased school choice and a wider variety of job prospects.

New report from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research

New Zealand Council for Educational Research. (June 2012). “Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching  a New Zealand perspective.”
Education systems must be built around the learner instead of the learner being required to fit into the system, according to a new report commissioned by the New Zealand Ministry of Education.  Supporting future-oriented learning and teacher  a New Zealand perspective, prepared by researchers at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, identifies six emerging principles for future learning as well as describing how these principles are currently expressed in New Zealand educational thinking and practice.

The report challenges educators to use current resources for learning (time, teachers, technology, etc.) and new resources to customize students’ learning experiences.  The report recognizes diversity as a strength for a future-oriented learning system, something to be actively fostered.  In order to cultivate 21st century skills, citizens need to be educated to understand diversity and possess the ability to work with people from various cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds as well the ability to think between, outside, and beyond past paradigms.  Thirdly, the Council emphasizes a shift from student learning focused on acquiring knowledge to student learning focused on developing capabilities to work with knowledge.  The authors write, “From this point of view, disciplinary knowledge should be seen, not as an end in itself, but as a context within which students’ learning capacity can be developed.”  A fourth key principle identified in the report is rethinking the traditional roles or “scripts” followed by learners and teachers.  If the goal of schooling is no longer to just transmit knowledge, then educators must be cognizant of how their roles should be re-envisioned to best support every learner’s potential. The report prioritizes a culture of continuous learning for teachers and educational leaders and an education system that is designed to incorporate what is known about adult learning and cognitive development.  Lastly, the report authors recommend building a wider school community that takes advantage of new kinds of partnerships and relationships.  Students must not only learn from their teachers but from other people, with specific kinds of expertise, knowledge or access to learning opportunities that exist in real-world context.

Ben Jensen, School Education Program Director for Australia’s Grattan Institute

Jensen, Ben. “Pupil power: time to ditch teacher bonuses and focus on student learning,” The Conversation, May 17 2012.
Ben Jensen, School Education Program Director for Australia’s Grattan Institute, author of the recent Catching up: learning from the best school systems in East Asia, and recent CIEB interviewee, recently published an opinion piece in The Conversation about teacher bonuses.  Jensen argues that teacher bonuses are the wrong way forward in education reform.  Jensen contends that because teacher bonuses are so often dependent on student test scores, and test scores are only a partial and often unreliable measure of teachers’ work, bonuses are not based on what truly identifies an effective teacher.  In addition, Jensen contents that newer and more data-driven measures of teacher effectiveness like those currently being promoted by policymakers in the United States such as value-added measures are also problematic, because they do not identify the “practices that most increase student learning”.  To that end, the Grattan Institute produced a report in 2011 outlining how teacher appraisal could be approached.  They recommend using at least four of the following methods, all of which provide feedback on student learning, to assess how well a teacher is performing: peer observation and collaboration; 360-degree assessment; parent surveys; student performance and assessments; direct observation of classroom teaching and learning; student surveys; external observation; and self-assessment.  It is not just teacher evaluations that focus too much on the teacher and not enough on student learning, Jensen argues.  Teacher education, professional development, and debates around teaching career structures are all guilty of the same misdirected attention.  In his article, Jensen note that, “in most examples of teacher bonus reforms around the world, the impact on students has been negligible, and in some cases the negative impact on teachers has negatively affected school improvements.”  He goes on to say that, “Singapore is the only high-performing country that still uses a teacher bonus scheme, but the bonuses are a single component of what has been broader school reform.”

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

School Profile: Zhabei No. 8 Middle School, Shanghai

By Vivien Stewart

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

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

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

School Profile: Tampines Elementary School, Singapore

By Vivien Stewart

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

In this section of our newsletter, we provide a summary of the key findings of the OECD report.  In our Statistic of the Month section, you can find graphic displays taken from this report and another recent OECD report that neatly summarize some of the most important findings and show how a number of the countries surveyed for the report sort themselves out along the dimensions of interest.  This article should be read in conjunction with those graphics.

Unsurprisingly, the report finds that certain investments in educational equity pay off.  They argue for early government investment in education, and maintaining a strong investment in the system through upper secondary school, with specific, targeted investments in and policies for low-performing schools. The authors recommend elimination of system practices that hinder education, among them grade repetition, early tracking, school-choice schemes that do not actually offer “choice” to all students, and “dead-end” upper secondary programs as opposed to academically demanding vocational tracks in upper secondary school that ensure that all students have a high quality pathway to the job market.  The authors also propose several broadly outlined strategies for improving low-performing schools with a particular emphasis on strong school leadership, highly-qualified teachers and strong links to the community.

The report points to countries that have been unusually successful at minimizing the effects of socio-economic status on school performance. Finland, in particular, and to a somewhat lesser extent Canada, South Korea and Japan, have all been able to help a high proportion of their students from low socio-economic backgrounds achieve at high levels, as measured by the 2009 PISA scores in reading. The OECD average reading score is far lower than it is in any of the countries just listed, while the average percent of variance in reading achievement among students from various social backgrounds is nearly twice as high as it is in Finland. Other countries, like the United States and New Zealand, have higher average PISA scores than the OECD average, but also a higher percent of variance in those scores – showing that those systems are both lower achieving overall and more unequal within their countries.

Other Recent Reports of Note

• The measurement of educational inequality: achievement and opportunity, The World Bank (publication date: November, 2011). The authors of this working paper examine educational inequality and measurement issues in international standardized assessments like PISA. They use these measurement issues to calculate inequality indices for 57 countries and provide results along with an analysis of whether education inequality correlates with factors like GDP, school spending and student tracking.
• Student Standardised Testing: Current Practices in OECD Countries and a Literature Review, OECD (publication date: October 11, 2011). This report discusses the most relevant issues concerning student standardised testing in which there are no-stakes for students through a literature review and a review of the trends in standardised testing in OECD countries. It provides an overview of the standardised testing typology in the no-stakes context, including identifying the driving trends behind the gradual increase in standardised testing in OECD countries and the different purposes of standardised tests.
• Teachers’ and School Heads’ Salaries and Allowances in Europe, 2009/10, Eurydice (publication date: October 4, 2011). This Eurydice data collection and comparative study on teachers’ and school heads’ salaries and allowances covers full-time, fully qualified teachers and school heads at pre-primary, primary, lower secondary and upper secondary education levels for the 2009/10 school year. The cross-country comparative analysis focuses on comparing the decision-making levels that are responsible for setting teachers’ and school heads’ statutory salaries. The minimum and maximum statutory salaries are presented relative to the GDP per capita in each country, with an indication of salary progression and its relation to professional experience. The latest increase/decrease in the purchasing power of personnel employed in education in relation to the impact of the economic crisis since 2008 is also analyzed. Finally, the different types of allowances that teachers may receive are presented as well as the decision-making levels responsible for their allocation and their levels.