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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And thus the stage was set for the third summit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education Equity

The issue of educational equity is one that is important to policymakers in all top-performing nations, but the situation in China is unique.  Shanghai has one of the best education systems in the world, but it is an anomaly in a country that is also characterized by a sprawling rural populace without many of the benefits of Shanghai’s system.  As recently as a few years ago in China, not all children had access to nine years of compulsory education, though that changed at the end of 2011.  China’s government has been working to redress this gap, and an article at China.org quotes Chinese Education Minister Yuan Guiren as saying that “[China has] made a lot of progress in improving fairness in education in recent years … My dream is to ensure that we can … provide education for all people without discrimination and cultivate every person in this nation to become a talent.”  A great deal of their policy and financial focus has been directed towards poor, minority, female and rural students over the past five years.

Despite Shanghai’s great strengths in education, policymakers and educators are concerned there, too, with a different equity issue.  Unlike in the rest of China, where female students may have less access to education than male students, in Shanghai, female students are outperforming male students fairly significantly.  In 2008, girls made up more than 60 percent of the top scorers on the gaokao, China’s university entrance examination, up from about 34 percent in 1999.  As a response to this dramatic shift in performance, The Japan Times reports that some Shanghai schools have created classes for boys only, hoping learning in a single-gender environment will help to boost male students’ confidence and improve their performance.

In China’s Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, there is concern over the equity of the education provided to students from ethnic minorities.  In that region, almost all schools are required to teach all of their classes in Cantonese; this requirement has been in place since 1997.  The New York Times reports that this policy has been detrimental to students who do not speak Cantonese fluently.  As a response, the government has opened “designated schools” in which classes are taught in English and the student body is 95 percent ethnic minority.  However, many feel that the students attending these schools are at a disadvantage due to their separation (both physically and linguistically) from mainstream society.

Education Funding

Following the release of the Review of Funding for Schooling (better known as the “Gonski Report”) in Australia last year, both the federal government and the states have been working to reach agreement on what school funding will look like going forward.  The report proposed a uniform system of funding schools across Australia, with a base funding amount augmented by a school-specific “loading” to address economic, cognitive and physical disadvantages among the student body.  However, the premier of the state of Victoria has rejected this plan, preferring instead to propose his own system.  The Age has the full story.  Other states, too, have rejected the Gonski proposals.  In Queensland, the Education Minister has announced that they will be developing their own funding plan, while Tasmania has emerged as the first state with a Labor government (the same party that is in power in the federal government) to reject the government’s plans.

Nearby in New Zealand, a recently released study from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research found that, according to a survey of the country’s principals, secondary schools are often struggling financially.  Principals reported budgetary deficits, with a majority stating that their finances were worse in 2012 than they were the previous year.  However, the Ministry of Education rejected the report’s findings, with a staffer contending, “schools are adequately funded to deliver the curriculum so that all students are able to learn and achieve.”  Read more at the Otago Times.

China, meanwhile, has been working to increase funding for schooling as part of their overarching strategy to improve the system and create both greater equity and improved student performance.  An article on Xinhuanet reports that China has been increasing education spending since 2009, with an investment totaling nearly US$5 billion over the past four years.  Four percent of GDP is about the same, proportionally, as what the OECD countries spend on average on education each year; top performing systems such as Australia, Finland and the Netherlands also spend about 4% of their GDP on education. 4-Traders reports that the government plans to increase education spending by 9.3% in 2013 and to focus on educating rural students.

Student Pressure

Most of the top-performing East Asian education systems are known for the the extensive hours students spend studying outside of class, often to prepare for university entrance exams.  The Japan Times reports that students in that country are attending cram schools, or juku, earlier than ever before.  Whereas in the past students began attending juku in their teenage years, now it is becoming increasingly common among elementary and even preschool students.  However, there does seem to be a degree of ambivalence on the part of parents: while many feel that they should not have to pay for private tutoring in addition to regular schooling, they often turn to juku in order to ensure that their children are not falling behind their peers.

In China, by contrast, aware that immense pressure on students is often not conducive to a student’s health, many provinces are making strides in changing the culture of “cram.”  Beijing, in particular, is leading the pack in developing policies focused on reducing student stress in an education system where tests are a central element of schooling.   The Global Times reports that after March 19, primary schools in that city will face limitations on testing and homework, and secondary schools will be prohibited from ranking students based on exam scores.  However, the article also reports that parents are not necessarily on board with these changes.  One parent pointed out that as long as the gaokao, China’s university entrance exam, dominates a student’s academic prospects, the system is unlikely to change. The Shanghai Daily has also recently covered the tension between the government efforts to relax education in the primary grades and parents’ concerns about their children’s futures, while Xinhuanet reports that China will be launching a national campaign to ease stress and move towards more comprehensive evaluations of student performance.

Teacher Quality

Both Australia and the Netherlands have produced new policy plans for improving the quality of their teaching forces in the past month.  In the Netherlands, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science released Working in Education 2012, a policy document that calls for turning schools into professional organizations where teachers would have access to attractive career paths.  The government’s recommendations for improving teacher quality, to be introduced by 2016, include developing a competency document for each teacher that describes their skills and the activities designed to maintain and improve them, implementing a peer review system for teachers, and introducing performance-related pay pilots.

In Australia, both the state and federal governments are concerned with the issue of teacher quality.  In New South Wales, the Education Minister has announced that there will be a new minimum entry standard for teacher education programs.  The Australian reports that teacher candidates would need scores of at least 80 percent in three subjects on the high school leaving exams, including in English.  Another component of the new quality measures is an introduction of a literacy and numeracy test that teacher candidates must pass while they are completing their degree.  The federal government has also announced plans to require literacy and numeracy tests and an assessment interview for students entering teaching programs.  The Education Minister of New South Wales has stated that his state’s plan does not conflict with the federal plan, but would hold teacher candidates to a higher standard than the federal plan.

Early Childhood Education

In Singapore and Shanghai, the government and parents are increasingly focused on early childhood education (ECE).  Singapore plans to spend more than US$2.4 billion on preschool education in the next five years, which doubles their current investment, writes Channel News Asia.  In Shanghai, parents are so eager to enroll their students in early childhood programs that some have begun signing their children up for these programs on the day they are born.  According to the Global Times, however, this demand for preschool has created a boom in the private ECE sector.  This has led to concerns about the quality of the teaching staff and the programs offered, and calls for improved government oversight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

By Marc Tucker

My apologies to Maimonides.  But I would not blame you if you were perplexed about the recent dust-up after the latest PIRLS and TIMSS data came out.  Some of the best-known names in education research worldwide came out with guns blazing, mostly at one-another, in a rapid-fire exchange about what the numbers meant.  I thought some of you might welcome a guide to the shooters and the shots, and a bit of commentary on the profound meaning of it all.

Tom Loveless, the head of the Brown Center at the Brookings Institution jumped on the data to say that they called for a “rethinking of the Finnish miracle success story….If Finland were a state taking the 8^th grade NAEP [the sample survey used in the United States to monitor the progress of American students over time], it would probably score in the middle of the pack.”  Jack Buckley, Commissioner of the National Center for Educational Statistics in the U.S. Department of Education confessed that, “I’ve always been a little puzzled” by the high level of attention paid to Finland.  Well, so much for Finland!

Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein wrote an analysis of the data claiming to show that while reading achievement of American students on PISA was growing between 2000 and 2009, it was falling by an even larger amount in Finland.  Similarly, they said, in math, US students from the lowest social class were also gaining substantially, while scores of comparable Finnish students declined.  “This is surprising,” they said, “because the proportion of disadvantaged students in Finland also fell…” And they go on to say that, by their analysis, the achievement gap between the most and the least advantaged students in the United States is actually smaller than in “similar postindustrial countries, and often only slightly larger than gaps in top-scoring nations.”

Ha!  That means that the withering criticism showered on American schools for their poor performance was totally undeserved.  The problem, if there is a problem, lies not in the schools, poor Horatio, which have been doing a much better job than anyone has given them credit for, but in the enormous disparities in family income that have opened up in American society.  And Finland, according to this analysis, hardly deserves its status as the model that the United States should be adopting.

Not so fast, say Paul Peterson, Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann.  Peterson is at Harvard, Hanushek at Stanford and Woessmann at the University of Munich.  The data, they say, don’t show that at all.  What they actually show is that, even if such corrections are made, American students at the top do not perform anywhere near as well as the students in the top performing countries, or, at least, not such a high proportion of them do.  Things are just as bad as they always said they were, and the need to turn up the heat on the schools to perform up to international standards is as great as ever.

But wait a minute, says Andreas Schleicher.  The Carnoy-Rothstein analysis depends, he said, on a challenge to the methods used by OECD-PISA to do its survey research, and that challenge, says Schleicher, just won’t hold up in court.  To which Carnoy and Rothstein said in reply to the reply, Oh yes it will.

So what is going on here?  Why are all these people so exercised about this data?  What are their agendas anyway?  Who is right and who is wrong?  Why does it matter?  And what does it mean?

I know that research is supposed to go where the evidence leads it and the researcher is only there to record the ineluctable result, without fear or favor.  But the reality is that researchers have values to support and reputations to protect, and their conclusions are more often than not influenced by both their values and the reputations they have established as a result of the policy positions they have taken.  So, perhaps it would help to sketch in the positions taken on the relevant issues by the people I have named.

It should surprise no one that spokespeople for the Brookings Institution and the United States National Center for Educational Statistics should be waiting to pounce on Finland and on the people who have used the Finns’ standing in the international league tables to make a case for using the educational strategies the Finns have embraced.  Both Brookings and a series of U.S. Department of Education research executives, some of whom have gone to Brookings when they left the Department of Education, have been deeply skeptical of international education benchmarking and ardent advocates of what they have described as the “gold standard” of education research, meaning the use of experimental research techniques as the only legitimate way to attribute cause in social research.  It is obviously impossible to randomly assign national “treatments” to national populations in the arena of education, so, from their point of view, all statements that this or that set of policies “causes” these or those national outcomes in the arena of education policy are necessarily suspect.

Brookings and the Peterson, Hanushek, Woessmann team are both strong supporters of charters and the introduction of market forces generally as school reform strategies.  Brookings, as well other Washington-based think tanks, are eager to deflate the recent enthusiasm for international education benchmarking in part because they fear that the close examination of the strategies used by the top-performing countries will show little evidence that charters or market strategies in general are effective strategies for raising student achievement at a national scale.

Peterson, Hanushek and Woessmann each have their own views on what is most important in education reform, but all are advocates of charters and reform agendas based on market forces, and all appear to believe that it will take fear of foreign competitors to put this reform agenda over the top in the United States.  They have also done research that they say supports their claim that market strategies do work in the top-performing countries.  Implicitly, then, they believe, unlike their Brookings colleagues, that it is possible to do rigorous research using comparative data gleaned from these international surveys that attributes cause and from which, therefore, it is possible to draw policy conclusions.  This team of researchers has consistently advanced the view, like my own organization, that economic ruin will be the fate of any nation that fails to hold its own in international education competition, though their prescriptions as to the most effective policy agenda are different from our own, based on the study of pretty much the same data.

But Carnoy and Rothstein come from a very different place.  They believe that the relatively poor performance of American students on the international surveys of student achievement is a function of the large and increasing disparity in incomes among Americans, in absolute terms and in relation to other countries.  They are outraged that organizations like my own and researchers like Peterson, Hanushek and Woessmann hold the schools accountable for poor student performance, when they think the fault lies not in the schools and teachers, but rather in a society that tolerates gross and increasing disparities in income among Americans.  They would have us focus on promoting policies that would result in a fairer distribution of income in the United States.

Which puts them in direct conflict not just with Peterson, Hanushek and Woessmann, but also with Andreas Schleicher, the driver of the whole PISA system at the OECD.  Schleicher’s primary framework for the analysis of the PISA data displays the country data on two axes, one for student achievement on the subjects assessed by PISA and the other for equity, the pattern of the distribution of results from the poorest to the best performers within countries.  Countries with short tails in that distribution are described as having high equity; those with long tails are described as having low equity.  Schleicher points out that the United States just barely escapes being among those countries in the worst quartile on both measures.  Another table in Schleicher’s slide deck shows that, when socio-economic status is held constant, the schools of some nations do a much better job than others of reducing achievement disparities among students.  Carnoy and Rothstein would take American teachers off the hook, saying that the performance of poor and minority students is actually improving, the gap is not so large as was thought, and the performance of poor and minority students in the top performing countries is actually declining.  To the extent there is a problem, it is a problem caused by socio-economic status of the students, not the teachers’ performance.  Schleicher would say, no, that is not so.  Even when we look at students from comparable socio-economic backgrounds, American schools do less to close the gap with the students from more favored backgrounds than schools in most other countries.  They cannot both be right.

So it is no wonder that Carnoy and Rothstein go after Schleicher and his data and methods with hammer and tongs.

So who is right and who is wrong here?  All of the people I have named are competent researchers from well-regarded institutions.  Just as each of these people have their own values and established positions on the relevant policy issues, the same is true of me and the organization with which I am associated.  Our analysis of the dynamics of the global economy strongly suggests that high wage countries like the United States will find it increasingly difficult to maintain their standard of living unless they figure out how to provide a kind and quality of education to virtually all their children that they formally thought appropriate only for a few.  And we also believe that the most likely source of good ideas for strategies that will enable them to do that is the countries that have already done it.  We think that whether the source of poor performance is mainly growing disparities of income or relatively poor performance of the education system, the dynamics of the global economy are unforgiving and countries like the United States do not have the option of saying that the educators can do nothing, that the only thing that will save us is income redistribution.  We do not think that the only way to learn what strategies are likely to work is research methods derived from the experimental sciences.  Indeed, we think that the record clearly shows that American business recovered from a devastating assault from Japanese firms in part by inventing and using the very method—industrial benchmarking—that we and others are now using in the field of education.

To me, the most important conclusion to be drawn from the debate whose contours I have just rather roughly outlined is that now, for the first time in the United States, the international surveys of student achievement really matter.  That is a big, big change.  It was not the case before that advocates of the most hotly debated education reforms in the United States felt that they needed to take the data from these surveys seriously, to defend their positions or to advance them.  Clearly, they do now.

The second point is that the data from the international surveys is being used to make points not about peripheral issues, but central issues.  It really matters whether the cause of the United States’ relatively low standing in the international league tables is income disparities among the students’ families or poor education in the schools.  It really matters whether or not countries like Finland have important lessons for the rest of the world.  It matters whether the survey methods being used by the organizations that design and administer them bear up to scientific scrutiny or not.  And, lastly, it also matters whether the methods used by those who do research comparing the effects of different policies and practices on student achievement in multiple countries have enough scientific merit to justify their use by policy makers to make national policy. These are consequential questions.  This is the first time that we have seen a sustained debate by some of America’s leading scholars on these matters.  It is not likely to be the last, and that appears to herald an era in which, for the first time in the United States, international surveys of student achievement are likely to take a prominent place in the public debate about education policy.
You may be wondering where I come out on the welter of claims and counterclaims I described above.  Now that I have laid my analytical framework on the table along with those of the other analysts, you are in a position to apply the same dose of skepticism to my conclusions as I urged you to apply to the others.   My take on the data we now have in hand is more or less as follows.

First, the usual note of caution.  One snapshot does not a movie make.  We should not declare a trend before we have more than one data point.  So we might want to see whether the changes in rankings suggested by the recent PIRLS and TIMSS data hold up over time.

Second, as many have pointed out, TIMSS and PIRLS put the accent on measuring how students do on what amounts to a consensus curriculum.  Did they learn what international experts think they should have been taught in the subjects they assess?  PISA measures the capacity of students to apply what they have learned in the classroom to proxies for real-world problems of the sort they might actually encounter outside the classroom.  I have a strong preference for the latter goal over the first, which mainly comes from an experience I had years ago, when Archie Lapointe, the director at that time of the Young Adult Literacy Survey, told me the following.  The survey asked the young people surveyed to add a column of figures and take a percentage of the result. Almost all could do it.  It also asked the same respondents to take a restaurant check, add up the items, get a total and calculate a tip.  Very few could do it.  Like Alfred North Whitehead, I have very little use for what he called “inert knowledge.”

Third, we need to keep in mind that the fine-grained distinctions in the rankings, for most countries that are near one another, are not statistically significant.  What we should really be paying attention to is the groupings of countries in the rankings, when countries are grouped in such a way that the measured differences among the groups are statistically significant.  If you look at it from this perspective, what we see is the United States still has a long way to go before the vast majority of its students score in the front ranks of performance at many grade or age levels in many subjects, which is how I would define top performers.

Fourth, I think it is pretty clear from the OECD data that smaller proportions of American students score in the higher deciles of performance on the PISA tests, and more in the lower deciles than is the case for students from the top-performing countries.  If that is true, then it cannot also be true that the United States would do as well as the top-performing countries if only the poor, Black and Hispanic students were taken out of the rankings, as many American teachers and some policymakers maintain.  It is also clear from the OECD-PISA analysis, as I pointed out above, that, when the data are corrected for students’ socio-economic status, American schools are less effective than the schools of most of the countries measured at closing the gap between these students and students with higher socio-economic status.

This, of course, is not where Carnoy and Rothstein come out, but I think Andreas Schleicher won the battle between him, on the one hand, and Carnoy and Rothstein on the other.  But don’t take my word for it.  Read the claims and arguments made by both sides carefully.  There is a lot at stake in this conflict.

So, what then are we to make of the fact that, if Massachusetts, North Carolina and Florida were countries, they would have done very well indeed in the most recently released rankings?

The case of Florida, I think, is pretty straightforward.  The Florida Center for Reading Research, administered by Florida State University, is one of the nation’s leading centers for reading research.  Its methods are widely admired throughout the United States.  The state of Florida has managed to leverage this research program and its key figures to produce widespread implementation throughout the state of the methods advocated by the Center.  We can see the results in the PIRLS fourth grade reading results.  The question, of course, is what effect, if any, this will have on student performance in the upper grades as the students who have benefitted from these programs mature through the years.  That story has yet to be told.

In North Carolina, we are looking at a program of education reform that began with Governor Terry Sanford, whose first term as governor began in 1961.  Sanford’s unrelenting emphasis on improving education in the state laid the base for Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., who served as governor from 1977 to 1985 and again from 1993 to 2001, making him the longest serving governor in the state’s history.  Through that whole period, he never lost his focus on education as the key to the state’s economic growth, and, during that period, North Carolina showed more progress on student achievement as measured by the National Assessment of Education Progress than any other state in the United States.  Hunt’s agenda for education reform was profoundly affected by what he was learning about the strategies adopted by the top-performing countries in the world.  Like them, he focused on teacher quality, high quality instructional systems and early childhood education.  North Carolina was among the very first states in the United States to send delegations of key state policy-makers abroad to study the top performers.

Massachusetts is a similar story.  In this case the first phase of the reforms were driven by the business community, organized by Jack Rennie, a very successful businessman who worked hard to organize that community, and Paul Reville a public policy analyst.  They played the key role in pushing the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 through the legislature.  The Act provided hundreds of millions in new funding for the schools in exchange for explicit performance standards for students, set to international benchmarks and carefully drawn curriculum frameworks, also set to international benchmarks; a new comprehensive assessment system set to the standards and curriculum frameworks; much tougher standards for getting to be a teacher, intended to greatly ratchet up teachers’ command of the subjects they intended to teach, and a system to disclose student performance, school by school, with results reported by student subgroups, so that poor performance by these subgroups would not be hidden in the average scores for the school.  Right after the Act was passed, David Driscoll, until then the Deputy Commissioner of Education, was made Commissioner and remained in that position for ten years.  Under Driscoll’s leadership, Massachusetts, despite a great deal of pressure to do so, never backed off of its decision to set and to maintain internationally benchmarked standards, for both student performance and teacher certification.  After Driscoll left, the new governor created a new position in state government, to provide leadership to all the parts of government concerned primarily with education at all levels.  He filled that position with Paul Reville.  Between them, Driscoll and Reville provided the same kind of strength and continuity of leadership that Governor Hunt provided in North Carolina, and for a very similar agenda, an agenda that is in many respects consistent with our own analysis of the strategies used by the top performing nations to get to the top of the league tables.

You may or may not agree with my analysis of the kerfuffle over the release of the TIMSS and PIRLS results.  You may or may not agree with my explanation for the rise of Florida, Massachusetts and North Carolina on the PIRLS and TIMSS league tables.  But, in any case, I urge you to look at the contending papers, and come to your own conclusions.  All of us could benefit greatly from a long, loud, contentious effort to define what it means to be educated, and to better understand why some nations are more successful than others at educating the vast majority of their young people to whatever standard they choose.

* This is a second version of the original post for this month.  We misstated the conclusions presented by Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein in the report described in this newsletter.  We believe we have stated those conclusions accurately here, and apologize to the authors for the error.

For the record, however, the version of the Carnoy-Rothstein conclusions that we based our first statement on was itself based on the version of the report that Carnoy and Rothstein originally released, which claimed that their re-estimate of United States PISA scores would result in the United States ranking 4^th among OECD countries in reading, and 10^th in math, a major revision upwards of the US PISA rankings.  In their most recent version of their report, released last week, Rothstein and Carnoy revised these numbers downward somewhat to 6^th in reading and 13^th in math, but, as the post points out, even these numbers are contested.

An interview with Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at the Institute of Education, University of London, on his paper entitled Optimizing Talent: Closing Educational and Social Mobility Gap Worldwide, published last year at the Salzburg Global Seminar in Austria.

Marc Tucker:  In your paper, you start out making an argument that today’s children are more intelligent than their parents and their grandparents and you combine that with an argument that the quality of teaching in government-funded schools appears to be higher than that in private schools in most wealthy countries.  Can you tell us more about the research on both points?

Dylan Wiliam:  The first argument draws on the work of psychologist James Flynn (the Flynn effect), an American living and working in New Zealand.  He found that IQ tests need to be re-benchmarked every decade, because IQs are rising, about 3 to 4 points every ten years.  So IQ norms are rising, and people are getting smarter in ways we may not entirely realize.  The average would be around 110 or 115 if we didn’t adjust it.  It has risen 15 points since World War II.  This is occurring on some tests more than others; arithmetic scores have gone up very little while spatial scores and problem-solving scores are increasing substantially.  Maybe young people aren’t using their intelligence today as well as they could be but there is evidence that they are smarter.

Tucker:  Most American teachers think about intelligence in the way they were taught to – it is a function of the genes.  Is the gene pool changing, or do we have a different idea now about what these tests are measuring?

Wiliam:  Research in genetics shows that the nature vs. nurture debate is essentially an irrelevant question.  Interestingly, what you find in that debate is the estimate depends on the variation in environment.  It is an unstable question unless you can calibrate the differences in environment, which no one can do.  Secondly it is a question of epigenetics—the study of changes in gene activity that do not involve alterations to the genetic code but still get passed down to at least one successive generation.  What we are seeing is that certain genes get switched on or switched off depending on the experience we have.  For example, there is one gene that if you have two long forms, nothing happens but if you have two short forms the likelihood of getting depression increases in an abusive environment but the likelihood decreases in a healthy environment.  So what we understand now is that the nature vs. nurture debate is completely irrelevant because different environments switch on or switch off different genes.

The plasticity of IQ is much greater than was previous imagined.  There were some experiments with orphans from Romania and they had extraordinary cognitive deficits when they were in the orphanages, but rich environments helped them to catch up very quickly.  Supportive environments really do help make-up for a lot early on.

Environments vary quite a lot.  Many people are familiar with the Hart and Risley study, Meaningful Differences: An average three-year old from a professional-class family would have accumulated experience with almost 45 million words while an average three-year old from a welfare family would have accumulated experience with about 13 million words, resulting in a 30 million word gap.  A child from a working class house that is in the top ten percent of cognitive development will be overtaken by a child from a middle class house that is in the bottom ten percent of cognitive development by age six. So there are extraordinary differences in the environment that make any kind of speculation about genetics questionable.

I have a goal that we should magnify the impact of genetic effects on IQ because if we give all students a rich environment, then the only difference would be in genetics.  The important thing is that high quality environments do seem to make a big difference.  There are debates about things like Head Start—IQs go up while in the program and decline when they leave that environment, but if they learn to read while in the program, those skills are there for life.

There is the argument that what you do with the talents you have is more important than the actual talents you have.  Teaching kids about delayed gratification, persistence, how to apply themselves— these things are important and we are finding they can be learned.  My conclusion is that there is almost certainly a genetic component to IQ, but we can’t change it so we shouldn’t worry about it and it’s probably not that important.

Tucker:  Your second proposition is that when you take everything as equal, public schools do better than private. Can you explain that in more detail?

Wiliam:  The 2006 OECD data shows that in most countries, kids in private schools outperformed kids in state schools.  In some countries, the gaps are quite large.  But the most extraordinary thing was they had a lot of background about the educational background of the students and have complied an index of socioeconomic deprivation.  When you control for the socioeconomic status of the student and the schools, there is not a single country in PISA where kids in private schools outperform kids in public schools because you are removing group effects.  The effects of the private schools outcomes are peer effects.  So if you’re a parent and can afford to send your kid to a private school you probably should because the teacher may not be good but the peer group is.

Once you control for these things, school effects are small.  By the time kids are 8-years old, one year’s progress is about .4 of a standard deviation.  So the average achievement made by one student in a cohort is very small compared to the overall spread of achievement in a cohort.  The range of achievement within a cohort is ten times the average progress made by a cohort a year.

The consequence is that the differences between students are typically much larger than people imagine, and it’s hardly surprising that any differences in school effects gets swamped by this.  And the second thing is that teacher quality is one of the most important variables in the system, and if teachers are randomly distributed through the system, it diminishes school effects.  For all these reasons, school effects are quite small.  That explains why reform efforts based on changing the kinds of schools available to students are ineffective, because even if the schools are good, they are not making that much of an effect.  That is because teacher quality appears to be randomly distributed across the system.

Tucker:  In the United States, where teachers have more choice about where they teach than in other countries, what you see is teachers with more seniority and experience choosing the higher status and easier positions within a school, and teachers with better reputations preferring to teach in a school with more advantaged students.  So you would expect to see better teachers teaching in schools with more advantaged students – a systematic bias toward having good teachers in more advantaged schools and bad teachers in less advantaged schools.

Wiliam:  It might be true, but it might also be the other way around.  The fact is, those teachers with seniority may not be any better than the others.  Teachers with seniority may be able to migrate to easier to staff schools, but they aren’t likely to be any better – those decisions are made on things only weakly related to teacher quality, like experience.  So it doesn’t distort the system.

Tucker:  Your logic line begins by saying, in effect, that kids’ intelligence is steadily improving and we have every reason to believe that public schools are at least as good as private ones, so you ask, why are employers so unhappy?  And the answer is because the dynamics of the global economy are changing their requirements.

Wiliam:  People haven’t really understood how rapidly the world of work is changing, because it has happened incrementally.  In the 1980s, being able to type in bold on a word processer would increase a secretary’s salary by 25 percent, now, we expect 7-year olds to be able to do that.  What we see is an extraordinary increase in the types of skills that people are expected to have.  More jobs are being automated, so the number of jobs that can be done without basic literacy and numeracy skills has decreased.

People forget how much more skilled people are today then they were 25 or 30 years ago, let alone 50 years ago.  There is an extraordinary destruction of jobs by automation.  Before you were basically renting your physical strength to the employer.  A factory may still be the world’s largest manufacturer but it employs way less people.  What are left are the jobs that not easily automated or off-shored. There are quite a lot of manual jobs that will never be off-shored—Hairdressing and taxi driving will always be required locally.  Middle jobs such as appraising someone’s eligibility for a mortgage – that used to be a skilled job.  Now, computers can do that more reliably, cheaper and quicker.

Tucker:  I always use the example of sail making, it used to be a skilled job, but now there are algorithms that will calculate every single panel in a sail as well as the measurements of the entire sail and it will tell you the conditions you can use that sail and when it will break. And it will also cut and sew the sail automatically.  As long as the work is routine, it’s automatable.

Wiliam:  Routine cognitive jobs turned out to be easy to automate.  And they are often easier to automate than routine manual jobs because computers are simpler than robots.  Shelf stocking is still done by human beings because they can still do it cheaper than a robot.  In the auto industry, there is a woman who does a job for $25,000 a year, whereas a robot arm can do the job for $100,000 a year.  As soon as the robot arm is cheaper than the worker, she will no longer have a job.  This is the race between education and technology, as described by Claudia Goldin from Harvard.  The world of work is destroying jobs faster than we can up-skill.  We have been walking up the down escalator in the past and have been able to make progress but now the escalator is speeding up and we may fall behind.  We need to walk faster and improve our schools faster in order to progress.

America is wealthy enough to give everyone in the country a very high standard of living by redistributing the current wealth.  This will not happen.  If you are a teacher in school today you should be preparing your student for a world where the redistribution doesn’t take place as well as if it did take place—in other words, we have to prepare them for the world we will think will unfold as well as the one we hope will unfold.

Tucker:  At the end of your essay, you make the point that the job of schools used to be to identify talent and let it move to the top.  Now, schools have to be talent incubators or talent factories – we can’t just identify it, we have to create it.  What does that mean in terms of what schools look like?  How do educators have to redefine the task?  What does this change look like?

Wiliam: The talent refinery model held that some kids can learn, and others can’t, and you have to figure out the ones that you should invest time in.  In contrast, the talent factory model holds that every kid has to achieve at a high level.  And many people say that that’s an impossible goal.  I think more good things will happen if we assume that’s achievable than if we assume it isn’t achievable.  I’m not saying there aren’t differences between students – there are huge differences.  So we need a school that is designed to minimize the impact of those differences, rather than to maximize them.  Giving them more time, bringing them in for weekend tutoring – the idea that the school will do whatever it takes to make sure that every child has a reasonable shot at getting reasonable proficiency in the desired subjects.  In high school, we have that model already in athletics.  A high school football coach doesn’t just cancel the season if they only have six good players; they take the students they have and make them the best football players they can be.  We need to translate that into the academic equivalent.

Vivien Stewart, Senior Advisor for Education at Asia Society and CIEB International Advisory Board Member, reports on the proceedings of the inaugural meeting of the Global Cities Education Network, held in Hong Kong.

The 21st century will be the century of cities, according to some observers.  Today, half of all humanity lives in cities.  Massive migration from rural areas and internationally has made cities increasingly diverse, typically including multiple languages, ethnic and/or religious groups.  With rapidly growing populations of poor, often unskilled residents, aging populations to take care of, and overtaxed public services, large cities are the sites of societies’ greatest challenges.  But they also possess significant advantages in terms of wealth and of cultural and social opportunities.  They are the creative hubs of economies and societies, the dominant drivers of both U.S. and global economic growth.

As knowledge- and innovation-based economies become more dominant, a critical factor in determining cities’ future economic success will be the skills and talent of their workforces.  In a world that is increasingly interconnected, the opportunities for success will also require both individuals and cities to be able to compete and cooperate on a global scale.

It was these new challenges that brought cities from Asia, Australia and North America to Hong Kong for the inaugural meeting of the Global Cities Education Network.  Founded and convened by Asia Society, an international, non-profit educational organization, the Global Cities Education Network seeks to act as a mechanism for collaborative learning and problem solving between large urban schools systems.

In recent years, as the role of education in driving economic and social development has become ever more apparent, international benchmarking of educational best practices has become an increasingly valuable tool for policymaking.  However, these international education comparisons have hitherto been made primarily at the national level.  But while education policies are usually set at the national or state level, it is in cities that such policies are actually implemented in real schools and with real students.

So, teams of policymakers, practitioners and researchers from Chicago, Denver, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Seattle, Toronto and the charter network Ed Visions came together in the Global Schools Education Network to discuss the critical challenges they face, and to identify ways to learn from each other and from the world’s best practices.  This first meeting was, in a sense, an experiment.  Although it is clear that good ideas travel across cultures, these cities are very disparate.  The context in Seoul is not the same as in Chicago – would they be able to find common ground?

The participating cities discussed two critical sets of issues — achieving quality education for all students and retooling their education systems to develop the knowledge and skills needed in the 21st century.

ACHIEVING EQUITY AND QUALITY

The highest performing education systems are those that combine quality with equity.  In these systems, the vast majority of students have the opportunity to attain high levels of skills, regardless of their own personal and socio-economic circumstances.  Yet even in the highest performing systems, a significant number of students fail to achieve a minimum level of education.

Every city in the Global Schools Education Network is working to provide greater equity in its education system, some with more success than others.

A particular focus of the discussion among the participants at the meeting was on the increasing diversity of cities.  In Toronto more than 20 percent of the population have been born outside of Canada (and are referred to as “new Canadians”).  And despite the overall increase in student performance and secondary school graduation, there are still groups that are falling behind, especially black males, native Canadians, and students who have come from Latin America and the Middle East.  In Melbourne, 24 percent of students have one parent born overseas and 20 percent speak a language other than English at home.  In Shanghai and Hong Kong, massive migration from poor rural and inland areas poses challenges to the traditional schools.  And while Seoul’s diversity is small in scale (2 percent) compared to other cities, it is nevertheless challenges the traditional processes of the education system.

Most cities give more resources to schools serving disadvantaged students but quantity of resources may not be as important as the ability to have the best teachers working in these schools.  Recognizing that the quality of the teacher is the single biggest in-school factor affecting student achievement, the discussion also focused on how to get enough high-quality people to go into teaching and how to ensure that the neediest students have access to the highest quality teaching.  Some cities such as Singapore have done extensive work on developing a high-quality teaching profession; others have worked on specific aspects of the issue such as Shanghai’s efforts to get the best teachers into the weakest schools.  These efforts and others could be used to inform other cities.

Another trend in most of the cities was towards the greater provision of choice and options for different types of schools.  Singapore, for example, is developing portfolios of schools.  Melbourne has government, Catholic and independent schools.  In the United States, charter schools, like the Education Visions network, are increasingly part of the city mix.  Seattle has pushed a great deal of decision making to the school level, which has stimulated innovation but exacerbated inconsistent results.  In all the participating cities, the trend is towards greater decentralization of authority to the school level with just broad policies set at the city or district level.  However, choice and decentralization can lead to greater inequities if not designed with equity in mind.  So the challenge in running an effective urban system of schools is — what needs to be consistent across schools and where can flexibility be allowed?

Despite their challenges, cities also have many advantages.  Often the broader cultural and economic environment for education is more favorable.  And particular approaches such as choice among schools or professional learning communities among teachers are easier to implement in a city.  Indeed, an analysis conducted by OECD showed that in many parts of the world, cities outperform non-urban parts of their countries.

TRANSFORMING LEARNING: KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS FOR THE 21st CENTURY

Around the world and certainly in each of the participating cities, there is a sense that the aims and processes of education in the 21st century need to be fundamentally different from those in the 20th.  No longer is providing basic literacy skills for the majority of students and higher order skills for a few an adequate goal.

Every participating city is engaged in or contemplating wide-ranging reforms of curriculum, instruction, and assessment to prepare students for the increasingly complex demands of life and work in the 21st century.

While there was real agreement among the cities on the general direction in which education needs to go, there are tremendous challenges of implementation and cities approach the task with different strengths and limitations.  Asian cities have developed highly effective systems for knowledge transmission, where all the elements of the system are aligned and produce high performance, but their pedagogy is more traditional.  Western cities, on the other hand, have a more developed tradition of constructivist pedagogy and more freewheeling societies.  They have schools that are renowned as “peaks of excellence” but they have been less effective in developing systems to get all students to high levels of achievement.

The rapid changes in knowledge today are also putting a greater premium on investing in lifelong learning, raising new questions not just about the goals and focus of schooling but also about how to distribute learning resources over the lifecycle.  Every city it seems faces critical challenges in trying to reduce the enormous gap between what modern societies and economies demand and what education systems currently deliver.

COMMON PRIORITIES

In the final sessions of the meeting, participating cities agreed on a number of key common priorities of policy and practice where international benchmarking efforts through the Global Cities Education Network would be particularly helpful.

1.    Developing High-Quality Teachers and School Leaders
Cities want to know how to improve their efforts to attract, hire, develop, evaluate and retain high-quality teachers – and to ensure that the most disadvantaged students have highly capable teachers.  Since cities differ in the degree of influence they have over certain aspects like teacher training and teacher distribution among schools, a range of strategies for improving quality and distribution need to be identified.

2.    Improving Achievement of Low-Achieving and Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Students
In every city, some groups of students still lag significantly behind.  And the increasing scale and complexity of diversity facing large cities makes improving policies and practices in this area an urgent priority.  Bringing together the best available international research with a comparative analysis of the approaches of selected cities could shed important light on how the achievement of these students can be improved and how cities can make their increasing diversity an asset.

3.    Implementation and Assessment of 21st Century Skills
Every city is trying to varying degrees to modernize the content, methods and outcomes of their education systems towards 21st century skills and learning environments.  Perhaps most strategic in terms of moving systems in this direction is the need to craft ways to better assess these skills.  An analysis of what different systems around the world are doing to measure different aspects of 21st century skills together with an examination of ideas from the world’s best research on measurement would be an important contribution to helping cities transform their systems in this direction.

4.    Effective Systems Design: Centralization, Decentralization and Choice
All the cities are moving away from top-down management, with its emphasis on tight prescription and uniformity of educational practice, to giving more autonomy to individual schools.  They are encouraging portfolios of different types of schools and providing more choices of educational paths to students, especially at the secondary level.  What needs to be centralized and what should be decentralized to address these challenges is a major issue of system design, one that every city is grappling with to varying degrees and would be another fruitful area for comparative work.

This is a shortened version of a longer piece initially published on the Asia Society website.  Click here to read the full report and to learn more about the Global Cities Education Network.

Sharon Lynn Kagan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world

At the outset, the report’s authors take care to point out the differences between preschool and childcare.  They point out that there is a growing understanding of the importance of the developmental phase of a child’s life between the ages of three and six, as well as research indicating that preschool programs help with child development and school readiness and serve to help level the playing field among children of different socioeconomic backgrounds.  At the same time, enrolling a child in preschool has been shown to save money on schooling down the road, as children with a strong preschool foundation are less likely to need remediation or to repeat a grade.  Another economic benefit of preschool programs is that they facilitate female participation in the workforce.  The report cites James Heckman’s work on the economic benefits of preschool education; he has found that government investment in preschool yields an annual return of 7 to 10 percent in the form of lifetime wages.  Preschool also yields other lifetime social benefits such as reduced crime rates, lower welfare and education costs, and increased workforce productivity.  Thus the report, and the index used to measure the strength of early childhood education systems, takes the perspective that a universally available, high-quality preschool system is the goal that governments should be working toward.

The index is broken down into four main categories: social context, availability, affordability and quality.  These are weighted and the scores in each category are combined to make up the final score for each country.  Quality carries the most weight, and accounts for 45 percent of the final score.  Availability and affordability each account for 25 percent of the final score, and social context accounts for the final 5 percent.  Within each category, there are several sub-categories indicating how the authors of the report arrived at the final score for each category.  Social context measures the prevalence of malnutrition, the under-five mortality rate, the DPT immunization rate, the gender inequality index and the adult literacy rate of each country.  Availability measures the preschool enrollment ratio at age five or six and for the relevant age group, early childhood development and promotion strategy, and the legal right to preschool education.  Affordability measures the cost of private preschool programs, government spending on preschool education, available subsidies for underprivileged families, and subsidies for preschools that encourage including underprivileged children.  The quality category is comprised of the teacher-student ratio, average preschool teachers’ wages, curriculum guidelines, the training of preschool teachers, health and safety guidelines, data collection mechanisms, the links between preschools and primary schools, and parental involvement and parent education programs.  The scores for each country are derived from a combination of quantitative data and “unique qualitative assessments.”

By these measures Nordic countries fare best, and European countries in general tend to outperform Asian, North American, Latin American and African countries.  The report explains the predominance of Europe in the top 20 countries on the league table (16 of the top 20 places, in fact) by pointing out that, “it is culturally and politically accepted in Europe that the government will assume a significant role in delivering preschool education.”  Thus, the top countries are all countries that have, for the most part, been investing in preschool education for decades: Finland, Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands.  New Zealand and South Korea round out the top ten performers.  In addition to finding that Europe commands the majority of places at the top of the league table, the report finds that the average income per person in any given country correlates strongly with the overall ranking – rich countries perform better than poor countries, for the most part, even within Europe.  That being said, there are several countries, including the United States, Japan, Canada and Australia, that are ranked in the middle of the pack, despite being wealthy.  Many of these countries, while having some very high-quality preschools according to the index, do not have good policies in place to ensure fair and equal access to these programs, thereby accounting for their relatively poor performance.

Of course, the authors acknowledge that every country has its own particular challenges in achieving a universal, high-quality preschool system.  Some have a diverse population made up of students of varying language, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.  Others may suffer from lack of funding.  Still others have large proportions of the population living in rural areas where it is difficult to establish programs.  Less wealthy countries typically have to make a choice between expanding access and improving quality at the outset, and, when that is the case, find that it is particularly important to educate parents on the importance of both early child development and early learning.

The report provides policy recommendations in the areas of both access and quality.  In terms of access, the authors and the experts interviewed recommend putting a system of subsidies into place, either in the form of “demand-side” subsidies (money or vouchers flowing directly to families) or “supply-side” subsidies (funds provided directly to preschools to incentivize enrolling children who cannot otherwise afford to attend).  Although most of the top-performing countries generally pursue supply-side policies because the government provides universal preschool, the authors find that many countries might find it feasible to use a combination of supply and demand strategies to ensure access.

On the quality side of things, the report recommends several important policy changes: improving teacher training and teacher quality, establishing clear curriculum guidelines, managing the transition between preschool and primary school, improving teacher-student ratios, increasing parental involvement, having clear health and safety guidelines in place, and collecting data with “robust data collection mechanisms.”  Teacher quality is perhaps the most centrally important component of providing quality preschool education, and varies widely from country to country, with Finland requiring a bachelor’s degree (many preschool teachers also have master’s degrees) and other countries hiring “literally anybody who is physically able and interested in working with children.”

This report makes clear that in order to establish a quality preschool education system, it must be treated, for the most part, like the primary and secondary education system, with the same types of policy levers and quality assurance mechanisms.  Indeed, the report often relies on well-established primary and secondary best practices in order to draw policy recommendations for early childhood education.  The authors mention, for example, Finland and South Korea’s practices of recruiting teachers from the top of the high school cohort, suggesting that this is a way to manage quality (though they do point out that this is not strictly enforced in either country when it comes to choosing preschool teachers).  They suggest working to build a profession able to attract high-quality recruits by compensating preschool teachers at a fair and living wage, reducing the teacher-student ratio to make the job more attractive, and establishing regulations and specific skill sets that are required of teachers in order to enter and remain in the profession.  They furthermore suggest working to build strong leadership in preschools, which would further contribute to the sense of preschool teaching as a profession while also encouraging the leaders to serve as innovators in the field.  Apart from improving teacher quality, putting curriculum guidelines and learning expectations into place can help bring lower-quality teachers up to a higher standard, and help all preschools provide the type of education expected of them.  Ultimately, the report’s authors and the interviewed experts argue, when funds are limited, human capital development—that is, the preparation of the preschool teachers—must absolutely be prioritized over things like technology and infrastructure.  However, one policy to “improve” early childhood education programs—using standardized tests to measure student performance and holding teachers accountable based on the test scores—which has been growing in favor in countries like the United States is not part of any of the recommendations found in the report, nor is it a tool used by any of the top performers.

It is interesting to note where the world’s top performers in primary and secondary education fall in this ranking, given that preschool is increasingly seen as an important foundation for high student performance in later years.  Four of the top primary and secondary performers crack the top ten in this early childhood education league table, with Finland ranked first, the Netherlands eighth, New Zealand ninth and South Korea tenth.  Hong Kong, Japan, Canada, Australia and Singapore are in the middle of the pack, rated at nineteenth, twenty-first, twenty-sixth, twenty-eighth, and twenty-ninth, respectively.  China fares very poorly, ranked just three steps up from the bottom.  It is interesting to note that Asian countries fare, by this ranking, generally worse than their European and commonwealth counterparts.  It is telling to compare the quality rankings to the overall rankings.  When looking at quality alone, several of the top-performing Asian countries actually fare much better.  South Korea is ranked tenth, Hong Kong eleventh, and Japan thirteenth.

We wonder whether the relatively low rankings of the Asian countries is a function of the perspective from which the data was gathered and analyzed.  More women have been in paid employment outside the home in Northern Europe than in Asia for decades now.  No doubt, that fact goes a long way toward explaining why Asia has not developed anything like the infrastructure for supporting very young children outside the home that Europe now has.  That fact by itself does not mean that children are less well cared for, but it does mean that the observer will see less formal infrastructure there for taking care of very young children.  But women are now entering the paid workforce in Asia in greater numbers than previously and the governments in those countries may find that they are more interested in European-style policies in this arena than was previously the case.

As workforce demographics change and the importance of early childhood education shifts away from daycare alone, we may see some countries, already performing well in quality measures, begin to climb the overall rankings.  Singapore, clearly, as evidenced both by this report and another recent report from the Lien Foundation, Vital Voices for Vital Years, has begun to invest a great deal of support into improving the quality of preschool education, perhaps because Singapore has long encouraged the entry of women into the paid workforce.  As they improve, it seems clear that countries will need to follow, for the most part, a roadmap set by the top performers in primary and secondary education.  At the same time, they will need to take into account some of the important differences at this life-stage, including the need for increased parental involvement outside of school, and quality healthcare for young children.