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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And thus the stage was set for the third summit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On January 19, 2012, the National Center on Education and the Economy launched the Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB). The new Center will conduct research on the world’s most successful education systems.  It will also offer access to information, analysis, and opinion on the education systems of the top-performing countries from all over the world through its new web portal. Click here to find out more.

In August 2011, Emily Wicken joined NCEE as a research analyst. Emily recently completed a PhD in History from Brown University, following a BA in History from Carleton College in Northfield, MN, where she also completed coursework in Education Studies. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the treatment of criminals in the West Indies, Ireland and India in the 1790s and required a year of independent research in UK archives.

In the Fall of 2011, Wanying Wang joined NCEE as a visiting scholar. Wanying recently completed a PhD in Education from the University of Hong Kong where her studies focused on a curriculum innovation in Peking University in Mainland China; the university is committed to modeling the core curriculum at Harvard University.  She holds a master’s degree in education and a bachelor’s degree in law.

Latest Publications and Events

Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems

On November 10, Harvard Education Press released NCEE’s latest book, Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems. The book, edited by NCEE President Marc Tucker (with a forward by Linda Darling-Hammond), focuses on five countries that have sustained records of superior education performance including Canada (with a focus on Ontario), China (with a focus on Shanghai), Japan, Finland, and Singapore. The authors describe each country’s history, culture, and education system in terms of standards, instructional systems, assessments, teacher quality, school finance, the gateways through the system, and the incentives that affect student motivation. In the final chapter, the book offers recommendations for how the United States can catch up and even outpace these educational leaders. Purchase a copy of the book here.

To celebrate the release of Surpassing Shanghai, NCEE hosted a book signing and briefing on November 15 with Marc Tucker and New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winning-author Thomas Friedman, who co-authored the book, That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind In the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back. The discussion was moderated by NBC correspondent Luke Russert. Video from the event is now available on NCEE’s web site.

NCEE in the News

Dan Rather Reports

On January 12, Marc Tucker participated in Education Week’s Quality Counts event and joined Mary Jean Gallagher, Deputy Assistant Minister at the Ontario Ministry of Education; Anthony Jackson, Vice President for Education at the Asia Society; and Emiliana Vegas, Lead Education Economist at the World Bank for a policy roundtable discussion entitled the Global Challenge. In November 2011, Marc kicked off his new blog, Top Performers, hosted by Education Week. He will be blogging at least once a week on what we can learn from the nations leading the world in student achievement and how those lessons can help shape U.S. policy and practice.  Marc also blogs occasionally for National Journal’s Education Expert blog—check out his latest post on why charter schools should not be driving national education policy.  Last November, Marc also wrote a commentary for Education Next entitled, “A Different Role for Teacher Unions” and appeared on Dan Rather Reports to discuss why the United States has fallen so far behind its international peers in terms of student achievement. Watch part of the interview here or to view the full show, Take a Lesson from Singapore, visit iTunes.