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.

Mining is by far Australia’s biggest industry. But that does not mean that it is Australia’s biggest employer. I learned that once a mine is established, most of the mining is automated. The mining itself is almost completely automated. Automated, driverless trucks deliver the ore produced by the mine to automated trains that deliver it to automated machines that take it from the trains and dump it into largely automated ships which deliver it to Australia’s dominant customer, China.

It might take 3,000 people to build one of these mines and the associated infrastructure, but only 300 to actually operate it. So it makes no sense to build big new towns for the workers who build the mines, because they won’t be there long. So the mining companies fly them in at the beginning of the week and fly them home at the end of the week, maybe hundreds of miles in each direction, for as long as it takes to construct the new mine and related infrastructure, at enormous cost.

In Singapore, I ran into a senior official from Germany who happened to know a lot about vocational education and training in China and about how the Germans are doing business in China. I asked him how companies like Daimler, the makers of Mercedes Benz motorcars, were able to get Chinese workers who were as skilled as the famed German mechanics. Oh, he said, Daimler’s operations are now almost completely automated. The numbers of highly trained mechanics they need is now so small that they can bring in a small crew of trainers from Germany and train all the workers they need themselves.

Besides, he said, Daimler is not making cars in China for export, but only for the China market. The price of making such things in China has been steadily rising, relative to the price of making them in Europe, so it no longer makes sense for Daimler to make cars in China for export.

In 1990, my organization, the National Center on Education and the Economy, issued a report, the introduction to which pointed out that industrial workers in South Korea were working for one tenth of what similarly skilled American workers were making, and those in mainland China were making one one-hundredth of what American workers made. But that is not true anymore. The average wages of American autoworkers have been falling steadily since then and those of similarly skilled Chinese workers have been rising. Wage levels for industrial workers in Shanghai are now around one quarter of those in the United States. And wages are swiftly rising in the interior of China, too.

This is to be expected in a world in which workers on one side of the world are competing directly with workers on the other side of the world, as never before. In such global markets for labor, one can expect that the prices for labor will slowly come into equilibrium, with prices coming down in the high priced countries and rising in the low price countries, for similarly skilled labor. Eventually, one could expect that these prices would be about the same from one country to another for the same skills.

For China, that will mean that their decisive price advantage in world markets will wither and die. The Chinese know that, and know that, increasingly, their growth will have to be internal, the result of their own people getting richer and demanding more goods and services from their own suppliers.

As the difference between the “China price” and the prices charged by other countries for similar goods and services becomes smaller and smaller, the United States will find that it no longer has access to the kinds of very cheap goods that has made Walmart such a success in our country and around the world. So the prices of many things that Americans have now become accustomed to purchasing very cheaply will rise, in some cases steeply. That will mean that a dollar earned by low-skill, low-wage workers in the United States will buy even less than it does now. It is also the case that the return of manufacturing to our shores will continue to pick up, partly because the difference between the cost of their labor and the cost of our labor is narrowing, but also because it is better to have suppliers who are closer than farther away, it is easier to protect intellectual property rights, and, most especially, because labor costs make up less and less of the cost of the product to the customer, because of advancing automation. So the return of manufacturing will be a blessing, but a blessing for fewer and fewer workers.

As the most advanced global companies come out of the Great Recession, many of the jobs they shed will not come back. Many have used their massive cash supplies to purchase the very latest in automated equipment to become more efficient, to automate many jobs that people did before the Great Recession, jobs that will never return. More and more of advanced industrial economy will look like the Australian mining industry. The industries will be healthy, but will employ far fewer people than before. Productivity will be high, but employment will be low. The owners of many firms in those industries will prosper. But the citizens of the countries they conduct operations in will suffer. Income disparities will grow more quickly than at present and the middle of that income distribution will get narrower and narrower as these processes accelerate.

There will be employers in each of those countries who will tell government that the way to be competitive is to keep the price of labor low, to waive environmental regulations because regulations make their products uncompetitive, to cut back on health care and retirement benefits for the same reason. They will argue, in effect, that the only route to competitiveness for those countries is to pollute the environment, endanger public health and lower ordinary workers’ standard of living.

But there is another possibility. You can see it in Singapore. With a combination of determination, persistence and smart policy, the Singaporeans have been investing wisely in their future for half a century. When other countries in the East saw their future in offering cheap labor to global companies, Singapore was trying to figure out how to raise the cost of their labor—and therefore the standard of living of their people—by providing higher educated and better-trained labor. They made life difficult for their low-value added producers and made it very attractive for their high value-added producers. They made very close partners with the world’s leading high tech companies, figured out just what kind of skills they needed most and made sure that they could get those skills in Singapore. They paid very close attention to every segment of their workforce. They built a very high floor under the entire workforce by providing a world-class academic curriculum to all their students and creating a world-class teaching force to teach that curriculum. They built a system of polytechnics as good as any in the world to provide very highly skilled senior technical workers for a wide range of industries. Perhaps most impressive, they created a set of post-secondary vocational schools for the bottom quarter of their students as fine as any I have seen anywhere in the world, with facilities that rival those of many American universities. They turned vocational education and training from a dumping ground into a sought-after alternative that attracts more and more students every year.

And little wonder. Ninety percent of the graduates of their vocational schools have job offers in their chosen fields within six months of graduation. Singapore has one of the lowest rates of youth unemployment in the industrialized world. When I was there, I heard the head of Rolls-Royce Asia (which makes jet engines, not motor cars) explain that they decided to make Singapore their Asia manufacturing headquarters in no small measure because of the high quality of Singapore’s work force.

The distribution of income in the United States and many other advanced industrial countries is getting to look more like an hour glass every day, hollowing out the middle class and endangering their political stability as a result. That is not happening in Singapore, and that is true because Singapore had a strategy for improving the lives of their people, a strategy that married economic policy to education policy in very explicit ways. Singapore has created both a basic education system and a vocational education and training system that can sustain an economy that is shaped not like an hour glass but rather like a flattened diamond, with a big fat middle. Singapore’s population is about five million, right in the range of many American states and some European countries.

Here in the United States, educators and training organizations look to our Bureau of Labor Statistics to produce data about employers’ projected demand for labor as the basis for their own planning. They try, in other words, to produce the profile of skills and knowledge in the workforce that the economy will need. The Singaporeans have not done that. They have imagined the kind of economy they want, the kind of economy that will provide a good income and a decent life and rising standard of living for their population. And they have then worked very hard;mdash;and successfully—to produce a workforce with the skills needed to realize that dream.

In a world in which global employers can get the labor they need anywhere in the world and will seek to get that labor at the lowest possible price, it no longer makes sense for a country to base its education and training policies on projections of companies’ domestic human resources needs. The question should be not what domestic companies want to be more competitive (lower wages, fewer regulations, less restrictive labor practices, less concern about pollution), but what will attract global companies to produce services and goods in your country and pay high wages to the people who do that. Singapore bet that supply would create demand, as long as other government policies were carefully crafted to support its larger aims. Nations need not be helpless in the face of the changing dynamics of the global economy.

Automation is steadily taking over more and more of the routine work done in high wage economies. This is a good thing. What that leaves is interesting, challenging, creative work. Will it do that only for a few people, leaving increasing numbers unemployed or underemployed and desperate, or will these changes lead to full employment economies in which more and more people do interesting, challenging and creative work? The answer to that question does not depend on companies’ projections of what they will need. It depends on public policy, on what the people of a country decide they want for themselves, and it depends on whether a country invests in developing the skills, knowledge and capacity of their people in such a way as to make their country an attractive place to do business for the kinds of global companies that will offer interesting, creative and challenging work to enough people in enough occupations to provide full employment at high wages.

No country will be able to offer that kind of broadly shared prosperity if it is offering first class education and training only to its elites. Singapore realized that it could only get to broadly shared prosperity if it built a first class system of education and training for everyone. They put as much effort—perhaps more—into building their vocational education system as they did into their university system. They built an education and training system that would offer global employers not just highly educated and trained professionals and senior managers but highly trained and educated workers at every level, for all the work that needs to be done, in both manufacturing and services.

When I was in Australia, I was discouraged to hear some of my friends dismissing Singapore’s achievements on the grounds that Singapore is not a “liberal democracy,” just as I have heard some of my friends in the United States dismiss Singapore because its government does not tolerate either drug users or those who throw chewing gum on their sidewalks.

This, in my view, is a kind of cultural arrogance we can ill afford. Singapore is only half a century old. I have met many officials there with degrees from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge whose parents were illiterate and poor. These officials are sophisticated, worldly in their ambitions for themselves and their children. As the conference I was at in Singapore got underway, it featured a band of polytechnic students that included a young man with scarlet hair and others who found other ways of declaring their independence from the cultural commitments of their parents. These young people did not grow up with the sense of existential threat to the very existence of their country that made their parents quite willing to trade restrictions on their political freedoms for the chance to build a decent life for themselves and their children. There is every reason to believe that these young people will find a way to make the transition to liberal democracy just as their parents found a way to build a brilliantly successful economy. Our best hope for China is that the country continues to look to Singapore for inspiration. Many others could learn a thing or two from Singapore if they want a country with broadly shared prosperity, a strong middle class and the kind of freedoms that only a broad and prosperous middle class can guarantee.

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.

Or do we?  Consider the typical list of  “21st century skills”:  Problem Solving, Creativity, Leadership, Collaboration, Adaptability, Initiative, Critical Thinking, Learning to Learn, Agility, Innovation, Communication, and, of course, Technological Literacy.  What’s interesting about this list is that, except for the last item, Technological Literacy, all of these goals were important to the headmasters and faculty of Harrow, Eton and Rugby—the great British “public” schools at the close of the 19th century and the opening of the 20th.  These schools were responsible for training that era’s “masters of the universe,” the people who would be responsible for running the British Empire.  They needed people who could operate independently, if necessary, who could apply what they had learned to problems no one had anticipated, who could come up with innovative solutions to those problems, who would be good team members, who could lead, who could communicate well, and so on, right through the list.  Back in those days, though, it was clear to everyone involved that much of it would be learned at school but outside the classroom— on the playing fields and by the student as he negotiated the informal, but formidable, social structure of the institution.  Not least important were the values they wanted those institutions to inculcate.  “Its not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game that counts.”  If course, it did matter whether you won or lost, but your standing in society would depend in some measure on how you did it.

What is most important about the skills they were after is that they were reserved for—and, in some respects, actually defined by—the British elite.  They were not for the hoi polloi.  Far less was expected of the ordinary British students and the schools that prepared them.  What is truly remarkable about the typical list of 21st century skills is not their content—it is a very old list—but the fact that the countries that are now leading the PISA league tables expect all their students, not just an elite, to master them, and have more or less completely redesigned their education systems to that end.

But the matter does not rest there.  For some years now, employers in the world’s advanced economies have been complaining that the graduates they get do not measure up to their needs.  Correctly surmising that educators have not understood how dramatically the terms of global business competition have changed the nature of their human resources requirements, they have pursued the not unreasonable idea that they might get a better response if they could only produce a more accurate and detailed list of their requirements.  And thus was born a growing number of efforts to define 21st century skills.

In my mind, these efforts have not so much defined a new set of skills as make explicit the sorts of skills that have always been expected of most elites, but were never codified in this way.  That’s actually very important, because we are here discussing the nature of the demands now being placed, for the first time, on mass education systems.  Countries in the past have always been willing to spend a lot to educate their elites, because they have been so small, and because it has often been the elites themselves that shelled out the money for the education of their own children for this purpose.  This time, it is different.  It is for everyone, it is the public’s money, most of the children who will now have to meet these standards will be harder to educate but there will be no more money than there was before to educate them.  So it is now very important to spell out what society is trying to achieve, and to spell it out in a way that can guide the legions of ordinary teachers who will now be expected to do for ordinary youngsters what only elite teachers were expected to do for elite students before, so that students all over a country will have access to the same opportunities.

But it turns out to be not simply a matter of writing down on paper what the faculty of the English public schools were trying to accomplish.  Elite higher education institutions communicated informally with elite secondary school heads what they were looking for and the heads recommended the graduates who they thought would be most suitable as undergraduates at their elite institutions.  They did not need to spell out the skills nor did they need to have tests that had been proven to be valid and reliable.  Back in those days, there was no organized education research establishment, and there were certainly no cognitive scientists, psychometricians and professional test makers.  So now we have the advantage of science as we go about formulating the skills graduates will need as they enter the workforce and take up their duties as citizens and family members.  And we also have the advantage of a very active business community, as well as private foundations, and government, which have collectively been willing in many cases to fund research intended to produce empirically-derived descriptions of the needed skills.

We’ve been at this awhile.  In 2009, the OECD published a Working Paper on “21st Century Skills and Competencies For New Millennium Learners in OECD Countries.”  The authors, Katerina Ananiadou and Magdalean Claro, gathered together all the definitions of 21st century skills they could find and sent out a survey instrument to the OECD countries asking them whether they were incorporating such skills in their education policies.  Only 16 countries returned the survey form.  Most said that their country’s policies addressed most of the items on the list in some way, usually in the context of an overall revision of their national or state or provincial curriculum.  But virtually all said that they were not measuring the acquisition of most of the mentioned skills in any systematic way, or any way at all, except to the extent that school inspectors chanced to take them into account in the course of their visits.  Apart from skills related to the use of information technology, they reported, schools of education were not training prospective teachers in the development of these skills.  And, though there was mention of these skills in official documents, the terms were not well defined or specific. It seems that not much was happening as the first decade of the new millennium was coming to a close.

But before 2009 was out, the situation changed dramatically.  A consortium formed by three of the world’s leading technology companies—Cisco, Intel and Microsoft—announced that they were partnering with Singapore, Finland, Australia and the United States to create a serious research and development program to identify the 21st century skills with the specificity necessary to produce very high quality web-based assessments of them.  This Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills program (now known by its acronym ATC21S) would be based at the University of Melbourne in Australia and headed by Barry McGaw, formerly the director of the education program at the OECD (McGaw has since retired and the program is now headed by Patrick Griffith).  Costa Rica and the Netherlands have since been added to the ranks of participating countries.  Several other world class universities, in addition to the University of Melbourne, have also been added to the roster of participants, as have several commercial developers.  Leading academics were involved in specifying the 21st century skills to the detail needed to use them to drive a serious research and development program intended to result in high quality curriculum and assessments.  The decision was made by the participants to focus the research and development program on two arenas:  ICT Literacy for Learning and Collaborative Problem Solving.  The first round of piloting those materials is now complete and more is under way.

The reader will note that the choice of these two arenas meant that the research and development would focus not just on what the relevant skills are, and how to teach them and how to assess them, but, in particular, how to teach them and how to assess them using technology.  The participants clearly believe that technology opens up possibilities for enriching teaching and assessment in ways that are not possible without the technology and are out to demonstrate the validity of that belief.  The assessments are performance-based and are designed to model the kind of instruction that will enable students to do well on them.  For a more detailed overview of the ATC21S program, see this video of Patrick Griffith.  To get a feel for the kind of instructional materials being prepared by the project, see this video.  To get access to the papers prepared by leading academics to support the work of the ATC21S consortium, look here.

The ATC21S effort initially involved more than 250 researchers worldwide in the process of defining 21st century skills.  In the end, they organized them into four categories, as follows:

Ways of Thinking: Creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and learning

Ways of Working: Communication and collaboration

Tools for Working: Information and communications technology and information literacy

Skills for Living in the World: Citizenship, life and career and personal and social responsibility

The faculty at Eaton, Harrow and Rugby would have been very much at home with the first, second and fourth of these, and perhaps the second part of the third as well.

The ATC21S acknowledged its debt to a number of other initiatives that preceded it, including the Partnership for 21st Century Skills in the United States, which partnered American firms with American states to develop a list of skills which the partner states then drew on as they developed their academic standards; and the work of the Lisbon Council in the European Union.  And they also acknowledged the work of several groups which had focused more narrowly on defining needed skills in the arena of information technology and communications, including the International Society for Technology in Education and the Educational Testing Service in the United States.

But by far the most interesting contribution to this nascent field in recent times has been a contribution of the National Research Council of the National Academies in the United States, the report of an NRC panel chaired by Jim Pellegrino titled “Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century.”  You can download a brief on the report and a PDF of the prepublication version and order a printed final report here.

The report acknowledges right at the outset that “…these dimensions of human competence…have been valuable for many centuries….The important difference across time may lie in society’s desire that all students attain levels of mastery—across multiple areas of skill and knowledge—that were previously unnecessary for individual success in education and the workplace.”  The Committee identified three broad rubrics under which it organized the relevant skills, as follows:

The Cognitive Domain: Of which there are three clusters—cognitive processes and strategies; knowledge; and creativity.  Included here are critical thinking, information literacy, reasoning and argumentation and innovation.

The Intrapersonal Domain: Of which there are again three clusters—intellectual openness; work ethic and conscientiousness; and positive core self-evaluation.   These include competencies like flexibility, initiative, appreciation for diversity and metacognition.

The Interpersonal Domain:  Of which there are two clusters—teamwork and collaboration; and leadership.  Included here are communication, collaboration, responsibility and conflict resolution.

Pellegrino and company acknowledge that there is not very much research showing a causal relationship between these skills and the kinds of adult outcomes that the societies interested in 21st century skills are hoping for, but they point out that the research that is available points in that direction.  And, of course, they gently suggest that more research on this subject would be useful (there are many calls for more research).

The Committee uses the term “deeper learning” to describe what it is mainly after, the ability to take what is learned in one situation and apply it to new situations.  And they call this process “transfer.”  They then go on to say that deeper learning often involves shared learning and interactions with other people.  Deeper learning is used by the individual to develop expertise in a particular domain of knowledge or performance.  The product of deeper learning is transferable knowledge, including the knowledge of how, when and why to apply this knowledge to answer questions and solve problems.  All of this knowledge is structured around fundamental principles of the content area and their relationships, not lists of facts and procedures.  This, it seems to me, is a very important point.  We hang our knowledge on the conceptual structures of the disciplines, and it is in the process of understanding those structures and learning how both to hang new knowledge on them and use them to understand new situations that we come to be able to solve new and complex problems.  This is why rote learning of facts and procedures is not enough, indeed why it is not the heart of the matter.

But the Committee makes it very clear that it is a great mistake to think about the 21st Century Skills as hanging out there by themselves, to be taught as if they were freestanding subjects.  No, no, it says.  They play out differently for different disciplines and the only way to teach them successfully is in the context of the disciplines.

For those who might have thought that the job was nearly done when the 21st Century Skills have been described, the Committee puts that thought to rest.  Standards documents will need to be thoroughly revised to reflect this much broader range of skills subject by subject.  New curricula will have to be written.  Most important, perhaps, the programs of teachers colleges will have to be completely rethought and new approaches to student assessment will have to be developed, because we now have the tools to assess  only a very small part  of what we need to be assessing and, not least, because assessment always drives what teachers do in the classroom, and, in this age of assessment-driven accountability, if the assessments do not skillfully assess what we now want our students to be able to do, we won’t teach it and the students are not likely to be able to do it.

All of which brings me back to where I began.  These are not new skills.  What is new is the determination of a growing number of nations to teach them to all of their students.  Even though these are not new skills, they will not be widely found among a nation’s students unless the education system of that country, taken as whole, is driven by standards, curriculum, assessments and teacher education systems fundamentally different from those that were previously used to drive that country’s mass education system.  Some nations are well down that road.  Others, like my own, are largely at the beginning of it.  The Pellegrino report provides some very useful insights into the research that can be used to do that, the research that still needs to be done, and the scale and nature of the task ahead.  That is a very useful contribution.

It is almost as if one could forego benchmarking trips elsewhere because you will find it all in Singapore.  That is true in the sense that you will find that Singapore has researched it, considered it and adapted it, but you are not likely to find the thing itself, because adaptation is not adoption.  Everything is made use of.  Nothing is replicated.

Ngee Ann Polytechnic

A few examples will do.  The purpose of this trip was to benchmark Singapore’s vocational and technical education system.  So these examples will be drawn from that arena.  But I could just as easily have drawn them from any other aspect of their education and training system.

Years ago, Singapore decided as it was developing its own vocational education system that it needed to have a system of occupational skill standards.  When I asked about that, they said that they had taken the methodology for developing their occupational skill standards from the American DACUM process for occupational job analysis and curriculum development and had borrowed the organization structure for involving industry in the development of skill standards from the Europeans.

But my organization, the National Center on Education and the Economy, has researched national occupational skill standards systems for years.  We long ago came to the conclusion that, notwithstanding their obvious value for getting students and training organizations to focus on the skills that industries feel they need, such systems have a very serious downside.  There is no point in having such systems unless industry drives the development of the standards.  The whole idea is to have standards that reflect industry needs.  The easiest way to do that is ask industry associations to take the lead in developing the standards. But, if you do that, you get a standard for average practice, which is almost always, by definition, behind leading edge practice.  When you set average practice as a standard, it takes a long time to change that standard.  The effect is to train young people for a standard that is more and more behind the times, making it less likely that industry leaders will be able to get people who can do the work the way they need to have it done.  They might be better off in a country with no skills standards.  So, you can see that national occupational skills standards can be an enormous advantage, but they can also be a deadly trap.

When we asked the leaders of Singapore’s polytechnics what they thought about these observations, they laughed and said that they, too, had come to the same conclusions.  So the government listened to what the industry groups had to say, but considered it only as advice, not as the last word, and felt free to change the standards that emerged from these processes if they felt that the standard needed to be changed to make Singapore more competitive, more in line with the most effective forms of work organization, better positioned to use the latest technologies, better aligned with the needs and practices of the world’s leading firms.  That is the essence of smart adaptation.

Ngee Ann Polytechnic Library

Here’s another one.  The Singaporeans looked hard at the famous German dual system of vocational education.  When we talked to them, they told is that the dual system is among the most important of the innovations they brought to Singapore.  But the dual-system, alternating formal education in school with on-the-job training in the workplace, is the primary upper-secondary education system for young Germans headed directly into the workforce.  In Singapore, young people not headed to University go either into the upper secondary vocational education system or into one of the polytechnics.  In the upper secondary vocational system, there is no sandwich program alternating time in the workplace with time in school.  It is all in school, but the Singaporeans have persuaded the companies to give them the state-of-the-art machines they need in the classrooms (working engines for current model cars, for example, with cutaway engines for the automechanics program) and have also persuaded the firms that it is in their interest to regularly cycle the school instructors through their firms to keep their skills up to date.  The Singaporeans figured out that, without the long European guild tradition to back it up, the German dual system would not work in Singapore.  Where they do use the apprenticeship system was in their adult education system, for employed workers who already had a firm attachment to the sponsoring firm.  Another smart adaptation.

Economic Development Board logo

In the late 1970’s, the Singaporean Economic Development Board (EDB), the nerve center of economic development strategy in Singapore, persuaded Germany and France to set up, at their own expense, several state-of-the-art vocational institutes in Singapore.  This was very similar to the move made in the 1960s by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s then prime minister, when he persuaded several leading nations to set up high-powered institutes of technology in India, on the model of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  The vocational institutes in Singapore were to be upper secondary schools.  One of the top officials at the EDB insisted that these new schools be set up as “factory schools,” that is, that they look as much as possible like the very kinds of work environments the students would work in when they graduated, and the training in the school would be based on the production of actual advanced manufacturing systems produced under contract to local firms, with the students doing most of the work required to build those systems.  The foreign countries and the foreign firms they partnered with to build and staff these schools were persuaded by the EDB to build them in part by important economic concessions offered by the Board but also by the argument that students trained on the machines provided by these countries and firms would be inclined to order them when they joined the staffs of Singapore firms as foremen and supervisors.  The faculty members in these schools were required to take paid sabbaticals every few years, during which time they were expected to get an assignment anywhere in the world on the staff of one of the world’s leading technology firms.  On that person’s return, he or she was expected to update the school’s curriculum on the basis of what had been learned.  In this way, the schools’ curriculum was constantly refreshed, always reflecting the global state of the art.  So Singapore had a constant supply of young people coming into their firms in mid-level technical positions who were very well versed in the latest factory automation and microelectronics manufacturing techniques.  Was this benchmarking?  Not of the traditional sort, but the spirit was certainly there.  It was a remarkably effective and efficient system for constantly bringing back to Singapore the very best manufacturing technologies in the world, and making sure that Singapore could offer a workforce very well versed in those technologies.  We had learned about the German-Singapore Institute and its French mates on our first trip to Singapore in 1989.  What we learned this time was that Singapore had since built an entire system of world-class polytechnics on this model.  When we talked with a group of Singaporean employers toward the end of our visit, it was clear that they place a very high value on the skills, knowledge and attitudes that the graduates of these polytechnics bring to their firms.

Again and again, I found myself very impressed by the quality of thought that had gone into the continually evolving design of the Singaporean education and training system.  I am choosing my words carefully here.  The keyword is “design.”  Everywhere one looks, one sees thoughtful designs of the kind that a very good engineer would create.  This was true of each subsystem and of the system as a whole.  And, indeed, when we asked about how the system was managed, this attention to systems design was reflected in the answer.  The organization of the system as a whole included features designed to assure that managers of all related parts of the system were in constant touch with one another, and that nothing was done that would affect the functioning of the larger system without close consultation with the managers of the adjoining system functions, both vertically in the system and horizontally as well.

This is no accident.  When I first discovered that the Economic Development Board is the nerve center of the Singapore government, during our first trip in 1989, I also discovered that the staff of the EDB was made up mostly not of economists but of engineers.  Economists tend to be analysts, but engineers are system designers.  This orientation came naturally to them.

But there was a related point that seemed no less important to me.  When Lee Kuan Yew took the helm in Singapore, even before Singapore gained its independence, he was determined to use economic development to lever his destitute little group of islands into a standard of living for his people far above what it was when Singapore was birthed.  And he believed that could only be accomplished by smart, honest, uncorrupted government officials.  He decided that he would have to attract to government the smartest people he could find in Singapore, so his policy was to provide people in government compensation comparable to what they would get for comparable jobs in private industry.  He identified the very top high school students and offered to pay for their education at institutions like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge if they would agree to come back and serve in his government.

It is those people who were responsible for vaulting Singapore from a tiny impoverished dot on the map in 1965 to its current status as one of the most successful economies in the world.  And today, this practice continues.  Leaders in government agencies in Singapore, including the Ministry of Education and its sub-agencies, are some of the most knowledgeable and forward-thinking education leaders we have met anywhere.

Many observers have likened Singapore not to a nation but to a large corporation.  This is partly because one does not see here the usual play of partisan politics and partly because the usual play of partisan politics has been replaced by a kind of rationale planning and attention to execution that is more characteristic of a well-managed corporation than of a liberal democracy.  That said, however, this is a nation that believes in government, in the capacity and legitimacy of government to lead.

And that, of course, could contain the seeds of a big problem for Singapore.  Countries and organizations with very strong leadership are often countries and organizations where everyone stands around waiting for the top to tell them what to do.  In today’s world, that is the death knell of economic competitiveness.  It is entirely plausible that the very instrument that enabled Singapore to climb to the top could be the instrument of its failure to compete in a world in which economic leadership is increasingly a function of innovation and entrepreneurship from below, not instructions from on high.

Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam

So I was especially happy to learn before we left for Singapore that we had managed to get some time with Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam.  In 2005, when Shanmugaratnam was Education Minister, he delivered a speech in which he commented on a trip he had just taken with several Ministry of Education officials to Japan. Japan, he said, had come to the same conclusion that the Singaporean government had come to, namely, that the future belonged to countries whose workforces could invent the future, could out-create and out-innovate their competition.  And the Japanese and the Singaporeans were in agreement on the kinds of changes that would be necessary in their schools to meet this challenge.  But, he said, the Japanese had imposed these changes from the top down, and there was no buy-in from the schools.  That would not happen in Singapore.  The goal would be reached with leadership from the schools, and support from the top, or as he put it, there would be “top-down support for bottom-up initiatives.”  For government to achieve its objectives, it would have to change the way it worked, in a pretty fundamental way.

I am telling this story in part because it says something very important about one small country’s route to top performance, but I am also telling it because it says something about the process of benchmarking.  Shanmugaratnam and his team learned something very important in Japan, but they did not copy it, just as they had earlier learned very important things from Germany and the United States, but did not copy them.  It is too early to tell whether Singapore will be able to make the deep cultural shifts that are needed to reach the goals they set for themselves a few years ago, and it is also too early to tell whether the Japanese will succeed in reaching similar goals, but it is, I think, a sure bet that Singapore’s deeply ingrained, almost reflexive, habit of constantly checking to see how their peers are responding to the neverending changes in the global competitive environment and then thinking hard about the implications of what they find for their own actions has served them very well over and over again as they have made their way to first world status.  It is a very powerful learning system.

A World-Class Education: Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation (ASCD, 2012)

Vivien Stewart is a mistress of deception.  In A World-Class Education: Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation, she distills a lifetime of astute observation into a slim volume so skillfully written—so easy to read—that the reader is hardly aware of the subtlety of the analysis it contains.  Commissioned by ASCD, an American association of educators, it compares the achievements of a selection of top-performing countries with their American counterparts.  But the book should be no less interesting to educators in other countries seeking to improve their performance, wherever they stand on the international league tables, whatever their position in their country’s education system.

Full disclosure:  Stewart is an old friend and colleague, a member of the Board of Trustees of the organization I head and a member, too, of the International Advisory Board of our Center on International Education Benchmarking, sponsor of Tucker’s Lens.

Books of this sort written by educators and educational researchers tend to focus almost exclusively on education policy and practice narrowly conceived.  But Stewart has done development work in Africa, served with the United Nations and witnessed first hand the rise of Asia over the last couple of decades.  She is very perceptive about education policy and practice, but she has a wider perspective.

Perhaps because that is so, this reader had a sense of history while reading this book that I have not encountered from other books of the same sort.  Stewart paints a picture of profound change—of the sort seen only once in a century, if that—in the education systems of countries all over the globe as they respond to the equally fundamental changes in the global economy.  We see how China, with an education system totally devastated by Mao Tse-Tung, its schools and universities closed, its educators fired and sent to do manual labor in the countryside, determines to telescope a development process that usually takes forty or fifty years, to do whatever it will take to become a front-rank education power on the global stage—and succeeds!  We see how Singapore, on a small island with no resources other than its strategic position astride the route between two giant oceans, with no school system to speak of, riven by ethnic rivalry, despised by its much larger neighbors and poor as a church mouse, nonetheless uses education and job training as the spearhead of its strategy for vaulting into the top ranks of the industrial nations.  And then there is Finland, which, after World War II was a sleepy agricultural nation whose education system lagged far behind that of its much larger neighbors, so used to being in the shadow of Sweden that it was astonished to learn that their country, having ignored the conventional education reform wisdom of its betters for years, had beaten every other European nation in the first PISA rankings and has maintained that position ever since.

What comes through is a story in each case of fierce national determination, a kind of educational hunger that, in each case, transcended political rivalries and was not to be denied.  In each case, we see an absolute conviction, starting at the top and fully shared by the entire polity, that education and high skills hold the key to economic success.  But we also see a moral commitment to shared prosperity, a belief that the key to shared prosperity is a genuinely high level of education for the entire population, and a determination to make sure, as a practical matter, that the policies needed to provide every child with a high quality education are implemented well and implemented in detail.

The point I am making here has to do with the way we read books of this sort.  Both the writers and the readers tend to ask and answer the question: What policies and practices account for the success of the top-performers?  That is a good question and this book does a first rate job of answering it.  What that question misses, however, is another question, which is: What does it take for a country that is not in the front ranks to join those ranks?  The answer to that question does not consist entirely of the answer to the first question.  What comes through clearly in this book is another set of answers having to do with political leadership of the kind that galvanizes action and creates the kind of broad new consensus that is required to uproot long-established arrangements and relationships.  What comes through is the crucial role that international education benchmarking plays in creating for a country a new vision of what might be possible and the confidence among many players that is required to take a chance on abandoning a system with which many players are very comfortable.  What comes through is the need for continuity and stability of political leadership.

It is, I think, no accident that we see in Singapore, Shanghai and Japan (until recently) different versions of one-party rule and in Finland a country in which consensus across party lines is necessary before great actions can be taken on any important issue.  In the case of Ontario Province, in Canada, another of the examples we are shown by Stewart, all the reported progress took place under the leadership of one Premier, who placed education reform at the epicenter of his political agenda.  Whether it was one-party rule, cross-party consensus or the extended leadership of one elected official, what all these cases have in common is political continuity that has lasted long enough to enact and implement major changes in the nature of the entire education system.

In all of these cases, the political leaders involved took the time to mobilize broad public support for their education agendas.  In almost every case, they made their case on the wings of a perceived existential economic threat, or, in the case of the developing countries, an enormous economic opportunity.  Importantly, even in the case of one-party rule, the profound changes in education system design that Stewart reports on were not shoved down the throats of any of these countries.  Stewart shows us how each of these countries, cities and provinces decided on their programs of reform only after making mighty efforts over a long period of time to gain wide input from their professional educators and the public at large.  In every case, professional educators were partners in the reform effort, not the opposition to be overcome in a hostile takeover.

What are we to make of this?  Should we conclude that the countries most likely to lead the next era of education reform are those with one-party rule or consensus-style politics?  If you believe, as I do, that only those countries can achieve the highest incomes, then that would be tantamount to saying that, with the exception of those countries sitting on unusual concentrations of natural resources, the richest countries in the world will be those with one-party rule or consensus-style politics.

The record, I think, shows that it will be harder, but by no means impossible, for countries with rough-and-tumble multiparty politics to scale this ladder.  Those terms would describe Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and, yes, even Ontario, where the Premier who turned things around just began his third four-year term of office.  All are among the world’s top performers.

But none of us should think that following in the footsteps of those countries that now lead the world’s league tables of student achievement is going to be simply a technical matter best left to professional educators.  It simply won’t happen without very effective and often courageous, far sighted political leadership.  Stewart points out that, although the origins of the trajectories that have enabled the leading countries to get where they are began 20 or 30 years ago, their histories show that most were able to make substantial progress in five to ten years, in some cases even less.  In the political world, some progress is needed to get permission to go the next step and major progress is needed to forestall those who want to turn the clock back.  Stewart’s book gives us enough examples showing how political leaders have beat the odds in this way to give heart to those who are flirting with similar commitments in countries in which they can expect rough going.

The toughest case is probably the United States.  For structural reasons that will not be easily changed, the United States is now in the grip of a politics so poisoned as to make consensus on almost any important matter impossible.  In an effort to find agreement in the field of education, the political parties in my country have joined forces around an agenda for education reform that flouts virtually ever principle that informs the successful education strategies of the top-performing countries.

But the United States has been counted out many times in the past, only to succeed in the end.  Though neither presidential candidate has talked much about education in the current campaign, because both are hobbled by their own constituencies in this arena, the public, in one poll after another, has said they believe education to be one of the most important issues facing the country.  There are signs in many quarters that many who have championed either the status quo or radical efforts to destroy the system from the outside are now interested in alternatives.  The United States may be more ready than many believe to adopt the broad agenda Vivien Stewart lays out in this book.

Whether that is true or not, the logic of the book’s underlying story is very powerful.  The future belongs to those countries that display vision and leadership, embrace ambitious standards, commit to broad equity, do everything possible to get and keep high quality teachers, build a system that is both aligned and coherent, set up effective management and accountability systems, motivate their students and adopt a global and future orientation.  We’ll just have to see which countries embrace that message and which do not.

The need for the kind of routinized basic skills required by most workers in a mass-production economy was dying.  The skills needed now, we said, were not routine.  We would now need “people who have a good intuitive grasp of the ways in which all kinds of physical and social systems work.  They must possess a feeling for mathematical concepts and the ways in which they can be applied to difficult problems, an ability to see patterns of meaning where others see only confusion, a cultivated creativity that leads them to new problems, new products and new services before their competitors get to them, and, in many cases, the ability to work with other people in complex organizational environments where work groups must decide for themselves how to get the job done.”

And we said that the key to accomplishing these and a number of other similar goals was simple to state and extremely difficult to accomplish.  We would have to convert teaching from a blue-collar occupation into a real profession, a profession with the same kind of status that architecture, engineering, the law and medicine have.  We spelled out how far the United States would have to go to get there.  We showed how the supply of teachers was lagging further and further behind demand, even with abysmally low standards for becoming a teacher.  A chart in the Carnegie report showed that the United States was drawing more and more of our teachers from the non-college-bound high school tracks and fewer and fewer from the high school students who were in college preparation programs.  We showed the steady decline in scores of prospective schoolteachers on the college entrance matriculation examinations.  Most devastating, we showed a dramatic decline among first year college students who were women who were interested in teaching as a career. At the same time, there was an equally dramatic increase in the numbers of women interested in going into business and the law.  The message was:  Just as the United States was about to need by far the best teachers we had ever had, we were about to get the worst.  All we had to do to get that result was nothing.

As it turns out, we did not do nothing.  We did worse than nothing.  But I am getting ahead of my story.

The Carnegie Task Force proposed that all teachers be required to major in college in the subject they would teach in school, even in elementary school, and also be required to get a masters degree in teaching to make sure that they also mastered their craft; to make teachers’ compensation competitive with compensation for the high status professions; to base our teacher education programs on the best scientific knowledge about learning that was available; to create career ladders for teachers based on their acquisition of advanced knowledge and skill; and, not least important, to provide a truly professional environment for teachers in our schools, beginning with giving them the right to decide as a faculty how best to use the resources available to the school to meet the needs of their students. We suggested starting with the creation of a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, to establish truly professional standards for the work of teachers, and to have professional teachers set those standards.  Our little team spent the next year designing the National Board and getting it fairly launched.

I have just finished reading two books that brought all the memories of those years back in a rush: Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School, by Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan, and Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn From Educational Change in Finland?, by Pasi Sahlberg.  Hargreaves and Fullan set out to answer a very important question:  What would a true profession of teaching actually look like?  Sahlberg’s book traces the remarkable history of modern education reform in Finland, but at the heart of that story is the answer to another, no less important question:  If you happened to be in charge of the education system of an entire country, how could you plausibly put in place, over time, the kind of professional teaching corps described by Hargreaves and Fullan?

There is not nearly enough space available in this column to allow me to summarize either book.  I strongly recommend that you read both, if you have not done so already.  For me, the experience was a bit like reading Robert Frost’s poem about the road not taken.  Professional Capital describes, much better than I could have done at the time I drafted the Carnegie Report, what we would find in schools run by professional teachers.  They make it clear that mastery—real mastery—of the subjects to be taught and of the craft of teaching are important, but not, by any means, all that is important.  To be a pro, they say, you also have to have an aptitude for connecting with young people and supporting them in many different ways.  You have to be able to figure out when they are not learning what they need to learn quickly and draw on a wide range of scientifically-based knowledge and intuitive skills—the kind the best doctors have—to find the right solution or combination of solutions.  Critically important, you have to be prepared to be not a lone ranger, but a very productive member of a highly skilled team, the faculty of the school, drawing on their expertise and contributing your own in a process of continuous learning in which the students benefit mightily from the combined effort of the entire faculty.  And all of them have to be as good as you are and set standards for themselves and their own contribution that are just as high as the standards you have set for yourself.  You have to make sure that you take the time to interact with that faculty in a serious way.  And, lastly, you have to be prepared to work for years—Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours— to really master your craft.  There are no shortcuts in this process if you really want to be a pro.

Finnish Lessons is the story of the thirty years it took to move the Finnish education system from average performance to the envy of the world.  The tale is very well told and utterly engrossing.  Sahlberg describes Finland as consciously taking a unique path to education excellence.  In the years after World War II, he says, few people went beyond primary education, schooling focused on rote skills and memorization and the secondary schools that were available tracked students in the way that was then common in Europe.  He describes the circumstances that led, in the early 1970s, to the creation of Finland’s signature schools, the peruskoulu, the nine-year common school that offers the same demanding curriculum to all students.  He gives a feel for the opposition to this development from politicians and business executives who were sure that only a few students could really master that curriculum and that having the same expectations for all students would inevitably drive the standards down for Finland’s best students and doom the Finnish economy.  But he shows how the Finns’ understanding of the global challenges they faced, combined with their twin commitments to very high quality and very high equity in education won the day and then led to the realization that, in order to make the peruskoulu actually work, Finland would have to have a world-class teaching force, a teaching force drawn from the same pool of students from which Finland’s architects, engineers and doctors are drawn.

Sahlberg lays out the specific steps the Finns took to make sure that they could build that kind of truly professional teaching force, policy measures that are, I’m sure, familiar to most of those who read this newsletter.  Sahlberg makes the case, as well as it is ever going to be made, for professionalizing teaching as the key to world class student performance at the national level, but he is smart enough to know that no single factor explains this kind of success, that a nation cannot succeed in such an effort unless it thinks of its task as creating an effective system with many important mutually supporting elements.  And he knows that many of those elements, in Finland, are not likely to be adopted by many other countries, especially, the Finnish commitment to the well-being of its children on many fronts, the relatively even distribution of income in that country, the long-standing very high rate of book reading in that country, the early mastery of written language by young children watching captioned TV, and much more.  Still, there is no question in Sahlberg’s mind that, if you want high achievement and high equity, you have no alternative but to work as hard as you can to produce a highly educated, fully professional teaching force, and once you have it, to trust it will do the right thing by your children.

Which brings me to the nub of the issue.  What is quite striking about both of these books is the prominent role of arch villain that is played in both by the United States.  Throughout Finnish Lessons, Sahlberg contrasts the Finnish Way with GERM, an acronym he invented that stands for Global Education Reform Movement.  It is not a term of approbation.  He contrasts the Finnish Way with an education reform movement, whose key elements are “competition and choice, standardization of teaching and learning, tightening test-based accountability, and merit-based pay for teachers.”  He makes it clear that he regards the United States as the home of this agenda, and the agenda as the antithesis of everything that the Finnish Way stands for.

He is not alone.  The United States and what Sahlberg calls the GERM, play the same roles in Professional Capital.  This will come as no surprise to readers of Fullan’s Wrong Drivers, which describes the primary elements in the GERM agenda as the worst drivers one could imagine if one’s aim is to raise national student achievement to world class levels.  In my own book, Thinking for a Living: Education and the Wealth of Nations, which I wrote with former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall, we argued that the agenda that Sahlberg christens as GERM is a direct descendant of the kind of Tayloristic thinking that dominated “modern management” in the age of mass production.  The conception of teaching in that model is the antithesis of a professional conception of teaching.  It is a blue-collar model of teaching, the very thing that the Carnegie Report declared to be the enemy of any successful plan to greatly raise student achievement in the United States.

Sahlberg, Hargreaves and Fullan are right.  In the years following the release of the Carnegie report’s call for professionalizing teaching in the United States, we did the opposite.  We doubled down on the old, Tayloristic, blue-collar model of teaching.  At the end of their book, Hargreaves and Fullan urge American policymakers to adopt the set of attitudes toward teachers that they associate with successful policies in Canada and Finland.  At the end of his book, Sahlberg once again denounces the American choices and makes the case, if not for the details of the Finnish model, for its spirit.

All of this made me think hard about why Finland was able to move toward a professional model of teaching of the kind that we had advocated in the Carnegie report and the United States did not.  After reading Sahlberg on Finland, I think I understand it.

Teaching has had a very high status in Finland for a very long time, much higher than in the United States.  The word for teacher in Finland is the same for schoolteachers as it is for university professors.  In the 1950s, at state dinners, the order of precedence for leaving the table after the dinner was the senior statesmen first and then the teachers, followed by every other class of attendees.  As Sahlberg recounts the tale, the path from a very ordinary, low attainment education system after World War II to the development of the “Finnish consensus” to move forward with the peruskoulu in the early 1970s was accompanied by a steady increase in demand for education and a steady improvement in the ability of the Finnish education system to meet that demand.  Thereafter, as Sahlberg describes it, officials did what they had to do to greatly improve the quality of the teaching force and the success of these very high quality teachers, as revealed by the startling success of Finland in the initial and subsequent administrations of the OECD-PISA assessments.  These results not only provided a justification for trust in Finland’s teachers, but also staved off the demands from some important quarters to import into Finland important elements of the GERM agenda.  At no point in this story does Sahlberg tell us that the Finnish public lost faith in its teachers or had any reason to do so.

Now let us consider what was happening in the United States in the same period.  The Carnegie report, calling for the professionalization of the American teaching force, was released in June of 1986, not long after the implementation of the new peruskoulu in Finland and just as that country was putting in place the elements of its plan to professionalize its teaching force.  But the upward trajectory of teaching and of the public’s view of teachers in Finland was matched by a downward spiral in the United States.  Finland was going from middling performance on the international stage to the top of the league tables.  The United States was going from undisputed world leader in public education to the middle of the league tables.  At the same time, the cost of American schools was skyrocketing.  Income distribution in the United States was moving from among the most equal in the industrialized world to the least equal, steadily increasing the rate of poverty.  While Finland was climbing to technological preeminence in the global economy, global American companies were being hollowed out, iconic American firms were going under and the American consumer was living off of loans from China, a developing country.  Not least important for this story, as I said at the outset, the quality of American teachers was declining by many objective measures, matched by a steep decline in the performance of American school children, relative to the performance of the leading countries, which, one by one, were surpassing the United States.

What I realized, thinking about all this, is that the environment for education policy-making was hugely influenced by the upward trend in Finland and the downward trend in the United States.  The Finns never had a reason to distrust their teachers.  The long-standing reverence for teachers made it natural for the country to call on the best of their young people to come to the aid of their country by becoming teachers when the country responded to the emergency caused by the sudden failure of their protected market in the Soviet Union and the banking crisis, and just as natural for the best of their young people to answer that call by becoming teachers.  When the peruskoulu turned out to be a success, these fine new teachers were celebrated by the citizens and became the most desired spouses by other young people forming families.  They put their heart and soul into their teaching, which produced the Finnish surprise when the 2001 PISA scores came out, and that cemented the Finnish Way of education policy.  This is a classic virtuous cycle if ever there was one.

But the opposite happened in the United States.  The seeds were sown just after World War II, with the passage of the GI Bill.  Young soldiers, who would never otherwise have gone to college, did so.  Many went on to graduate schools.  In their 40s in the 1970s, many had more education and a better education than the women who taught their children.  Whereas before the war, teachers were respected because they had more education than the parents of the students they taught, after the war that became less and less true, and because it was less and less true, they were progressively less respected, especially in the middle class suburbs where the burgeoning class of professionals and managers lived.  In the 1970s, teachers’ salaries slipped badly relative to those of people in other college-educated occupations and, in the view of some influential Americans, teachers were on the “wrong” side of the civil rights issues.  Teachers, feeling that their backs were to the wall, joined the American Federation of Teachers if they were in the cities, or the newly unionized National Education Association if they were in the suburbs.  The unions they joined were not like the European unions, which included professionals and were invited to partner with business owners in setting important national policies.  They were conceived in the old Tayloristic American model, actually reinforcing the grip of the blue-collar model of teaching in the United States.  Then other countries began to outperform the United States, an enormous blow to national pride, and the cost of education went up without student achievement following, leaving many Americans with the impression that the teachers had taken the money and simply put it in their pockets, rather than to improve student performance.  Few Americans realized that, as American’s real wages were declining, full time homemakers were going into the workplace and were no longer at home when their children came home, an increasing number of families had only one parent, and the number of children in poverty was swiftly rising.  Much less did they stop to realize the significance of these trends for the work of teachers in our schools.

The cumulative effect of these developments in the United States was to alienate ordinary Americans from their teachers.  While Finnish teachers were being credited with improving student achievement, American teachers were being blamed for letting it decline. While Finnish teachers were celebrated for producing high achievement at modest cost, American teachers were scorned for increasing the cost of schools dramatically while doing nothing to improve student performance.  While Finnish teachers were doing whatever needed to be done to improve the performance of their students, American teachers were perceived to be working to the union rule and unwilling to police the poor performers in their own ranks.  The more American teachers were blamed for the poor performance and rising costs of American schools, the more they relied on their unions as their sole source of support and the more the unions were attacked, the greater their bunker mentality.  I have absolutely no doubt but that you and I—any of us—would have behaved in exactly the same way in the same circumstances.  But it produced a perfect vicious cycle.

This turn of events produced the current politics of American education.  Admired American governors started to take on the teachers and their unions and to demand that the educators take some responsibility for the poor performance of American students and become accountable for their own performance.  The Clinton administration was the turning point.  “Third Way” politicians like Clinton (and Blair in England) were not about to base their education policies on trust in teachers.  There was no constituency for trust of teachers in the United States, either among Democrats or Republicans.  Both parties were looking for ways to fix education but neither party could figure out how to do it by rebuilding the system from the inside.  Key figures in both parties perceived the education system to have been captured by the professional educators.  The forces created by the downward spiral I have described were so powerful and the respect for professional educators so depleted that key figures in both parties were trying not to fix the system but to blow it up.  The Democrats would not go for vouchers and the Republicans could not get enough support for vouchers from the public to put them into play, so the two parties settled on charters as the bipartisan strategy for fixing the schools.

It will do no good to tell American policymakers that they need to change their attitudes on these matters.  Their attitudes reflect the attitudes of the public at large.  What happened in the United States and England, I believe, was not an accident and not the result of stupidity.  It was the result of a downward spiral that Finland never experienced, and the jaundiced view formed by the American public about public educators that came from their bitter disappointment in their educators and the educators’ unions.  There is no doubt in my mind that the course that the United States is now on will lead to ever poorer performance.  All the evidence, from every quarter, points to that outcome.  I believe, however, that we will have to wait for GERM to burn itself out before we change course.  There is still time for the United States to adopt the agenda we put forward in the Carnegie report, the agenda the Finns came up with on their own.  I remain hopeful that Winston Churchill’s famous dictum that “Americans always do the right thing…after they have exhausted all the alternatives” will be prophetic in this case.

Photo from the 2011 International Summit on the Teaching Profession

I left the second International Summit on the Teaching Profession not at all sure of what I had learned.  But, after a few days to sort it out, there is quite a lot.  Here it goes —

1.    Swiftly broadening goals

I was struck by the way many of the top-performing countries talked about their goals for their students.  Singapore is a good example.  Lee Sing Kong, the Director of Singapore’s National Institute of Education and a member of the Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB) Advisory Board, explained that the small country’s vision statement for its education system was completely overhauled recently.  They reminded themselves that what they do in education is for the learner, their needs, their interests, and not simply to cover the content.  They said they wanted to help their students achieve understanding of essential concepts and ideas, not just dispense information.  They want to prepare their students for the test of life, not just for tests.  They said they want to focus on teaching the whole child, on nurturing them holistically across domains, not on the subjects per se.  They want to teach their students the values, attitudes and mindsets that will serve them well in life, and not only how to score good grades on exams.

Shinichi Yamanaka, Deputy Minister of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, said that thirty years ago, when the economy shifted from mass production to high-value-added manufacturing and customized production, Japan decided that it had to overhaul its education system away from rote learning and toward the growth and development of the autonomous individual.  He said this was an enormous undertaking and, thirty years later, Japan is still figuring out how to accomplish it.

Zhang Minxuan, a key leader of Shanghai’s drive to the top of the education league tables, said that for more than a millennium, the Chinese people believed that if you could recite 300 famous poems, you could be a poet.  This led to the Chinese commitment to a regime of exams based on memorization and rote learning.  But, he said, they do not believe that anymore.  Their priorities are on thinking, problem-solving, preparing Chinese students to live in a highly integrated global environment and cultivating individual talent.

Mrs. Cherry Tse, the Permanent Secretary for Education for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, said that young people are now being exposed to masses of data on a scale not imagined by their parents and much now depends on being able to help them sort out the real information from “the crap.”  They need, as never before, to be “discerning,” to live and work effectively in a state of constant flux.  She worried that educators live in a sort of cocoon that will make it hard for them to prepare students for such a world.  Part of this worry comes from her belief that it is more important than ever for students in Hong Kong and elsewhere to develop a strong sense of empathy for people in other parts of the world, especially for those who are less fortunate.  The schools, she said, are not changing as fast as society, and that must be fixed.

Note that there is no mention in this litany of the importance of learning to read, to write and to have basic mathematical literacy.  This much is assumed.  Which is to say that the aim of education in the world’s leading mass education systems is no longer simply to provide basic literacy.  As these statements witness, the aim has now gone far beyond that to embrace what were, through the 20th century, the aims for only the elite.

2.    A focus on the distance between rhetoric and reality—or—between the political leaders and the teachers in the classrooms

I can hear you now dismissing the sentiments just expressed as the usual talk of politicians—vague aspirations that have little impact on what actually happens in classrooms.  Which leads to my second observation.  The very same people who made the observations just reported also worried about the distance between rhetoric and reality, which had the effect of making me believe that these people were expressing genuine ambitions for their education systems, ambitions they intended to make good on, to the best of their ability.  Some examples:

A representative of Norway pointed out that “we say we value 21st century skills but we test basic skills.  We are not testing what we say is most important.  I understand that the politicians need data for their purposes, but we need to be careful that their needs do not distort and distract from what is best for our students.”

A representative from New Zealand said, “We want our students to be capable, confident, creative and innovative, but all we measure is the first of these.  Some nations around this table put high stakes only on the first of these and some put high stakes only on language and math.”

Please note this last.  The international meetings I have gone to over the years have been models of politeness.  Statements of this sort are never made.  Because they are never made, the underlying issues are never raised, much less addressed.  But it did not end there.

3.    A focus on implementation

Mrs. Cherry Tse, from Hong Kong, said that it is now crucially important to align the goals of the system designers and managers [the government] with the goals of all the other participants, not least the teachers.  She mused about the difficulty of knowing whether government is doing the right (that is the moral) thing, and said that this is why it is so important to have a very inclusive discussion involving many stakeholders about the purposes of education to create as broad a consensus on that point as possible.

Kai-ming Cheng, one of the conference rapporteurs and a member of the CIEB Advisory Board, who is from Hong Kong, noted that the distance between the goals driving the system managers and the teachers tended to moderate in well-managed systems and be much larger and more problematic in systems that are not so well managed.

Ben Jensen, Director of the school education program at the Grattan Institute in Australia, observed that the expressed goals of many poor-performing national education systems are often very like those of successful systems.  He wondered whether what distinguishes the successful systems from the less successful systems might be the care and planning they put into implementation of their policies.  That is, he wondered whether it is execution, not intention, that separates the successful from the unsuccessful.

I am a veteran of many, many years of meetings at which senior representatives of national education systems have droned on and on, hour after hour about the virtues of their education systems and the wisdom of their plans.  This meeting was very different.  The room was full of people for whom their goals were not just rhetorical expressions of windy aspirations but statements of aims they knew to be very difficult to achieve that they were nevertheless working overtime to turn into reality.  They were quick to acknowledge their frustrations and concerns about their own plans.  They knew and quickly acknowledged the distance between their rhetoric and the reality on the ground.  They recognized that the only way they could bridge that gap was by paying far more attention in the future than they had in the past to the importance of execution, of making real changes happen on a very large scale on the ground in their schools.  And they were determined to pull that off.  They knew it would take a long time.  They came to this meeting to learn everything they could from their colleagues in other countries that would help them achieve their goals back home.

That was exhilarating.  And gave me more hope than I have had in some time.

I leave my readers around the world to ask themselves how their country fits into this account of the conversation at the second International Summit on the Teaching Profession.  How broad is your discussion of goals for students?  Can you assume that they will get the basic skills they need?  Or is that still an issue in your country?  Has your country really made the commitment to provide to all students the skills formerly thought appropriate only for a small elite?  Is your country’s education system still held captive to a high stakes accountability system driven by high stakes tests of the basic skills?  Is there a broad and deep consensus on a real 21st century conception of the goals of education?  Does your country acknowledge the distance between the aims of the designers and managers of the system and its teachers?  How large is that distance?  Does your country put as much energy and commitment into designing and carefully executing sound plans to implement your reform agenda as it does into its development, or does the old rhetoric fade into obscurity as the new rhetoric arrives to take its place?

To our surprise, our hosts had very little interest in talking about what we regarded as the stunning performance of their students.  They were very focused on the global economic competition and, from their standpoint, their schools were far behind, even though they considerably outstripped the United States in mathematics and science performance.  They pointed to the low number of Nobel prizes won by Asian scientists and especially to what they saw as the paucity of entrepreneurs who could lead enterprises that leapfrogged others in the invention of new technologies and entire industries.  They were certain they would lose in the years ahead if they could not produce their own Steve Jobs and Bill Gates—lots of them.

So they pressed us hard to tell them how we taught creativity and innovation in our schools.  And we laughed.  We don’t teach creativity and innovation in our schools, we said.  The origin of American creativity and innovation lies elsewhere, mainly in the great value that the society places on the individual, rather than the group.  In sports, the arts, industry and everywhere else, it is the excelling individual we celebrate.  Our literature puts the rebel, the individual inventor, the lone pioneer, the general who disobeys orders and wins the battle because he did so and the sheriff whose town deserts him but defeats the bad guys anyway on the highest pedestal.  Again and again, these are stories about the individual who, all alone, and often in defiance of convention, society and his superiors, advances the frontier, wins the battle and invents the future.  Our schools are certainly part of this culture, but we do not, we said, teach creativity or innovation.  The larger culture creates an environment in which people have much more social support than elsewhere to invent something new, challenge the established order, rebel against those in authority or create something different.

But they did not want to hear this and did not stop asking the question.  That’s because they understood that Americans place the individual much higher than the group in the hierarchy of our values.  And they believe that it is this value that produces insolent students, disorderly schools and a great deal of violence in American society that they do not want in theirs.

In Asian culture, much higher value is placed on respect for the group, for the elderly and for those higher in the social or managerial hierarchy than in the United States.  This respect for the group is responsible for the Asian saying that it is the nail that sticks out that gets hammered down.  American youth are taught that each individual has to look out for himself.  Asian youth are taught that, if you support the group effectively, you can expect the group to look out for you; if you rebel against the group, you can expect nothing.  If you give your superiors credit for your achievements, and defer to them in many other ways, your turn will come in time, but, if you do not defer, and insist on being recognized for your achievement and openly challenge the developing consensus in the organization, you can expect no support for yourself or your views.

I came back from that trip to Asia with a strong sense of irony.  We went to Asia to find out how they produce such strong mathematics and science skills in their students only to find out that they did not value that achievement half as much as we did.  They look at the United States for ways to improve their capacity for creativity and innovation only to find out that we do not teach those things in our schools.  The United States would very much like to achieve the levels of mathematics and science competence in our students that we see in Asian students.  But we are not willing to pay the price if getting that level of competence requires us as individuals to surrender the independence of spirit that characterizes our nation.  The Asians we had met want very much to gain the kind of creativity and innovative capacity we have, but not at the price of the kind of social disorder they believe to be a consequence of our devotion to the individual over the group.

But since that time, my sense of irony has greatly diminished and I have come to see these relationships among school performance, creativity and innovative capacity as much more complicated than I did then.

We can see now that there are countries in the West that are achieving levels of student performance in mathematics and science comparable to those we see in Asia. Asian values are certainly not responsible for that.  We can now see that there are a number of specific features of the structures of education systems that the top-performing Asian countries and the top-performing Western countries both embrace.  These features are independent, then, of unique national histories or culture and a compelling case can be made that they account for a substantial amount of the ability of these countries to top the league tables year after year.

And we can also see the Asian countries funding planeload after planeload of edu-tourists to visit Western countries in a continuing effort to find something they can take home in the hope that it will enable them to produce graduates who are more creative and innovative.  I have observed that, over the years, these visiting Asians are asking ever more sophisticated questions about the origins of our capacity for creativity and innovation and are getting steadily better at adapting their systems in the light of what they are learning.

All those years ago, I was inclined to agree somewhat uncritically with the Asians who saw themselves at a great disadvantage to the West with respect to creativity and innovation, and who also worried that their devotion to the group would prove a major handicap in the economic sweepstakes ahead.  Now, I am not so sure.  It is undoubtedly true that the West, and the United States in particular, has the edge in terms of “disruptive” innovation, the kind of innovation that produces new industries and wipes out old ones in a stroke.  But the consensus style of the Asian countries, combined with the very high general level of learning in the workforce, is a very powerful engine for the kind of continuous improvement that is very difficult for the Western countries to match.  Who is to say which of these—continuous improvement or disruptive change—will prove to be more useful to national economies in the years ahead?

Which brings up my last point.  When I completed the trip to Asia all those years ago, I thought that there might be ineluctable tradeoffs in the design of national education systems.  To get more of this, you would have to settle for less of that.

Now I am not so sure.  Culture matters.  But history is full of successful attempts by nations to change their cultures in order to better adapt to a changing environment (and of the stories of those that failed to adapt).  It is possible now to construct a sort of dimension line framed by the degree to which nations are currently benchmarking their competitors in the field of education in a disciplined way and, in an equally disciplined way, taking what they find from other successful nations and adapting it to their own needs, in a never-ending round of adaptive change.  At one end of the dimension line are those countries that are bending every effort in this direction.  At the other are those barely making any effort at all.

The Asian countries, for example, are ever more determined to find ways of developing citizens who are more creative and innovative without lowering their academic standards or their tolerance for what they see as antisocial behavior.  They are not alone in their eagerness to learn and adapt.  Those are the countries I would bet on.