In order to successfully help young people prepare for employment, education providers and employers must open up the lines of communication and become more engaged in each other’s worlds.  In the most innovative and effective school-to-work systems around the globe, it is common for employers to help design post-secondary training curricula or to offer their employees as faculty to training programs.  At the same time, education providers should actively encourage students to spend half their time on a job site and help them secure interview opportunities.

These findings from a McKinsey & Company report published in December are not all that surprising.  In fact, many of the education systems scoring at the top of the international league tables have already reached these conclusions and implemented similar strategies.  After returning from Singapore last year, Marc Tucker recapped what he had observed, writing, “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.  [Their experience] 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 auto mechanics 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.”  This city-state also boasts one of the lowest rates of youth unemployment in the industrialized world.

According to McKinsey, the second common success factor occurs when employers and education providers work with their students early and intensely so the education-to-employment journey is treated as one continuum in which employers commit to hire young people before they are even enrolled in a program and are invested in building their skills.  What the report, Education to Employment: Designing a System that Works, brings to the table is powerful examples of where this is working around the world.  One model of a cohesive school-to-work continuum can be found in China’s Vocational Training Holdings (CVTH), the largest training institute for China’s automotive industry.  This vocational education program establishes and maintains relationships with about 1,800 employers, which provide internship opportunities and “promises to hire”.  The CVTH provides their students with access to a large database that houses information on each of the employers such as company size, how many workers they need, and the type of worker required.  Prior to graduation from CVTH, students take a survey on their ideal job placement situation and are matched to an employer based on their preferences.  The Institute then provides post-graduation support to students for a year if they are not happy with their initial placement.  Within three months of graduation, 80 percent of CVTH graduates are employed and of the students that are not, many of them have exited the job market to pursue higher education degrees.

The report authors surveyed young people, education providers and employers in nine countries including Brazil, Germany, India, Mexico, Morocco, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and the United States.  They found that the road from postsecondary education to employment looks vastly different from one perspective to the next.  While 72 percent of education providers in the survey believe new graduates are ready to take on entry-level positions, fewer than half of young people and employers agreed.  The United States demonstrated one of the widest opinion gaps on this issue with 87 percent of education providers stating that graduates and new hires are adequately prepared for entry-level work and only 49 percent of employers thinking this is the case.

This disconnect is partly explained by the lack of communication between employers, educators and youth.  A third of employers in the surveyed countries said they never communicate with education providers and of those that do, fewer than half say it has proven effective.  Meanwhile, more than a third of educators report that they are unable to estimate the job-placement rates of their graduates.  When surveyed, educators were asked to identify their priorities.  Helping students find jobs after graduation fell to the middle of the list for both private and public education providers.

Young people are also failing to connect the dots with less than half considering the job openings and wage levels of the professions most commonly associated with their selected major.  And while nearly 60 percent of youth view on-the-job training and hands-on learning as the most effective instructional technique, only 24 percent of academic-program graduates and 37 percent of vocational graduates said that they were enrolled in programs that regularly provided these types of experiences.

Another interesting finding is the general low perception of vocational schools.  While the majority of young people believe vocational training is more helpful than an academic track in finding a job, less than half of those surveyed actually enrolled in these types of programs.  Of the nine countries studied, Germany is the only place where students think academic schools and vocational schools are held in equal esteem. Germany and a number of other Northern European and Asian countries, provide young people with high quality post-secondary education and training experiences linked closely to labor market needs.  This experience provides young people with a route to good jobs so it is not surprising that perceptions about vocation training differ when quality systems are in place, students are participating in them, and they are functioning well.

Education to Employment suggests that stakeholders implement three interventions to improve the school-to-work transition.  The first intervention is to collect and disseminate more data to students and parents on career options and training pathways.  Education institutions should offer more information about their job placement rates and their graduates’ career trajectories.  In Singapore, the Ministry of Education requires education providers to take an annual survey of their graduates about six months after graduation to collect data on employment status and salary.

Secondly, the report calls for multiple providers and employers to work together within a particular industry.  As an example, the report references Apprenticeship 2000, an industry-led coalition founded in Charlotte, North Carolina by two German companies, Blum (a hardware fabricator) and Daetwyler (a printing equipment manufacturer).  Blum and Daetwyler wanted to establish a strong pipeline of employees that would have the guaranteed specialized skills they needed.  So using the German apprenticeship model, they worked with a local community college to set-up the program and made it available to qualified high school students and experienced workers.  The employer coalition has grown to include eight members that commit to covering the cost of training and wages of its apprenticeships over a 3.5-year period.  Students who complete the program earn an associates degree in manufacturing technology, bring in $9 an hour while studying and are guaranteed employment upon successful completion of the program.  Member companies agree to a common curriculum, recruit as a group and are forbidden from poaching employees.

The last recommendation is to create “system integrators”, an individual or a group responsible for the high-level view of the fragmented education-to-employment system.  These “system integrators” would be charged with working with education providers and employers to develop skill solutions, gather data and identify and share positive examples.  In Australia, the Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency (formerly known as Skills Australia) serves as the “system integrator” and is responsible for driving greater collaboration between industry providers and the government on workforce development issues.  The agency is responsible for critical functions such as administering the new National Workforce Development Fund to deliver training for high-priority industries and occupations and to conduct skills and workforce research on the quality of jobs and future working life in Australia.

The full report and a number of additional case studies can be found here:
http://www.mckinsey.com/client_service/public_sector/mckinsey_center_for_government/education_to_employment

The European Commission looks across member countries education and training systems and sets new targets for 2020

In a recent publication from November 2012, the European Commission identified new strategic priorities in meeting the education and training goals that have been set for European Union member countries.  This is part of the broader, ongoing Europe 2020 initiative undertaken by the European Commission in which member countries have agreed on growth and improvement targets in the areas of employment, research and development, climate change and energy sustainability, education, and fighting poverty and social exclusion to achieve in the next decade.

The education and training goals provide a glimpse into the arenas that the EU will focus its funding and technical assistance support on in the coming decade.  These include:

• developing and strengthening quality vocational education and training systems that link to the workplace;
• improving the education and training outcomes of students in at-risk groups;
• improving the teaching and learning of 21st century skills;
• helping low-skilled adults acquire usable skills;
• increasing the use of technology in teaching and assessment; and
• improving the teaching profession.

The European Commission also identified priority roles for the EU to take to help their member countries meet these goals.  These include monitoring progress towards these goals in the member countries; creating an apprenticeship alliance across the EU; and creating a European Area for Skills and Qualifications.

Along with setting new goals for 2020, the European Commission also released a country-level analysis that provides a baseline of 27 member countries against the new 2020 goals.  The report also provides descriptions of major policy initiatives and reforms that they plan to implement as they work toward these goals.  You can learn more about the initiative here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Recently, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released their 2012-2013 Global Competitiveness Report.  In this report, the WEF ranks 144 countries based on a global competitiveness index; their definition of competitiveness encompasses “the set of institutions, policies, and factors that determine the level of productivity of a country,” with the understanding that productivity directly influences prosperity.  The index is based on 12 “pillars,” including institutions, infrastructure, macroeconomic environment, goods market efficiency, financial market development, labor market efficiency, technological readiness, market size, innovation and business sophistication.  All of these pillars speak to a country’s ability to promote both stability and growth among their institutions and workforce, strengthening their position in the global economy.

We have always believed that education is one of the most important factors affecting a country’s economy, and the WEF is in agreement.  Two of the twelve pillars used to calculate the overall score deal with a country’s ability to provide education for its children from the primary level through the postsecondary level, with one of the pillars also factoring in the health profile of a country.

So who came out on top?  Unsurprisingly, several of the countries with the strongest education systems as measured by the OECD’s PISA program cracked the top ten, with both Singapore and Finland in the top three.  The Netherlands, Hong Kong and Japan placed slightly lower but still performed well, coming it at fifth, ninth and tenth, respectively, though Japan did slip one spot from last year.  Hong Kong moved up two spots from the last ranking to enter the top ten, displacing Denmark, which slid from eighth place to twelfth.  Other PISA top performers’ results were mixed; Canada, Korea and Australia all made the top twenty (fourteenth, nineteenth and twentieth, respectively), while New Zealand came in at twenty-third, rising two places from last year, and China at twenty-ninth, dropping three places from last year (though it is important to note that China is not itself a PISA top performer – Shanghai is).  However, even twenty-ninth place in a field of 144 is fairly impressive.

The WEF, in addition to producing an overall ranking based on the 12 pillars included in their index, also provided rankings within each of the 12 pillars, making it possible to compare their education top performer lists with the PISA top performers.  In the health and primary education category, six of the top ten PISA performers made the top ten in the WEF analysis (Finland, Singapore, New Zealand, Netherlands, Canada and Japan).  Rounding out the category were European nations known for their ability to provide wide scale and equitable healthcare and basic education: Belgium, Iceland, and Switzerland, and one surprise, Cyprus, which is ranked fifty-eighth overall.  However, in the category of health and basic education, Cyprus received a score of 6.5 out of 7, primarily, it appears, due to a primary enrollment rate of 98.7 percent of children, a relatively high life expectancy (79.4 years) and a low incidence of certain diseases.  Indeed, the health and primary education category is much more focused on health than on primary education, with eight of the ten indicators within the category related to health, and just two, quality of primary education and primary education enrollment rate, related to education.

The other pillar dealing with education – higher education and training – does take into account many other factors that actually speak to the quality of the education system.  The indicators are secondary and tertiary enrollment, quality of the education system, quality of math and science education, quality of management schools, Internet access in school, availability of research and training services, and the extent of staff training.  In this category, four of the PISA top performers (Finland, Singapore, Netherlands and New Zealand) were rated among the WEF top ten.  The other countries included Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, the United States and Taiwan.  The United States is world-renowned for its university system, and the European countries all have some of the strongest vocational and training systems in the world.  Taiwan has extremely high enrollment in both secondary education (100 percent) and tertiary education (83.4 percent, ranked seventh of all countries), as well as a high quality math and science education (ranked sixth of all countries).

Clearly, the countries that perform the best on PISA are among the most economically competitive in the world, for a variety of reasons.  But the WEF report, and their index, suggest that there are other factors beyond student performance worth considering in evaluating both competitiveness and education systems.  Their rankings place more emphasis both on the context of education – particularly the health of children and the workforce – and on the strength of non-academic education, and particularly workforce training.  Both of these factors are hugely important to the overall strength of the education system and can be clearly brought to bear on many of the other factors that add up to a competitive economy, including pillars like labor market efficiency, technological readiness and innovation.  Taken together, the PISA results and the WEF rankings indicate the continued predominance of systems like Singapore, Finland, the Netherlands and Hong Kong, who top the rankings in many respects, while more established advanced industrial economies like the United States appear, conversely, to be on the decline.

Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathrin Hoeckel, Policy Analyst at the OECD

In May 2012, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its much-anticipated Skills Strategy, a major new initiative aimed at helping governments improve their economies through comprehensive skills policies.  Kathrin Hoeckel, a Policy Analyst at the OECD, worked closely on the strategy and its accompanying report, Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Lives: A Strategic Approach to Skills Policies.  Betsy Brown Ruzzi, Director of the Center on International Education Benchmarking, recently spoke with Hoeckel about the scope of the project, its implications for education and workforce issues, and next steps for countries interested in implementing the report’s recommendations.

Betsy Brown Ruzzi: There is a strong consensus around the world that investing in human capital is a major key to economic success.  The new OECD Skills report was designed to help countries committed to this goal.  Can you give us a brief summary of what the report recommends to policymakers around the world working on investing in their people?

Kathrin Hoeckel: The aim of the Skills Strategy report was to boost development in economic and social terms.  We approached this topic from a number of angles including education, labor and economics.  We examined the issue through three pillars.  First, how economies can develop the right skills, that is, how to ensure the education system produces good quality skills that are needed and makes them available to everyone.  Second, how economies can encourage people outside of the labor market, for example, women or older workers, to participate.  And lastly, how economies use the skills of their labor force, in other words, how they ensure that the jobs that people are in match their skills so there are not a lot of over-skilled or under-skilled people filling jobs.

Brown Ruzzi: Perhaps we can look at the first pillar more closely.  The report suggests that countries gather and use intelligence on the demand for skills.  Can you describe how countries can go about this today?  Are there any countries with particularly good systems for doing this?

Hoeckel: First, countries need to determine the demands of their labor markets. There are a number of countries that have developed sophisticated systems to assess these skills and extrapolate future needs.  Australia has a system to gather data on labor market needs, particularly job vacancies, as well as the Monash University system that is able to help project what the workforce needs will be in the future.  A number of countries, like the UK, work with user surveys from employers; the surveys provide information on recruiting and employers’ plans for the future.  However, OECD is cautious about relying too heavily on future projections of economic needs, because there are limitations to the usefulness of projections given unforeseen changes in the economy.

In addition to collecting data on labor market needs now and in the future, countries need to align the demand for skills and the education system.  Countries that have strong vocational education systems with strong participation from employers are more likely to quickly adapt and respond to the needs of the labor market.  These countries, for example, Germany, Switzerland and Australia, actively involve employers in educating and training their workforce and that leads to a better match between what employers need and the skills their workers have.

Brown Ruzzi: Our own research shows that some countries rely mostly on projections from employers with respect to their future skill requirements.  In those countries, demand will lead supply.  But others make policy decisions about what sort of economy they want for their country and base their projections at least in part on these decisions.  In these countries, supply will produce demand.  Can you name examples of countries that use these different approaches?  What combination of these approaches would you use?  Why?

Hoeckel: Shaping the demand is a major part of the skills strategy, because just having a match between skills and jobs might not be enough to drive an economy forward.  In a local labor market, if there are only low skilled employees doing low wage jobs, it will be impossible to raise the standard of living and the economy will stagnate.  There are a lot of context variables to take into consideration in order to move production up the value chain, such as industrial policy, innovation policy and the promotion of entrepreneurship.  A country that has made major progress on this front is South Korea.  South Korea’s economy was at the level of Ghana’s a few decades ago, but aggressive industrial and human capital policies allowed it to jump to the front of the line in the OECD.  They set ambitious goals regarding what they wanted the country to look like and what industries to invest in, and they provided the human capital to develop these industries to reach higher economic standards.  This required a comprehensive approach, including industrial policies and education policies that run parallel with labor market needs.  However, one thing to always keep in mind is that education policy always lags behind many other areas since it takes time to educate future workers to meet the needs of the new economy.

Brown Ruzzi: The report also recommends that countries design efficient and effective education and training systems.  What strategies should countries use to do this?

Hoeckel: Strategies depend on the country.  But in general, the education and training system should always be of a high quality that delivers not just qualifications but people with strong, comprehensive basic skills.  Another general rule is that you have to include employers in the entire process of building up and running an education system.  If the world of work and learning are too detached, then you won’t get good results.  It is also important to have an inclusive education system.  During the last decades, most countries have focused their attention on raising tertiary graduation rates, but these can distract from fundamentals including insuring a minimum education for all.  We see through our research that the largest problem that many countries face is helping the people with the most limited skills; they struggle in the labor market throughout their life unless they have basic skill levels.  If you look at the whole cross section of people, over a lifetime, it is very costly to educate everyone to a minimum level, but if you compare that to what a country must invest in the welfare system and other costs that might be required to support individuals if they do not have a minimum education, it looks like education is the better investment.

Brown Ruzzi: Raising the quality of education and promoting equity in educational opportunities is another recommendation in the report.  Singapore is a good example of a country that found out years ago that the bottom quartile of its students could not function at a level high enough to succeed in their vocational education system, and they redesigned their system so that they both raised the academic standards for their vocational education system and, at the same time, greatly raised the proportion of the students in the bottom quartile who could meet their standards.  Do you know of other countries that have done this?

Hoeckel: A number of countries have made major improvements here.  One concrete example is a non-OECD member, Brazil.  It is a country that has made large increases in enrollment at the lower levels of education but this also holds true for secondary and post-secondary education.  The trend today is looking at enrollment numbers and the targets you have for getting diplomas.  That is what they initially did in Brazil, but then they realized that while young people were graduating with qualifications, they did not necessarily have the right skills.  To combat this problem, Brazil greatly increased the number of highly qualified teachers, invested in the general infrastructure of their compulsory schools, and put in place financial incentives for poorer students to attend school.  But quality increases cost more.  Finland raised the standards of its least achieving students by adding an instructor to help these students as soon as they find out they are struggling.  It is a huge investment that pays off, as compared to making struggling students repeat a grade, which research shows does not work.

Brown Ruzzi: Another policy lever the report discusses is putting skills to effective use by increasing the demand for high-level skills.  This seems to be quite a task given the economic downturn in many parts of the world; however, it seems to be the real secret to economic success in the 21st century.  What did your report say about unlocking the secret of creating high value-added jobs?

Hoeckel: This is the key ingredient, but also the most difficult area to tackle.  For example, I just visited Spain, and they are struggling economically.  They have a fairly well educated workforce but not enough work.  But there are things countries can do to promote product innovation, innovations in work organization and workforce innovation.  In this arena employers and trade unions must be deeply involved.  For example, in the UK they have a number of incentive funds for innovation, encouraging employers to better use the skills of their staff.  In Northern Italy, private and public actors have invested jointly in a skills hub where local employers work closely with a polytechnic where their people are trained, where they do product research whose results are given back to employers to improve production, and where they provide free training to the unemployed.  This is a very local effort but in that local economy, it has led to moving production up the value chain.  A lot of bottom-up initiative is required, but government can help by providing incentives and an environment where innovation can flourish.

Figure 1.2: Source: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Lives: A Strategic Approach to Skills Policies, Page 23

Brown Ruzzi: Even in the economic downturn, companies across the globe report that they have a shortage of either technical workers or a shortage of workers with high-level math, science, technology or engineering skills, or both.  (See Figure 1.2 above)  What does the Skills report say about this issue to countries that want to help their employers match people with jobs?

Hoeckel: This is an interesting phenomenon—How can you have skills shortages at the same time as high unemployment?  One thing to keep in mind here is that employers always complain about not being able to find the right people with the right skills.  Often there are not really shortages, but the working conditions and pay may be so low that people just don’t want the jobs offered.  Others decide to stay at home if the pay is low and working conditions are bad, particularly if they have good government benefits.  There is always a group of employers with true shortages because of cyclical changes where the education system is not fast enough to provide people with the skills they need.  In Australia, for example, when mining boomed, they needed to recruit outside the country to fill the job vacancies.

If you want to solve this problem through the education system, there are some countries that have retrained older workers in the areas where they need people, for example in the care industry.  But obviously education is always a slow process.  Employers are faster than government in seeing these changes.  That is why we suggest that employers become part of the whole process in designing education systems, because they can be faster in terms of forecasting their skills needs.

Brown Ruzzi: As part of the report, you wrote about early findings from a new OECD survey that will measure the skills of adults in the labor force in member countries.  The survey is called PIACC and results from the first global application will be available in October 2013.  Can you tell us a little more about the early findings of the new PIACC survey that OECD has developed to directly measure skills of adults?

Hoeckel: The survey is about the working age population (ages 16-64) and is being carried out in most of the OECD member countries and in some non-OECD member countries.  It includes responses from 5,000 individuals and looks at foundational skills such as reading, writing, problem solving and math.  It looks at the level and distribution of these skills.  We already see at this early stage in the results that in some countries the share of people not even reaching the minimum level of skills needing to operate in today’s economy and society is quite high.  I am sure to some this will be a shock.

If you look at distribution by level of qualification, the current proxy for human capital, you can see that it is a poor measure.  For example, the level and distribution of skills of people with a tertiary degree in one country is very similar to those with an upper secondary qualification in anotherquality varies across countries.  As the report points out, people acquire skills through work and other experiences and can also lose those skills if they don’t use them.  And, the older you get, the more skills you lose.  But this curve doesn’t have the same slope in all countries.  This means we can do something about it.  The extent to which people use skills in the workplace has something to do with the steepness of this curve, and we can figure out what countries and companies are doing to maintain these skills.  Another thing that is going to be interesting as we get the results from PIACC is the extent to which skills match or don’t match the requirements of your job.  We have observed that the higher your skills and the better the match, the more you will earn and the more training you will receive.

Brown Ruzzi: How do you see countries using the results from the PIACC survey in their skills policy?

Hoeckel: We hope that some of the results will be so striking that countries will wake up.  The issue of low skilled workers is pretty clear:  if countries see that one- third of their adult population is not reaching the minimum skill level, they might do something about it such as investing in adult education, promoting life long learning, and working on preventing high school dropouts.  We need to understand that training someone at the beginning of their working life is not enough; constantly maintaining and extending training should be the goal.  Our message is not just to governments, but to employers and individuals alike.

Brown Ruzzi: The report argues that countries around the world need to create a national skills policy. How is OECD helping their members do this?

Hoeckel: The whole point of the skills strategy is not just to look at skills and education, but to have a strategic approach and look at everything as a system.  There are so many elements that mutually influence each other: whether you are well matched with your job has an impact on your further skills acquisition. These issues are usually handled in different parts of government.  We want to encourage countries to adopt a strategic view.  In the future, starting with the framework we have laid out in the report, we will work with individual countries, offering a menu of options.  As a first step, we will offer a basic assessment using the framework to look at a given countries strengths and weaknesses.  Next, the OECD can help bring all of the key stakeholders together to discuss these issues and come up with joint solutions.  Third, the OECD can help countries take their strategy to an action level.  Our contribution as outsiders is that we can take a step back, take a look at things and put the right people in contact.  Once we have the PIACC data, we will be able to provide even more in the way of contributions to these countries skills strategies.

Source: Accenture. (2011). No Shortage of Talent: How the Global Market is Producing the STEM Skills Needed for Growth; McKinsey Global Institute. (2012). The world at work: Jobs, pay, and skills for 3.5 billion people.

Judging by the headlines in many developed economies—especially the United States and the United Kingdom—there is growing concern that they are not producing enough STEM workers (people with degrees in science, technology, engineering or math) to meet the growing need for such people.  We often hear of a global “skills mismatch”; millions of new workers are entering the labor force every year, and millions of new jobs are being created, but many jobs are going begging because the available workers do not have the skills for the new jobs.  A recent report from Accenture, “No Shortage of Talent: How the Global Market is Producing the STEM Skills Needed for Growth,” refocuses this argument, contending that the skills mismatch is one of location, rather than overall supply and demand.  The authors of this report argue that while jobs requiring STEM knowledge and skills are growing at nearly twice the rate of other occupations in the United States, just 13 percent of American college students choose a STEM major.  In China, on the other hand, more than 40 percent of college graduates have STEM degrees; this figure is nearly 50 percent in Singapore (see figure 1).  In addition to the East and South Asian power players in the STEM field, countries like Brazil are also experiencing a rapid increase in the number of students who choose to pursue STEM degrees; by 2016, Brazil will have surpassed the United States in the number of engineering PhDs produced every year.  Furthermore, countries like Germany, with strong vocational education programs at the secondary level, are holding their own in terms of STEM degree production, with more than a quarter of students in higher education choosing a degree in these fields.

The benefits of producing a strong STEM workforce are myriad.  In another recent report, “The world at work: jobs, pay and skills for 3.5 billion people”, the McKinsey Global Institute found that in the United States, a STEM worker will earn, on average, $500,000 more over a lifetime than a non-STEM worker.  However, despite the benefits to both STEM workers and to national economies, the authors of this report also found that countries approach the issue of creating STEM workers very differently.  In the United States, there is a laissez-faire approach; students are free to choose their majors or specializations after being admitted into a university, and the vast majority of students do not choose STEM majors.  Many other countries, by contrast, require students to apply for places within a college or a university in a specific specialization in order to be admitted, thereby allowing the country to have a greater degree of control over degree production.  In Singapore, for example, the government estimates the fields in which workers will be needed and the number that will be needed in each field and then allocates the slots in its first year classes in its higher education institutions accordingly, in an effort to align supply and demand as closely as possible.  Individual students can still choose freely among careers for which they want to train, but the government controls the number of slots available in any given field.  This policy clearly has a bearing on the Singapore’s position on the league table above.  This capacity to align supply and demand this way is associated with countries that pay all or most of the cost of higher education—which happens in some countries but by no means all.  Several countries that have such policies, including Singapore, also have in place bonding schemes where the government pays for a student’s higher education in exchange for the student’s agreement to work in the country, sometimes in the public sector, for a certain number of years following graduation.

Source: McKinsey Global Institute. (2012). The world at work: Jobs, pay, and skills for 3.5 billion people.

The issue of a skills mismatch does not end with STEM degrees.  The McKinsey report estimates overall future job shortages and worker surpluses for the global workforce in 2030.  They suggest that there will be an overall shortage of nearly 40 million high-skill workers, or 13 percent of the global demand for people with higher education, as well as a shortage of 45 medium-skill workers (15 percent of the total demand) and a surplus of about 95 million low-skill workers, all of which means large number of people out of work and employers unable to fill positions unless more is done to raise the skills of low-skilled workers, entice more students to enter STEM and other high demand fields, and match employers with the workers they need.  The same countries that are producing high numbers of STEM workers, particularly China and India, are also adding the majority of new workers to the workforce.  China and India alone added enough new workers between 1990 and 2010 to represent 37 percent of the total workforce growth of 706 million; between 2010 and 2030, China’s workforce growth is expected to decline slightly to just 13 percent of all new workers, while India’s workforce growth is expected to grow to 28 percent of all new workers.  Young developing economies including Bangladesh, Pakistan and many African nations, along with young middle-income economies (such as Brazil, Mexico, Vietnam and Indonesia) added half of new workers between 1990 and 2010, while advanced economies (for example, the United States, Japan, Hong Kong and Australia) contributed just 11 percent (see figure 2).  The primacy of developing economies in workforce growth will continue through 2030; in this period, advanced economies are projected to add just 5 percent of new workers to the global workforce (see figure 3).

Source: McKinsey Global Institute. (2012). The world at work: Jobs, pay, and skills for 3.5 billion people.

Of course, not all degrees – STEM or otherwise – are created equal.  A separate 2005 McKinsey report, “The emerging global labor market: The supply of offshore talent in services – Part II” found that just 10 percent of Chinese engineers and 25 percent of Indian engineers are educated to a global standard – that is, suitable for hiring by a multinational corporation, whereas about 80 percent of engineers educated in the United States are considered globally suitable.  This finding is corroborated by the 2011 Aspiring Minds National Employability Report, which found that the majority of Indian engineering degrees are not awarded from the top 100 universities, which tend to be the main institutions that large, multinational corporations recruit from.  Other datasuggest that large portions of these degrees are what the world would consider “sub-baccalaureate.”  However, despite the concerns over the quality of some of the millions of STEM degrees being awarded in China and India, Accenture calculates that even if just 20 percent of Chinese STEM graduates are qualified to a world standard, this would represent more than 700,000 graduates by 2015, as compared to just 460,000 in the United States.  Additionally, while both McKinsey and Accenture recommend putting policies in place to facilitate the immigration of STEM workers to the countries with large STEM shortages, this strategy seems unlikely to address the skills mismatch in the long term.  Developing economies that want to progress by creating successful technology-driven companies within their own borders, must invest in raising the quality of their own education systems and do this while providing the vast majority of their populations with the opportunity to excel in high quality learning environments.  Countries with historically strong economies must work to produce STEM majors at a much higher rate by giving students the knowledge, skills and tools they will need to succeed in STEM courses in compulsory

Source: McKinsey Global Institute. (2012). The world at work: Jobs, pay, and skills for 3.5 billion people.

education.  However, as Marc Tucker has written in his Education Week blog, Top Performers, it is virtually impossible for a country to produce large numbers of high quality STEM graduates from mass education systems that were designed to produce mainly relatively low-skilled graduates overall.  It may be useful to think about the developed world as containing two categories of countries.  In one category there are nations with education systems that are still designed to produce large numbers of students with little more than a basic education and relatively small numbers of students who have what could be termed elite skills, the United States and the UK are in this category.  In the other category are countries that have redesigned their systems to educate all their students to the elite skills standard.  Countries like Finland, Japan, Korea and Singapore are in this category.  Countries in the first of these two categories will find it very difficult to greatly increase the proportion of high quality STEM graduates without redesigning their education systems using the strategies employed by the countries in the second category to provide elite skills to all their students.  This is a tall order for developing countries, and that is the reason that the highly industrialized countries, though small in population relative to the largest developing countries, are likely to have a disproportionate number of high-quality STEM graduates for a while.

Singapore skyline

In 2011, Singapore was ranked the best country in the world to do business by the World Bank and was also ranked first in the world in investment potential in the 2011 Business Environment Risk Intelligence report.  Singapore receives high marks from both the World Economic Forum (ranked second in global competitiveness) and INSEAD (ranked third in their global innovation index).  Working hard to be the center for commerce in Southeast Asia, Singapore’s business leaders understand that the education system must produce a workforce that can keep up with global demands to continue as a top performer economically and to continue to enjoy a rising standard of living for its citizens.

During a recent trip to Singapore, CIEB Director Betsy Brown Ruzzi along with NCEE President Marc Tucker and CIEB Advisory Board member Vivien Stewart, met with a group of business leaders from a variety of industries in Singapore.  Each are on the front lines of managing the recruitment, hiring, training and evaluation of the Singapore workforce in their particular industry.  All have had experience not just in Singapore, but in a number of other countries in Asia and around the world, building human capital systems for their companies.  They shared their thoughts about how Singapore’s education system affects hiring practices, what they have observed about how Singapore’s workforce compares to that of other countries, and how Singapore is innovating in order to remain globally competitive.

Among the companies participating in this business roundtable was a global organization that employs 127,000 people worldwide with 1,700 employees based in Singapore.  In that company, ninety-five percent of the Singaporean workforce is recruited directly out of university, with the company providing them with the training they will need to be promoted from within.  That company also told us that they maintain a global selection standard when vetting future employees.  Their employees are made up of sixty-one different nationalities in Singapore alone.  They told us that they are able to attract the best from around the world, because people are willing to move to Singapore.  Singapore, they said, “…has a good infrastructure for foreign workers and their families, with international schools and assistance with moving to and from the country”.  It helps a lot, they said, that Singapore is an English-speaking nation and provides all of the modern conveniences and amenities these employees might want.  They told us that they seek out people with intelligence, people skills and agility for their firm.

Another corporate leader we talked with from the services side of the economy employs a local workforce of 9,000 people, seventy percent of which are Singaporean.  She told us that the Singapore government prefers local hires and has imposed a quota on foreign hires.  This poses some problems for the company, because Singaporeans do not generally like shift work, and so they look to the Philippines and China for functions requiring this type of work.  She said that they are working very hard to figure out how to make service-industry work more attractive to Singapore’s job candidates.

Another business leader whose firm sources, develops and trains talent to match employer requirements in Singapore and across the world including Australia, Japan, Africa and the United States works with Fortune 500 companies who have offices in Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia.  He told us that many research and development groups have been moving to Asia in order to produce locally driven innovations.  Asian populations are growing, and they have different needs from Western populations.  There is fierce competition for international business between China, Singapore and Hong Kong.  Although international companies do not see Singapore as a big consumer market due to its fairly small population, the talent it can offer makes it a big draw.  The competition between Hong Kong, China and Singapore is based on business leadership, legal infrastructure and the ecosystem of suppliers.  Right now, he said, Singapore is ahead in all of these respects.  Even the mining industry is considering establishing a base in Singapore, because they need access to the banking system and to the kind of talent Singapore can provide.  Singapore can be used as a hub for that industry, with buyers and sellers based there and refiners nearby.  He added, “Singapore is also attractive because of the language abilities of its population.  Many customers are from places like Indonesia.  Singaporeans are more likely to speak their languages than people in Hong Kong or Shanghai, for example.”

A representative from the finance industry, whose global firm has its South East Asian headquarters in Singapore, said that its workforce is very mobile – employees often move around the world over the course of their careers.  When recruiting employees, they target students from the Ivy League as well as top universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore.  Their priority is to keep their employees for the long term, and to that end, they have a talent reassignment program to help employees remain employed during economic downturns.  In this particular company, many of its employees are from the United States and the United Kingdom who want to work in Singapore because of the strong market, compared to the economy in their home countries.  However, at the same time, she told us that her company is trying to decrease costs and has realized that they can hire local talent for the jobs traditionally reserved for expatriates, without having to spend money on the benefits expatriates require.  Singapore, she said, also has advantageous tax policies for corporations; corporations are taxed at a rate of 17 percent, as compared to 32 percent in China.

One member of the group mentioned that consumption and growth is stabilizing in markets like Western Europe and North America, while Latin America, China, India and Vietnam all have large populations and growing consumer bases.  Those different markets require different innovations due to culture and resource availability.  In his company they want to create an environment where the business can grow with local talent, and particularly people with high skills and the ability to meet future needs.  Singapore, he said, is in a unique position, competing with Hong Kong and Shanghai as an emerging East Asian business hub, as compared to places like Seoul and Tokyo, which have reached a plateau.  The Singaporean government has thought ahead to attract international business by providing excellent infrastructure.  He sees Singapore as a well-oiled machine, particularly in the realms of finance and commodities.  He told us that it is the number one country for bright people who have the ability to think ahead, plan and orchestrate development, and it is unique in Asia.  While not perfect, Singapore is much more advanced in these respects than anywhere else.  His company is moving one of its largest manufacturing units to Singapore to base the business close to the fast-growing Asian market.

“The talent in Singapore is as good as in any other market that we work in,” said another business leader.  “While workers in Korea tend to be good with analytics, employees in Singapore are good at operating with discipline, rigor, depth and follow-through.  Recent university graduates are top-notch, and creativity has really picked up in the last ten years.  However, the younger generation is missing drive, which is really present among workers in China.  This seems to become a problem as any economy strengthens.  The biggest employment challenge in Singapore, though, is volume.  Singapore is a small country with a workforce of only about four million people and 40,000 new graduates a year.  There is also competition from foreign workers, since a lot of companies bring in employees from other countries.”  Comparing Singapore’s workers to those of other countries, he classified them as, “having strong power of mind — intellectual capacity — and strong collaborative skills, with slightly weaker agility and leadership skills.  In Japan, China and Hong Kong, power of mind is very high, and in Korea, agility is very high.  In the United States, intellectual power is ok, but agility and leadership skills are very high.”

The service industry representative talked to us about the local talent in Singapore as “…having strong project management and multi-tasking skills.  They work hard; people in Japan, China and Korea may work longer hours than Singaporeans, but can be less productive.  Their weakness is in their aversion to doing shift work, and their high expectations for what they should be doing can be an issue.  They tend to expect immediate promotions, and are less willing to take on less challenging positions or to do administrative work, but this is an issue with all high growth, developed economies.”

In our discussion about the Singapore education system’s contribution to the Singapore economy, one member of the group said, “The streaming system in Singapore’s schools can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The students who are considered the best and the brightest get a disproportionally high investment from educators, and generally are groomed to go into government.  Due to the high levels of early investment in their education, these students are some of the best in the world.  But we see a big drop when we begin to look at the middling and lower-level students, who are the ones who go into middle and lower management jobs.  The system would be better off investing in traits like risk-taking and creativity.”

Another company told us that they hire a small number of graduates from Singapore’s polytechnics.  These hires have good qualifications, although that company generally prefers university graduates.  He mentioned that some polytechnic students use that experience as a steppingstone to university, and after graduation are often hired for management positions.  One of the other company representatives at our meeting said that her company hires a large number of employees from polytechnics, and gives them 18 months of training after graduation.  The government, she said, has recently been working to raise the status of polytechnics by promoting them as a good route to universities and careers.

As we finished up our meeting, one business leader summed the conversation up by saying, “Singapore will continue to reinvent itself.  Over time, it hopes to become a headquarters hub for international business and for research and development centers, and it will continue on the path to becoming a leisure and entertainment destination.  It is easy to attract people to work in Singapore, and though entrepreneurialism is weak, creativity among workers is on the rise and will continue to grow.”  “Singapore is branding itself as an education hub now, too,” said another member of the group.  “Asians from other countries are choosing Singapore for their studies, and there are numerous agreements and institutions in place to facilitate this development.  In terms of creativity, the government has been making strides in this arena, and opened up the entertainment, art and culture scenes to attract creative types.”

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.