Education in a Changing World: Flexibility, Skills and Employability.

The World Bank (2012). Education in a Changing World: Flexibility, Skills and Employability.
In order to provide students with 21st century skills, curriculum and examinations must teach and test teamwork, leadership, and communication skills, according to a new report from the World Bank.  Adding their voice to many recent reports on 21st century skills necessary for individuals to succeed in the global economy, the study reiterates that across the world, employers are seeking individuals who possess a combination of technical and “soft skills”, however many schools are not currently organized to easily facilitate the development of these competencies.

Education in a Changing World: Flexibility, Skills and Employability argues that countries must provide people with the right skills to actively participate in the economy.  These skills include “soft skills” which the report defines as communication skills, creativity, leadership, teamwork, the ability to learn, values and ethics.  The report argues that although the labor market demands “soft skills” as well as subject-area knowledge, most schools are organized only according to disciplines.  Most teachers are focused on examinations and most students prioritize good grades above all else.  And teachers are unequipped to teach “soft skills”.  The report recommends that soft skills be developed and integrated into school curricula and that school systems partner with employers to identify skill gaps.

To develop a 21st century skilled workforce, countries should develop flexible education systems that provide learners with the skills they need in response to changing circumstances.  An adaptable system has the advantage of imparting knowledge and skills when people need them and delivering learning wherever it is convenient.  The report advises countries to determine which part of their education system should offer more flexibility by examining their economic needs.  It defines flexibility as learning opportunities that include formal and non-formal education options, full and part-time programs, a variety of majors in both the technical and vocational fields, classes designed for college age and adult learners, financial subsidies for tuition and scholarships, easily transferrable credits and varied course durations.  Middle-income countries, where the challenge is to increase attendance in tertiary education, may want to provide more flexibility in two-year college programs.  Low-income countries, where the challenge is to increase attendance in secondary education, may want to consider providing more flexibility in their technical and vocational education programs and offering various long- and short-term skills training programs.

Education, the report says, does not take place in isolation from the outside world, but is highly linked to the world of work.  The report argues that education tends to be rigid and conservative while labor markets are fluid and unpredictable.  Effective linkages between the two depend on changes in both sectors.  Therefore, apprenticeship programs must respond to the changing context of the labor market and information and career guidance must be readily available for students, particularly for low-income students who have fewer networks and connections to the labor market.  Part of the responsibility also falls on learners to be realistic in their expectations, prepare themselves with the skills in demand and develop self-learning skills to make themselves more desirable to employers.

While much is known about enrollment and completion rates of students in secondary, vocational and tertiary education in OECD countries, much less is known in developing countries where much of the World Bank’s work takes place.  The report calls for more research in this area as well as more information on the skills and competencies required and valued in the job market in low-income countries.  In particular, the report emphasizes the need for more research on school-to-work transition; stressing the lack of data on whether vocational education contributes more to economic growth than general secondary education.

Teaching and Leadership For the Twenty-First Century: The 2012 International Summit on the Teaching Profession.

Asia Society (2012). Teaching and Leadership For the Twenty-First Century: The 2012 International Summit on the Teaching Profession.
Teaching and Leadership For the Twenty-First Century offers reflections from the 2012 International Summit on the Teaching Profession held in New York City this past March and convened by the U.S. Department of Education.  One of the main themes of the conference was how to create the learning conditions that give the next generation the skills to create the future.  A concern that was echoed by many of the Summit participants is the divide between the ideal of “twenty-first century schools” and the reality of schools today.  A representative from Norway said that schools say they test twenty-first century skills, but really only test basic skills.  This conflict in goals sends mixed messages to teachers about what is expected of their students versus what is valued on examinations for which both teachers and students are held accountable.

Participants also discussed the growing demands on teachers and the resources and training they will need to be effective in instilling twenty-first century skills.  A background report (Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders) prepared in advance of the Summit laid out the key elements on this point that participants discussed: effective school systems need clear standards for what teaching graduates should know and be able to do in each subject, accountability on the part of teacher preparation programs for ensuring teachers have these competencies, more mentoring for new teachers, development of a wider pedagogical repertoire among trainee teachers such as co-operative and inquiry-based learning, greater capacity by teachers to incorporate ICT skills in all coursework, greater facility by teachers in using data to guide instruction, greater understanding of local and global cultures and communities and research skills to diagnose and solve classroom problems based on evidence.

Another overarching issue emerging from the Summit was how to best match teacher supply with demand.  Countries must expand the overall supply of high quality teachers, address shortages in specific subjects, recruit teachers to teach in the neediest areas and work hard to retain teachers over time.  To get there, participants agreed that policy responses are needed at two different levels: improving the general attractiveness of the teaching profession and more targeted approaches to getting teachers into high-need areas.  Installing effective leadership at the school level also emerged as a key issue and countries discussed how they recruit highly qualified leaders, provide systematic and high-quality training to their school leaders and maintain ongoing support and appraisal of principals.  Lastly, Summit participants discussed the importance of building partnerships and support for reform among employers, schools of education, university leaders, the media, parents and students.

At the summit, each participating country offered what they viewed as their top priority, commitment, or action steps to improve the teaching profession in their country.  You can find details by country in the full report.  Finland, for example, “Seeks to develop new collaborative models for school development and teacher education development, change assessment to better meet curricula goals, improve pedagogical use of social media, and participate in an international network for teacher education.”  Japan’s goal is to further advance its efforts at reform of preparation, recruitment, and professional development for its teachers.

Barbara Ischinger, Director of Education at OECD, remarked during the closing session that, “it is clear that learning from other countries, whether through a Summit or through visits to other systems, is an increasingly important learning tool for policymakers and educators.”  A third Summit will be convened by the Netherlands and is scheduled to take place in Amsterdam in 2013.

Delivering School Transparency in Australia: National Reporting Through My School.

OECD. (2012). Delivering School Transparency in Australia: National Reporting Through My School.
Australia’s My School website, launched in 2010, is an innovative school reporting tool that was created as part of Australia’s comprehensive education reform program.  This new report from the OECD, part of their Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education series, provides an analysis of the website, couching their findings in the broader contexts of Australia’s recent education reforms and the general challenges of school reporting and providing school transparency to government and the public.  The bulk of the report provides an overview of Australia’s recent adoption of a national assessment program and the manner in which they created and rolled out the My School website, as well as providing a detailed overview of the types of data available on the website.

The authors conclude that the My School website is a particularly effective national data reporting tool, due largely to certain policy decisions made at its inception.  These included identifying international models in this arena and adapting them to create a model appropriate to the Australian context.  Additionally, the goals and objectives for the design of the system were based on scientific evidence from independent experts.  Another strength of the My School website is that it avoids league tables and instead provides school data in a unique way, only comparing a school to other schools with similar student bodies.  This type of data reporting provides greater insight into school performance and prevents misunderstandings that may arise from more common reporting tools such as rankings and league tables.

The OECD, using data from both their own PISA program and the United States, finds that in general, reporting school-level test scores tends to improve school performance, largely because it provides information to the school community who can then use the information to influence needed changes at the school level.  Other countries struggling with issues of school reporting and transparency may draw some policy lessons from Australia’s experience.  Among these are the need to have strong political leadership, to “articulate a clear case for policy change,” to invest in creating good data and to understand the public interest in access to this type of information.  It is also important to note that My School is an integral part of a set of systemic school reforms, rather than a band-aid applied to the existing system.

The case of Australia makes clear that when it comes to school reporting, the type of data available, and the way it is presented, is more important than simply collecting the data.  Merely ranking a school by its test scores is not enough to determine how that school is performing; instead, being able to see how that school compares to similar schools, how the students compare demographically to other students, and how the students in that school have improved or declined over time, tells us much more.  For more on how the My School website and other Australian education reforms are changing the face of education Down Under, please see our interview with Barry McGaw, Chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, from earlier in the year.

Although the project has just started, the World Bank has already produced numerous products based on the information they have collected thus far.  One of these reports, Strengthening Education Quality in East Asia, was published in December 2011 and presents data in a wide range of SABER’s assessment areas: teacher policies, school autonomy and accountability, private sector engagement, vocational tracking, information and communication technology, and tertiary education.  The authors of the report examine 13 countries and economies in East Asia, rating their policies in each area as either latent, emerging, established or advanced, while also examining overall trends in educational policy shifts in the region.  This report represents an example of the types of benchmarking and comparisons the data collected in the SABER project will be able to facilitate, and is well worth a read, particularly for those interested in education systems in East Asia.  Another report produced with SABER data, published in August 2011, is particularly relevant now, as the international education community recently turned its attention to the teaching profession at the second International Teaching Summit in New York.  This report, authored by Emiliana Vegas and Alejandro Ganimian, is titled, “What Are the Teacher Policies of Top-Performing and Rapidly-Improving Education Systems?,” and it lays out teacher policies based on empirical evidence that they have collected and existing studies on this topic.

In their report, the authors rely both on data collected directly from participating countries and economies as well as information from multiple databases set up to compare international student performance.  Using these multiple sources of information, the authors selected a set of 20 countries that they considered to have the most successful education systems in the world.  From there, the authors analyze these countries’ and economies’ teacher policies in order to tease out commonalities that indicate best practices.  The term “successful” when defining education systems is especially important here.  The 20 education systems that Vegas and Ganimian chose to highlight are not necessarily worldwide top-performers.  Instead, they are classified into four categories, each with five members.  The first is “top-performing and rapidly improving;” this group includes Hong Kong, Canada, Finland, Belgium and South Korea.  The second group is “top-performing;” Japan, Taipei, Singapore, the Netherlands and Hungary receive this distinction.  The third group is composed of “rapidly-improving” systems that have made long-term gains: Chile, Iran, Luxembourg, Israel and New Zealand.  And the final group consists of systems that have shown rapid improvement over the short term: Ghana, Armenia, Lebanon, Indonesia and Mexico.  The classification of these systems as “successful” rather than “top-performing” is important, because it allows for an analysis of policies that have helped systems improve alongside the policies that have been in place in top-performing countries for a long time.

SABER – Teachers, the arm of the broader SABER program focused solely on teaching, analyzes 10 discrete policy areas:

-    The requirements to enter and remain in teaching,
-    Initial teacher preparation,
-    Recruitment and employment,
-    Teacher workloads and autonomy,
-    Professional development,
-    Compensation,
-    Retirement rules and benefits,
-    Monitoring and evaluation of teacher quality,
-    Teacher representation and voice, and
-    School leadership.

For the purposes of this report (and the broader analysis that the World Bank is conducting with SABER), SABER has identified eight policy goals on which they collected data.  The authors view these policy goals as “best practice” policies a country should have in place or try to establish.  These policies include:

-    Setting clear expectations for teachers,
-    Attracting the best into teaching,
-    Preparing teachers with useful training and experience,
-    Matching teachers’ skills with students’ needs,
-    Leading teachers with strong principals,
-    Monitoring teaching and learning,
-    Supporting teachers to improve instruction, and
-    Motivating teachers to perform.

Each of these goals has been linked to “policy levers,” which are defined as “actions that governments can take to improve.”  Levers are linked to specific indicators.  For example, for the policy goal “motivating teachers to perform,” the levers are: having minimum mechanisms in place to hold teachers accountable, rewarding high-performing teachers, and sanctioning low-performing teachers.  The indicators in this case range from things such as “is teacher absenteeism taken into account in teacher performance evaluations?” to “do high-performing teachers get better chances of promotion?” The goal of this report is to provide an analysis of these various layers, from broad policy goals down to specific indicators, to provide a portrait of what the most successful systems are doing.  As the authors point out in their introduction, “the impact of many reforms depends on specific features of their design.”  They give the example of teacher merit pay: in some countries, this has proven successful; in other countries, it has not.  It is only by analyzing how merit pay is implemented, from the way teachers are evaluated to the types of incentives and administrative procedures used, that governments hoping to borrow these policies can best determine how to implement them.

While data has not been published yet on a number of the indicators, several insights emerge from this report.  Vegas and Ganimian find, for example, that in successful education systems, just 30-50 percent of teachers’ working hours in primary school and 25-40 percent in secondary school are devoted to instruction, suggesting that these countries place a premium on lesson preparation rather than classroom hours.  With regard to teacher pay, they find that starting salaries range from 80-120 percent of the GDP per capita, while average pay falls between 100-200 percent of GDP per capita, even in the “rapidly improving” countries.  While education researchers have long known that top-performing countries prioritize lesson planning and teacher collaboration and development, as well as paying their teachers well, the SABER data provides a portrait of how these policies are enacted, and suggest specific benchmarks that countries can meet in terms of how they structure statutory work hours or how they position teacher pay relative to other salaries.

Another interesting set of findings deals with teacher evaluation.  The authors find that in most successful systems, teachers have at least one and as many as three internal evaluations annually (evaluations done by school principals and peer review), while external evaluations (school inspections) are somewhat deemphasized.  Teacher evaluations in these systems tend to rely on a combination of information drawn from student achievement data, peer reviews and principal observations, while data gleaned from school inspections are used only in a minority of successful systems.  Teachers are generally expected to be able to demonstrate innovative teaching practices, strong classroom management, and subject-specific knowledge in addition to subject-specific pedagogical skills.  The ways in which teachers are evaluated has been a serious topic worldwide, with many education systems seeking the perfect blend of internal and external oversight.  While not promoting any specific format, the SABER data does shed light on how teacher evaluation is being done in countries with some of the strongest and rapidly improving education systems in the world.

While this new initiative from the World Bank is highly ambitious and impressive in its scope, it is important to note that in this early stage of the work, the data collection activities have been driven to some degree by pre-determined categories that define top-performance.  In future reports, it will be important to keep a close eye on whether or not these pre-determined “best practice policies” are borne out by the evidence.  As this initiative evolves, Top of the Class will be sure to continue to cover new reports and findings from this comprehensive source of information about important issues in education worldwide.

Other Reports of Note

OECD (March 2012). Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders for the 21st Century: Lessons From Around the World.
This publication underpins the 2012 International Summit on the Teaching Profession by summarizing research about what can make educational reforms effective and highlighting reforms that have produced specific results, showed promise or illustrated imaginative ways of implementing change. The report, like this year’s summit, is organized around three interconnected themes including developing effective school leaders, preparing teachers to teach 21st century skills, and the issue of teacher demand and supply.

OECD (March 2012). The Experience of New Teachers – Results from TALIS 2008.
This report examines the working lives of new teachers through the TALIS 2008 survey of lower-secondary school teachers. New teachers are defined as having two years or less of teaching experience.  In most countries, new teachers assume virtually the same teaching responsibilities as more experienced teachers, but they report that they often lack the necessary classroom management skills for effective teaching and learning. Their classrooms often have insufficient time devoted to teaching and learning and poorer disciplinary climate.

EI Research Institute (March 2012). The Future of the Teaching Profession.
This paper is a review of the available evidence on the relationship of the teaching profession to societies and governments globally.  It reviews possible next steps that governments, communities, and the teaching profession itself could take to enhance the learning, efficacy, and status of teachers.  It illustrates how policy has been shaping the nature of the practice, often with the effects that limit teachers’ professional judgment and which may, in the process, constrain student achievement.  Most importantly, drawing on evidence from international research, this study offers alternative propositions for system redesign, providing vignettes of breakthrough practices from around the world.

OECD. (November 2011). Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from around the World.
The 2011 International Summit on the Teaching Profession is the basis for this report; the authors summarize the evidence that underpinned the summit and highlight some of the major lessons to be taken away from that meeting.  The chapters are organized around the recruitment and initial preparation of teachers; teacher development, support, employment conditions and careers; teacher evaluation and compensation; and teacher engagement in education reform.  In each of the chapters, the authors delve into problems faced and the strategies employed by participating countries, pulling out particularly effective or interesting techniques that have policy implications for other OECD countries and economies. They argue that top teaching forces are not the result of cultural respect for teachers but of certain, deliberately formulated policies.  They also advocate for a high level of teacher responsibility and a prominent, highly-engaged role in education reform.

Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics (October 2011). Teachers’ Pay and Pupil Performance, Paper No. CEPCP352.
This article, a summary of a longer report titled “If You Pay Peanuts, Do You Get Monkeys?”, examines how teacher salaries are determined across OECD countries with an eye towards explaining how the real and relative levels of teacher compensation affect the quality of a country’s teaching force.  Using OECD data and their own methodologies, the authors find that there is a statistical correlation between teacher salaries and student outcomes, and argue that a 10 percent increase in teacher pay would result in a 5-10 percent increase in student performance.  They end the article with a series of policy recommendations related to their findings.

The Grattan Institute (February 2012). Catching up: Learning from the best school systems in East Asia.
Australia’s Grattan Institute examines East Asia’s four top-performing education systems: Hong Kong, Korea, Shanghai and Singapore in light of the fact that these systems are not among the world’s top spenders.  The report also highlights that their success is dictated not only by culture and tradition, but by a commitment to equity and excellence.  Just a decade ago, Hong Kong was ranked 17th in the world in reading in the PIRLS assessment while Singapore was ranked 15th, and both countries have since rocketed to 2nd and 4th place, respectively.  The authors of this report find that while many countries set common goals, the difference between the top performing countries and others is that the top performers pay very close attention to implementing those goals at the classroom level.  The report includes a detailed comparative analysis for each of the East Asian countries, Australia and the United States.  In addition to the full report, the Grattan Institute has produced a 33-page executive summary.