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May 22, 2012

Equity and Quality: Is it Possible to Get Both?

Much of the history of American education over the last half century or more can be seen as a struggle between those who favor quality and those who favor equity as the top priority for national education reform.  The stage was set at the dawn of the last century, when the battle was played out under the auspices of the National Education Association, not a union, as it is now, but the great tent under which American educators of all job descriptions were gathered.  At first the Committee of Ten, dominated by the leading college presidents of the time, won the day for a demanding liberal arts curriculum in our secondary schools, featuring mathematics, English, Latin, foreign languages and the sciences.  Not ten years later, they lost the battle they had so recently won to those who argued that the vast mass of workers and immigrant children were ill served by such an elitist curriculum, and it should be replaced by a curriculum much better oriented to their presumed capacity and vocational aims.  Later Sputnik would mobilize the country to insist on a much more demanding math and science curriculum to prepare an elite that could beat the Soviet Union.  Then, when the civil rights movement took center stage, the needs of minority and low-income students took top priority.  For a century, first one camp had the upper hand and then the other.  For a century, the United States behaved as if it was obvious that no country could excel on both agendas at the same time.  But what if that is not true?  What if it is possible that a country can top the charts in both equity and quality at the same time?  What if we have had it wrong for a century or more?

The OECD-PISA data answer these questions unambiguously.  On page 15 of their recent report, Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools, there is a graph with the title "High performing education systems combine equity with quality." The X axis shows where the countries place on a dimension line formed by the percentage of variance in performance among the countries that is explained by the PISA index of economic, social and cultural status (a measure of the degree to which socio-economic status predicts student achievement).  Countries in which socio-economic status is a relatively poor predictor of student performance are on the right and those in which it is a good predictor are on the left. The mean scores for reading achievement for each country are on the Y axis, with the low performers on the bottom and top performers on the top.  Fourteen countries, those that scored very well for reading achievement, but in which the socio-economic status of their students was a poor predictor of student achievement, are in the upper right quadrant of the chart.  These are the countries that top the charts in both quality and equity.  But the United States is not among them.

In fact, the United States just barely escapes being in the lower left quadrant of the chart, those that score worst on both quality and equity.  We are saved by the fact that our reading performance is slightly higher than the average.  Had the OECD used our mathematics performance, we would have been in the lower left quadrant, among the lowest performing countries on both dimensions.  So it is clear that it is in fact possible to do well on both goals at the same time.  But we are not even in the ballpark.  Why not?  What can we learn from the top-performing countries about what we should be doing?

The report identifies five places we should be looking for answers in the policy arena:

Postpone tracking until upper secondary: What they mean here is that, through grade 9 or 10, the top-performing countries typically have the same demanding curriculum for all students.  This means that they rarely do ability grouping.  Ability grouping, from grade one on, has long been a hallmark of American education.  These other countries have learned that, when students are assigned to ability groups at a young age, those assigned to the lower groups for several years have such an undemanding curriculum that they don't stand a chance of succeeding against a more demanding curriculum by the time they get to upper secondary school.  Their elementary and middle schools really are common schools.  They set high standards and expectations for all their students and those students meet those expectations.

Eliminate grade repetition: For a long time, we have moved our students through the grades whether they were ready for the next grade or not, on the theory that students who are held back are often so humiliated that they just give up.  But then we find that many who are moved ahead are not ready for the next grade and cannot do the work and many of these students give up, so we insist that they repeat the grade until they are ready.  But this is a Hobson's choice; both alternatives are very destructive.  What the top-performing countries have succeeded in doing is training their teachers to constantly assess their students, embedding that assessment in their curriculums, so that they can catch a student who is starting to fall behind very quickly; they also train their teachers to be very good consumers of research to the point that they can identify the right solutions for the students who are beginning to have trouble and get them on the right path very quickly.  They also tend to increase class size to the extent necessary to give teachers more time to give one-on-one assistance to students who need it and to plan how they are going to give each student the time and attention needed to make sure that he or she succeeds.  The solution to eliminating grade repetition is not pushing students ahead who are not ready.  It turns out to be making sure that all students are pursuing a demanding curriculum and all students are keeping up with that curriculum.

Make funding responsive to needs: The United States has a local school funding model that makes it virtually inevitable that the lion's share of our resources—our best teachers, our finest facilities, the most enriching activities—go to our wealthiest students and our poor and minority students get what is left over.  The top-performing countries typically make sure that the most resources go to the students who are hardest, not easiest, to educate.  No surprise that this makes a big difference when it comes to the chances that students from low-incomes and minority homes will achieve at the same level as students from well-to-do homes.

Manage school choice to avoid inequities: All over the world, we see school choice programs operating in such a way that parents with the time, money, ambition and resourcefulness to move their children to better-performing schools do so, and leave behind students whose parents are less resourceful, have less money and are not so ambitious for their children, creating larger and larger differences between the better-performing and worse-performing schools.  Many of the top-performing countries, however, place a high value on choice in schooling, but they have taken strong measures to make sure that their choice systems are as fair as possible.  Some move some of their best teachers and principals to some of their poorest-performing schools.  Others constrain choice when it is having unfair effects on equity.  Some vary those constraints based on the severity of the inequities they see in different locations.  There are a variety of strategies for dealing with these issues, but all of the top-performing countries that place a high value on choice find some way of leveling the playing field for all children as they design their school choice programs.

Design equivalent upper secondary pathways: In most of the top-performing countries, the common school ends around the age of 16, and then students pursue different pathways.  In most of the advanced industrial nations, there is very strong parental pressure on students to go to college.  But nations need balanced work forces and students have different talents and interests.  Top-performing nations find ways to make all the paths that lead to balanced work forces attractive to students, while at the same time making the barriers between those paths very permeable, so it is never too late for students who want to change paths to do so.  Some countries deal with this problem by simply declaring that all paths are equal, but this never works.  Others, as I said, work hard to make all of the different paths attractive. The top-performers realize that all education is vocational, in the sense that medical doctors have had a vocational education no less than the auto mechanic.  But not all vocations have the same status in society.  The most successful nations design their upper secondary school programs so that all paths lead to jobs that can provide a good living and a rewarding career.  One way to do that is to make sure that all tracks have substantial academic content and then make sure that all students have what it takes to pursue tracks with substantial academic content.  That way, there are no dead ends.  This stance stands in sharp contrast to the current situation in the United States, where at least a third of our students leave high school unable to enroll in their community college without having to take remedial courses in mathematics, English or both.

Yes, Virginia, you can have it all.  We can get high equity and high student achievement.  But we will have to go at it differently, very differently.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 9:01 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 15, 2012

Implementing the Common Core State Standards

Notwithstanding the last-ditch street blockades erected by the naysayers, it seems more likely with the passage of each day that most American states will stick by their commitments to implement the Common Core State Standards.  But what does it mean to "implement the standards," and what do we expect implementation to accomplish?  Much depends on how we set expectations.  If those expectations are fulfilled, standards will be seen as having succeeded, if not, standards will have failed.

A new report by William Schmidt, an education professor at Michigan State University, provides a statistical analysis making a strong case that the Common Core K-8 standards in mathematics are comparable to those used by the world's top-performing countries and an equally strong case for the link between high standards and high student performance at the state level here in the United States.  So, does that mean that we can expect world-class student performance if we implement the Common Core State Standards?

That depends on what we mean by "implement the Common Core State Standards."  Schmidt has interviewed American teachers on this point.  The good news is that, when asked, they say they like the Common Core State Standards.  The bad news is that they also say that these standards are pretty close to what they are already doing, so they clearly think they don't have to change their practice much in order to implement them.

None of the countries that outperform the United States think that they got there simply by implementing challenging academic standards.

Our own work strongly suggests that the main reason that students are not ready for college level mathematics is that they have not really mastered elementary and middle school mathematics, and when we looked into why that is true, we discovered that it is because many of their teachers, from elementary school to high school, do not really understand elementary school and middle school mathematics very well.

Years ago, researchers found that among all the professions, school teachers did less reading as adults than the members of any other profession.  There is no reason to believe that that situation has changed.  Reading and writing a lot are the keys to writing well.  It is hardly clear that American teachers are in a position to teach their students to write well, any more than they are in a position to teach their students the mathematical reasoning behind arithmetic.

All of the high-performing countries have not only developed high academic standards and matching assessments, as well as first-rate curriculum to which the assessments are aligned, but they have also worked very hard to develop a high quality teaching force.  It will not matter what the mathematics standards for students are if many of their teachers cannot meet them.  It will not matter what our writing standards are if many of our teachers cannot themselves write well.  It will avail us nothing if we require our students to reason well, to be really good at synthesizing information from many sources in a creative way and to analyze complex data and come up with an original solution, but we have failed to make sure that their teachers can do these things.

Implementing the standards cannot simply mean informing teachers about what the designers of the standards intended or providing them with videos of teachers teaching the standards well.  If that is what it ends up meaning, we can expect very little from the implementation of the Common Core State Standards.  If we expect adoption of the Common Core State Standards to result in world-class student performance, then each state will have to do the other things that top-performing countries have done.  That includes creating high quality, highly coherent state-level instructional systems; putting a whole complex of policies in place to greatly raise the quality of teachers; putting more resources behind students who are hard to get to high standards and less behind those who will reach those standards more easily; aggressively benchmarking their competition and keep learning from them; changing out their low-quality multiple-choice tests for much higher quality assessments; greatly reducing high stakes assessment and starting to trust their teachers as the quality of their teaching force rises; and organizing and managing schools in a way that makes employment in those schools attractive to people who could otherwise become high status professionals in other sectors of the economy.

If we are going to rely exclusively on new standards and new tests to improve student performance in the United States, then we should not expect much.  If we are after the same kind of student performance we see in the top-performing countries, we will have to deploy a much wider range of strategies to get there.  This is a big agenda.  If our competitors are any guide, it will take years to implement.  But there are no shortcuts.

Bottom line: high standards are necessary, but hardly sufficient.  It is time to start setting realistic expectations.  That means starting to share this larger agenda and helping the press and the public to understand that new standards can be the prelude to major improvements in student performance, but it is going to take years, many years, to match the performance of our best competitors.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 9:25 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 08, 2012

Teacher Quality and Teacher Accountability

On Saturday, May 4 the New York Times published a column by Charles Blow that you ought to read.  Blow is one of my favorite columnists and this is one of his best columns, straight from the heart, about his mom, a lifelong, utterly committed teacher.  But it is also about what is wrong with teaching policy in the United States today.

I have a confession to make.  Though I have been working for decades to make teaching a true profession, I remember, when I first read the No Child Left Behind Act, thinking to myself: "Well, this is long overdue; now, if the kids are not learning, their teachers' jobs will be at risk."

Years ago, when our foster daughters were in high school, the older one had a teacher who regularly came to school drunk, and when she was drunk, she was mean-spirited.  There had been endless complaints about her, but all that happened was that the principal had kept reassigning her to classes with students whose parents were less likely to make a scene.  That was in a well-regarded suburban district.  Later, I would visit classrooms in an inner-city district in which I found teachers who were dripping with contempt for the students they were supposed to be teaching. They expected nothing from them and that is what they got.  I remember one principal who said to me, "I have been found to be incompetent four times, but they will never get anyone to replace me. I will be here forever."  I have seen more than my share of teachers who are incompetent time-servers.

It always infuriated me that, in many schools and systems I visited, it was the teachers who sucked up to the principal who got whatever goodies were to be handed out rather than the competent, dedicated teachers.  Then there were the talented young former teachers who showed up in my office telling me they had decided to leave school teaching and get the training they needed to get into research, development and policy analysis so that they could "make a difference."  When I pressed them, they talked about how they had been thrown into the most difficult classrooms and left there to sink or swim, how the older teachers resented their new ideas and created an environment in which the cynics and timeservers ruled the roost, and the unions and management had rigged the system so that the big retirement benefits went to the teachers who stayed to the bitter end, even if they had burnt out years before, and were just showing up to boost their retirement pay as much as possible, counting the days and shortchanging their students every one of those days.

So you would think that I would be a big cheerleader for using high stakes accountability testing to get rid of the time-servers and incompetents who are contributing the least to their students' education.

But I'm not.  Like everyone else, I'm persuaded that teacher quality is the single most important school factor determining student achievement.  For those who are consumed with anger at the incompetent, uncommitted teachers they know and the unions they see as protecting them, it is obvious on the face of it that, more important than anything else, we should bend every effort to use the most powerful evaluation technologies available to sort out the good teachers from the bad ones and use whatever means we can find, including public humiliation, to get rid of them.  This is the impulse that drove the framers of No Child Left Behind and, later, of the use of value-added testing schemes to rate teachers.

I understand that impulse, and, as I said above, there is a part of me that is very sympathetic to it.  But then reality takes hold.  The goal is not to get rid of bad teachers; it is to get good ones, not just for some of our students, but all of them.  Now you might say that these aims are not in conflict.  Why not get rid of the worst and bring in the best, all at the same time?

There is nothing wrong with such a strategy in theory, but there is everything wrong with it in practice.  The most consistent element in the No Child Left Behind Act passed by the last president and the teacher quality and accountability policies being pursued by the current administration is the use of high stakes accountability systems based on low-quality literacy tests in two subjects to hold schools accountable for student performance.  The context in which these policies are being pursued is not the Great Recession, but what is for schools more properly thought of as the second Great Depression, an era of massive school layoffs and contraction in school budgets.

Charles Blow lays it out point by point in his column in the New York Times.  The United States is recruiting its teachers from the least capable portion of our college students while the top-performing nations are recruiting from the most capable.  College students who are among our most capable students look at what teachers make when they begin teaching and how much they can expect their salaries to grow and can't figure out how they can possibly make ends meet when they take into account what it will take to pay off their student loans.  Then they look at public policy toward teachers, and, as he says, "...teachers have been so maligned in the national debate that it's hard to attract our best and our brightest to see it as a viable and rewarding career choice, even if they have a high aptitude and natural gift for it."

Our best and brightest students see us laying off teachers and talking tough about getting rid of those teachers who, according to some cheap test, are not measuring up.  They don't see us offering starting pay comparable to the starting pay of engineers, as our best competitors do.  They don't see us talking about forgiving the tuition charges for college students who choose to go into teaching, as many of our competitors are also doing; they see us promising to fire teachers who fail to help their students make enough progress as measured by methods that our newspapers are denouncing every day as deeply flawed.  They don't see us celebrating our teachers; they see us putting the screws to them.

However tempting it might be to put the screws to those teachers who deserve it, such strategies are ultimately profoundly self-defeating.  Blow is right.  There are time-servers in every field of endeavor.  It is a terrible mistake to build our policies around our grievances.  There is only one way to get where we have to go, and that is by pulling out all the stops to get our best and brightest into teaching, and by working with the vast majority of our teachers to help them improve their capacity to deliver for their students.

The vast majority of the teachers who will be teaching our students in five years are in the schools right now.  We should be working as hard as possible to convince them that we do not regard them as our enemy, but rather as our best hope for the future.  We need to reach out to them and find out how they think we can help them build their capacity to do a better job.  Most of us find most of the rewards in work in the knowledge that the work we do is highly regarded by our colleagues, and a source of pride in our community and among our friends.  Teachers are no different.  

We are fools to think that we will improve teaching by inducing fear into the hearts of the incompetent.  All we will accomplish is inducing resentment among the many good teachers we already have, inducing them to leave, which is happening at an increasing rate, and inducing revulsion among the best and brightest of our young people who therefore choose some occupation other than teaching, which is also happening at an increasing rate.

It is time instead to reach out to our teachers with an offer of support and to the most promising of our young people who are deciding on their careers with new policies that will convince them that we genuinely mean to convert teaching from a blue collar occupation into a high status profession that can offer them the profound satisfaction and reasonable compensation that Blow describes.

Some of the toughest accountability systems in the world can be found in the best of our professional partnerships in the law, medicine, architecture and engineering.  What counts most in those organizations is not accountability to your immediate supervisor but accountability to your professional colleagues.  It is a world in which everyone is working as long as it takes to get the work done, and doing less then your very best puts you at risk in a world in which all the people around you are doing their very best.  That world does not need formal evaluation systems and the analogue to value-added measures of a teachers' contribution to a students' knowledge and skills.  In truly professional organizations, your colleagues are taking the measure of your accomplishments every day and there is plenty of information on which to make those judgments.  The pressure to produce comes from those colleagues and the fear of letting them down is intense.  We will not have top-performing schools without top-performing teachers.  And it is true that we will not have top-performing schools unless we have powerful accountability systems.  But the record shows that we will never have the professional teachers we need unless we embrace professional systems of accountability, and we will never get those unless we start treating our teachers like professionals rather than blue collar workers.

Giving in to our impulse to punish the incompetent and the time-servers is a form of self-indulgence we can ill afford.  It is only serving to drive out of teaching the very people we most need to go into teaching.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 1:52 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 01, 2012

College Loan Interest Rates: The Real Issue

Over the last couple of weeks, the question as to what rate of interest college students will pay on their loans leaped to the front pages of our vanishing newspapers.

Both parties have agreed that the rates should stay where they are, instead of doubling at the end of June, which is what will happen if the Congress does nothing.  So now a big fight is shaping up over where the money will come from to make up for the loss of the revenue the rate hike would have produced.

This is an important political issue, because it is a big pocketbook issue at a time when the size of pockets really matters.  But it is absurd that the issue of college costs should have come down to this.

The cost of college has been increasing much faster than the increases in inflation for years.  During the same period, the number of days of instruction offered by the typical college has been declining, as has the proportion of total tuition charges accounted for by instructional costs.  

What, exactly, is going on here?  These facts strongly suggest that the cost of going to college is not steadily increasing because the cost of instruction is increasing.  So what accounts for the increased costs?  There are several possible culprits. Foremost among them is the fierce competition for students among the institutions.  More and more, that competition is driven by accounts provided by students currently at the institutions of the quality of the amenities those institutions provide: the quality and variety of the food, how up-scale the on-campus housing is, the range and quality of the sports and recreational facilities, and so on.  This information is made available through public web sites and rating agencies like U.S. News and World Report.  The institutions clearly feel that they have no choice but to invest heavily in what I think of the "country club" amenities of college in order to be a player in the enrollment game.

Then there is the "psychiatric clinic."  With the advent of the Americans with Disabilities Act, many grade school students have become accustomed to the availability of a wide range of free counseling services.  When they arrive on the college campus, their expectations are undiminished.  The result is that postsecondary institutions are spending far more on such services than they used to.  Perhaps we should think of this as another offering of the "country club."

We should not forget the "research game."  When I was in college, many of the biggest firms in the nation had research and development labs far larger than any university research programs.  No more.  These firms are slim and trim now, and most look to the universities for research and development.  But the federal government views research and development as a natural cost for the universities and they look at themselves as aiding that research, but only to a degree.  So the students are expected to bear a large share of the research and development costs themselves, and those costs have been skyrocketing.

And then we have collapsing state budgets.  Legislatures in recent years have been taking the view that grade schools ought to be a public investment, because everyone benefits when young people are educated, but, at the same time, squeezed by ever-higher health care bills, they have been also taking the view that higher education mostly benefits the individual, and so the individual should pay for it.  So the states have been paying less and less of the bill while giving the institutions permission to charge the students more and more for less and less instruction.  All this while many other advanced industrial countries charge little or nothing for higher education and are therefore surpassing the United States in the proportion of their work force with a college education, a key measure of work force quality.

Meanwhile, students are leaving college and graduate schools with staggering debts.  This is making it less likely that capable students will enter low-paying professions, like teaching and public service and more likely that they will not be able to purchase homes, buy cars or purchase a college education for their own children, because they will be paying off their college loans.  So this enormous debt will act like a giant anchor on the economy for years to come and condemn many people to a standard of living well below that of their parents.

What is the Congress doing about this?  Year after year, it is increasing the amount of taxpayer funds going to pay these increased costs of higher education, because most of the students are from the middle class and the middle class votes.  The system, it turns out is happy to take those dollars and increase the price which apparently just produces more dollars from the Congress, while, year after year the system provides less and less instruction, and education of dubious quality.  

This is not because the people who run the higher education system are venal or stupid.  They are simply responding to the incentives they face, as any of us would.  If students make application decisions based on the amenities that institutions provide, then the institutions have no choice but to provide the amenities.

Maybe Congress should take a deep breath and think about changing the incentives that the institutions face.  Maybe the federal government should say that the amount of grant and loan aid will be conditioned on the proportion of total cost that is accounted for by instruction.  Maybe it should say that it will pay for non-instructional costs, but only up to a certain proportion of the instructional costs.  Or set dollar limits for the amount that it is willing to pay for certain categories of non-instructional costs.

The point I am making is that the public interest lies in the learning that takes place in these institutions, not in the level of amenities provided.  My guess is that if most students knew how much money they will owe to pay for the amenities they get, they would rebel.  But, if some individuals discover what it costs to live in what amount to five star hotels while in college, and still want to pay for it, no problem, but they should arrange to pay for that themselves, not with government grants or subsidized loans.  

Maybe it is time, too, for the federal government to pay the full cost, not part of the cost, of the research programs it funds.  I can see no compelling reason for the students to pay for it.

Maybe the federal government can figure out how to stop the states from disinvesting in higher education by providing graduated matches for increasing their investments in this vital area.

It is time to get serious about changing, in a fundamental way, how we fund our higher education institutions, so that we can put our money where it really counts, into high quality education for our students.  Leave the country club to others.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 8:40 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

April 25, 2012

Finland Embraced a Highly Productive Reform Strategy; The United States is Racing Toward a Dead End—Why?

Over the last thirty years, the United States has seen the status of its education system relative to that of other industrial nations sink from the top to the middle.  In the same period, Finland's system has risen from obscurity to first place.  Finland got there in large measure by greatly raising the quality of its teachers and treating them in every respect the way high-status professionals are treated everywhere, in matters ranging from the way they are paid and trained to the kind of autonomy they have and the way they are largely accountable to one another rather than to traditional supervisors.  

In recent years, rather than adapting the strategies that have enabled its competitors to perform at much higher levels, the United States has pursued another, very different, course.
 
It has introduced young entrepreneurs into the schools in the hope of producing "disruptive innovation."  It has adopted market mechanisms like charters, in the hope of creating more attractive options for students and parents. And reformers have relied ever-more-heavily on accountability systems designed to identify good teachers and bad ones using data derived from basic skills tests, in order to shame poor-performing teachers into leaving the schools. 

There is no evidence, either from the top-performing countries, or from within the United States, that such strategies have worked or could work to greatly improve student performance at scale.  But the United States nonetheless remains committed to them. The question is why?  The answer, as we shall see, is revealed by tracing the broad outlines of the history of education in Finland and the United States since World War II.

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 school teachers 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.  The key inflection point on the path from a very ordinary, low attainment education system after World War II to its current status among the world leaders was the development of the "Finnish consensus" to move forward with the creation of a new form of school, the peruskoulu, in the early 1970s.  The new peruskoulu was a nine-year common school for all students with the same curriculum for all.  The challenge level for everyone was set to that formerly set only for Finland's student elite.  It was a decision to go for the highest possible levels of both quality and equity at the same time. 

It was this decision that led almost ineluctably to the decision that Finland would have to have teachers for all its students of the same kind and quality formerly thought necessary only for its elite students.  Thereafter, the Finns did what they had to do to greatly improve the quality of the teaching force. The effect of having these very high quality teachers was revealed in 2001 by the startling success of Finland in the initial and subsequent administrations of the OECD-PISA assessments.  This quite unexpected success 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 American education reform agenda.  At no point in this story did the Finnish public lose 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, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century, 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.  Not only that, but the cost of education in the United States was moving from the middle of the league tables to the top.  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, 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.

In retrospect, it is clear 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 young people to come to the aid of their young people when the country responded to the emergency caused by the sudden failure of their protected market in the Soviet Union when that country fell apart and the banking crisis that ensued, and just as natural for the best of their young people to agree to become teachers.  When the peruskoulu turned out to be a success, these fine new teachers were celebrated by the citizens and became the spouses most desired by other young people interested in forming families.  They put their heart and soul into their teaching, which produced the Finnish surprise when the 200 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 teachers were sometimes 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, without doing what they needed to do to use it 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. 

In 1983, when A Nation at Risk charged that the condition of American education would be cause for war if it had been inflicted on us by another nation, the clear implication was that American educators were responsible.  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 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 circle.

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.  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 the currently dominant American education reform agenda to burn itself out before we change course.  We can only hope that Winston Churchill's famous dictum that "Americans always do the right thing...after they have exhausted all the alternatives" was prophetic in this case.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 3:35 PM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

April 18, 2012

A Response to Jay Greene

Jay Greene, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and fellow at the George W. Bush Institute, recently reviewed my latest book, Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World's Leading Systems, in Education Next. In a post on their web site, I respond to his review. See below or visit here to read my response.

Jay Greene's review of Surpassing Shanghai in Education Next was not so much a review as a hatchet job.  Unhappy with our conclusions, he chooses not to debate them, but to savagely attack our goals, our methods and me personally.

Greene derides our goal of identifying "best practices," that is, the policies and practices that have enabled the students in an increasing number of countries to surpass student achievement in the United States.  He seems to suggest that is a fool's errand, undertaken only by industry gurus like Tom Peters and Jim Collins in the business community.  It is obvious to him that this is a form of "quackery."  The evidence he offers is that some of the firms that Peters and Collins identified as top performers subsequently failed.

Firms rise and fall.  Only a handful of the firms in the Dow Jones Industrial Average fifty years ago are in it today, and many don't exist any more.  But that hardly means they were not once great or that firms today have nothing to learn from other firms that are eating their lunch now in the same market they serve.  

Quite the contrary.  When the Japanese attacked American manufacturers in the late 1970s, many American firms went out of business in the face of superior manufacturing methods.  Most of those that survived did so, in part, because they took their challengers seriously and studied their methods in detail.  They studied their "best practices."  They did it with industrial benchmarking, the method we have used.  I would like Jay Greene to explain to all of us why this method, which proved so successful in helping to restore American manufacturing to its leading position in the 1980s, should be derided when it comes to restoring American education to its former world-leading status.

In our book, we point out that the research methods, most valued by American researchers, which involve the random assignment of research subjects to "treatments," cannot be used when researching entire national education systems, because it is not possible to randomly assign national populations to the national education systems of other countries.  Oh yes they can, says Greene, and he points to the work of Karthik Muralidharan and Michael Kremer.  Well, we engaged Muralidharan to accompany us on our three-week-long benchmarking research in India and I know his work well.  He is best known for his own research in that country, in which he looks at the widespread implementation of a program to provide a form of private schools to the children of impoverished rural farmers.  It turns out that these schools are more effective than the public schools they replace, partly because the teachers in the public schools rarely show up for work and partly because more teachers can be purchased for the same amount of money.  Interesting, but irrelevant to the argument at hand.  No one in his right mind would characterize this program as an entire national education system.  Not for the first time, Greene grossly mischaracterized the evidence in order to make his point.

Greene not only attacks the methods used in the chapters in each country in our book, but he then goes on to announce that the conclusions drawn in the last chapter have almost nothing to do with the preceding chapters.  He offers two pieces of evidence for this outrageous assertion.

One is Kai-ming Cheng's observation in his chapter on the Shanghai system in which he describes how a certain number of slots in key schools in Shanghai are set aside for students from outside that schools' enrollment area who can choose that school if they wish.  But I learned from our own benchmarking in Shanghai that those slots are sold to parents and the poorer their children's performance in their sending school, the more the receiving school charges.  This system was not designed to facilitate school choice nor was it designed to improve student performance.  It was designed to enable formerly elite schools serving members of the Communist Party to stay afloat as they are decommissioned as key elite schools.  That is why I did not include it in my list of strategies in wide use in countries that are outperforming the United States.

The other piece of evidence that Greene offers for his assertion that my analysis and summary ignored the work of the chapter authors in the book is that I ignored what they had to say about decentralization of decision-making in these systems.  But that is not true.  What I describe is a process that many others have observed.  The top-performing countries have centralized the setting of goals, the setting of standards and the measurement of student achievement, and relaxed their control over the way schools choose to get their students to high standards.  Over time, as they have succeeded in raising the quality of their teaching forces, they have started to relax the degree to which they specify their standards and curriculum, moving from a bureaucratic form of accountability to a more professional form of accountability.  This whole process cannot be accurately described as a process of either centralization or decentralization.  It is much more accurately described as a process of professionalizing the teaching force, a point that is made repeatedly in Surpassing Shanghai.

If Greene was right, and I ignored the chapter authors' presentation of the facts when writing my analysis and summary, you could reasonably expect that they would be, to say the least, annoyed.  But, in fact, I did what any editor and summarizer could be expected to do: I shared my draft analysis and summary of the chapters with my fellow chapter authors, who seemed, on the whole, quite satisfied that I captured the essence of their findings.

After denouncing the "best practices" identified by the authors of Surpassing Shanghai on the basis of the methods we used, Greene appears to realize that his war on "best practices" has led him to inadvertently attack the kinds of studies done by people whose policy prescriptions he prefers, like Ludger Woessmann and Eric Hanushek, who have done well-regarded statistical analyses of survey data from OECD-PISA and other sources.  We have, by the way, a high regard for these researchers and relied on them in our own work.  So he retreats from his blanket condemnation of "best practices" study methods to exempt quantitative studies.  But, then, to my astonishment, he even announces that case studies are OK if they are "well-constructed."  This is after directing what he takes to be withering fire at our case studies.  He mentions in particular Charles Glenn's case studies, describing them as "well constructed," but never explains what distinguishes "well-constructed" case studies from ours, which--apparently--are not.  

So, in the end, all the methods we used meet with Jay Greene's approval.  It is only our conclusions that are odious.  He is left with a very weak reed indeed to which he then clutches.  The problem with the best practices approach, he says at the end of his review, is that, "by avoiding variation in the dependent variable," it prevents any scientific identification of causation.  What?  Our aim was to look at the top-performing countries to find out how they are doing it.  If we strip the highfalutin language from Greene's assertion, he is saying that we cannot possibly figure out what is causing their top performance, because all or most of the factors we think might be causing it might be found in low-performing countries, too, and, if we haven't looked at them, we have no way of knowing that.

But Jay Greene evidently did not read the introductory chapter of our book, in which we lay out our method, or the concluding chapters, in which we conduct the analysis promised in the first chapter.  The strategy we used was to compare the top performing countries to the United States.  What we found was that the top-performing countries, as different from one another as Finland and Shanghai, Canada and Japan, shared a set of principles that underlie their reform strategies with each other, but not with the United States, and the United States is pursuing a set of strategies bases on principles that are not found in the countries that are doing the best job of education their students.  Greene, you will note, failed to tell his readers that.

Why?  It is not because he does not like our methods.  His colleagues are using the same methods.  It is not because there is "no variation in our dependent variable."  There is variation in our dependent variable; we are comparing countries in which student achievement (the dependent variable) is high, to one, the United States, in which it is mediocre.  

It is because he does not like our results.  We found that the principles of school reform he has been advocating don't work.  They are not being used in the countries with the top performance, and the country that has been most influenced by his message turns out to be a mediocre performer.  That is a very important finding.  And it is apparently a little difficult to take.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 9:25 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

April 12, 2012

School-by-School vs. System Reform: Why Business Leaders Need to Go Back to the Future

Do you remember the 1980s, when the United States spawned a whole new breed of education governors, people like Bill Clinton, Lamar Alexander, Jim Hunt, Tom Kean, Terry Branstad and Richard Riley?  These men made education the heart and soul of their term in office. Many continued when they left office, Hunt, for example, chairing the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, Branstad running a university and Alexander becoming Secretary of Education, as did Riley.

Most of the new education governors were well-educated southerners.  All were determined to lead their states to rapid economic growth and they knew that they would need to persuade the nation's industrial leaders that their states could offer a world-class education to their workers and their families.  They also knew they would have to greatly improve their education systems to pull that off.

They could not have done it without the strong support of the corporations they were trying to attract.  They were able to get that corporate support because the heads of many American corporations were getting much more exposure to the global economy than they had ever had before.  That exposure was chilling.  The competition from Japan and the five "tiger" economies of Asia was posing a threat to the very existence of many American manufacturing companies and many did not survive.  It was quickly apparent to many of these executives that one of the most important advantages their competitors were bringing to the table was the ability of their education systems to produce a palpably superior work force.  Governors and industrial leaders made common cause.

Corporate leaders like Frank Shrontz at Boeing, David Kearns at Xerox and Lou Gerstner at IBM famously became leaders as well in the effort to reform American schools.  When David Kearns left Xerox, he accepted a request from Lamar Alexander to join him at the helm of the U.S. Department of Education, and, while there, persuaded the Business Roundtable to create New American Schools, a new organization sponsored by some of the most powerful corporations in the United States, for the purpose of funding the development of new, creative designs for America's public schools.  One of the other partnerships of that era was Achieve, an organization put together by top business executives and the governors, to conduct an annual education summit that laid claim to leadership of the whole national education reform effort.  Presidents of the United States, invited to the annual Achieve summit, made it their business to attend.  It was natural for top corporate heads to join forces with the education governors to build a national agenda for education reform.  They saw the world in much the same way.

Do you remember those days?  Well, they are gone. Over the last 30 years, the dominant American firms have gone global.  Thirty years ago, they weighed in on American education policy because they were scared to death that they would be unable to compete because they would not be able to hire a competitive work force.  Now, they care as much as ever about getting a competitive work force, but they have learned that they can find the people they need at whatever skill level they require all over the globe, and often in greater quantity and at less cost than they can get them in the United States.  If they can't get what they need for their research and development labs or their distribution centers or their factories here in the United States, they can get them in Singapore or India or China or Hungary.

No less important, they and their successors have given up on changing the American education system.  Too hard, much harder than they had thought it would be.  And now they know they don't have to.  They can go anywhere they need to on the face of the earth for their employees.  So they no longer have a strong incentive to play a very important role in the national education debate.  

There are many fewer people who claim the title "education governor" now.  Governors are not generally suicidal.  If they are going to take on the reform of a very large and very complex institution like public education, they know they need allies.  Without such allies, the job is appallingly difficult.  Better to take on some other issue that is doable, for which there are some natural partners.

This does not mean, however, that American business is no longer a factor in American education reform.  It most certainly is, but in a very different way, and with very different consequences.  

Frank Shrontz, Lou Gerstner and David Kearns have been replaced by business leaders from the senior ranks of hedge funds, venture capital and private equity firms, and the kinds of entrepreneurial enterprises they fund.  They tend to be deep believers in "disruptive change."  They typically distrust government and the "system," and adopt a rather libertarian outlook.  Rather than work within the education system, they tend to support people and entities that work outside the system or work hard to challenge it.  They distrust education professionals and prefer instead to trust young, bright, well-educated people who are willing to take the system on.  In short, they identify with and give their support to people like themselves.  They are big backers of individual charter management organizations and of policies that would strengthen charter schools, which they see as taking on the system.  It is very doubtful whether the charter school movement would have gotten away from the starting gate without these deep pocketed, very committed supporters.

The difference between the new business supporters of education reform and those they replaced is very important.  Frank Shrontz, David Kearns and Lou Gerstner thought strategically about education reform.  Shrontz ran a firm making advanced aircraft from components fabricated all over the world.  Kearns' challenge at Xerox was to restructure a very large firm for much higher performance in very difficult circumstances.  Gerstner inherited a larger firm in even more dire straights and he, too, had no alternative but to restructure an older, larger and more encrusted firm to get much higher, leaner performance.  None of these men had the luxury of building a brand new firm free of traditions, bureaucracy and large internal vested interests.  None of them could indulge in trying to revive their firms by creating a "skunk works" off in a corner that would save the firm with disruptive changes from left field.  

For them, changing the schools meant changing the system, not going around it.  Kearns pointed out that, "...in the restructuring of giants like Motorola, Ford and Xerox lay critical lessons for education."  "Don't forget," he said, "that we are not trying to eliminate the public system.  We are trying to make it better."

Gerstner was a management consultant to very large firms before he was asked to head RJR Nabisco and then IBM.  His background made it natural for him to think about how to change the culture and incentives in large organizations in order to produce much higher quality at lower cost.  In his work on education reform, he ended up focusing on the quality of the teaching work force, because he knew from his own experience that no organization is any better than the quality of its work force, and, he thought about the schools problem not as fixing schools one by one, but in terms of the strategic moves that could improve the entire system.

But their successors were not from giant firms like Boeing, IBM, Xerox, Motorola and Ford.  They come from start-ups and the investment firms that finance them.  They think of themselves as upstarts from outside the system challenging the big, well-established companies.  None had to deal with the dead weight that comes with such firms.  They are used to being nimble and have instinctive distrust of the people who make the rules they have to live by, especially government.  So they were attracted to charters like bears to honey, because charters were presented as a way to go around the system, to leave its dead weight behind, while at the same time making it possible to attract the very kind of people whose work they would like to support.  That was fine with them, because they were not out to change the system, except to the extent that was necessary to give their chosen entrepreneurs, the charter school operators and other educational entrepreneurs, room for maneuver.

Ever since I was elected to a school board in Massachusetts and discovered that my constituents did not have the right to choose which of our four elementary schools they could send their children to, I have been an advocate of choice in our public schools. I am a proud member of the board of BASIS DC, a charter in Washington, DC that I think is likely to make a big difference in the lives of the students it enrolls.  But there is no evidence that charter schools as a whole improve student achievement in the United States any more than regular public schools do, once the background of the students attending them is taken into account.  I regard my service on the board of BASIS DC as a way to give something of myself back to the community and help the small number of students this school will serve.  I do not regard it as an investment that will help the students in the United States as a whole overtake the students in the countries with top achievement.

I do not doubt the commitment of this new group of business executives with an interest in education reform.  But I have grave doubts that they will make much difference in the history of American education or, for that matter, for a significant number of American school children.  Investing in particular charter schools or in Teach for America or New Leaders for New Schools is something that these business leaders can be justifiably proud of, but it won't make much of a difference with respect to the huge challenge we face in educating the great majority of our students to a world-class standard.

Frank Shrontz, David Kearns, Lou Gerstner, and their generation of business leaders, had it right.  If one is serious about addressing the underlying problems on the scale needed to make a difference for the vast majority of American school children, then one has to change the system charged with their education, however difficult that may be.  

That is a challenge that the best of our politicians cannot take on without allies. Their natural allies are in the business community, now as they were earlier.  It is still the case, even in the backwash of the second-worst recession in a century, that good jobs are going begging because employers cannot find the people with the skills and knowledge they need to fill them.  Craig Barrett, the retired chairman of Intel, may continue to play an important national role in education reform in part because he thinks it will help Intel in its quest for world class talent, but I suspect that his primary motivation is that he cares about his country.  I very much hope that, as the new generation of business leaders that has provided so much support to charters and other entrepreneurial efforts in education take pride in their successes, they also recognize the limitations of those efforts, and turn their talents and their influence to another, much more difficult challenge:  How to greatly improve the system that educates all the children in this country.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 4:01 PM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

April 05, 2012

How Australia Developed a National Curriculum and Assessment System

In studying the world's top-performing education systems, I have had the privilege of meeting some of the leading international experts in standards, curriculum development, assessments, and teacher practices. These conversations are often the thread that binds all of the data together to create a full understanding of how a country has moved the needle on student achievement. Recently, my organization had the opportunity to speak with Barry McGaw, the Chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) and a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Four years ago, Australia's six states and two territories agreed to develop common literacy and numeracy assessments aligned with a national curriculum in these subjects. Given the implementation of the common core state standards, I thought it would be helpful to hear how a country scoring at the top of the league tables is going about this process and what challenges they have encountered along the way. 

National Center on Education and the Economy: Can you give us an overview of the history of Australia's National Assessment and curriculum efforts and what spurred on their development and the decision to create ACARA?

Barry McGaw: Australia has been involved in international studies of student performance since they began in the 1950s; however, the first national surveys of literacy and numeracy occurred in 1976.  The evaluations were sample-based only, a bit like NAEP in the United States.  And then various Australian states introduced sample-based surveys in other curriculum areas.

The first assessment of all students across the country in literacy and numeracy occurred in 1990 in New South Wales, which is the largest state in Australia. It was very controversial at the time, particularly with the teachers unions. So, New South Wales began testing all of their students in literacy and numeracy, and then Victoria, the second-largest Australian state, followed, and then other states gradually joined in. Western Australia participated with a really creative set of sample-based surveys that covered their entire curriculum, but only moved to test the entire student cohort when the then-federal Minister of Education made it a condition of federal funding.

By the mid-2000s, the state Ministers of Education decided it would be good to get results expressed in a way that made them comparable across the country. They instituted a process of creating a common scale allowing each state to continue administering its own assessments, but calibrated onto a common scale. After a couple of years, there was some concern about how good the calibration was, and they said, if we're all testing in order to get the results on a common scale, why don't we all use the same tests? And so from 2008, the six states and two territories in Australia have all used the same literacy and numeracy tests nationwide, also known as the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).

The next major event occurred in 2007.  During the 2007 federal election campaign, the opposition announced that it supported the establishment of a national curriculum in English, Mathematics, Science and History. They won the election at the end of 2007. At the beginning of 2008, they set up an interim national curriculum board. I was appointed chair, with the goal of developing national curriculum in English, Science, Mathematics and History. The government added geography and languages other than English to the curriculum development plans in mid-2008, and then the arts were added later.

At this point, the intention of the federal government was to discuss with the state governments what kind of governance arrangement would be instituted in the longer term for this body. There was some debate about whether it would be set up as a not-for-profit that the ministers collectively owned or a more formal statutory authority of the Australian parliament. The federal minister won out, suggesting that the Council of Ministers (the federal minister and the six state and two territory ministers) would be the policy board for this new body. In late 2008, Australia established the new Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority with responsibility not only for national curriculum development, the national literacy and numeracy assessments, but also the sample-based assessments already underway on a three-yearly cycle for science, civics and citizenship and ICT literacy. Finally the task of public reporting on schools was added to the portfolio.  That work has resulted in the creation of the My School website.

NCEE: You mentioned that these national assessments were controversial with teachers unions. Can you talk a little bit about what their concerns were, and how ACARA was able to address them?

BM: The teachers unions were unhappy about the public nature of the reporting and this kind of external assessment. They typically argued that these types of assessments don't tell us anything we don't already know about our students. The response was, "you know how your students are doing in relation to one another, but you don't know how your students stand compared to students across the country." What typically wins the day in this debate is parents. Parents value information that shows them the bigger picture.  When the My School website came along, suddenly parents are not just getting reports on their own children, but they're able to see, collectively, for all the students in their school how they're doing in comparison with other schools. This information can be controversial, but to help on this front, we include information about the circumstances of the school.

Some other countries do what they call value-added analysis. Here is our approach. We obtain measures of students' background, in particular on their parents' education and their parents' occupation. We're not trying to measure socioeconomic status, we're trying to measure socio-educational status - what are the benefits that kids get from the occupation and education of their parents as they come to school. We use this information to create an Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage. And then for every school, we look at just 60 schools - 30 schools immediately above it and the 30 immediately below it on that index. These are schools that have got essentially the same kinds of kids. These are the schools that you can learn from, that can challenge you. Now we can show a school another school with kids exactly like theirs that is doing much better. That school can then ask themselves, what policies they might consider that are different from the ones currently being used? What practices could the school adopt that might reproduce the kind of superior performance that you see in the higher performing schools? So that's essentially the strategy of the My School website. Not only can it assist parents in their choice of schools, but it underpins attempts at school improvement.

NCEE: Last year, the OECD published a report on evaluation and assessment in Australia. What did you think about the recommendations that they made for Australia's system?

BM: I think it's a good report. The big thing that we are doing now, as the report pointed out, is developing a strategy for formative assessment. But let me explain where we are first.

The final version of the national curriculum in English, Math, Science and History for kindergarten to grade 10 was adopted in October 2011 and is up on the website. It was quite a historic moment, actually. Already the curriculum is being implemented in the Australian Capital Territory, which is like Washington, DC. Queensland and South Australia and the Northern Territory started implementation in January - our school year is the calendar year - and Victoria will have a major pilot in a couple of hundred schools; New South Wales and Western Australia will start in 2013.

What we now have to clarify is the achievement standards. For example, the curriculum states, that, in grade five, in mathematics, these are the things students should have an opportunity to learn. We see our curriculum as a kind of statement of student entitlement. What they should have an opportunity to learn is knowledge, understanding and skills, not just factual stuff.  Then we declare in the achievement standards, if a student has satisfactorily learned this, what will a student be able to do? Those statements can be difficult to interpret in any kind of precise way, so what we are doing now, is putting on the website actual samples of students' work, produced in response to real classroom tasks with annotations to say, this student work meets the standards and why. This year, while the curriculum is actually being implemented, we'll be obtaining a richer set of samples illustrating different levels of achievement at the A, B, C, D and E levels.  The samples of student work will be annotated, for the first time, by teachers across the country, so that we'll have nationally annotated samples of student work that can move in the direction of getting consistent use of formative assessments across the country.

NCEE: Can you expand on why it's important to have examples of student work when presenting the new curriculum to educators?

BM: You will see on the website, that there are statements of achievement standards to give teachers an idea of what students can do, given the opportunity to develop the knowledge, understanding and skills, set out in a particular part of the curriculum. We think that it is difficult to write such statements in a way that is unambiguous for teachers and that it is much more helpful to also provide samples of real student work in response to real tasks created by teachers, but then assessed by a group of teachers from across the country and annotated to provide an explanation for the judgments they make.

Under the previous federal government there was a requirement introduced that all schools report student performance to parents on an A-E (or equivalent) scale. Our annotated samples of students' work will illustrate performance for each score, A to E, for each subject, each year. We collected quite a few last year from schools involved in piloting the K-10 English, Mathematics, Science and History curricula, but will collect more during 2012 as some of the states will have already begun full implementation.
 
NCEE: While building NAPLAN and the national curriculum, what lessons did you draw from other countries? Are there any countries in particular that you used as a model, and in what ways? What do you see as distinctive about the Australian system?

BM: NAPLAN grew out of state-based assessments of literacy and numeracy that began in New South Wales in its then Basic Skills Testing Program in 1990.  The other states followed over the years.  While I was in Paris at the OECD, the Ministers for Education decided that the results should all be expressed on a common scale across the country. The separate tests were equated to achieve this, but then the Ministers decided that it would be better to use common tests.  NAPLAN was the result and the first NAPLAN tests were introduced in 2008. Interestingly, there was no common curriculum behind NAPLAN.  The new test reflected the separate tests that it replaced.

As part of the development of the Australian Curriculum, ACARA was directed also to develop literacy and numeracy continua and then to review and revise NAPLAN as necessary to reflect those continua.  We will time this change on the basis of implementation of the new curriculum with a revised NAPLAN probably to come in 2014.

In our curriculum, we paid attention to practices elsewhere.  Our mathematics curriculum, for example, has been increased in difficulty particularly at the elementary school level on the basis of our analysis of mathematics curricula in Singapore and Finland, two countries that outperform Australia in the international comparisons offered by programs such as OECD's PISA.

NCEE: Is there anything else you would like to talk about with regard to the report, or the direction the system is going in?

BM: I'd like to say something about the curriculum itself, rather than the assessment system. When we got started, we were calling what we did the development of content standards.  I found out from talking to an American journalist that we borrowed that term from you.  I also learned that in the United States you couldn't talk about national or state curriculum, so you used these words.  What we are doing now is saying that we are developing curriculum or the learning entitlements. We say to schools that by whatever means you teach, this is the knowledge, understanding and skills that your kids are entitled to have the opportunity to acquire. You've got to get around the constitutional arrangements in order to do the right thing. Australia has strong constitutional arrangements that say that education is the responsibility of the states, not the commonwealth, not the federal government. So how did we get there? We got there by making it a collaborative arrangement. All of this is decided not by the federal minister; all of this is decided by the six states, two territories and the one federal minister sitting at the table together.

This interview has been edited for length and to reflect the correct dates. To read the full piece visit: http://www.ncee.org/2012/01/international-reads/

Posted by Marc Tucker at 10:16 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

March 26, 2012

An Isolationist Report From the Council On Foreign Relations

The Council on Foreign Relations issued a report on American education last week that got a big play in the press.  In case you missed it, "U.S. Education Reform and National Security" does just what you thought it might--it charges that the sorry state of American education constitutes a clear and present danger to national security.

And they are right; it does.  Economists, military analysts and historians are in agreement that, these days, the ability to project military might is a function of national economic strength.  And, these days, economists are pretty much agreed that the strength of a national economy is heavily dependent on the skills of the national workforce.

But the Council's report goes further than that, to point out, as many have before, that the 25 percent of students who drop out of school are not qualified to serve in the military.  The same can be said of the 30 percent who graduate but don't know enough math, science and English to meet the standard set by the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.  That means that more than half of our young people are not qualified to serve in any capacity in the Armed Services of the United States.

An Army general in a position to know is quoted as saying that the fact that many recruits cannot read the training manuals for the technically sophisticated equipment the Army uses constitutes "an imminent and menacing threat to our national security."

Our military and intelligence services are very dependent on our ability to stay at the leading edge of many technologies, especially information technology.  Thirty-three percent of Chinese university graduates have a degree in engineering, compared to 4.5 percent of American university graduates (this is a huge number even recognizing that not all Chinese engineering degrees are equal to the degrees U.S. engineering graduates obtain).  Foreign students in U.S. engineering schools earn 57 percent of those degrees and most are not eligible to stay in the United States once they have their degree.  The shortage of qualified engineers, scientists and mathematicians is a serious problem for the entire defense establishment.

Our State Department and intelligence services are facing critical shortages of people who have the necessary language skills.  But, in Afghanistan, many of the Foreign Service officers in language-designated positions do not have the language skills they are supposed to have to fill those positions.  More broadly, few of our troops and officers have the cultural literacy they need to do their jobs.

None of this is news.  Indeed, almost all of the data about the problem has been produced and reproduced in countless documents over the years, but it should be sobering that the organization that, more than any other, represents the American foreign policy establishment, thinks that the state of the American education system represents a clear and present danger to the security of the United States.

There is nothing wrong and everything right with their call to action.  The problem is the solutions they offer.  There are three of them.  

The first calls for adding to the Common Core State Standards other standards for science, technology and foreign languages.  That is followed by a brief call for more "meaningful assessments," two sentences half-heartedly calling for unspecified changes in the way schools are financed and less than a sentence on raising standards for entrance into teachers colleges and giving teachers the skills they need to succeed.

Then the author warms to her first major theme, empowering educators, families, and students to choose.  This section goes on for pages and extols the virtues of various forms of public and private choice in American education.  Choice is presented as the American way, a close cousin of our penchant for innovation and the best way to assure a continuing wave of innovation, the lack of which is presented as the most serious problem confronting our public education system.

The last major recommendation calls for a regular national education audit, which would provide a wide range of disaggregated data in a uniform format for schools, districts and states across the nation.

I find this bizarre.  Of all the major organizations in the United States, the Council on Foreign Relations should be among the first to call for a serious look at the strategies that other countries have used to surpass us in the field of public education.  In the first half of the report, they dutifully present the data showing the extent of our shortfall when compared to other countries, and in the opening text they describe some of the specific policies that these countries use to achieve their aims.  But then, in the second half of the report, when it comes to figuring out what to do, they behave like their isolationist opponents; as if the rest of the world does not exist, had nothing to teach us, and is irrelevant.  

The Council on Foreign Relations has an interesting policy on listing the members of its task forces.  It will not release the names of the members until the reports are published.  Any member that wishes to disassociate himself or herself from the report may do so, but that person's name will not be on the report.  It is as if that person never participated at all.  Members that disagree also have the option of staying on the task force and writing a dissent to the recommendations.  Several of the members of this task force did exactly that including Linda Darling-Hammond (these additional and dissenting views can be found at the end of the report).

As Darling-Hammond points out, the countries that are beating the pants off us did not get there by privatizing their schools or promoting competition among them.  They did it by strengthening their public schools, in many cases by promoting cooperation among them.  She corrects statements made in the report designed to suggest that the evidence shows that privatization and competition among schools in the United States have been proven to be successful education reform strategies in this country (they have not).  She points out that the world's top-performing countries have invested in public education systems that serve all students, and goes on to say that the record of at least one country--Chile--shows that aggressive privatization used as a school reform strategy has produced a "huge and growing divide between rich and poor that has led to dangerous levels of social unrest."

If the presumably internationalist authors of this report had been interested in the strategies used by the top-performing countries to beat us, they would not only have cited the fact that these countries greatly raised their standards for getting into and graduating from teachers colleges in their problem statement, but they would have focused on this fact in the solutions they offered.  But they did not do that.

If they really cared about what it takes to drive student achievement up across the board, they would have emphasized much more than they did the grossly unfair distribution of financial resources among schools in this country and called for the United States to do what our most successful competitors do: put more money behind students who are harder to educate to high standards than those who are easier to educate.  But they did not do that, either.

If their aim was to produce changes in student performance on the scale they say they are after, they would hardly have spent time extolling the virtues of Teach for America (TFA) as their ideal with respect to teaching policy.  TFA supplies only about 4,500 of the 200,000 new teachers this country needs every year.  Given its design, TFA cannot be scaled to do much more than that.  It was never intended to be the answer to America's teacher quality problems.  There is plenty of evidence from other countries about the policies they used to produce entire teacher workforces of the quality of the TFA group.  The Council's task force might have placed those findings at the core of its recommendations, but it failed to do that.  

Looking at the pattern of the dissents to this report, it is clear that the sponsors of this report did an admirable job of assembling a diverse group of participants for the Task Force.  And then they did a thorough job of ignoring the advice they got from those closest to teachers and schools.  That is not what our most successful competitors have done.  Those who argue that strong accountability systems and market mechanisms will power this country to superior achievement in the education arena have strong political support, but there is precious little evidence that their agenda will work.  Every year we spend pursuing that agenda is a year lost in addressing the important challenges identified by this task force.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 4:12 PM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

March 19, 2012

On Borrowing Best Practices and Even Better Policies

Last week, I attended the Second International Summit on the Teaching Profession in New York City.  Like the first, this is a meeting of education ministers and teachers' union heads from countries around the world, most of which outperform the United States.  They've been talking about the strategies they've been using to improve their education systems.  Like the first Summit, it is fascinating.

Just before the Summit, the Asia Society, one of the Summit's sponsors, invited the top delegates from Shanghai, Hong Kong and Japan to share their views on some questions posed by Tony Jackson, the director of Asia Society's education program.  In this blog and several to follow, I will draw on this session and on the discussion at the summit for some observations about the major issues the United States is facing in education.

I'll start with some remarks made by Zhang Minxuan, the head of the Chinese delegation, at the Asia Society event.  Dr. Zhang is the Deputy Director of the Shanghai Education Commission and President of Shanghai Normal University.  In both of those positions, he has played a central role in devising the strategies that have propelled Shanghai to the very top of the OECD PISA league tables of national education performance.

In response to a question from Tony Jackson about how the people of Shanghai think about equity in education, Dr. Zhang said that ten years ago, the people of Shanghai just wanted schooling.  Now they want high quality schooling.  No one, he said, questions equity as a goal.  Everyone wants all Chinese students to have the same good opportunities to get a good education.  The question is how to achieve that goal.  It is relatively easy to achieve it with respect to things like physical facilities (I'll explain what he meant by that below).  The really hard part is making sure that all students have access to really good teachers.

After looking all over the world at the ways various countries addressed this issue, the Shanghai Education Commission decided to ask the best school principals and their faculties to take responsibility for managing other schools that perform less well.  Now the best school principals manage up to six schools.  When they do that, they often send some of their best teachers to the poor-performing schools for which they take responsibility.  Those teachers are, of course, very successful in those schools, and the result is that support grows among the whole faculty for making one of these teachers the new principal in that school.  In that way, over time, one good school and five bad ones become six good schools.

Guess where Dr. Zhang said the Shanghai Education Commission got the idea for doing this?  The answer is the United States.  They looked at the way our big city districts were inviting for-profit firms to take over poor-performing city schools.  They noticed that the results were usually not what we hoped for.  But they thought that this was to be expected.  For-profit firms would be more efficient, but not likely to prove better educators.  So they took the part of the idea that they liked—competent managers taking responsibility for managing multiple poor-performing schools—and ditched the part they did not think would work for them—having for-profit firms run the formerly poor-performing schools.  The result is dramatic improvements in low-performing schools.

I mentioned a moment ago that Dr. Zhang said that the easy part was fixing inequities in the distribution of quality physical facilities and other resources that did not involve human beings.  He said that the idea for introducing more equity into the distribution of such resources came from their visits to Switzerland.  They noticed that the richer cantons (like US states) in that country routinely shared some of their wealth with the poorer cantons, thus making the distribution of financial resources across Switzerland more equitable.  So that's what is now going on in China.  Wealthier parts of Shanghai are sharing their resources with poorer parts of Shanghai to even out the distribution of education resources in that enormous city, and the national government is sharing resources across China so that schools in poorer provinces in the China's interior have a chance to catch up with the remarkable improvements in education made by the richer provinces along the eastern and southern coasts of China.  It would be like the United States government implementing a deliberate policy of shifting resources for education from the wealthier states on our coasts to improve the schools in the poorer states in the south and interior west of the country.

Note that China did not simply borrow the ideas it is using.  It looked hard at what it saw elsewhere, took the wheat and left the chaff.  That is what it takes to go beyond borrowing to improving on the best of what you find elsewhere.  That is how the good become the best.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 9:02 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

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