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What Works

by Bill Gerritz 28 October, 2007

The October 18^th   Economist reported on a recently published study by McKinsey & Co.  This well known management consulting organization analyzed results from the Program for International Student Assessment.  Every three years, PISA reports on academic achievement of 15 year olds in 40 nations. Finland, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Singapore consistently have the best results. McKinsey  endeavored to identify the school factors that set these nations apart. They found three:

1)      have the best teachers

2)      allow teachers to learn from each other

3)      step in when pupils start to lag behind.

 At the end of this blog, I have attached exerpts from the Economist article so that you can read the specifics. It is a fascinating article.  I chose to blog about the article because for ISB, it offers mostly good news. The three factors are ones we have been emphasizing in our efforts to improve learning at ISB.

In my blog titled "Teacher Power", I discussed why ISB tries so hard to attract and retain great teachers.

Making it easier for teachers to collaborate about learning and to share good practices has been a theme at ISB for several years. Most teachers have common planning time with their colleagues. We encourage teachers to visit each other’s classrooms and to jointly plan units and lessons.

We have some processes in place to identify students who are not making adequate progress and then to help them.  We have seven special education teachers. Teacher teams often spend time worrying about students who are not progressing well. We also know our current processes can be improved so this is a major theme in our ISB 2010 improvement plan.

Oct 18th 2007
From The Economist print edition

What works in education: the lessons according to McKinsey

THE British government, says Sir Michael Barber, once an adviser to the former prime minister, Tony Blair, has changed pretty much every aspect of education policy in England and Wales, often more than once. “The funding of schools, the governance of schools, curriculum standards, assessment and testing, the role of local government, the role of national government, the range and nature of national agencies, schools admissions”—you name it, it's been changed and sometimes changed back. The only thing that hasn't changed has been the outcome. According to the National Foundation for Education Research, there had been (until recently) no measurable improvement in the standards of literacy and numeracy in primary schools for 50 years.

England and Wales are not alone. Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. No matter what you do, it seems, standards refuse to budge (see chart). To misquote Woody Allen, those who can't do, teach; those who can't teach, run the schools.

Why bother, you might wonder. Nothing seems to matter. Yet something must. There are big variations in educational standards between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which has established, first, that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea.

Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question: what do the successful lot have in common? Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich countries.

Now, an organisation from outside the teaching fold—McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments—has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says*, need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not sound exactly “first-of-its-kind” (which is how Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research, describes McKinsey's approach): schools surely do all this already? Actually, they don't. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would change education radically.

Begin with hiring the best. There is no question that, as one South Korean official put it, “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” Studies in Tennessee and Dallas have shown that, if you take pupils of average ability and give them to teachers deemed in the top fifth of the profession, they end up in the top 10% of student performers; if you give them to teachers from the bottom fifth, they end up at the bottom. The quality of teachers affects student performance more than anything else.

Yet most school systems do not go all out to get the best. The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a non-profit organisation, says America typically recruits teachers from the bottom third of college graduates. Washington, DC recently hired as chancellor for its public schools an alumna of an organisation called Teach for America, which seeks out top graduates and hires them to teach for two years. Both her appointment and the organisation caused a storm.

A bias against the brightest happens partly because of lack of money (governments fear they cannot afford them), and partly because other aims get in the way. Almost every rich country has sought to reduce class size lately. Yet all other things being equal, smaller classes mean more teachers for the same pot of money, producing lower salaries and lower professional status. That may explain the paradox that, after primary school, there seems little or no relationship between class size and educational achievement.

AP Asian values or good policy?

McKinsey argues that the best performing education systems nevertheless manage to attract the best. In Finland all new teachers must have a master's degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%.

They do this in a surprising way. You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries—Germany, Spain and Switzerland—would presumably be among the best. They aren't. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.

Nor do they try to encourage a big pool of trainees and select the most successful. Almost the opposite. Singapore screens candidates with a fine mesh before teacher training and accepts only the number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job. Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to demand. In both countries, teaching is a high-status profession (because it is fiercely competitive) and there are generous funds for each trainee teacher (because there are few of them).

South Korea shows how the two systems produce different results. Its primary-school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities. Getting in requires top grades; places are rationed to match vacancies. In contrast, secondary-school teachers can get a diploma from any one of 350 colleges, with laxer selection criteria. This has produced an enormous glut of newly qualified secondary-school teachers—11 for each job at last count. As a result, secondary-school teaching is the lower status job in South Korea; everyone wants to be a primary-school teacher. The lesson seems to be that teacher training needs to be hard to get into, not easy.

Teaching the teachers

Having got good people, there is a temptation to shove them into classrooms and let them get on with it. For understandable reasons, teachers rarely get much training in their own classrooms (in contrast, doctors do a lot of training in hospital wards). But successful countries can still do much to overcome the difficulty.

Singapore provides teachers with 100 hours of training a year and appoints senior teachers to oversee professional development in each school. In Japan and Finland, groups of teachers visit each others' classrooms and plan lessons together. In Finland, they get an afternoon off a week for this. In Boston, which has one of America's most improved public-school systems, schedules are arranged so that those who teach the same subject have free classes together for common planning. This helps spread good ideas around. As one educator remarked, “when a brilliant American teacher retires, almost all of the lesson plans and practices that she has developed also retire. When a Japanese teacher retires, she leaves a legacy.”

Lastly, the most successful countries are distinctive not just in whom they employ so things go right but in what they do when things go wrong, as they always do. For the past few years, almost all countries have begun to focus more attention on testing, the commonest way to check if standards are falling. McKinsey's research is neutral on the usefulness of this, pointing out that while Boston tests every student every year, Finland has largely dispensed with national examinations. Similarly, schools in New Zealand and England and Wales are tested every three or four years and the results published, whereas top-of-the-class Finland has no formal review and keeps the results of informal audits confidential.

But there is a pattern in what countries do once pupils and schools start to fail. The top performers intervene early and often. Finland has more special-education teachers devoted to laggards than anyone else—as many as one teacher in seven in some schools. In any given year, a third of pupils get one-on-one remedial lessons. Singapore provides extra classes for the bottom 20% of students and teachers are expected to stay behind—often for hours—after school to help students.

None of this is rocket science. Yet it goes against some of the unspoken assumptions of education policy. Scratch a teacher or an administrator (or a parent), and you often hear that it is impossible to get the best teachers without paying big salaries; that teachers in, say, Singapore have high status because of Confucian values; or that Asian pupils are well behaved and attentive for cultural reasons. McKinsey's conclusions seem more optimistic: getting good teachers depends on how you select and train them; teaching can become a career choice for top graduates without paying a fortune; and that, with the right policies, schools and pupils are not doomed to lag behind.

*How the world's best performing schools systems come out on top. McKinsey & Co.

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Comment on this post

Comment 4: lyla Weinsheimer

As a Canadian teacher I recognize these results as being the minimum required for an effective Ontario teacher. It seems that many mediocre teachers stick to their curriculum regardless of the level of knowledge of their students. It is a basic premise that we begin with what they understand and move them laterally as well as forward. This is the intervention needed with most disciplines in every grade. In Egypt we are dealing with money that buys marks and teacher and administrators with little or no integrity.

Comment 3: Mick Purcell

Fantastic! What a pleasure to see an administrator who understands the central component of an excellent education. He must have had good teachers!

Comment 2: Srishti Vaswani

I think this was a really interesting article. This argument of good teaching vis-a-vis high salaries has been a bone of contention in all educational circles across the globe. In any teacher's life, high motivation stems not only from having reasons to be motivated (monetary primarily) but several other factors such as aptitude, perspective toward education, amongst other internal and external motivators. However, in every child's life there may be that one special teacher who motivated him/her and changed the course of their life. I know I had several. So what is it really that makes a teacher that wonderful employee who leaves permanent impressions in impressionable minds? Is it his/her training, the amount of salary received or an inner calling that makes her/him a true model to emulate? Working at an International School myself, as a SEN teacher, makes me think that the amount of money I get is not the only factor, it is the freedom to be creative in my teaching approach and the opportunity for professional development that tops the list of making me a teacher that can make a positive difference in a child's life. As far as testing and formalising student selection goes, I think the approach is useful but stretched to unreasonable proprtions to combat the global competetive markets. A balance in all of this is indeed the call of the hour. Srishti Vaswani

Comment 1: International Educator

I was surprised (and somewhat relieved) to find the Canadian education system being praised in the Oct. 18th, 2007 article from The Economist. Over here in Canada, our education systems have gone through so much change and controversy in the past ten years. My experiences of being schooled in Nigeria, doing an exchange year in Switzerland, and later training to be a teacher in Canada have given me a lot of insights into the various education systems employed worldwide. That, combined with my three years of teaching in Japan, have confirmed my deep belief that what teachers bring to the table needs to be respected and reciprocated by administrators. Teachers alone do not have all the answers. Neither do administrators (or government policy makers) alone. However, working together, we can achieve a lot. The article rightly discussed the importance of dedicated support, from administrators and policy makers, for teachers. Teachers, at the beginning of their careers, often have much enthusiasm for teaching. However, that can quickly be curtailed by school administrators who have become disconnected from the classroom and from the realities of youths. I know that in my professional life, I have benefited most from colleagues who have employed best practices --and have done so a spirit of openness and honesty. A teacher can not be open and honest about their professional practice if they lack good faith and expert guidance from their administrators. No education system is immune from this problem. Not Japan (there is a high rate of depression and severe work/life imbalance amongst the teachers there), and sadly also not Canada. Though, according to the article, these two countries have superb education systems or student achievement, if they are to develop to the next level, more attention needs to be focused on validating teachers' expertise and on facilitating their continued positive engagement with the profession. Mr. Gerritz, the initiatives that you are implementing at ISB to attract and retain great teachers are similar to the initiatives that are being introduced (and in some cases, being revived after having been abandoned) by school boards here in Canada. Making it easier for teachers to collaborate about learning / share good practices, and allowing them common planning time with their colleagues are basic things that I am glad to see progressive administrators championing for their teachers. Together, we can be so much more. Yours in education. Atin Bank.

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