students fail - and professor loses job

Students Fail - and Professor Loses Job

Do we help people from disadvantaged backgrounds by some form of affirmative action, by the modification of standards?

One issue which seems clear to me is that institutions should never create an expectation for students from disadvantaged backgrounds that anything less than full attendance is acceptable. Talented students might be able to do very well with poor attendance but in most cases poor attendance equates with poor performance.

Teachers need to find new ways to engage and motivate students without dropping standards. Students need to accept responsibility for learning. These simple statements seem to have become quite complicated.

It's wrong that someone who takes a stand for high standards should lose their job.

What isn't mentioned in this article is the post modern trend towards cultural relativism that erodes the very notion of standards, it all depends on your perspective.

High standards are attacked from both the Left and the Right: The Left from the point of view of "inclusion", the Right from the point of view of "back to basics". The cultural "Left" (what I call the pseudo left) is more dominant, they promote a politics of inclusion, participation and flattery. It sounds progressive to include people. But it's not a response to a demand from below, it's imposed from above by cultural commissars who are looking around for some way to "engage" the "disengaged masses"
- truth slips from view ...

... some see truth itself is seen as a meaningless concept – due to their embrace of cultural relativism, the importance of "diversity", celebration of difference, a particularist world view linked to the politics of identity, repulsion or revulsion from modernity, all knowledge is seen as socially constructed, different views are equally valid, experience is more valuable than theory
- constructivism and objectivity

We have entered a period where there is incredibly pressure to look good, to achieve well by accountability measurements that are often dubious - the fuzzy standards of outcomes based education. This achieves very little real improvement but generates enormous amounts of paper work and wasted time.

I remain quite conflicted on this issue. On the one hand I see a clear need to establish standards of improvement for the most disadvantaged groups in our society, indigenous Australians in particular. On the other hand, there is a need for sweeping educational reform along the lines of slow deep learning and meta cognition which is perhaps very hard to measure.

staffing high needs schools

My focus question here, arising out of earlier discussions about Teach for America and the proposed Teach for Australia is:

What is the best way or a good way to go about staffing high-needs (or disadvantaged or urban rustbelt or remote indigenous) schools?

Recruiting and Retaining Quality Teachers for High-Needs Schools by Barnett Berry (bio) et al (pdf 23pp)

from Barnett Berry bio:

Dr. Barnett Berry's career, which began as an under-prepared, inner- city high school teacher in 1978, has focused on a wide range efforts to close America’s student achievement gap by closing the teaching quality gap.

As part of an earlier discussion on this blog about Teach for America (It sounds like a miracle), Sylvia Martinez recommended I read a shorter article by Barnett Berry. I didn't think much of that one but this longer pdf did impress me. One issue here is that it's difficult to discuss a complex issue effectively in the standard web2.0 article length. Web2.0 has produced a glut of writers many of whom don't read in depth.

first para:

The facts are daunting: Poor children and those of color are far less likely to be taught by qualified teachers—no matter how the term “qualified teacher” is defined. Studies consistently show that teachers who are better trained, more experienced, and licensed in the subjects they teach are more likely to be teaching in more affluent schools, serving more academically advantaged students.

YES, the education system is a well constructed shipwreck, designed to select the best swimmers - always has been and those who try to change this are brave

myth -> financial incentives are the silver bullet

YES, financial incentives are not a silver bullet but they are an important part of the mix, if we are serious about quality education for the disadvantaged (BB is saying this too)

Why teachers leave high needs schools:
one study:

• poor support from school administration
• lack of student motivation
• little teacher influence over decision making
• student discipline problems

another study:

• inadequate system - poor professional development, too little time to plan lessons
• bureaucratic impediments - paperwork, interruptions, teaching restrictions
• lack of collegial support

Why teachers stay at high needs schools:
one study:

• supportive school leadership (39%)
• salary and benefits (22%)

beliefs that might cause them to doubt success (and might leave to leaving):

• "overall working conditions would not allow them to be successful"
• "feel they are not sufficiently prepared"

another study:

• strong principal leadership
• collegial staff with shared teaching philosophy
• adequate resources
• supportive / active parent community

Recommendations from highly accomplished teachers

1) Transform teaching and learning conditions in high needs schools

• Class size is an important issue in high needs schools
• high stakes testing and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) does not encourage effective teaching
• there is inadequate preparation time [cf. Japan, China, Singapore]
• universal access to pre-school is important

2) Prepare and support teachers for specific challenges posed by working in high needs schools

• many teachers don't want to work in schools where it is very difficult or impossible to be successful
• utilise training which is job embedded, which focuses on student work and is led by peers in collaboration with peers
• just in time mentoring can be problematic - there is a lack of time to discuss pedagogy in depth and mentors must be of high quality to be effective (more funding for quality mentors can help here)
  

3) Recruit and develop administrators who can draw on the expertise of specially-prepared teacher leaders

• many administrators do not know how to support teachers, many use rigid, formulaic approaches
• "it takes a village to raise a teacher"
• convert some assistant Principal positions to teacher coach leadership positions

4) Create a menu of recruitment incentives, but focus on growing teaching expertise within high-needs schools.
Supportive Principals, freedom to use professional judgment and working with like minded and similarly skilled colleagues means more than extra pay

The last thing policymakers should do is develop a single incentive to attract accomplished teachers to high needs schools. Hence the word menu, above

Different teachers have different needs depending on their life circumstances, their geographic location and their age

5) Build awareness among policymakers, practitioners, and the public about the importance of National Board Certification for high-needs schools.

Conclusion:

" ... salary incentives alone will not suffice to attract and retain good teachers for high-needs schools. Working conditions matter—and most notably, access to good principals and skilled colleagues, lower class sizes and smaller student loads, high quality professional development, and classroom resources needed to help students meet high academic standards are critically important"

This analysis does impact back onto the Teach for Australia proposal

I've added a new tag - disadvantage - to this and some older posts, to help keep track and connect the dots

wendy kopp's book

one day, all children ... the unlikely triumph of teach for america and what I learned along the way (2001) by Wendy Kopp

I posted a brief comment about teach for america earlier (it sounds like a miracle), which attracted some helpful, critical responses from sylvia martinez (comments) and tom hoffman (blog)

My original interest arose partly by the endorsement of teach for america by the proposed teach for australia scheme as a solution to the australian indigenous educational crisis - even though it is important to note again there are significant differences b/w TFAmerica and TFAustralia, eg. TFAustralia pairs experienced mentors ("Fellows") with new recruits ("Associates")

In this post I want to say what Wendy Kopp says and does not say in her book

I still think it's amazing - it sounds like a miracle

Kopp's book is not analytical about education. eg. there is nothing of any substance at all in there about learning theory. Also the short teacher inservice program conducted by TFAmerica is at best highly problematic, from the Kopp account.

Kopp herself has never taught in a disadvantaged school. Her strength's are fund raising, management and promotional skills (including self promotion), which she learnt painfully

What I find amazing is the simplicity of the vision and the fact that it has succeeded significantly against the odds

Simplicity of the vision: Recruit high quality graduates to teach in disadvantaged schools

There is evidence of success in Kopp's book - although quite a lot of the evidence is anecdotal ("I visited this school and inspirational corp member was working their guts out doing this, this and this and achieving this")

More importantly, independent analysis has confirmed the success of Teach for America. This is documented in the Teach for Australia paper:

The most rigorous study to date, conducted in 2004 by Mathematica Policy Research, found that TFA teachers had a positive impact on math achievement of students as compared to students of all other teachers (who may or may not have a traditional certification background). TFA-taught students achieved the effect of roughly an additional month of math instruction over the course of a year. In reading, TFA teachers delivered similar gains as other teachers. However, TFA teachers had more substantial gains when compared to other novice teachers. In other words, Teach For America teachers were “an appealing pool of candidates…there is little risk that hiring TFA teaches will reduce achievement.” The study also notes the need for “programs or policies that can attract good teachers to schools in the most disadvantaged communities” and states “our findings show that TFA is one such program.”

The various statements in Kopp's book (some more evangelical, some more statistical quoting various surveys) are congruent with this analysis

For me the important thing is this. No one has successfully tackled educational disadvantage system wide systematically before, at least in Australia. There have been some individual successes in schools with inspirational Principals but no systemic success. Now we have a model that shows some real potential for success, warts and all.

The subtitle says it, "the unlikely success of teach for america ..."

At the end of the book there is some speculation about some of the reasons for success. This bit was interesting:

Perhaps the economic downturn, and the rise in civic committment following the tragic events of September 11 ... (Afterword, p. 187, 2003 edition)

The Australian education system, like the American has a very large gap b/w rich and poor. We need to take notice of this scheme.

Kopp's book is interesting but the real story of Teach for America will have to be told by the teachers themselves

teaching to the test

Teach for Australia says this:

Teach for Australia would develop standardised literacy and numeracy tests for the Fellow to assess their students. These would be short, low-stakes tests conducted every month that track each student’s performance in the key skill areas

... we need a no-excuses, unrelenting focus on performance in Australia’s remote schools. Monthly tests in literacy and numeracy are a key mechanism to achieving this. Good teachers, of course, are likely to do daily or weekly mini-tests (in addition to the monthly tests) to gauge student progress and determine areas of weakness.

Will this mean that the Fellows will simply ‘teach to the test’? Quite possibly, but if the tests are well constructed and properly assess the knowledge that students are supposed to learn, then ‘teaching to the test’ presents no difficulties.
- Teach for Australia

I think this needs to be discussed and fleshed out a lot more. The main potential problem of teaching to the test is rote learning - knowing an answer is "correct" but not understanding why it is correct or how that knowledge might be applied in some sort of variation of the theme or "real life" situation.

Of course there is a huge literature on this and the curriculum wars rage on unabated. Here is one example, from many:

... many children who correctly answered pencil-and-paper fraction questions such as 5/11 x 792 = q could not pour out one-third of a glass of water, and of those who could, only a small proportion had any idea of what fraction of the original full glass of water remained.
- Fractions: A Weeping Sore in Mathematics Education

My view is that good teaching methodology is a continuum from constructionist to instructionist and teachers have to walk the walk along the whole of that continuum.

Related: Noel Pearson's "radical centre" concept applied to education

teacher training

Here are the sorts of things covered in teacher training courses. These courses typically run for one year:

1. classroom management and behaviour management
2. lesson and program preparation
3. induction into a real school
4. subject expertise
5. learning theory
6. history of education and pedagogy
7. curriculum framework brainwashing (in South Australia it's called SACSA, a social constructivist framework which many experienced teacher despise)
   

The point I would make is that some of these things take considerably less than one year (1,2 and 3) and others take considerably more than one year (4, 5 and 6), to acquire a base level of competence. Others (point 7) are just a complete waste of time.

Student teachers vary a lot. Some don't relate or connect very easily to students. Others don't have a strong subject knowledge and make elementary mistakes in maths or whatever when teaching. To correct these problems will take a lot of hard work over more than a year.

Student teachers with a strong subject base who connect readily with the kids and are curious about learning quickly become good teachers.

I don't really have a problem with highly successful students (strong subject expertise) being given a crash course in teaching methods (8 weeks - Teach for Australia - is better than 5 weeks - Teach for America) and then being paired with an experienced mentor (Teach for Australia proposal) when they go out and teach in a disadvantaged school

This seems a reasonable response to real problems:

• the problem of the low and declining subject expertise in many of those who apply to teach
• the problem of hard to staff disadvantaged schools
• mathophobia - some primary teachers can't do grade 5 maths according to one expert
• the long tail of under achievement in Australian schools

The McKinsey report (page 31) recommends scrapping university based teacher training in favour of a more hands on just in time interventionist approach:

• move the initial period of training from the lecture theatre to the classroom
• placing coaches in schools to support teachers
• selecting and developing effective instructional leaders
• enabling teachers to learn from each other

None of this amounts to radical change which does require delving into points 5 and 6 on the initial list above. However, these issues take more than a year to understand anyway, they tend to be taken up by those with a deep passion for epistemology, which perhaps is not taught well at teacher training courses anyway.

The situation with remote indigenous education in Australia is so bad and so urgent that a quicker, simpler solution ought to be supported --> Teach for Australia. This does not preclude more radical transformations and in fact may help create the conditions to support such transformations.

It sounds like a miracle

an out of context response to Tom Hoffman:

"We -- meaning many US K-12 educational bloggers -- tend to do a lousy job of differentiating between various schemes and strategies for school or educational reform. We just sort of wave our hands a vague morass of undifferentiated correct-sounding happy talk. Rarely do we try to determine which of these things have more or less value than any other. In that sense, we haven't even started a conversation
- Compare and Contrast"

out of context because I'm ignorant about UbD, superficial about Bloom and Miguel writes far too much for me to keep up

But I wanted to say something about school reform and how it is framed

People have been talking about radical school reform for a hundred years (Dewey, Holt, Illich, Papert etc.) but it never happens in a way that scales significantly

Now we have a new radical school reform movement (web2.0) with bloggers becoming frustrated that it's not scaling and whinging about it - why don't other teachers follow my example and do what I do?

Well, this is because the cutting edge doesn't scale because it is the cutting edge. If it did scale then it wouldn't be the cutting edge. Often people are more advanced than others and they don't realise that because it just seems obvious to them because they "get it". At any rate, many teachers shut the door and teach and don't talk or think about epistemology at recess, lunch or after school as they sit in their "teachers cupboard" (a teacher once told me that when she was in Primary school she thought that after school teachers didn't go home but sat in their teachers cupboard)

eg. my favourite, Papert's constructionism, didn't scale not because it didn't work but because it demanded far too much from the average teacher

The only things that scale in education are those that follow the KISS principle

I've recently discovered Teach for America and would like to find out more about it because it does seem to be scaling, making a real difference in quality and is simple enough to qualify for the KISS principle

I've ordered this book to learn more:
One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach for America and What I Learned Along the Way by Wendy Kopp

This scheme claims to be succeeding in mobilising large numbers of high quality teacher learners, in cutting bureaucratic red tape (5 week teacher training course), targeting the disadvantaged and appealing to the powerful sentiment of "making a difference"

In the context of a hundred years of failed radical school reform, this sounds like a miracle

"What I have learned in building Teach For America and from our corps members and alumni suggests that it will take three things to raise achievement levels in low-income schools.

First, it will take committing ourselves to the vision that one day, all children in our nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education...

Second, we must recognize that accomplishing our mission will take more of just about everything - including more time and, ultimately, more resources...There's an understandable discomfort with the idea that it will take more money to make schools in low-income areas work. We've all seen and read about too many examples of wasted resources in schools. In some cases merely reallocating the resources already spent in low-income areas can make a difference. And I learned through my experience with Teach for America that money isn't everything, that tough financial situations force high-quality, innovative thinking. But I've also learned that although resources are not the solution to everything, they are necessary to carry out the big plans...

The third aspect of realizing our vision is the recognition that it will take a long-term, institution-building approach...when people think about what makes great organizations work, they see it's not a unique strategy. It's that the organizations have built the systems to achieve results, respond to change, and continually improve...Building effective school systems will not be easy. It will take superior leadership and a lot of hard work. It will require a critical look at all the forces - from how school boards govern to how states regulate - that could prevent school district leadership from taking any an institution-building approach. The good news is that there's no mystery about what it will take. The solutions are within our reach.
- Wendy Kopp, from this amazon reader review"

The Teach for Australia plan, based partly on Teach for America maybe our best shot to improve education

curriculum reform will not improve education without quality teachers

Some deep systemic problems of the Australian education system:

• mathophobia amongst many students and teachers - see the incredible quote below that many primary teachers can't do grade 5 maths
• Low status of teaching as a profession and often low quality of new teachers, who have never had very strong content knowledge
  
• burnout of older teachers, after years of teaching 5 lines to often difficult classes
  
• although our system (Private / government) produces some high quality students we have to acknowledge the long tail of under-achievement in Australian schools

Some extracts from Teach for Australia:

(the need for) Very strong content knowledge, particularly in English and maths. The lack of content knowledge has been a criticism of many existing teachers and teacher education degrees. Applicants to be Associate Teachers would be expected to arrive with outstanding content knowledge. As Dr Lawrence Ingvarsen from the Australian Council of Educational Research has stated: “The research indicates that you cannot use what are known to be effective teaching techniques unless you do understand the content deeply.” (page 9) ...

It is frequently noted that the quality of aspiring teachers has been in decline in the last few decades, particularly at the primary level... Professor Louden from the University of Western Australia notes that a “very large proportion of students [doing combined education degrees] cannot do grade 5 maths, because they have not learnt maths at school and they became primary teachers because it is something you can do without being any good at maths.” The National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy found that “participants [education faculty members] reported that many students lacked the literacy skills required to be effective teachers of reading. These students needed help to develop their foundational literacy skills.” (page 11)

I did a search on the Louden reference and found more detail in this article from July 2007, in The Australian:

He said poor maths skills among primary school teachers were an example of the underlying problem of the quality of those entering the education system.

While the educational debate centred on curriculum, the real challenge was to reverse the slide in the quality of people entering the profession.

Professor Louden said changing curriculums would not improve standards. "What drives improvement in schooling is teachers, one by one. It is not even good schools; it is good teachers. Good schools are schools with lots of good teachers," he said.

While half of the variance in school performance was due to the individual student, he said one-third was due to the teacher a student had in a year, 10 per cent year-on-year was in the student's socio-economic background and 5-10 per cent in the school, over and above the teacher.

"The underlying problem is that the social status of teaching has dropped dramatically," he said. "Every occupation that has been invented since 1970 is a graduate occupation and has gone into the occupational hierarchy above teaching.

"When I was a boy, most accountants did not have degrees. Now the biggest faculty in every university is a commerce faculty, and they are all people who are expecting to earn more and have higher social status than teaching."

While the top Australian students were among the best in the world, the system was failing those in the bottom half.

"Throughout the bottom half of kids, we just do not have it right anywhere beyond Years 3 or 4," he said. "Kids in the bottom quartile of mathematics performance at Year 5 probably learn no more mathematics, although they do another five years of mathematics.

With more searching I found this summary of current government thinking from a 2007 Senate Inquiry into the Quality of school education (162 pp):

Convincing evidence presented to the committee has stressed the centrality of good teaching as the factor which has most bearing on educational quality. Good teachers are the key to good performance. Good schools are those which are made up of good teachers. The committee has found that at a time of growing consensus on curriculum improvements, the threat to improved standards may result from the insufficient numbers of more able recruits to the teaching profession, and the failure of employing authorities to place a sufficiently high priority on measures which maintain the professional and intellectual vigour of teachers. This is particularly so in the case of teachers who have been at the chalkface for many years and whose sense of vocation is under strain.

It appears that in some respects the training offered to teachers does not match the needs of schools for more rigorous and challenging teaching. While this may in part be attributed to declining entry standards to teaching, the committee notes that there is some dissatisfaction with the ability of many new teachers to cope with the challenges of teaching. A great deal of emphasis has been placed recently on improving the experience of practise teaching, including its duration, vis-à-vis the time spent on more theoretical aspects of training. This committee has other concerns. It believes that many new teachers have insufficient grounding in the actual subject content they are teaching. That is, they do not know enough history, have limited appreciation of literature through not reading enough of it, and are ignorant of, and frightened of, mathematics and science. This has a direct effect on the quality of educational outcomes because it can impede student intellectual growth.

Schools are our most public institutions. They are the most vulnerable to criticism and are often perceived as failing in their mission. The committee agrees that much of this criticism is unfair, and based on misperceptions. It takes little account of the need for schools and teachers to accommodate and deal with students whose social conditioning, often in dysfunctional families, thwarts their willingness to learn and weakens their ambitions.

But often the criticism is not unfair. Schools and systems need to acknowledge that such criticism often result from informed observation of poor performance or neglect of students' leaning difficulties. The growth of skills and abilities may be stymied as much by the absence of challenge as by class disruption or slow progress of some students in a class. The failure to organise a school so as to maximise learning opportunities for all students partly explains the existence of the long tail of under-achievement which characterises the relative performance of Australian schools, compared to those in Canada, in the various international comparative surveys (page 15)

teach for australia

I'd like to become involved in this scheme because it addresses the most important current educational need in Australia.

Teach for Australia: a practical plan to get great teachers into remote schools (23pp)

INTRODUCTION

There is an educational crisis in remote Australia that is not abating. On the key literacy and numeracy benchmark measures, remote students are well behind mainstream levels. Amongst Indigenous students in remote areas, educational results are at catastrophic levels: the most recent publicly available data shows that only 4 percent of remote, Indigenous students in the Northern Territory passed the basic minimum Year 3 reading benchmark. Students are leaving school functionally illiterate with little or no chance of properly engaging in the real economy.

The current approach to remote education must change. The existing system is not delivering, and current reform is too slow. Fundamental reform is required.

Critically, school attendance – a particular problem in remote schools – must be addressed. Welfare payments should be made conditional upon a good school attendance record. The Australian Government has already announced plans to move in this direction. A decisive impact on the quality of school education can also be achieved through focussing on the most important lever to improve educational outcomes – the quality of teachers. ANU research shows that a teacher who rates in the 90th percentile of performance can achieve in half of a year what a 10th percentile teacher can achieve in a full year. Nothing else has been shown to have such a stark impact on results.

This paper outlines a plan to ensure that remote schools receive a higher proportion of the 90th percentile teachers. It recommends the creation and funding of an independent organisation – Teach for Australia – that recruits and evaluates high quality teachers to be available for placement in remote schools. Teach for Australia would create:

• Teach for Australia Fellows. Experienced teachers who have an exceptional track record in delivering results would be recruited as Teach for Australia Fellows and would receive an annual $50,000 fellowship (in addition to the usual salary package) once placed in a remote school. The fellowship would be contingent on the teacher regularly assessing student’s literacy and numeracy performance and ensuring that students are progressing against objective measures in these areas. A teacher who is not delivering would not have their Fellowship renewed.

• Teach for Australia Associate Teachers. The ‘best and brightest’ individuals who are currently not in the teaching profession would be recruited, provided with two months of intensive training and then placed alongside a Fellow in remote schools. A $20,000 stipend would be provided (in addition to the usual salary package). As with the Fellows’ stipend, the Associate Teachers’ stipend would be contingent upon adequate performance. This pathway is modelled on the successful ‘Teach For America’ initiative and the UK’s ‘Teach First’.

As well as recruiting and placing high quality teachers, Teach for Australia would provide the training for the Associate Teachers and professional development for the Fellows. It would also develop tools for effective teaching in the classroom, including ongoing student assessments to inform teaching and to be included as part of regular performance reviews. It would undertake these activities in conjunction with Macquarie University, through the establishment of the Teach for Australia Academy for Effective Teaching. Academy training would also be made available to Indigenous Educators who work in schools where a Fellow-Associate pair are employed.

teachers union opposes viable plan to help the most disadvantaged group in australia

Everyone knows that aboriginal education is a disaster zone

... the relative failures affecting students in the mainstream pale in comparison to the absolute educational failures diminishing the life prospects of thousands of students in remote indigenous communities.

A significant minority of students from these areas leave school without having acquired any literacy or numeracy skills, and are therefore unlikely to participate in the real economy. This is the most critical disaster in Australian education
- Incentives will bring top teachers

Noel Pearson has a viable plan to do something about it. Read the above article. Pearson's plan borrows from the McKinsey report.

Who is against this? The teachers union.

Adam Lampe, from the Australian Education Union, says any introduction would be fiercely resisted.

"We would fight wholeheartedly against the introduction of any kind of performance pay," Mr Lampe said
- Plan to entice teachers to remote Australia

So the union is against a viable plan to help the most disadvantaged people in Australia.

The role of the unions is to help the disadvantaged? Maybe at one stage, earlier on in their history. Not any more. The role of the union is to help their middle class members. Too bad about the disadvantaged.

McKinsey: run schools as you would run a successful business

I've been trying to make sense of the McKinsey report, which I now see as a combination of insightful common sense and opportunistic fudge, the latter with respect to the disadvantaged. None of the reports ever solve that problem. Whole system change is usually about a few insights, realism (money) and fudge / deception. Which is why it drives me mad. But its worth looking at this in anticipation of whether the Rudd/Gillard “education revolution” will pick up on it.

I'm missing detail here. I'm not spelling out the fudge in detail but am happy to discuss with anyone who has actually read the report.

btw the McKinsey report pdf has the copy feature turned off, proof that it's not intended to be discussed – it's just "experts" dumping their expertise onto us.

The McKinsey report is American (but with extensive comments about different education systems around the world) and the Brian Caldwell article is an attempt to apply some of the McKinsey thinking to Australia

McKinsey report: How the world's best performing school systems come out on top

Are we serious about an education revolution? Brian Caldwell
(many of the comments following the Caldwell blog are worth reading – I try to cover an aspect of the “big picture” here not covered in those comments)

Some stand out, slap in the face ideas / facts from Caldwell (his article is short, worth reading the whole thing):

“The gap between our high and low performing students is amongst the widest in OECD nations. Up to one-half of all teachers plan to leave the profession within 10 years. The number of students in private schools has jumped by 21.5 per cent in the past 10 years compared to 1.2 per cent in government schools ”

“Every teacher in Australia entering the profession from a university should have a master's degree - as in top-performing Finland - with targets for minimum ENTER scores progressively raised to match those for entry to other highly-sought degrees.”

My context for this is the Kevin Rudd / Julia Gillard promise for an “education revolution” and the inadequacy of what they have delivered (no documents indicating deep thought) so far

What McKinsey and Caldwell are both saying is that to improve education you have to improve the quality of teachers and the status of the profession.

Teacher quality is the most important factor. "The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers". The early years are particularly important. The negative impact on students of a series of bad teachers in the early years is severe and irreversible

That is a bit startling because in a way its pretty obvious. How did we get to be where we are today and why hasn't this been tried before?

In Australia up until now the quality issue has been managed largely through elite, expensive Private Schools, which have had the right to hire and fire (teachers and students). Why is this no longer good enough?

With globalisation, the knowledge economy and increased competition, education has become more important. So, these reports are about the stronger possibility of governments being prepared to spend some money strategically in order to move up the ladder of OECD educational performance because that could well be more related to success in the current economy. These ideas have been around for a long time. Barry Jones wrote Sleepers Awake: Technology and the Future of Work, predicting these trends in 1982. Over the years with more globalisation and interconnection the need to work smarter has accelerated. And so it comes to pass that the need to get the best value for dollar in education expenditure has crept up the political ladder in terms of importance.

The detail makes sense if you keep this big picture in mind. It's a globally inspired outcome based cost-benefit analysis devoid of any wider educational vision. The authors are saying we should run schools in a similar way to how you would run a successful business. The vision is higher quality teachers on reasonable (but not high) money working harder in a profession with higher status. Nice trick if you can get it and according to McKinsey you can get it if you try

Where to spend more money:

• On teacher quality and marketing of the profession

Other strategic reforms:

• Select teachers before training them not after, the pay them while being trained with a guaranteed job at the end
• Coaches for teachers in schools, including Principals who are coaches. ie. Principals as educational leaders not as bureaucrats who become overwhelmed with the paper work
• Far more classroom based teacher training
• Facilitate more of teachers learning from each other
• Front loading compensation - the recommended wage structure is designed for the gullible: front end loading to suck them in initially but then a relatively flat increase in the ensuing years. I don't see how this is going to change the problem identified by Caldwell, “half of all teachers plan to leave the profession within 10 years”

Where to spend less money:

• Have fewer teachers overall, reverse the trend to smaller class sizes

Much is made of the fact that measured literacy hasn't improved in the USA despite increased spending and reduced class sizes. A good quality teacher will produce better results with larger classes than a poor quality teacher with smaller classes. I would accept this as true. eg. many Private Schools in Australia have large class sizes and achieve better results. For those students the parents are more involved, the classes are better behaved and the overall culture is more pro-learning than in many of their government school counterparts

Some Charter schools have been successful but they have not been successful overall (McKinsey, p. 14). Hence, McKinsey loses interest because they are only interested in whole system change, not more radical but small scale change

Where to fudge:

• On helping Disadvantaged schools, which are the ones that really need smaller class sizes.

It's true that you can get away with larger classes in elite Private schools but that doesn't work in Disadvantaged schools.


SOME OTHER HAPHAZARD CRITICAL THOUGHTS:

Real improvements in literacy, science and maths will ultimately develop internal to those domains and research into how to better communicate those subjects to young people. The outcomes based approach assumes that we already know what we are doing and just have to measure it.

I recall that brilliant books have been written about the search for quality. Zen and the art of motor cycle maintenance. And how much harder it is to find than measuring outcomes.

In view of the limited scope of the study the wider issues to do with literacy are not explored. eg. the impact of multimedia on reading scores, see "Why Johnny And Janey Can't Read, And Why Mr. And Ms. Smith Can't Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in a tumultuous time" by Mark Federman
and
Twilight of the Books: A recent study has shown a steep decline in literary reading among schoolchildren by Caleb Crain

How is teacher quality measured? In systemic cyclical fashion. The right stuff is defined as the top performers within the current education system (which is seen to be failing in many respects). South Korea selects its teachers from the top 5%, Finland from the top 10%, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%. Those who succeed in the current system represent quality and should be the source of who we select to put back into the system.

information about the co-author:
(Michael Barber's) book was The Learning Game:Arguments for an Education Revolution. Its author, Michael Barber, former research officer for England's largest teachers' union and later professor of education, became Tony Blair's chief adviser on education the day after the election. He now works for McKinsey & Company and is co-author of McKinsey's report How the World's BestPerforming School Systems Come Out on Top, which is currently the most widely read study worldwide of what should lie at the heart of an education revolution

McKinsey quote: ... smart countries will succeed by being "swift to adapt, slow to complain and open to change"

“Slow to complain” ... you get it now? Just compete in the global economy – don't ask too many questions