Tag Archives: international standards

Shared Vision for the Next Generation of Teaching

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U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined seven fellow national education leaders last month in signing a shared vision for the future of the teaching profession during the opening 2012 Labor Management Conference in Cincinnati.

“Lessons and best practices from talented teachers is the driving force behind this shared vision for transforming the teaching profession,” said Duncan.  “The principles outlined in the document represent ways to strengthen and elevate teaching as one of our nation’s most valued and respected professions.”

The shared vision, Transforming the Teaching Profession, focuses on three main goals:  1) high levels of student achievement judged by multiple measures; 2) increased equity through narrowing achievement and opportunity gaps; and 3) increased global competitiveness.  Seven core principles make up the elements of achieving these goals. They include:

  1. A culture of shared responsibility and leadership;
  2. Recruiting top talent into schools prepared for success;
  3. Continuous growth and professional development;
  4. Effective teachers and principals;
  5. A professional career continuum with competitive compensation;
  6. Conditions that support successful teaching and learning; and
  7. Engaged communities

U.S. education leaders developed the shared vision following the 2012 International Summit on the Teaching Profession held in New York City in March. The event gathered teachers, union leaders, and education ministers from 23 high performing and rapidly improving countries and regions to share ideas and best practices for elevating teaching and improving student performance.

The 2012 Labor Management Conference brought together state and district teams nationwide to spotlight local work around the next generation of great teaching. Over a dozen state and district presenters showcased their work, which includes elements illustrated in the vision document such as collaborative working environments, career ladders, differentiated compensation, college and career ready standards, and community engagement to support classroom instruction.

For more information on the core principles, please visit http://www2.ed.gov/documents/labor-management-collaboration/2012-shared-vision.pdf

 

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National Dialogue on Strengthening and Elevating the Teaching Profession

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The US Department of Education kicked off Teacher Appreciation Week by initiating a dialogue on improving teaching profession, as well as the public perception of America’s teachers.  A vision document for reforming the teaching profession created by active classroom teachers working temporarily for the U.S. Department of Education was posted for public comment on the Department’s website May 8. The 14-page document reflects input from more than 2,500 teachers across the country who participated in approximately 200 roundtable meetings over the past six months.

The RESPECT Project, which stands for Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching, is the Obama Administration’s effort to honor and elevate America’s educators.  The administration’s proposed 2013 budget seeks $5 billion for a new competitive program to support states and districts working to reform the teaching profession.

“Our goal is to make one of America’s most important professions into one of America’s most valued professions. We encourage educators nationwide to join this important conversation and share their ideas for transforming the field of teaching,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

As part of its work to better support teachers, the administration has held two international conferences with labor leaders and education ministers from high-performing countries around the world. And, later this month, the administration, national teacher unions, school superintendents, school boards and labor mediators are convening for two days in Cincinnati to focus on reforming the teaching profession.

RESPECT explores transformative ideas for improving classroom instruction, making the most of the school day and year, strengthening the relationship between principal and teachers, and distributing talent to high-need schools and subjects. In addition, it discusses effective methods for recruitment, training, development, and creating career pathways that encourage talented teachers and leaders to maintain professions in education.

The vision document, titled “The RESPECT Project: Envisioning a Teaching Profession for the 21st Century”, is available for public comment until June 19, 2012 at http://www.ed.gov/documents/respect/discussion-document.doc

 

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Why Innovation Can’t Fix America’s Classrooms

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In a recent article for The Atlantic, Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, reflects on wages and education.  Using examples like Japan, Finland, Hong Kong and Shanghai, Tucker claims that until the U.S. finds a way “to educate our future work force to the same standards…wages in the United States will continue to decline.”

Rather than looking at what these countries and megacities are doing to outperform the US in both education and economics, policymakers, business leaders, educators and advocates “are confidently barreling down a path of American exceptionalism, insisting that America is so different from these other nations that we are better off embracing unique, unproven solutions that our foreign competitors find bizarre.”  Although solutions such as vouchers, grade-by-grade testing, charter schools and pay-for-performance appeal to many people, they are “nowhere to be found in the arsenal of strategies used by the top-performing nations.”

Thirty years ago, Tucker observes, American companies who survived the economic rise of Japan managed to do so by figuring out what the Japanese were doing to become increasingly competitive—and then did it better.  Therefore, the most effective way to improve student performance vis-à-vis top performing countries is to figure out what these countries are doing, “and then, by capitalizing on our unique strengths, develop a strategy to do it even better.”

The problem with American education is not a lack of innovation.  It is a lack of what the most successful countries have: coherent, well-designed state educational systems.  “Playing to our strengths makes sense.  Ignoring what works, simply because it was invented elsewhere, does not.”

To read Tucker’s full article, please visit http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/why-innovation-cant-fix-americas-classrooms/249524/

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Have We Gotten It Wrong on School Reform?

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In a recent blog post for The Huffington Post, Jack Jennings of the Center on Education Policy reflects on the current “business” of education reform.  Benchmarking, once used only in top performing companies, has tricked its way down to education, the most prominent example being the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

The CCSS were written after a comprehensive study of what top-achieving countries are doing with their education systems.  A new book, Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems, by Marc S. Tucker “takes benchmarking one step further.”  Shanghai, Finland, Japan, Singapore, and Ontario’s school systems are analyzed, mainly because their students consistently outperform American students on international exams.

According to the study, six key factors are responsible for these school systems’ students academic success:

1. Schools are funded equitably, and needy schools are given additional resources.

2. Teachers are paid competitively with other sectors.

3. Professional development, teacher preparation, and mentoring programs are invested in and maintained by government coffers.

4. Teachers are given time during each school day for collaborative planning and professional learning to improve instruction.

5. The curriculum is organized around problem-solving and critical thinking skills.

6. Students are tested rarely, but carefully, with measures that require analysis, communication, and defense of ideas.

The book concludes that high-performing school systems are “focused on building coherent systems of teaching and learning, focused on meaningful goals and supported with universally available, strategic resources.”

The CCSS are important first steps to bringing more coherence into the US education system, but they are only first steps.  However, as long as “grossly unequal funding,” low teacher pay, extensive student testing that leads to punitive actions for schools who fail, variations in the quality of teacher prep, and discordant professional development practices continue, the US will not be able to meet or surpass the academic excellence of these foreign school systems.

“Some will argue that the United States is unique—that what brings success in other countries is not relevant to our situation.  The American steel and automotive industries once also believed that.  They sank, until they realized that knowledge did not stop at our nation’s borders…Are our leaders making the same mistake?” asks Jennings.

To read the full article, you can download it here:  http://www.cep-dc.org/cfcontent_file.cfm?Attachment=Jack_HuffingtinPostBlog_11_23_11.pdf

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Duncan: Microsoft will take over TEACH; the dangers of “educational protectionism”

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At first blush, many listening to Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s speech at the Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum may have thought they had accidentally stumbled into an economic forum.  Duncan’s speech was liberally sprinkled with many terms from the current economic rhetoric: “zero-sum game,” “international competition,” and “protectionism.” Words often used in debates over economic reforms and free trade agreements were instead used to highlight the attitudes that many have towards international collaboration in the public education sphere.

Duncan urged attendees to harness the power of technology and collaboration to “elevate the teaching profession and accelerate achievement,” as well as to “resist the idea that international competition in education is a zero-sum game, in which one nation’s advance is another nation’s loss.”   While acknowledging that the current global economic system creates a vastly more competitive, even cutthroat, job market, “educational protectionism” is not the answer.

In support of these ideas, Duncan then announced that Microsoft’s Partners in Learning (PiL) will be taking over the Department of Education’s TEACH campaign, a program aimed to future teachers (particularly those in STEM, special education, and those of diverse heritage) and raise awareness of the value and importance of the profession.  As the new owner and operator of the program, PiL will be responsible for maintaining the website, (teach.gov, which will move to teach.org), marketing the program, and “improving and expanding the teacher recruitment campaign.”  The Department’s new role will be that of official partner in these efforts.

Duncan covered many more topics during his speech, mainly focused on the potential positive impact of technology on education, citing examples from across the globe, and on the need for collaboration across countries, industries, and companies—even those in direct competition.  He lauded the “healthy competition” that Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation programs have encouraged, which are “beautiful illustration[s] of how healthy competition and collaboration go hand-in-hand.”

In closing, he again used economic terms to describe the needed changes in education.  Rather than a future with “countries vying to get larger pieces of a finite economic pie for themselves…expanding educational attainment everywhere is the best way to grow the pie for all.”

To read Secretary Duncan’s full speech, please visit http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/secretary-arne-duncans-remarks-microsoft-partners-learning-global-forum

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Report from the International Summit on the Teaching Profession

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The U.S. Department of Education and Asia Society released a report last week entitled, “Improving Teacher Quality Around the World: The International Summit on the Teaching Profession,” addressing lessons shared during the two-day event held in New York City in March. The summit marked the first-ever convening of education ministers, teachers, and union leaders from high-performing and rapidly improving countries and regions.

The report, authored by Asia Society’s Senior Advisor for Education Vivien Stewart on behalf of the Summit’s partner organizations, outlines summit discussions and emerging lessons from around the world on how to strengthen the teaching profession. The discussions were framed around four overarching themes: Teacher Recruitment and Preparation; Development, Support, and Retention of Teachers; Teacher Evaluation and Compensation; and Teacher Engagement in Education Reform. Representatives from England, Finland, Hong Kong, Norway, Singapore, The People’s Republic of China and the United States served as discussion leaders during the Summit. Speakers highlighted numerous examples of best practices, shared challenges, and the importance of systematic, coherent reforms for strengthening the teaching profession.  Their experiences, together with those of other Summit participants, serve as examples throughout the new report.

Delegations that participated in the summit included representatives from Belgium, Brazil, Canada, The People’s Republic of China, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong SAR, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The U.S. Department of Education organized the summit in coordination with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Education International (EI) and U.S.-based organizations – National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), Asia Society and WNET.

“The report concludes that achieving consistency in teaching quality has become central to the agenda of every country,” said Asia Society’s Stewart. “To make progress, governments and teachers’ organizations will need to work together, as they did at the summit, to invent a new vision for the teaching profession.” Plans are underway to convene a second international summit next spring.

To download a copy of the summit report, visit http://asiasociety.org/education-learning/learning-world/worlds-education-leaders-support-teachers.

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Time for Deeper Learning

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Policy and practice at the local, state, and national levels should support the concepts of “deeper learning” to help all students meet higher expectations and be prepared for college and a career, according to a new policy brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education. The brief, “A Time for Deeper Learning: Preparing Students for a Changing World,” argues that deeper learning provides students with the deep content knowledge students need to succeed after high school and the critical thinking, collaboration, and communication skills that today’s jobs demand.
 

According to the brief, today’s increasingly complex world requires that young people learn more, process more, and produce more, but the nation’s education infrastructure is not currently designed to support these increasing demands. As evidence, the brief points to results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showing that American students trail their peers from other developed countries in using their knowledge to solve problems in key subjects like reading, math, and science.

“A Time for Deeper Learning” argues that American schools tend to offer a two-tiered curriculum in which some students-primarily white and relatively affluent-have had opportunities for deeper learning, while others-primarily low-income and students of color-have focused almost exclusively on basic skills and knowledge. It finds that the nation’s prosperity in the near future will depend more than ever on students from underserved groups.
The brief observes that the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently known as No Child Left Behind, presents a unique opportunity for federal policymakers to create opportunities for states and districts to put into place the kinds of policies and practices that a deeper learning environment requires. It outlines policy actions that support deeper learning in five different areas-standards, assessments, accountability, professional development and teaching practice, and state-level polices-and provides a picture of what deeper learning might look in the classroom.

The complete brief is available at http://www.all4ed.org/files/DeeperLearning.pdf.

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Is College and Career Readiness an Internationally Competitive Standard?

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Yesterday I blogged about a journal article in Educational Researcher that found that the Common Core Standards were not aligned well with international standards. Today, I present a dissenting opinion.

ACT has released a research report, titled “Affirming the Goal: Is College and Career Readiness an Internationally Competitive Standard?” This study also looks at the international competitiveness of the Common Core State Standards to determine how these standards measure up. ACT determines that the definition of college and career readiness exemplified by the Common Core Standards is, in fact, internationally competitive.

The report answers three key questions:
What does college and career readiness really mean?
How do we know if our college and career readiness standards are internationally competitive?
How would the U.S. fare if college and career readiness standards were fully adopted and successfully implemented?

For more information and to read the full report, see http://www.act.org/research/policymakers/reports/affirmingthegoal.html

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Common Core Standards: How they Stack Up

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A recent article in Education Researcher by UPenn education dean Andy Porter and several of his colleagues explains similarities and differences between the Common Core and current state and international standards, using the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) as its metric.

The SEC is an analytic framework developed at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research that categorizes ELA and math content by two variables: topic (e.g., multistep equations, inequalities) and cognitive demand (e.g., memorize, perform procedures, demonstrate understanding). In all, the SEC identifies nearly 2,000 of these distinct types of “content” (the product of combined topic and cognitive demand variables). Experts then analyze and match individual standards with SEC content components and use these metrics to compare various sets of standards and curricular materials.

The paper finds that-of the twenty-seven states’ standards that are analyzed-state and Common Core standards differ significantly, with the latter generally demanding a higher level of cognitive reasoning than the standards of the states. Despite this rigorous cognitive demand, the Core standards place less emphasis on advanced mathematical concepts in algebra and geometry than do the average set of state standards.

What’s more, the Common Core standards don’t align all that well with international standards. For example, Finland, Japan, and Singapore all place greater emphasis on “perform[ing] procedures” than does the Common Core.

Whether or not you completely buy into the SEC’s framework model, with its levels of rigor and definitions of content, these findings raise a cautionary flag about states’ abilities to quickly implement the Common Core standards and leads one to question whether these common standards are less aligned with the expectations of other countries than was previously thought. [Gadfly]

To read the article, visit: http://www.aera.net/uploadedFiles/Publications/Journals/Educational_Researcher/4003/103-116_04EDR11.pdf

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Lessons Learned from Top-Performing Nations

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Released by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform explains why as the performance of students in one nation after another surpasses that of American students, and the states, in response, institute one reform after another, student performance remains stagnant.

According to the report, the countries that are outperforming the United States have been pursuing strategies that the U.S. has not been pursuing, while the U.S. has embraced strategies that none of the best-performing countries have embraced. Reduced class size and more money for schools have long been advocated by American educators as solutions to poor student performance, but neither is correlated with high student performance in the best-performing countries.

But it is also true that school charters, support of entrepreneurs pursuing disruptive innovations, and firing teaches whose students perform poorly on standardized tests are nowhere to be found in the arsenal of strategies used by the top-performing nations.  Among the strategies now on the front burner in the United States, only the effort to develop internationally benchmarked student achievement standards and high quality examinations appears to have a parallel in the program of the nations with the best student performance.

At a symposium being held earlier this week in Washington, D.C., U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and educators and experts discussed the findings of the NCEE paper, which demonstrates how the U.S. has failed to follow the successful reform paths shared by Finland, Japan, Singapore, Canada, China and other top-performing nations. Among its key recommendations to American states are:

 

  • Build their strategies for improving student performance on the continuing study of the strategies employed by the top-performing countries.  This is what most of the top performers have been doing for years. It keeps them at the top of their game.
  • Expand the work begun on the Common Core State Standards by expanding it to the rest of the core curriculum, and creating curriculum frameworks that specify what topics are to be taught in the core subjects, grade by grade.  Don’t use the new tests being built by the state consortia for grade-by-grade accountability testing — not one top-performing country does that.  Instead, pick one or two grade levels for accountability testing (often, in the top-performing countries, the end of middle school and/or the end of the sophomore year of high school) and make them “gateway tests,” with standards that have to be met before moving on to the next stage of one’s education or training for work.
  • Develop a world-class teaching force by greatly raising standards for entry to teacher education programs, moving teacher training from low-status higher education institutions to research universities. This means insisting that all teachers-including elementary teachers-have in-depth knowledge of the subjects they will teach, apprenticing new teachers to master teachers, raising teacher pay so it is comparable to that of the leading professions, and giving teachers substantial research skills so they can take the lead in improving teaching practice.
  • Move away from local control of school finance and toward state adoption of responsibility for financing schools.  The top-performing nations have moved steadily toward systems of school finance that provide more resources to students who are harder to educate than to other students, an essential step in making sure that all students are able to reach internationally competitive standards.
  • Abandon the old industrial model of school and district management and move toward modern methods of managing professionals.  The countries that have succeeded in attracting their best young people to teaching trust their teachers, listen to them when making policy, and put them in charge of improving practice. They are not locked in conflict with their unions. Some of the nations with the strongest student performance also have some of the strongest unions in the world.  But the experience of those nations shows that, when schools are run on a high performance, professional model, the unions need to change, too, along with the management model, moving toward a very different labor relations model.
  • Spend our education budgets differently.  Other countries are getting much more for their money by spending less on fancy school buildings, glossy textbooks, intramural sports and district administration and more on their teachers and their most disadvantaged students.
  • Make sure all elements of the education system are coherent and aligned.   The top-performing countries have systems that make it look as though the parts and pieces of their policy systems and practices were designed to work smoothly together.  In the U.S., we tend to add program after program, initiative after initiative, law after law, and regulation after regulation, all piled on what went before.  Nothing else we do will matter very much unless we build an education system that makes sense.

For the report, see http://www.ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Standing-on-the-Shoulders-of-Giants-An-American-Agenda-for-Education-Reform.pdf

For the webcast of NCEE’s symposium featuring Secretary Duncan on May 24, 2011, see http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/NCEE/110524/

Core Education is dedicated to systemic reform of education that is based on international best practices. For more about what we do, see www.CoreEducationLLC.com

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