This Week's Reading

As I was hunting around the resources this week, I spend some time on the Learning First website, Public School Insights. I stumbled across the article on the International Summit in Education, and found it very interesting. While we are talking about the influence of various organizations on education, this article highlighted some differences between education in the United States and education in countries that perform well on tests such as PISA. I am persuaded that these factors highly influence the quality of education in as significant a way as unions, boards, and other groups! The article says:

"It’s been more than a week since the U.S. Department of Education sponsored International Summit on the Teaching Profession took place in New York City. For those of us who were observers, the conversation was valuable but the extended time spent sitting and listening challenged our ability to absorb all that was being exchanged. However, a few themes kept resurfacing:

* In countries with high performing students as measured by the PISA tests, the teaching profession is held in high esteem and attracts the strongest students to its preparation programs.
* Conversely, those same countries support a highly selective process for identifying potential teachers and accepting them into teacher preparation programs.
* Once on the job, teachers in high performing countries are given an average of 15 hours/week to confer with colleagues, observe others’ classrooms, and participate in professional learning activities.
* In countries where students score well on international tests, teachers’ salaries are on par with engineers, doctors, and other professionals.
* In all the countries that participated in the summit, teachers are unionized.

In countries where student achievement is high, teachers are given a great deal of autonomy to deliver instruction in ways that reach students with a variety of learning styles. Further, this autonomy is important to teachers and a mark of their professionalism. Even in countries with strong central education departments and national goals and standards, schools and teachers are free to craft the instructional support in ways that fit their individual teaching styles while meeting the needs of the students with whom they work.

The following countries sent representatives to participate in the conversation with US educators and policymakers:

Finland, Norway, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, Estonia, Slovenia, Sweden, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan

While simultaneous translation was provided for Brazil, China, and Japan, the other education ministers delivered their reports and remarks in near perfect English….humbling to those of us who aren’t multi-lingual. The real test of impact from this summit (a proposal was made by U.S. Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, that it become an annual event held around the world), will be the extent to which we act on what we heard. This will require a collaborative effort from all those present and the educators they represent and a commitment to respectful dialogue to determine the difficult but necessary changes the U.S. education system needs to make to reach the ranks of “high performing” countries."


To me this is a list not just of factors that make education effective in these countries, but also a list of all the ways we could work to make public education work better here. What if teachers were paid more? More people would teach! This also might lead to a higher caliber of teacher, as many good teachers leave the profession due to a lack of professional recognition and compensation. Imagine if teachers were held in the same esteem, and paid the same salary range, as engineers and doctors? More people would want to teach, so enter the highly selective teacher preparation programs. Additionally, I cannot imagine what teaching would be like if I had 15 hours of collaboration time each week! This is a phenomenal amount of time dedicated to continued development and improvement in instruction, whereas I often feel that if I desire to do that kind of work, it must happen on my own time, such as giving up prep periods or spending vacation time working on training and professional development.

This was an enlightening read, and highlighted some of the key differences that I've been feeling for some time now. I hope we can take some lessons from these successful countries.