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
