In a two part blog on the best ways to organize an educational system, Mark Tucker outlines his vision and details the specific methods that can be used to achieve this vision.
Mr. Tucker writes:
NCEE, the organization I head, runs the biggest and most successful program for training school principals in the United States, the National Institute for School Leadership (NISL). We are more convinced than ever that leadership development is one of the most productive of all investments a state or nation can make to improve student achievement, but the work we have done benchmarking the world’s most successful education systems has given us another perspective on what it will take for American school leaders to enable their faculties to match the performance of the schools in the world’s top-performing education systems.
Among them, three stand out. First, more important than the design of any single component of an education system is the overall design of the system itself. When the whole system is set to high standards, designed to function coherently and implemented with care, there is a very high likelihood of very good performance across the board. Conversely, when education reform is little more than a welter of unrelated initiatives, no matter how good in themselves, little of lasting consequence is accomplished.
There are two lessons, with multiple components, that have been learned from this system design:
- System design is important and school leaders need to see their role as system designers.
- Policies and practices of any given school might be coherent and mutually reinforcing and dead wrong.
So what would a good system—a well-functioning school organization—look like?
- The expectations for all the students in the school, irrespective of background, need to be high, bench-marked to those in the top-performing countries
- The faculty must have access to a first-class curriculum and associated assessment system that both reflects the high academic standards and constitutes the main resource for achieving them.
- The teachers must have the knowledge and skills needed to teach that curriculum well to the kinds of students who inhabit their school.
- The faculty need to operate in an environment in which, no matter how well they are doing, they have strong incentives to do even better are constantly working to improve their own skills and knowledge.
The key is to create for our teachers an environment–the school–that is a true professional workplace. By professional workplace, I mean the sort of work environment that accomplished engineers, accountants, architects, medical doctors and attorneys work in. This is critical for two reasons. First, because, to get the job done, we need to attract to teaching more of the high school graduates who would otherwise have been able to pursue high-status professional careers. Second, and more important, when professional workplaces are organized well, the people in them not only do their best work, but they work hard-all the time-to improve their skills and knowledge so they can get ever better at their work.
To read more of Part 1, see http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/08/organizations_in_which_teachers_can_do_their_best_work_part_i.html.
To read more from Part II, see http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/08/organizations_in_which_teachers_can_do_their_best_work_part_ii.html.
