In a recent blog post, Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy explains how fundamental changes in the way schools are managed could both attract better teachers and enable them to do their best work. Tucker’s blog post was motivated by the results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students’ reading, mathematics, and science literacy.
Tucker argues that many have suspected for years that a focus on knowledge work and knowledge workers, an idea originally made popular by Peter Drucker’s 1969 The Age of Discontinuity, would enable American students to flourish. This would essentially mean that students are given more autonomy in their work and that much of the meaning of their work would be based on connections with fellow students, not on responses from teachers. But Tucker and others have not had any means by which to prove this hypothesis, until the recent results of PISA.
Here are some excerpts from his post:
Toward the end of the slide deck that Andreas Schleicher is using to describe the findings of the 2012 PISA survey you will find a series of slides that are new, that have no analogues in previous reports of the PISA data. Those slides confirm our impressions with data.
First the slides conclude that the data show that, “Schools with more autonomy over curricula and assessments tend to perform better than schools with less autonomy, where they are part of school systems with more accountability arrangements and greater teacher-principal collaboration in school management.” In other words, on balance schools will perform better when they have more autonomy from the larger system of which they are a part, but only if the school faculty participates in the decisions to be made. The data also show that we see the gains we want not just when the faculty has a major role in making the important decisions, but when the school is also held accountable for the results. This finding is referring to environments in which school performance against national or state metrics is broadly shared not just within the professional education community, but with the entire community.
Second, the data show that, “Schools with more autonomy with respect to resource allocation perform better than schools with less autonomy in systems with more collaboration.” And, “Schools with more autonomy perform better than schools with less autonomy in systems with standardized math policies.” This round of PISA focused on mathematics.
So we only see the gains we are looking for when the state has been clear about the goals, the results we want for students and the measures we will use to determine whether those goals have been achieved. The PISA data makes it clear that, when those goals, desired results and measures have not been put in place by the state, we cannot expect to see gains for the students when we grant more autonomy to the teachers.
The data also show that the professional, knowledge-worker model will not work when teachers are paid blue-collar wages. “Among high income countries, high performers pay teachers more.”
Finally, Schleicher makes it clear that autonomy in decision-making for school faculty with respect to curriculum, assessment and use of school resources is not to be confused with school choice. He reports that the data show, “…there is no relationship between the prevalence of competition and overall performance level.”
One final point. Though this set of slides does not include an analysis of the relationship between teacher quality, faculty autonomy and student achievement, other OECD data and analysis shows a very strong relationship between teacher quality and student performance.
So, there is now plenty of evidence that, for all the reasons Drucker enumerated, the people who run our state education systems must not only go after highly qualified teachers, they must at the same time pay them well and make fundamental changes in the work organization of schools both to attract the people they want and to enable them to do their best work.
Interestingly, the move toward knowledge work and knowledge workers may be favored by those who believe in empowering students yet this strategy may also give some of those same people pause because of its similarity to corporate-model school reform. Hopefully, this model could be one that education reformers of different stripes could rally behind.
For more information, please visit:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/12/pisa_on_the_teacher_as_professional.html
and
http://www.slideshare.net/OECDEDU/pisa-2012-evaluating-school-systems-to-improve-education
