A World-Class Education Read online

  A World-Class Education

  Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation

  by Vivien Stewart

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1. Globalization and Education

  Chapter 2. Success Stories from Around the World

  Chapter 3. The Common Elements of Successful Systems

  Chapter 4. Developing Effective Teachers and School Leaders

  Chapter 5. Modernizing Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment

  Chapter 6. Creating the Future

  Acknowledgments

  References

  Related Resources

  About the Author

  Study Guide

  Copyright

  Copyright 2012 by ASCD

  Publisher's note: This e-book has been formatted for viewing on e-reading devices. If you find some figures hard to read on your device, try viewing this e-book through an application for your desktop or laptop computer, such as Bookworm (http://bookworm.oreilly.com) or Adobe Digital Editions (www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions).

  Introduction

  Everything has changed, except the way we think.

  —Albert Einstein

  ***

  The world is changing, and fast. The accelerating pace of globalization over the past 20 years—driven by profound technological changes, the rise of Asia (especially China and India), and the ever more rapid pace of scientific discovery—has produced a whole new way of life. Companies manufacture goods around the clock and around the world, ideas and events travel the Internet in seconds, a financial crisis in the United States affects the ability of farmers in Africa to borrow money for seed, and pollution in China affects the air in Los Angeles. The world in which today's students live is fundamentally different from the world in which we were raised. As never before, education in the United States must prepare students for a world where the opportunities for success require the ability to compete and cooperate on a global scale.

  Technological, economic, and political trends have increased the demand for higher skills and reduced the demand for lower skills while intensifying the competition for quality jobs. Since 1990, more than 3 billion people in China, India, and the former Soviet Union have entered the global economy (Zakaria, 2008), and while these countries at first concentrated on creating low-skill jobs, they are increasingly aiming to become competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economies. In fact, countries around the world are trying to raise people out of poverty and respond to increasing popular pressure to provide more economic opportunities for the next generation through expanding education. No country wants to be just the shoe manufacturer of the world.

  The global economy is not a zero-sum game in which only one country can be prosperous. An expanding middle class in other countries provides an expanding market for U.S. goods and services, and companies from newly expanding economies may build plants and create jobs in the United States. But the competition for high-skill and high-income jobs is indeed escalating, and the United States cannot maintain its standard of living unless it provides its citizens with a world-class education system.

  It is therefore all the more alarming that in December 2010, when the 2009 results from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD's) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) were released, U.S. students once again scored well below those in other developed countries on tests of reading, math, and science. These mediocre results followed similar scores from the previous rounds of PISA in 2000, 2003, and 2006, as well as from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS) conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. In fact, the United States has a high proportion of students who do not even reach baseline levels of proficiency on PISA.

  As educators, we care a lot about excellence and equity, but viewed through the lens of international comparisons, American K–12 education seems neither excellent nor equitable. But are these comparisons valid? Why should we pay attention to international assessments? We don't need an international assessment to tell us that many of our schools are not doing well; we have plenty of our own testing to tell us that. Are they just one more stick to bash teachers with? What can we learn from international comparisons that we can't learn from our own research and experiences?

  When the media reports on international assessment results like a horse race, with winners and losers, these are understandable questions. However, they miss the point. In today's interconnected world, our students are not competing with students from the state or city next door, but with students from Singapore, Shanghai, and Stockholm. We owe it to our students to understand what is happening around the world. For their sake, we can't afford to give them an education that is lower in quality and less up-to-date than that which other countries are providing. Just as American businesses need to know what is happening in other countries if they hope be successful, we as educators need to understand global trends in education in order to create schools that equip our students for the world of tomorrow, not the world of yesterday.

  Another reason for paying attention to international assessments is that, having now been implemented over a number of years, these assessments and their results have led to a growing body of research, observation, and discussion that goes beyond the numbers and rankings to help us understand why some systems are moving ahead rapidly and producing more equitable performance while others remain static and unequal. In the 20th century, the United States was the world leader in education. We were the first country to achieve universal secondary education and the first country to expand higher education beyond the elite class. However, in the 21st century, other countries are catching up and leaping ahead of us in high school graduation rates, in the quality and equity of performance in their K–12 education systems, and in the proportion of students graduating from college. Contrary to the beliefs of some pundits, American education has not gotten worse—but education in other parts of the world has gotten a lot better, a lot faster. How are countries that are outperforming our own K–12 education system doing it? What education policies and practices have they adopted? How do these differ from American educational practices? And are they relevant to the United States, or do they depend on a particular cultural context?

  This book attempts to provide some answers to those questions by examining the following key issues:

  The major global trends that are transforming the skills needed and changing the shape of the global talent pool.

  How the U.S. education system compares with other education systems against the emerging world standards of excellence.

  How other countries have developed high-performing education systems and the lessons they hold for the United States.

  The common success factors that cut across these high-performing systems.

  Current international best practices in two key areas of education—developing and maintaining a 21st century teaching and leadership profession and creating modern curriculum, instruction, and assessment systems.

  How technology and international exchange can help the United States create a world-class educational system that is responsive to future challenges.

  Let me stress at the outset of this book that there is no perfect education system. Globalization poses challenges for everyone. Every education system in the world struggles to some degree to keep up with the rapid pace of change. And countries face many similar challenges. For example, widespread internal and international migration have created more heterogeneous societies everywhere, placing new demands on educators as they respond to students and families from differing cultural and linguistic backgrounds
. In addition to challenging schools to adapt to new populations, globalization also raises fundamental questions about whether the knowledge and skills needed by today's graduates will be significantly different from those that schools have provided in the past.

  But other countries are demonstrating that large-scale educational acceleration is possible, even as our own educational performance has been flat for decades. Their success is not accidental, but the result of careful policy choice and effective implementation. Through combinations of national policies and leadership together with capacity building at the school level, these countries are achieving excellence in terms of student achievement, student retention, equity, and efficiency, and they are doing so at a lower cost than in the United States. Some may argue that the experiences of countries that are significantly smaller are not relevant to a country the size of the United States. But many of these countries are the size of American states and could therefore be looked at as models for state-based education systems. In addition, we can learn from countries that are significantly larger than ours and still making giant strides, such as India and China.

  High-performing or rapidly improving countries are also intently focused on becoming learning systems, constantly updating their assessment of whether their education system is preparing their students for the rapidly changing global knowledge economy. As leaders contemplate changes in particular policies and practices, whether in science and math, teaching and leadership development, or early intervention, they routinely compare their countries' methods against research and best practices from all over the world, including the United States. This strategy, known as "international benchmarking," has become a critical tool for governments and educators as they seek to develop world-class education systems. Some are sending not just their policymakers and researchers to scour the world for international best practice, but also their principals and teachers; in the United States, we rarely do this.

  This book has its roots in my own experience. After growing up and being educated in England, I traveled to Africa, where I studied the relationships among education, economic development, and nation building. I then moved to the United States, where I worked for a number of years at Carnegie Corporation, directing its children, youth, and education programs. I was engaged in many efforts to improve American education, including implementing early childhood education, reforming urban schools, promoting healthy adolescent development, and improving the teaching profession. In the 1990s, my work with Carnegie Corporation also allowed me to see firsthand the changes in schools and universities in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War. Later, in a stint as a senior education advisor at the United Nations, I worked on providing education to refugees around the world and restarting schools for children affected by war. Finally, in my eight years as the vice president for education of Asia Society, I witnessed the extraordinary rise of Asia, traveling extensively on that continent and conferring with many educators and political and business leaders about the growth and challenges of Asian economies and education systems.

  The privilege of being exposed to all these international experiences brought home to me just how dramatic the current global transformations are—comparable in scale and scope to the Industrial Revolution. The thirst for knowledge is universal, and education's importance to societies is now almost universally appreciated. Getting education right gives a country a powerful platform on which to build a healthy economy and a healthy society. Getting it wrong can hold back a country for years to come, especially in this new borderless knowledge economy, where human capital is the greatest asset most countries have.

  As I have engaged in education efforts over the course of my career, I have tried to understand why, in the post–Cold War era, many countries have leaped ahead while the United States, once a world leader in education, has barely improved its performance over the past 20 years. What are the ingredients not just of effective schools but of effective systems? This book combines my own firsthand experience and observations of education systems in different parts of the globe with the small but growing research literature on these questions. My fundamental concerns are that the United States is being harmed economically and socially, as well as in terms of its ability to deal with the rest of the world, by its slow educational response to globalization, and that until very recently, our country has largely ignored the vigorous global conversation about educational performance and innovation.

  There are many important initiatives underway to improve education in the United States on a wide range of fronts. We have many wonderful schools and "pockets of excellence," and our research and educational innovation are second to none. But this is not a book about those efforts, important as they are. Rather, its aim is to make educators aware of the new global context and standards of excellence by examining the experiences of countries that have surpassed or will soon surpass the United States educationally for the purpose of understanding what U.S. schools might do differently and better.

  Chapter 1 examines the great transformation that is taking place around the world and the need for the United States to become more internationally competitive. Chapter 2 describes the immense educational improvements made in recent years in Singapore, Canada, Finland, China, and Australia, and analyzes some key lessons. Education and political leaders in these countries did not pursue identical policies, but Chapter 3 draws out common themes and elements and suggests areas for reflection for those looking to improve education in the United States. Chapter 4 examines international lessons in building a high-quality teaching and school leadership profession. Chapter 5 proposes how curriculum, instruction, and assessment need to be modernized to give our students the knowledge and skills to prepare for the 21st century. Finally, Chapter 6 looks at what kind of efforts will be needed to create a world-class education system that will carry the United States into the future.

  My visits to schools around the world have led me to ponder the key ingredients of successful school systems. Is it money? Is it culture? How do communities and countries move from having poor or highly unequal schools to good or even great schools? What are the political and economic contexts that drive reform? What education policies did governments pursue or not pursue? How did they assure quality? Equal opportunity? How did they ensure good teachers? My goal in writing this book is to add to the conversation about developing world-class schools in the United States and to engage more educators in considering the possibilities in international experience. What high-performing countries show is that performance does not have to be flat, that substantial improvement on a wide scale is possible, and that both excellence and equity are attainable. By looking at the lessons to be learned from countries that have effectively ramped up their educational performance and considering how they might be adapted in our national context, we can broaden the range of options under consideration and draw on a wider evidence base. Because international benchmarking in education is relatively new and the experiences of many countries and many educational issues have not yet been thoroughly researched, no book can yet be definitive about what can be learned from education systems around the world. However, just as a businessperson today cannot afford not to benchmark his or her industry against the best in the world, we as educators cannot afford to isolate ourselves educationally. The yardstick for judging educational success is no longer national but international, and international benchmarking can be an important tool for improvement.

  Learning goes both ways. Other countries have learned a great deal from the United States in the past, and I believe it is time for American educators to adopt a new worldview, to be open to others' practice, and to be willing to share our own experience. This is an enormously resourceful country with great assets. If we now engage with the world's knowledge about globalization and education, and if we build on and modernize our own assets more effectively, we can indeed have a world-class education system for our children and grandchildren.
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  Chapter 1

  Globalization and Education

  If Americans are to continue to prosper and to exercise leadership in this new global context, it is imperative that we understand the new global forces that we have both shaped and had thrust upon us. The alternative is to be at their mercy.

  —Edward Fiske

  ***

  The World Transformed

  We used to think that people who thought the Earth was flat were uneducated. But Thomas Friedman's best-selling book, The World Is Flat (2005), helped us to understand that if the world is not exactly flat, then it is deeply interconnected as never before. Friedman's book described how technology and the fall of trade barriers have led to the integration of markets and nations, and enabled individuals, companies, and nation-states to reach around the world faster and cheaper than ever before. We see evidence of this interconnectedness in our lives every day—from the food we eat to the coffee we drink to the clothes we wear. Sports teams recruit talent from around the globe, and the iPhones we use to communicate are manufactured in more than 19 different countries.

  This transformation of the world has happened relatively recently and in a short period of time. The economic liberalization of China beginning in the 1980s, the development of democracy in South Korea in 1987, and the fall of the Soviet Union and the development of free trade treaties in the early 1990s introduced 3 billion people, previously locked into their own national economies, into the global economy. Harvard economist Richard Freeman calls this the "great doubling" of the global labor force (National Governors Association, Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, Inc., 2008, p. 9). In the late 1990s, the wiring of the world in preparation for the "millennium bug" unleashed another set of sweeping changes, as did the 2001 accession of China to the World Trade Organization and the 2003 economic liberalization of India, which jump-started that country's tremendous growth. The results have been staggering. Twenty years ago, bicycles were China's primary method of transportation, the G7 group represented the most powerful nations on earth, and the World Wide Web was just a proposal (McKinsey, 2011). Who at that time would have imagined the dramatic skyline of Shanghai today, that the G7 would become the G20, and that mobile web use would be growing exponentially around the world?