I’m posting this as a bookmark to myself as much as anything else. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) and its Study Group on International Comparisons in Education produced a report on what we can learn about improving our own education systems in the United States by comparing it to high-performing systems in the rest of the world. One member of the group was Indiana state representative Bob Behning. Some take-aways from my initial scan of the report:
- The U.S. is falling behind when compared to the rest of the world. This can’t be explained away by hand waving about apples-and-oranges.
- The good news, of sorts, is that there are now lots of countries doing better than we are, so we don’t have to re-invent the wheel. We can see what works and copy it.
- There needs to be a support structure in place so that kids come to school ready to learn. In other places, that can take the form of government support to families with young children or extended family structures or the community generally. The upshot is that the kids are healthy and the kids are being educated before they get to school. Extra resources are devoted to struggling kids once they get to school.
- Access to elite teachers. The system recruits high quality educators; implements a rigorous system of preparation and licensure; pays them well; develops a mentor system; gives them a professional environment to work in; selects high quality administrators; and develop standards benchmarked to other countries.
- Develop a Career and Technical Education path for those students preferring more of an applied education rather than a more academic approach. This shouldn’t be an educational backwater like so many vocational programs. It should be geared to boosting the national economy and providing a higher standard of living for a broader base of the population.
- These reforms should be part of a comprehensive plan. It will probably be the case that not all problems can be tackled at once, but the plan implementation should not be erratic or arbitrary.
The report then profiles Finland, Singapore, and Ontario as examples. The study group also apparently studied Albert, Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland, Shanghai, and Taiwan.
These are excellent steps – but I would boil it down to three things
1) National will to make this a priority.
2) Really working on the aspects that make it likely for children to fail- which means investment in the poor, socio-economic issues rather than the social gospel of seeing the poor as morally bankrupt.
3) Real respect of teachers and teaching as a profession – which means money, but more importantly self-determination and the time necessary to work out curricular issues and attending to children’s needs.
At this point, I see precious little of any of that in the “market-driven, privatization of education” promoted and pursued by the Supermajority in the Indiana General Assembly – especially under House Education Chair Bob Behning – whose influence on the ISTEP replacement committee is utterly corrosive.