From this morning’s New York Times: Imported From Britain: Ideas to Improve Schools:
During a decade in power in Britain, the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair made efforts to improve English schools, with some apparent successes. …[S]ome educators believe there is much to learn from England’s experience.
A few are turning to Sir Michael Barber, a senior adviser to Mr. Blair from 1997 through 2005….
...[Barber states:] “What have all the great school systems of the world got in common?” he said, ticking off four systems that he said deserved to be called great, in Finland, Singapore, South Korea and Alberta, Canada. “Four systems, three continents — what do they have in common?
“They all select their teachers from the top third of their college graduates, whereas the U.S. selects its teachers from the bottom third of graduates. This is one of the big challenges for the U.S. education system: What are you going to do over the next 15 to 20 years to recruit ever better people into teaching?” [My emphasis.]
South Korea pays its teachers much more than England and America, and has accepted larger class sizes as a trade-off, he said.
Finland, by contrast, draws top-tier college graduates to the profession not with huge paychecks, but by fostering exceptionally high public respect for teachers, he said.
Under Mr. Blair, Sir Michael said, Britain attracted more talented young teaching candidates by offering stipends of £7,000, or about $14,000, for college graduates undergoing a year of teacher training. … “We completely recast our teacher recruitment and training system,” Sir Michael said.
…In the early 1980s, government reports deploring educational mediocrity rattled both nations, inspiring movements to improve standards and accountability on both sides of the Atlantic. And during the last decade, both nations began federally driven school improvement efforts, he said.
“But it’s a lot harder to do education reform in the United States than in the U.K.,” Sir Michael said.
That, in part, is because of sheer size, he said. England’s elementary and secondary educational system, which has about seven million students and 24,000 schools, he said, is more akin to California’s, which has about 6.3 million students and 9,500 schools, than to the United States’, which has about 50 million students and 90,000 schools.
But more important, he said, Britain’s political system endows its prime ministers with greater powers to impose new practices than any corresponding American official enjoys, since basic education policies in the United States are set in the 50 states and in the nation’s 15,000 local school districts, he said. Even though President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Law has considerably increased federal influence over what happens in American schools, Washington still plays a subsidiary role to states and municipalities, he said.
…[F]or the state [of Ohio] to put its recommendations in place in a coherent way, he said, would require an unlikely alignment of galaxies: The Ohio State Board of Education, the state’s new Democratic governor and its Republican-dominated Legislature would all have to cooperate closely.
“And that’s not to mention Ohio’s 613 school districts,” he added. “So it’s a real challenge to align all these actors behind that reform.”In Mr. Blair’s Britain, it was possible to impose a new policy quickly. … No American state has addressed its failing schools with a vigor that is even remotely similar, even though under No Child Left Behind, about 1,800 of the nation’s schools have been identified as in need of overhaul. So far, none of the 50 states have even outlined a forceful set of policies for such schools.
…Sir Michael said that he considers No Child Left Behind to be an outstanding law, perhaps one of the most important pieces of education legislation in American history, he said. But the law is not without its flaws, he said, which include its methodology for identifying underperforming schools on the basis of student test scores alone.
“It depends much too often on quite crude tests and one year’s data,” he said….
7 comments:
America doesn't select anything - market forces determine where talented and smart people go - The bottom third cannot find anything else so that is why they go into teaching - who in their right mind would want to spend their life in a classroom when opportunities abound to realize your dreams? Just another reason to teach the basics and and then let the young ones get on with living. Instead, public schools are too busy trying to teach bullshit.
6:34--
Who would want to spend their life in a classroom? In the U.S., colleges and universities are staffed with some of the manifestly best and brightest, despite relatively low pay. You seem to have a limited conception of what a "dream" can be. Teaching well can be a dream every bit as inspiring as any you seem to have in mind.
If you had read the article (carefully), you would know that, in Finland, some of the best and brightest really do end up teaching in public schools. Hence your question is idiotic.
Think, my friend. Think.
Yes. Also, anonymous, schools have already turned back to teaching "the basics," and have utterly turned away from "bullshit" such as art or creative thinking or physical education. (They aren't teaching the basics well, mind you; but that is the focus now.) You seem unaware of what's actually happening in the K-12 system these days.
After two years directing a program for undergraduates heading into teaching, I'm agog and discouraged about the state of K-12 education. Almost universally, teachers who care about their students despise "No Child Left Behind," not only because it makes teachers "teach to the test" and neglect any semblance of creative or independent thinking in the classroom, but also because under it, the worst students ARE left behind. That's because teachers, to improve their scores, must focus on just the students who are close to entering another level of "achievement" (test scores), and NOT those who are way down below that. It's a tragedy and a crime.
But what else should we expect from a President who was a lousy student himself? He has no clue.
Undergraduate majors for future teachers tend to be lame, watered-down general ed requirements (know just a little about many things), and little else. They are commonly understood to be a joke, by those in the disciplines. At my institution, a select committee recommended the dissolution of the "Liberal Studies" major, because it seemed clear that we'd want teachers for our children who have mastered the creative and analytical skills, the depth of understanding, and the genuine intellectual interest fostered by majoring in a (almost any) discipline such as Philosophy, Chemistry, English, or others. Our administration didn't go for it (yet), and that's too bad. The current major attracts students who are not very bright--though often wonderful people who authentically have the dream of helping kids--and also a lot of lazy, unfocused students who can't bring themselves to do a "real" major.
It's a huge mess. In the meantime, the pulic continues to support "No Child Left Behind" without the slightest knowledge of the harm it is doing. Typical of our democracy, and so depressing.
Thanks for the interesting article, Chunk. In my tenure with the pre-teacher program, I realized how bizarre it is that academics in higher ed. don't care or think much about what's going on in K-12, although it directly affects our dream of producing independent thinkers. What happens in K-12 currently in this sorry nation does all it can to fight that.
Read "Schoolhouse Crock: Fifty years of blaming America's educational system for our stupidity" in this month's Harper's Magazine.
Here's my favorite George-W-Bush-as-lousy-student story (and one I use when students ask me about using a thesaurus): Before he was sent off to an exclusive prep school to get him ready for his automatic admission to Yale, Dubya's mom gave him a going-away present--a thesaurus. She told him that his teachers would expect him to use fancy words, and this was where he'd find them.
One of Georgie's first English class assignments was a personal experience narrative involving a life-changing event. Describing the death of his older sister, Bush wrote "The lacerates were running down my face."
--100 miles down the road
"The lacerates were running down my face."
Oh man, I can't stop laughing.
Nicely said, grumpy. Your commentary is indeed thought provoking.
grumpy points out that No Child Left Behind leaves behind the worst students. But it leaves the very gifted out as well. Students who with very little effort will get 98% of the test materials don't have room for a big impact on the school average, so the resources go to those who do. Why bother bringing a kid to 99% when you can maybe work on a 60%-er and have a bigger statistical impact?
Why bother with spending resources on anything at all that a gifted child might be interested in that will jeopardize the school's test-score-based funding? These kids are left to fend for themselves in the mistaken belief that one of their gifts is the ability to educate themselves in an environment that gives them inadequate guidance and cares little about their needs.
And are "Student Learning Outcomes" a possible mechanism for doing that to us at the community colleges? I think so -
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