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….
