Education question
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Read the speech from the United States Secretary of Education in
2011 regarding Highly Performing Countries.
Reflect on the following questions:
• According to this speech, what can we learn from other highly
performing countries?
• What do we need to be mindful of when comparing data from one
country to another?
• What do highly performing countries have in common related to
assessment and use of data?
Lessons from High-Performing
Countries
Secretary Duncan’s Remarks at National Center on Education
and the Economy National Symposium
MAY 24, 2011
Contact:
•
(202) 401-1576, press@ed.gov
I welcome this opportunity to reflect on what the United States
can learn from the nations with the best-performing education
systems. My thanks to Marc Tucker and the National Center on
Education and the Economy for having me here today.
As Marc mentioned, last December, the OECD released a report
entitled Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education:
Lessons From PISA for the United States.
I asked OECD to prepare that study for a very simple reason: A
number of nations today are out-educating the United States. I
wanted to know what the U.S. could learn from the practices of
those high-performing and rapidly improving countries. In a
globally competitive economy, the value of benchmarking the
practices of high-performing education systems seemed like a nobrainer.
These top performing nations not only were doing a better job of
accelerating achievement and attainment nationwide than America,
they also were doing a better job of closing achievement gaps
among minority and disadvantaged students. What were their
recipes for success?
As you’ve just heard, we followed up on the OECD study. At the
smart suggestion of Dennis Van Roekel and John Wilson of the
NEA, our department co-sponsored in March, along with OECD
and Education International, the first-ever International Summit on
the Teaching Profession. I was amazed to learn that this kind of
summit had never happened before.
Today, I’m here to give a first take on some of what we have
learned. I want to give a special shout-out to the Asia Society,
which has completed a report on the Summit on behalf of the
Summit co-sponsors. That report will be available in the next few
weeks.
I would sort the lessons of the OECD study and the International
Summit into three baskets.
First, I think it is clear now that most high-performing nations
establish a number of common principles and cornerstones to
build a strong education system and high-quality teaching
profession. Every nation, of course, has unique characteristics of its
teaching profession, culture, and education system, which may not
be directly analogous to the U.S. But to the extent that the U.S.
can copy or adapt, and beg, borrow, and steal, successful practices
from other nations, we should do so.
As I’ll get to in a moment, I am much more optimistic than Marc
that the U.S., including state and local governments, is in the midst
of adopting a number of the core elements of high-performing
education systems.
In the second basket of lessons are reforms that, while important
and invaluable, cannot be easily replicated or exported to the U.S.
at a national level.
In the final, or third basket of lessons, I would place educational
innovations here in the U.S. that are of considerable interest
overseas and may help lead the way to strengthening the
education system both here and abroad. The U.S. absolutely has
much to learn from other nations. But we can also lead by
example in some areas as well.
Let me start with some areas of agreement at the Summit.
Virtually every education minister and union leader who spoke at
the Summit affirmed the singular and urgent importance of
elevating and strengthening the teaching profession in a
knowledge economy. Throughout the globe, education is now
recognized as the new game-changer that drives economic growth
and social change. And it is great teachers who help build the
higher-order skills that students need to succeed in the 21st
century.
The overwhelming sentiment at the Summit was that teachers
today need to be treated more as professionals and knowledge
workers, and less as interchangeable cogs in an educational factory
line out of the last century.
Teachers need and deserve more autonomy and respect—and they
must become real participants and partners in reform if outcomes
for children are to dramatically improve.
A second, shared theme of the summit was that outcomes and
data matter. We cannot return to the days when educational policy
was primarily propelled by concern with inputs, instead of
outcomes. In the information age, student learning and student
growth are the ultimate barometers of success. Children are our
first and foremost clients.
High-performing nations may differ on how they assess learning.
Yet every top performer is using data in one form or another to
inform instruction, and to monitor and improve performance. As
Michael Gove, the UK education minister, said at the summit, topperforming countries use data to identify what is working in order
to “shout it and share it.”
Finally, the summit highlighted the importance of one familiar, and
one not-so familiar, statement of fact. The familiar sentiment was
that a nation’s education system can only be as good as the
quality of its teachers. But several education ministers and union
leaders amended that thought. They added that the quality of a
country’s teachers can only be as good as the system that recruits,
prepares, provides professional development, and compensates
teachers.
Contrary to popular wisdom, a top-notch teaching force does not
just naturally bloom out of traditions of cultural respect and
reverence for teachers. Instead, success stems from coherent,
deliberate policy choices, carefully implemented over a period of
years.
High-performing education systems pursue a comprehensive set of
reforms—not piecemeal, reform-by-addition. They don’t push
reforms in isolated silos. They commit to system-wide reform.
Now, the International Summit highlighted not just the similarities
of high-performing countries but also their differences. There is no
single recipe for building a strong teaching profession. It is not
that easy. And it is clear that some of the nationwide reforms
adopted in high-performing education systems are not likely to be
adopted nationwide in the United States.
As Marc Tucker points out in his paper, nearly all of the highperforming nations and regions in the OECD study have national
standards, a national curriculum, a grade-by-grade curriculum
framework, and high-stakes national exams given to students at
key gateways, like exiting secondary school.
In his concluding remarks at the Summit, Gene Wilhoit, the
extraordinary leader of the chief state school officers, pointed out
that the United States has an unusual confederated education
system. The federal government plays a very different role in the
U.S. than in many countries, including Singapore, South Korea,
Japan, and Finland.
The tradition of local control and local financing is much stronger
here than in most top-performing countries and provinces. The
federal government does not set national standards. We have not
and will not prescribe a national curriculum—and in fact we are
barred by law from doing so.
And the fact that schools in the U.S. are funded in significant
measure out of local property taxes makes it more challenging, on
a national basis, to direct extra resources to low-income students
and the communities that most need support.
In the U.S., the primary federal roles are to incentivize reform and
innovation, enhance equity in educational access and outcomes,
and protect the rights of disadvantaged children, minority
students, English-language learners, and disabled students.
Our department also helps to document and share effective
practices and provides technical assistance. We support states,
districts, and 14,000 school boards. As Marc Tucker accurately
describes in his paper, “two centuries of practice have vested a
great deal of authority in local boards of education [in the United
States] to a degree that has no parallel in most other countries.”
In addition to having unusual governance challenges, the U.S. also
faces questions of scale when it comes to copying or adapting the
practices of high-performing countries. Many of the highperforming countries and regions are much smaller than the U.S.
I was excited to hear at the Summit about how Finland has built a
high-quality system for recruiting, preparing and training teachers,
with agreed-upon goals of what teachers are expected to know
and be able to do in specific subject areas.
Finland’s strong teacher unions contribute to building a top-notch
teaching profession by serving as professional organizations that
train and develop teachers. They have evolved far beyond the
traditional adversarial focus on bread and butter issues to build
trusting but tough-minded partnerships with management.
They have retained their role to speak truth to power—yet
accepted fully the responsibility for quality and professional
accountability to one another.
Educators and teacher preparation programs here in the United
States have so much to learn from Finland’s example in all of these
areas. The United States must do everything in its power to make
sure teachers receive world-class preparation for the classroom
and are recruited from the most able students with a gift and
passion for teaching. In Finland, that mean the top 10 percent of
college graduates enter the teaching profession.
Yet transforming teacher preparation programs in the U.S. along
the lines of Finland’s example is more challenging here than in a
small nation or province. Finland has a total of eight universitybased teacher preparation programs. The United States has more
than 1,400 education schools, regulated by 50 states and voluntary
accreditation bodies.
Professional development for teachers in the U.S. is similarly
fragmented. Particularly in tough economic times like today, I lose
a lot of sleep when I think about our results in this area. We spend
at least $4 billion every year in federal funds on professional
development—and don’t have good results to show for it. When I
talk to great teachers across the country, they are stunned by this
number—and by how little this investment has benefitted them or
their colleagues. The Summit similarly highlighted that Finland has
done an extraordinary job of narrowing achievement gaps. Again,
American educators have a lot to learn from the Finns about how
to get the best teachers and principals in front of the students
who most need their help. But it is worth noting that less than five
percent of children in Finland are poor. In the United States, more
than 20 percent of children live in poverty, and the population is
roughly sixty times as large.
Now, none of these differences mean that the practices of highperforming education systems are irrelevant to the United States—
far from it. The implication is rather that these practices have to be
adapted to fit America’s unique governance structure and
traditions. In some instances, successful models from Singapore,
Hong Kong, or Finland can also be adopted at an equivalent scale,
at the state or district level.
Here, I am going to respectfully disagree with Marc’s conclusion
that “the strategies driving the best-performing systems are rarely
found in the United States.”
He asserts in his paper for this conference that leading education
reforms underway in the U.S. are conspicuously absent from the
best-performing countries.
It’s true that the United States has not adopted a national
curriculum or launched copycat versions of Finland’s teacher
preparation programs, Singapore’s professional development
system, or Japan’s tradition of lesson study. But, for the first time,
the U.S. today is embracing a number of core elements of highperforming nations.
Three developments mark a dramatic sea-change in the United
States.
The first is the state-led design and adoption of higher,
internationally benchmarked academic standards—and the
development of a new generation of assessments that will test
higher-order thinking skills, much like the high-quality assessments
used overseas.
The states’ development and adoption of the Common Core
Standards is a profound shift in American education that almost
most none of the education experts thought possible just two
years ago. For the first time, states have set a higher, shared
standard for success that shows whether students are college and
career-ready.
Our team clearly understands that better standards and
assessments, while vital, do not guarantee high-quality instruction.
So in our fiscal 2012 budget, we have requested $836 million in
funding to support states and districts to build high-quality
instruction systems around the new standards and in all content
areas—including literacy, arts, foreign languages, and the STEM
disciplines.
The second development consistent with the strategies of highperforming countries is the $4 billion Race to the Top competition.
For the first time, states today are deeply engaged in coherent,
coordinated, and comprehensive reform. In 46 states and the
District of Columbia, labor unions, school superintendents,
governors, and school board members worked together to design
bold blueprints for change. Even states that did not win RTT
awards now have a comprehensive roadmap for reform—and
many of them are continuing to move forward with real urgency
and courage.
Finally, the Administration’s $4 billion school turnaround program
is an unprecedented effort to redirect resources to the neediest
students and correct the imbalance that had made the U.S. one of
only a handful of countries that target greater resources toward
the lowest-need students.
Marc’s paper asserts that the current reforms to America’s
education system are largely at odds with the strategies of highperforming nations. He concludes—and I quote—that “analysts of
the OECD PISA data have [not] found any evidence that any
country that leads the world’s education performance league
tables has gotten there by implementing any of the major agenda
items that dominate the education reform agenda in the United
States.”
It is a sweeping statement. And with all due respect, I did not read
the OECD Strong Performers report on the lessons of PISA the
same way.
The OECD report stated that a “pillar of reform” in highperforming countries, “the development of internationally
benchmarked educational standards by states, is [now] well
advanced [in the United States] for the fields of language and
mathematics.”
The OECD report also concluded that “virtually every country
featured in this volume mirrors Race to the Top’s effort to support
the recruitment, development, rewarding, and retaining of effective
teachers and principals.”
These are important affirmations that the U.S. is on the same track
as other high-performing nations. Clearly, our education system is
not as far down the track as those of top performers, nor are we
anywhere near where we need to be to win the race for the future.
But we are not off-track, or chugging down an abandoned spur
line.
In fact, at the Summit, many high-performing systems reported
that, like the U.S., they too are utilizing bonuses, scholarships, and
salary supplements to reward great teaching, and to attract and
keep great teachers in hard-to-staff schools or shortage areas.
Singapore’s Senior Minister of State reported that upwards of 30
percent of Singapore’s teachers get performance-based bonuses.
His counterparts in Japan and China said that the central
governments there pay up to one third of the salaries of teachers
in poorer or rural areas to promote effective teaching in hard-toserve schools.
As I said earlier, I am committed to benchmarking the practices
and performance of top-performing countries because it can help
America accelerate achievement and elevate the teaching
profession. I am convinced that education leaders can better boost
student learning by working together and sharing best practices,
than by working alone.
Here is a quick example: Our Administration has launched TEACH,
a teacher recruitment campaign, to bring new college graduates
and career-changers into teaching, and also to enhance public
perceptions of the teaching profession.
We are looking to attract more applicants from the top third of
college graduates and to build a much more diverse teaching
force that better reflects the wonderful diversity of our nation’s
students. The lack of creativity, innovation, or even simple interest
in this at many schools of education troubles me greatly. TEACH
draws directly on lessons learned in England’s highly successful
teacher recruitment campaign during the Blair administration.
Look beyond the national level in the U.S., and you will see that
states and districts are using Race to the Top dollars to similarly
fund innovations that mirror the practices of high-performing
provinces and cities.
In Florida, the vast Hillsborough County school system is using
some of the state’s $700 million RTT grant to apply the lesson
study method developed by Japanese educators to stimulate more
collaboration and professional development around instruction.
Dozens of districts in Florida now use some form of lesson study.
In Maryland, educators are using part of the state’s $250 million
RTT award to provide a rich, well-rounded curriculum. They are
supporting both the development of a new elementary-teaching
certificate in the STEM disciplines, and expanding schools’ use of
world languages, including Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi.
Here in D.C., the district is using RTT funds to launch a
collaborative, professional learning community to assist struggling
schools. Teachers at high-achieving schools will help teachers at
low-achieving schools to adopt best practices, strengthen STEM
education, and propel overage students to graduation and not into
the streets.
The District anticipates that the Professional Learning Communities
for Effectiveness program, known as PLaCEs, will reach 11 schools
and 4,400 students in the 2013-14 school year. It is similar to the
program that Shanghai officials described at the International
Summit, where master teachers at high-achieving schools rotate
and share curriculum material with teachers in poorer or rural parts
of the province.
One of the most striking aspects of the International Summit was
that none of the Education ministers and union leaders from highperforming countries seemed content to rest on their laurels. They
talked about shared challenges to the teaching profession,
including a shortage of men in the classroom, the need to boost
diversity, and the poor quality of professional development at one-
off conferences.
Japan was concerned about a looming teacher shortage; Brazil and
Chinese officials worried about getting effective teachers in rural
schools. No one seemed content with singular silver bullets, like
reducing class size or boosting teacher pay. The consensus was
that good compensation was a necessary yet not sufficient
precondition to attracting top talent to the teaching profession.
All of this brings me to my third and final basket of lessons, the
areas in which the United States may help pioneer effective
strategies for accelerating achievement and attainment.
As I noted earlier, one of the overarching messages of the Summit
was that teachers must be treated more as professionals.
Lockstep compensation systems that take no account of teacher
impact on student learning or invaluable service in high-need
schools and underserved communities don’t do enough to treat
teachers as professionals.
My friend Randi Weingarten has pointed out that high-performing
countries not only out-educate America, they out-prepare and outrespect us.
I agree. And I d …
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