In this world, the optimists have it … not because they are always right but because they are positive. Even when wrong, they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success.
—David Landes
Some people travel the world to sit on beaches, others to see historical monuments or art museums or sporting events. I like to visit schools. Schools are microcosms of the societies they serve. Through them, you can see the struggles of the past and the tensions of the present but also glimpse immense hopes for the future. In the 21st century, the desire of families and governments everywhere, poor as well as rich, is for children to get a good education.
Schools come in all shapes and sizes. In many parts of the world, especially in Africa and South Asia, school buildings are very basic—simple buildings and roofs with mud or concrete floors and battered secondhand desks, if there are desks at all. At the other extreme, you'll find schools that feature gleaming new buildings and look more like colleges. Full of the latest technology, they are modern showpieces of pride and ambition. Inside the world's school buildings, there is also enormous variety in the quality and style of education provided. In far too many schools in the poorer parts of the world, I have seen unimaginative rote learning where children sit in rows, copying from the blackboard or reciting from old books left by missionaries. But I have also seen innovative programs where dedicated educators or philanthropists are introducing problem solving and project-based learning into poor rural schools, or building science labs in elementary schools located in drug-infested slums. Heroic individuals who are making a difference in children's lives are everywhere. The challenge today is not how to cultivate a few effective classrooms or effective schools, but how to create effective systems of schools to bring high-quality education to all children.
The global knowledge economy is a game changer. All over the world—from Indonesia to Poland, India to Norway, South Africa to Brazil—countries have been improving the education system as a pathway to participation in that economy. In the past, education systems tended to be inward looking. Schools and education systems considered themselves to be unique and thought that differences in culture and political systems made policies and practices developed elsewhere irrelevant. But today, governments and educators everywhere are looking for innovations and ideas for how to improve their systems from wherever they can find them. They recognize that no single nation has all the answers to the educational challenges produced by this new knowledge and innovation economy, and a new global marketplace of educational ideas is therefore developing.
Many high-performing nations have, in fact, been systematically searching the world for improvement ideas for a long time. The United States has been an important source of these ideas because of its leading position in education in the mid–20th century, the scale of its research enterprise, and significant innovations in many aspects of K–12 and higher education. For example, the now-famous Singapore math curriculum was developed using analysis of math research from around the world but especially from the United States. The Chinese compulsory education law was modeled on those in the United States. In the post–World War II period, many European countries (including England, where I grew up) looked at American comprehensive high schools as a better way to promote equal educational opportunity than their own separate and highly unequal academic and vocational schools. And today, many countries seeking to make their economies more creative and innovation oriented are interested in the kinds of constructivist pedagogies employed in some U.S. schools. At the higher education level, the United States' top research universities and community colleges are being emulated in many parts of the world.
Perhaps because of the U.S. position as the world leader on education in the mid–20th century, American K–12 educators have not been very active participants in these international benchmarking activities until recently. But now that it is crystal clear that other systems have moved ahead of the United States in important respects, there is growing interest in understanding more about how school systems in other parts of the world have raised their achievement. In this chapter, I describe some countries and education systems that have moved or are moving from poor to good to great. My purpose is to identify the key factors that have enabled these countries to develop strong systems of schools that are setting the gold standard. I have deliberately selected systems—Singapore, Canada, Finland, Shanghai (China), and Australia—that differ greatly from one another but outperform the United States on international assessments, producing both excellence and equity at lower cost. For each country, I also suggest key lessons for U.S. educators.
When Singapore became an independent nation in 1965, it was a poor, small, tropical island with few natural resources, little fresh water, rapid population growth, substandard housing, and recurring conflict among the ethnic and religious groups that made up its population. At that time, there was no compulsory education and only a small number of high school and college graduates and skilled workers. Today, visitors to Singapore see a gleaming global hub of trade, finance, and technology. The country is one of Asia's great success stories—a transformation from third-world status to first-world status in two generations.
Singapore's students are also consistently high performers on international assessments, having placed first in the world in math and science on the TIMSS studies of 1995, 1999, and 2003, and second in math, fourth in science, and fifth in reading on PISA assessments in 2009. How did this "little red dot on the map," as Singaporeans frequently refer to their country—a nation that is not even 50 years old—transform itself into a global economic and educational leader in such a short period of time? The answer hinges fundamentally on its education system. Lacking other resources, this island republic viewed human capital as its most precious asset. The Singapore government saw education as central to building both the economy and a sense of nationhood. Over a 40-year period, Singapore has been able to raise its education level from one similar to that of many undeveloped countries to one comparable to the best in the OECD (Stewart, 2011b). Naturally, the current Singapore school system did not emerge full-blown, but rather developed along with the economy in three broad phases.
During the first phase of Singapore's educational journey, now known as the survival phase, when most of the population was illiterate and unskilled, the government focused on expanding basic education as quickly as possible. Schools were built rapidly, people were recruited to staff them on a wide scale, established schools run by different ethnic (Chinese, Malay, Indian) and religious (Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Taoist) groups were merged into a single Singaporean system, and a bilingual policy was introduced so that all children would learn both their own language and English. The expansion was so rapid that universal primary and lower secondary education was attained by the early 1970s. During this phase, Singapore's economy relied largely on the activities of its strategically located deep-water port and on attracting low-skilled, labor-intensive foreign factories (Lee, Goh, Fredriksen, & Tan, 2008).
However, the schools in this first phase were not of high quality. Large numbers of students dropped out, and standards were low. Over time, increasing competition from other countries in Asia for these low-skilled industries led to a growing realization by the government that Singapore's comparative advantage was eroding, and that it needed to transition to a higher-skill economy.
The watershed Report on the Ministry of Education (Goh, 1979), informally known as "the Goh report," highlighted the high dropout rates and low standards of Singapore's education system and led to the second phase of educational development, now known as the efficiency phase.
The government's economic strategy was to move Singapore from a third-league, labor-intensive economy to a second-league, capitaland skill-intensive economy. A new education system was introduced in 1979, moving the country away from a one-size-fits-all approach to schooling and creating multiple pathways for students in order to reduce the dropout rate, improve the quality of education, and produce the more technically skilled labor force needed for the new economic goals. Streaming (a form of tracking) was introduced, starting in elementary school, along with three different types of high schools—academic and polytechnic high schools that could lead to college, and technical institutes that focused on occupational and technical training. The Singapore Curriculum Development Institute was also created to produce high-quality curricula and inexpensive textbooks for the new system. Streaming was unpopular when it was introduced, but the package of reforms significantly reduced the dropout rate and raised the pass rate on the English O-level examinations (taken toward the end of secondary school). And by 1995, Singapore led the world in math and science TIMSS scores.
A major focus of this period was on the production of technically trained people at all levels. For example, Singapore invested significantly in a postsecondary Institute for Technical Education (ITE) for those who left school after grade 10 and for adult job changers. Today, ITE's facilities and equipment are comparable to a modern high-tech university, and close working relationships with industries in each sector keep it current with changing demands and new technologies. ITE's strong curriculum allows interested graduates to go on to polytechnics and universities as well as directly into industry. As a result of these changes, the image and attractiveness of vocational education greatly improved, and there has been strong market demand for ITE graduates.
In many countries, technical education is looked down upon as a dead-end option, out of step with the changing needs of employers. But vocational education has been an important part of Singapore's journey to educational excellence. In 1992, Singapore took a hard look at its poorly regarded vocational education program and decided to transform and reposition it so that it was not viewed as a path of last resort. Dr. Law Song Seng led the development of the Institute for Technical Education, with the goal of making the school "a world-class postsecondary educational institution" that is "recognized locally and internationally for its relevance, quality, and value in a global economy" (Lee et al., 2008, p. 122). His team revamped the curriculum and workforce certification system, developed courses in new industries, and consolidated existing technical institutions into three mega-campuses. When I visited the ITE with a delegation from the North Carolina Board of Education, we were impressed with the quality of the facilities, which were comparable to well-endowed American universities that any student or parent would be proud to be associated with. Every course has close ties to its industry, including the most modern multinational corporations. This keeps the courses up-to-date, the equipment modern, the internships readily available, and the path to jobs relatively smooth. To combat societal prejudice against less-academically inclined students, the ITE carried out a marketing campaign for its "hands-on, minds-on, hearts-on" type of applied learning.
The result has been a doubling of enrollment since 1995, and ITE students now constitute about 25 percent of the nation's postsecondary enrollment. In 2009, more than 82 percent of ITE graduates who completed their training were placed in jobs. Pay levels for ITE graduates have been strong, and the ITE is now seen by students as a legitimate pathway to a decent future. Part of the reason for the success of the technical education at ITE is that students get a strong academic foundation early in their academic careers in elementary and secondary education so that they can acquire the more sophisticated skills required by leading-edge employers. The ITE received the IBM Innovations Award in Transforming Government, given by the Ash Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, and has been recognized worldwide as a global leader in technical education.
In the early 1990s, although Singapore's focus on efficiency had yielded good results, it became clear that the shift in the global economy meant that the prosperity of nations would increasingly be defined by the discovery and application of new ideas. The Singaporean government decided that they needed to make a fundamental shift in Singapore's education system and focus on innovation, creativity, and research. At the higher education level, they provided generous funding for research and endeavored to attract top scientists and scientific companies. Singapore universities have research partnerships with universities around the world in fields such as bioinformatics, information sciences, and medical technologies. In fact, more than 1 million foreign nationals work in Singapore.
At the same time, Singapore worked toward a new vision for their educational system: "Thinking Schools, Learning Nation." Its goal was "a school system that could develop creative thinking skills and lifelong learning passion and a national culture where learning and creativity flourish at every level of society" (Ng, 2008b, p. 6). The government undertook a wide range of initiatives over a number of years to implement this vision by providing more flexibility and choice for students through a broader range of courses and different types of schools, along with a major commitment to information and communication technology (ICT) as a facilitator of different kinds of learning. "We need a mountain range of excellence, not just one peak," said then–Minister of Education Tharman Shanmugaratnam (Lee et al., 2008, p. 21). A major investment was also made in upgrading the teaching profession: the government revamped career paths and incentives for teachers in order to attract top talent, made upgrades to teacher education through the National Institute of Education, and committed seriously to professional and career development in ways that are described in more detail in Chapter 4.
There were also major changes in school management. Instead of the former top-down system by which the Ministry of Education was in control, schools were organized into clusters and given more autonomy. The old school inspection system was scrapped and replaced by a school quality improvement model under which each school sets its own goals and annually assesses its progress on academic performance and a wide range of other indicators of a healthy school climate. Schools that perform exceptionally well are recognized as "schools of distinction." Greater autonomy for schools also led to an intense focus on identifying and developing highly effective school leaders.
Later—under the policy directive "teach less, learn more"—curriculum, pedagogical, and assessment changes opened up more "white space" in the curriculum and engaged students in deeper learning. A major investment was made in ICT to facilitate self-directed learning and place greater emphasis on project work. In my conversations with Ho Peng, director general of education in the Singapore Ministry of Education, she emphasized that the analysis that lay behind these reforms was that the Singapore education system had great strengths in its holding power (the dropout rate from its 10 years of general education is less than 2 percent) as well as rigorous literacy, math, and science curricula, but it was too overloaded with content and needed to do more to promote the kinds of broad inquiry orientation that would enable future learning. To this end, art and music are being emphasized more in the curriculum, and elementary schools are putting more emphasis on play and on stimulating student curiosity.
Victoria School is one of the oldest schools in Singapore, tracing its origins back to an English class in Kampong Glam Malay School in 1876. It is a top school, winner of one of the Ministry of Education's Schools of Distinction awards. Founded as a boys' school with a strong tradition of sport and leadership development, its principal, Mr. Low Eng Teong, described to me how the school is trying to change its model of teaching and learning using the ideas developed by Howard Gardner in Project Zero (see www.pz.harvard.edu) and incorporating technology throughout the curriculum.
In a lower secondary art class, students sit at computers. In the previous lesson they had studied self-portraits by artists Affandi and Van Gogh and explored how these artists had expressed their emotions using contrasting colors and fluid lines. Now the students are learning skills in graphic design by creating self-portraits using different kinds of typefaces. They are also using the Teaching for Understanding framework to explore the concept of identity and how it can be harnessed and expressed in many different ways and from different perspectives.
In a nearby geography classroom, students study the different rates of economic and social development of various countries. Sitting at round tables, with laptops in front of them, students work together to examine development indicators such as adult literacy rates, gross domestic product, employment structure, urbanization, and infant mortality rate for each of the four countries they have been assigned; to assess the value of each indicator; and to make a plan for what can be done to improve the development of each country. The teacher roams the classroom, asking each group probing questions about their conclusions thus far. Each group of students then presents their conclusions to the class using Google slides, while other students assess the presenting group's information and arguments using a rubric.
These classrooms don't fit the image of a traditional Asian classroom. Victoria School is in the vanguard of a change that Singapore is promoting to "touch the hearts and engage the minds of learners by promoting a different learning paradigm … emphasizing discovery through experiences, differentiated teaching, learning of lifelong skills, and the building of character through innovative and effective teaching approaches" (Ho Peng, Director General, Ministry of Education, personal interview, August 2010).
Vision and leadership. Singapore leaders had a bold, long-term vision of the role education should play in their country. Being a small nation that has to compete in a fast-changing world with nearby larger countries like China and India created a sense of urgency about the need to build up the only resource Singapore had—human capital. The strong link between education and economic development, and the value placed on creating a socially cohesive society, has kept investment in education a high priority. The economic imperative led to a focus on developing high-quality math and science as well as to globally recognized vocational and technical education, an area where most countries fail. It has also kept education dynamic and open to change as economic conditions change, rather than being tied to the past.
Commitment to meritocracy. The education system that was in place during Singapore's colonial period was only for the elite and was segregated by ethnicity and religion. An early decision of the new republic was to replace that system with a universal state-funded system in which talent and hard work would prevail. Over time, the Ministry of Education has developed a range of polices to promote equal opportunity, including community support programs, early intervention programs in school, and multiple pathways to further education and careers. The success of these efforts in closing the achievement gaps among groups and creating an education system and society that is open to talent from wherever it comes has created the belief in the general population that education is the route to advancement and that hard work pays off for students of all ethnic backgrounds and all ranges of ability.
Ambitious standards. Rigor is the watchword of the Singapore education system. Its primary school leaving exam and Singapore's own O- and A-level standards are as high as anywhere in the world, and students work hard toward achieving these milestones. In addition, all students have a strong early foundation in the core subjects of math, science, and literacy in two languages, which sets them in good stead for whichever education and career path they choose.
Curriculum, instruction, and assessment system. Singapore does not just establish high standards and then assume that teachers will figure out how to achieve them. Its Curriculum Development Institute has produced high-quality curricula in math, science, technical education, and languages that teachers are well trained to teach (Hong, Mei, & Lim, 2009). Other countries are now benchmarking their curricula against Singapore's (Ginsberg et al., 2005).
High-quality teachers and principals. In the past, Singapore had teacher shortages and was not always able to attract high-quality workers into the profession. In the 1990s, the Ministry of Education developed a comprehensive human resource system designed to draw the high caliber of teachers and school leaders needed to meet the country's ambitions for its students. This system includes active attention to recruitment of talent, coherent training, and dedicated, ongoing support. Singapore's human resource management system, perhaps the best in the world, is described in more detail in Chapter 4. Today, education policies in Singapore are focused less on structure and more on maintaining and increasing the quality of the education profession.
Alignment and coherence. In many countries, there is an enormous gap between policies and their implementation at the school level. In Singapore, there is enormous attention to policy planning and to the details of implementation. Whenever a new policy is developed, the Ministry of Education, the National Institute of Education, cluster superintendents, principals, and teachers all work through how to bring the policy about and assess whether it works. The result is very strong fidelity of implementation and relatively little variation among schools.
Accountability. Singapore uses performance management to drive improvement. Teachers, principals, university faculty, and Ministry of Education officials all have incentives to work hard, and a sophisticated performance evaluation system, using multiple measures and multiple reviewers, links performance to career development. This is described further in Chapter 4.
Global and future orientation. Singapore's education system has benefited from focused use of international benchmarking, studying aspects of many other systems and then adapting them to the circumstances of Singapore. More recently, it has also made a significant commitment to research on classroom pedagogy as part of its culture of continuous improvement. This is an education system that recognizes that the world is changing very rapidly—and one that demonstrates the capacity to learn and adapt. Singapore fosters a global outlook for everyone; teachers, principals, and students are expected to have "global awareness and cross-cultural skills" and to be "future-ready" (Singapore Ministry of Education, 2010).
The features described above have helped to make Singapore's education system world-class, but no system can rest on its laurels, and Singapore educators are certainly not complacent. Because it is a tiny country, Singapore is always vulnerable to the actions of larger powers. Through a wide range of initiatives, the education system is trying to respond to the perceived need for creative and flexible workers in a 21st century economy. However, it is a considerable challenge to alter a traditional, content-heavy, curriculum knowledge transmission system that is reinforced by high-stakes examinations that parents believe in and support through extensive tutoring. It is also difficult for teachers who were raised with teacher-dominated pedagogy to fundamentally change their practice. Finally, the economic forces in the global knowledge economy are increasing the levels of inequality in all societies. Singapore has closed achievement gaps among ethnic and income groups to an amazing degree and focused on a high-quality education for those at the bottom as well as the top, but there is still work to be done. However, the way in which Singapore has created a world-class economy fueled by a world-class education system through a steady succession of quality improvements, considered policy decisions, and careful implementation is a major global success story.
What can we learn from Singapore? Singapore is a small, highly centralized island state that was run by a single leader for 30 years. Changing the education system in Singapore is therefore easier—like "turning around a kayak rather than a battleship," according to Professor Lee Sing Kong, dean of the National Institute of Education (personal interview, 2010). But Singapore's student population of 522,000 in 360 schools is roughly the same as that of the state of Kentucky or a number of large American cities, suggesting that the types of major improvements brought about there could be undertaken at a state or city level.
From Singapore's beginning, there has been a very clear and persistent vision of the importance of education to economic development and social cohesion. The tightness of the link between education and economic development would not work in the U.S. context, but stronger collaboration among education, businesses, and economic leaders to cultivate a strategy for success in this new global context would create an urgent, forward-looking, and global focus on education development.
Singapore is also a good example of a continuous improvement system. No education policy change is taken on without careful consultation with schools as to how to make it work on the front lines. The voices of teachers and principals are integral to policy developments in Singapore. And all the key elements—curriculum, assessment, teacher training, professional development, and community support—are aligned to work together. Again, Singapore is a small and "tightly coupled" system, and different mechanisms would be needed in the larger, more multilayered U.S. system, but significant results in the classroom cannot be achieved without aligning all of these factors. This could be done at a state or city level.
Singapore has also made the development of high-quality educators—from the capable Ministry of Education staff to teachers and principals—a cornerstone of its system. Other countries are studying its human resource management system as well as its strong curriculum, especially in math, science, and technical education. There is one final lesson from Singapore's global and future orientation: in today's world, you have to be able to adapt rapidly to thrive!
Canada's education system has many similarities to that of the United States, such as the structure of schools, with elementary, junior high, and high schools; a population encompassing a majority and significant minority populations, including indigenous and immigrant groups; and decentralized educational governance—even more decentralized than our own. In Canada, education is the responsibility of the 10 provinces and 3 territories rather than the federal government. However, unlike the United States, Canada is a consistently high performer on international assessments, ranking in the top 10 in math, science, and reading in the 2009 PISA assessments. Furthermore, over the past few years, several provinces have made significant efforts to raise their achievement and reduce the number of high school dropouts. Two strikingly different provinces, Alberta and Ontario, have achieved notable success.
Alberta is a prairie province of 3.5 million people. It is comparable in size and cultural background to Iowa, and it has a similar number of students in grades K–12—589,000 students compared with about 515,000 in Iowa in 2008 (Fandel, 2008), and about the same percentage of students living in poverty. Alberta does have a larger share of students learning to speak English. However, students in Alberta perform significantly higher by international standards than students in Iowa do.
The province, growing due to its energy resources (oil and gas), has been investing in developing a high-quality public education system. According to the Canadian government, which estimates the average PISA scores of each province, Alberta ranked second only to Finland in science in the 2006 PISA, whereas the United States was ranked 29th. (The United States draws only a national sample for the PISA surveys rather than a state-by-state sample, so it is not possible to directly compare states with each other or with provinces in other countries.) When asked to explain why an already high-performing province was doubling its efforts, Alberta Minister of Education Dave Hancock said, "We are in a time frame where we don't know what the jobs will be in 10 or 15 years. With technology and the universal availability of knowledge and data, the learning has to move to how students can use data, can analyze and do problem solving. That changes the dynamic of how we learn significantly and so our system has to adapt" (Fandel, 2008, p. 70).
As part of its reforms, Alberta has put in place a provincewide K–12 curriculum in every subject, not just reading and math, so that all students have access to the same strong academic foundation. The curriculum is considerably more detailed than the kinds of guidance provided by the curriculum documents of many American states. For example, the science curriculum for grades 7, 8, and 9 is 73 pages long, whereas the Iowa core curriculum for middle school science is 4 pages long (Fandel, 2008). The curriculum is used by all Alberta schools and is credited with promoting greater consistency of instruction across the province. For example, Alberta had only 6.1 percent of its students scoring at the lowest level and 18.4 percent scoring at the top levels on the PISA science test in 2006; the United States had 24 percent scoring at the lowest level and 9 percent at the top levels. Teachers are involved in developing and assessing the provincial curriculum and have a great deal of freedom as to how they deliver it. The new social studies curriculum is also infused with more global content and perspectives, with the goal of preparing students who will be, in the words of Marcus Hauf, a 12th grade social studies teacher in Edmonton, "equipped with the necessary skills to analyze contemporary issues, make sense of them in historical context and to think critically about what is happening in the world today" (Fandel, 2008, p. 60).
A second element that Albertans regard as critical to their success is their teacher force. Teachers in Canada are paid better than most teachers in the United States, and the good salary attracts relatively strong candidates to the profession. After 11 years in the classroom and 4 years of university education, a teacher in Edmonton, Alberta, earned nearly USD$81,000 in 2008, according to the Alberta Teachers' Association. In Des Moines, one of the better-paying districts in Iowa, a teacher with the same experience and education would have made about USD$49,000, according to the Des Moines Education Association (Fandel, 2008). This is true even though Canadian per-pupil expenditures for K–12 education are lower than in the United States: USD$7,837 in Canada in 2005 compared with USD$10,390 in the United States (OECD, 2008). The recent reforms have put a major emphasis on and invested resources into professional teacher development. Every teacher develops an annual professional growth plan, which has to be aligned with the goals of the school and the province curriculum, but teachers propose how to attain their goals.
An action research program has also been implemented, the Alberta School Improvement Scheme, through which groups of teachers in a school come together to introduce innovations in teaching and learning and in student engagement and study their impact. There is now a growing provincewide repository of projects, and an annual conference brings people together to share their findings and progress. This process has really helped to improve teachers' skills and their attitude toward and use of data (Alberta Initiative for School Improvement, n.d.).
An accountability system consisting of provincewide achievement tests in grades 3, 6, and 9 and a diploma examination in 12th grade complements the focus on curriculum and professional development. And school report cards present test results, high school completion rates, and other measures of engagement and performance determined in consultation with the local community. Thus, within its schools, Alberta has developed a culture of high expectations for student performance and an ethos of continuous improvement among its educators.
Despite the fact that Alberta is already high performing by international standards, the Alberta Ministry of Education is launching a new reform program focused on the skills needed in the 21st century. It is often hard to persuade people to change when a system is clearly successful. But recognizing that the province's natural resources may not last forever and that the economy needs to shift to one based on human resources, in the spring of 2010 the ministry launched an in-person and online public engagement initiative built around the question "What should the educated Albertan look like in 20 years?" The findings of the report, Inspiring Change, are now being turned into policies (Alberta Ministry of Education, 2010). In public forums and during his reading of the 2011 Education Act before Alberta's Legislative Assembly, Minister of Education Dave Hancock has noted, "It is our responsibility to educate our children for their future, not our past."
The story of education reform in Ontario, where 27 percent of students are immigrants, is of great relevance to American educators. Ontario is Canada's largest province, responsible for the education of 2 million students. Much of the large immigrant population lives in Toronto, which is one of the world's most diverse cities, with more than 125,000 immigrants arriving each year from dozens of different countries and language backgrounds. Ninety-five percent of Ontario's students are in public schools. The Ontario Ministry of Education governs four publicly funded school systems, since in Canada students may select Protestant or Catholic schools in either English or French.
In the 1990s, a Conservative provincial government raised standards, cut funding, introduced teacher testing, reduced professional development, and increased support for private schools. The result was a period of intense labor unrest and strikes, strong public criticism of schools, high teacher turnover, and some flight to private schools. In 2004, a new premier and provincial government were elected with the goal of increasing achievement, bringing peace to labor relations, and increasing public confidence in the schools. The government introduced a set of reforms focused on increasing literacy, numeracy, and high school graduation rates (Asia Society & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). Just as important, they created the Ontario Education Partnership Table, where all the stakeholders in the system came together to create a new political consensus and work out how to achieve these goals.
For almost a decade in the 1990s, a Conservative party government in Ontario had enacted education reform efforts while battling with the teachers' unions. The government cut funding, reduced professional development, introduced teacher testing, and took out television ads that blamed teachers for the failings of schools. There was considerable public dissatisfaction, poor morale among teachers, several years of teacher strikes, and no improvement in student performance.
Then, in 2004, a new provincial government headed by Dalton McGuinty took office and dramatically changed the approach to education reform. The government reached out to the teachers' union to restore trust and consulted with them on reform strategy and ways to make reform effective. They signed a four-year collective bargaining agreement. They spent time in schools listening to teachers. The government's literacy and numeracy reform strategy was based on the assumption that teachers wanted to do the right thing but lacked the tools and capacity to do it, and that reforms could not be successful unless teachers were respected and bought in to the reforms. The deputy minister met quarterly with the teachers' unions, superintendents, and principals' associations, and an Ontario Partnership Table was created to bring a wider range of stakeholders together two to four times a year. Working tables of smaller groups delved into more detailed issues in the implementation of reforms. The government abolished the hated teacher test and changed their approach to teacher effectiveness by promoting professional teacher development, which they saw as the single most important factor in the improvement of teacher quality and student achievement.
Two architects of the reforms, Michael Fullan of the University of Toronto, who served as Senior Advisor to the Premier, and Ben Levin, who served as Deputy Minister of Education during this period, termed the Ontario approach "results without rancor or ranking" (Levin, Glaze, & Fullan, 2008, p. 23).
With 5,000 schools and numerous school boards to deal with, the Ontario reformers picked a limited number of targets to try to achieve. They set specific targets: 75 percent of students achieving at the provincial standard (70 percent, or B grade) in literacy and mathematics in the 6th grade (age 12), and a secondary school graduation rate of 85 percent. The major strategy chosen to meet these targets was professional capacity building—in the provincial Ministry of Education itself, in district school boards, and in schools and classrooms. The strategy, which was based heavily on Michael Fullan's research into implementation of school change, was based on the premise that top-down reforms do not achieve lasting change because they are not typically focused on the instructional core, they assume that teachers know how to do things that they don't, schools are overwhelmed by too many reforms, or they do not achieve teacher buy-in. So reformers set about addressing all of these issues.
A separate unit was created in the Ministry of Education and staffed by excellent educators—not bureaucrats—to work on the Literacy and Numeracy Initiatives. Schools and districts were required to create teams to develop achievement targets and plans for meeting them. Within schools, there was extensive professional development for teachers focused on key instructional practices in literacy and numeracy. In elementary schools, thousands of new teaching positions were created and new art, music, and physical education teachers were added to enrich the curriculum and allow regular classroom teachers more professional learning time. Intensive assistance was provided to the schools that had the greatest difficulties (Levin et al., 2008).
At the high school level, the Student Success Initiative was based on the recognition that potential dropouts can be recognized by the 9th grade. Teams were created in each school to track data on which students were likely to drop out, and the ministry gave each district funds to hire a student success leader to coordinate district efforts as well as a student success officer in each school. A number of initiatives were created to keep potential dropouts engaged in school, including credit recovery programs and high-skills majors, developed with employers to provide up-to-date skills to students who were not engaged by the traditional high school curriculum.
Reflecting the new government's view that government and the teaching profession had to work collaboratively rather than combatively, Ontario's approach to teacher effectiveness also shifted from teacher testing to teacher development. They abolished the much-hated test for initial teachers and developed a new framework for teaching and leadership that included a universal new teacher induction program, a new competency-based teacher program, a new competency-based teacher performance appraisal system in conjunction with annual professional learning plans, and a new talent identification and leadership development system for principals that included new principal preparation, mentoring, and evaluation components (Pervin & Campbell, 2011).
By 2010, the reforms had increased the numbers of students achieving the 6th grade standard from 54 percent in 2004 to 68 percent and had increased high school graduation rates from 68 percent in 2004 to 79 percent in 2009. The reforms had also reduced the number of low-performing schools from 20 percent to under 5 percent, improved teacher morale, and reduced the attrition rate of new teachers by two-thirds (Levin, 2008).
Provincewide strategy. Canada has shown that high-level performance can be driven from the province level (roughly equivalent to a U.S. state). In fact, Canada has no federal ministry or department of education. Within the provinces, there is also a complex system of local school boards, defined not only geographically but also by language and religion. Despite this local complexity, a number of Canadian provinces, including Alberta and Ontario, have been able to develop and implement significant provincewide quality improvements rather than improvements that affect only a small number of schools. One reason this is possible is the fact that over a number of years, financing of schools has moved from the local to the province level, which enables the provincial government to ensure that resources are distributed fairly and can also be used to create long-term reform programs, such as Alberta's broad provincewide curriculum or Ontario's focused literacy and numeracy effort. Information is broadly shared among provinces through a Council of Ministers and through universities, so that Canada performs well as a whole even though education is managed at the provincial and local levels.
Collaboration with unions and other stakeholders. The Ontario reforms began with the election of Dalton McGuinty as premier of Ontario, and his strong leadership has been critical. However, the antagonistic atmosphere that prevailed for a number of years prior to his election inspired a great need to reestablish trust between the government, the school boards, the teachers and the public. The creation of the Ontario Education Partnership Table brought together all the stakeholders two to four times a year; this collaborative working environment is key to the province's educational success.
Focus on instructional content and capacity. A key feature of Ontario's approach to reform has been professional capacity building, focused on classroom results, at the provincial, district, school, and classroom levels. A new Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat was created within the ministry (now called the Student Achievement Division); new types of positions (e.g., student success officers and literacy specialists) were created within schools, and leadership teams were created in each district; resources for professional learning about literacy and numeracy instruction were developed; and focused support was provided to unsuccessful schools. Thus, the strategy combined top-down policy prescription with bottom-up capacity building to produce results. Similarly, the Alberta system pairs a provincewide curriculum with a strong focus on professional development to build teachers' capacity.
Approach to teacher effectiveness. Overall, Canada has a good supply of teachers with enough well-qualified applicants, decent working conditions, and competitive salaries by international standards. In Ontario in the 1990s, the efforts to cut back expenditures, introduce teacher testing, roll back wages, and blame teachers for all the problems of the schools negatively affected teachers. They left the profession early, and Ontario struggled to attract new educators. Shifting the focus from teacher testing to teacher development through a comprehensive career framework for preparation, support, and evaluation of teachers and school leaders made a significant change for the better.
Alberta's education system performs at a very high level internationally, but it has certainly not solved all of its education problems. Its dropout rate is higher than Iowa's, for example. But by getting more consistency in the quality of what is taught and the quality of teachers, it is increasing its overall levels of achievement and reducing dropout rates. Ontario increased numeracy, literacy, and graduation rates; sharply reduced teacher attrition and early retirement rates; and increased public confidence in the schools in a relatively short period of time (2004–2007), but it has not yet achieved universal high school graduation. In addition, improvements in Ontario's test results are more significant in the area of basic skills than in the area of higher-order thinking, and the sheer number of educational initiatives proved confusing to schools. Still, the shift in public climate and the strengthening of the capacity of educators in the system at every level to improve instruction has set the stage for continuing improvement.
The success of reforms in Alberta and Ontario shows what strong leadership at the state or city level can achieve, even without a major national initiative. These reforms also show that strategies may need to be flexible in response to a particular context. Alberta's approach encompassed a broad improvement across the whole system, whereas Ontario focused on more targeted outcomes in reading, math, and graduation rates—bringing up the bottom. They were both facilitated by the movement of school funding to the province level over the past few years.
In the United States' current political climate of strong public criticism of teachers, one of the most powerful lessons from Ontario is that building collaboration and buy-in with key stakeholders, especially teachers, through the education partnership table is critical to bringing about policy change and sustaining reform momentum. But even with good policies, there is often an "implementation gap" between policies and what happens in the classroom. Here, the use of data to track students who were potential dropouts so that they could be supported from 9th grade onward, and the efforts to create alignment and coherence among the reforms at school, district, and provincial levels are also of direct application to the multilayered education system in the United States. Finally, the key focus of both provinces, intensifying over time, has been the strengthening of teacher and leadership capacity in schools through universal higher standards in preparation, mentoring and induction, performance appraisal, and professional development. The reform leaders believe that change cannot be driven primarily through test-based accountability and that capacity building at the school level is fundamental to real improvement in the classroom.
When you visit primary schools today in Finland, you will see small, well-equipped schools of a few hundred students, typically with small class sizes of 15 to 20 students, although they can have up to 30. Students, who enter school at age 7 after attending a state-funded, play-oriented preschool, are busy working in cooperative learning groups in the classroom or around the school on projects involving math problems or going to the library to check out more books. Each student reads at his or her own level, and there is little classwide instruction. The teacher is typically working with one student who needs more help while being open to questions from others who are working on projects, sometimes of their own design. From a very early age, students are encouraged to be creative, take risks, and solve problems that interest them. Special support teachers provide additional assistance to students who need it.
The atmosphere is relatively calm and peaceful, and students are engaged in their individual work. Students receive a free hot meal in the school every day, and health care is provided by the Finnish national health system. Because there are no external assessments until the high school leaving exam in grade 12, teachers and students are free to concentrate on learning rather than on test preparation. Teachers assess students through a mixture of diagnostic and performance tests that they create and provide feedback to parents primarily through descriptive material rather than rankings or other numerical measures. The school day is relatively short, as is the school year. This schedule allows time for the teachers to develop curricula and work with teachers in other schools to innovate and problem solve.
Schools have played a critical role in transforming Finland from a relatively poor timber- and agriculture-based economy to a modern technologically based economy, home to a huge telecommunications industry that includes Nokia, the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world. Education has always been respected in Finland. However, in the 1960s, Finland had a tracked and low-achieving education system that performed well below the level of other European countries, including its Scandinavian neighbors. In 1970, only 40 percent of Finnish adults had obtained an upper secondary diploma.
However, by 2000, due to a series of thoughtful reforms, Finland had become a high-achieving country, as measured by PISA assessments. It remained in the top group of countries in the PISA assessments of 2003, 2006, and 2009. In fact, in 2009, Finland ranked second in science, fifth in math, and third in reading—the only European country in the top group. Even more remarkable than Finland's high standards are its very equitable outcomes: across the whole country, there is less than 5 percent variation in achievement scores among schools. Graduation rates are very high, with 99 percent of the population completing basic education at age 16, and three out of five Finns attending state-funded higher education institutions. This expansion and quality development have been achieved with expenditures that are moderate by international standards. How did Finland transform itself from a country with an undistinguished track record in education to one with a world-class system?
Because of its small size and geographic location, the history of Finland is one of resistance to large nearby empires—first Sweden and then Russia. This has contributed to a strong sense of Finnish identity and values and to a high regard for Finnish language literacy that is an important cultural underpinning of the country's educational efforts. But these factors did not, by themselves, produce a strong education system. In the 1950s, Finland was an agricultural society that had suffered devastating losses of life during World War II and had a very limited and highly unequal school system. Most Finns had only six years of basic education, and secondary schools were mostly private.
In the 1960s, there was a wave of popular demands for greater social and economic equality as well as extensive discussions of Finland's economic future and how it could move away from its heavy reliance on timber. After many years of debate and disagreement, the parliament created a new basic education system: a common comprehensive school for all students from grades 1 through 9. This common school was not just another school structure; it represented a dream of a society in which all students, no matter what their background or where they lived, would get the quality of education, social support, and health care that they deserved (Sahlberg, 2011). The common school was implemented very gradually throughout the country, taking over private schools and merging the public and private teachers' unions. To address the challenge of getting all students to meet the same high standards, a new national curriculum was developed over a five-year period by the Ministry of Education in a process that involved hundreds of teachers (Sahlberg, 2011).
One consequence of the development of the common school and national curriculum was the realization that to hold all children—rather than just the group that had traditionally gone to secondary school—to the high standards in the curriculum, Finland would need teachers with different kinds of knowledge and skills.
In 1979, teacher preparation was incorporated into universities, and eventually master's degrees were required of all licensed teachers, even primary school teachers. As the teacher preparation system evolved, teachers were expected to be involved in research, have strong pedagogical content knowledge, be trained to diagnose students with learning difficulties, and differentiate instruction based on learning needs. Over time, as the quality and training of teachers strengthened, the ministry devolved more and more responsibilities to local schools and teachers. This degree of trust and professional autonomy to teachers in turn made teaching much more attractive as a career. Today, teaching is a greatly admired profession in Finland, on a par with other professions. Only 1 in 10 applicants is accepted into programs to become a primary school teacher, for example. Applicants must go through two rounds of selection, the first based on their high school record and out-of-school accomplishments, and the second based on a written examination on assigned books on pedagogy, an observed clinical activity, and interviews regarding teaching as a profession. These top candidates then complete a rigorous teacher education program supported by the government (Sahlberg, 2011).
Finnish educators believe that with early diagnosis and intervention, all students can achieve success in a regular classroom. A nested series of supports responds quickly to any signs that a student is falling behind. First, all teachers are trained in diagnosing student difficulties; if a student does not understand a particular area, the teacher will work with the student after school to make sure he or she grasps the key concepts. Thus, students' difficulties do not have to wait for an end-of-year exam to be detected and addressed. Second, this support from the classroom teacher is supplemented by a special teacher who has additional training in learning difficulties and is assigned to each school to work with students who need extra help catching up. Third, every school has a "pupils' care group," which includes the principal, special support teacher, school psychologist, and classroom teacher. This multidisciplinary team meets regularly to discuss how classrooms are progressing and can access a broader array of municipal services if a student needs support that is beyond the school's capacity to provide. In some schools, teachers stay with their students for more than a year, getting to know them well and taking deep responsibility for their learning. The final level of support for students is provided through the national health care system, which is tax supported and available free of charge to families (Grubb, 2007).
The combination of uniformly excellent teachers trained to diagnose learning difficulties, a strong focus on early intervention, and support personnel available in schools helps to produce highly consistent academic results across the country. Teachers also feel supported—they are not left alone to struggle with students in difficulty. Finland's success in international assessments is due to practices across all schools that minimize the gap between the bottom and the top in student achievement scores.
Another consequence of the development of the common school from grades 1 to 9 was an increasing demand for upper secondary school. A reform of the upper secondary system was instituted that abolished the traditional structure and created a much more flexible, modular system with more choice of both academic and vocational options, both of which can lead to postsecondary education. As a result, 43 percent of Finns in their 20s have completed tertiary education, the highest percentage in Europe.
In the 1980s, the Finnish government gave up central bureaucratic control of education and devolved responsibilities for improvement to the schools. The schools became the center of the action, with responsibility for curriculum, assessment, and innovations in teaching and learning, especially those that would prevent early school failure. Schools worked collaboratively in networks with other schools to pioneer improvements. Attention to cognitive science and new conceptions of knowledge and learning led to more attention to problem solving. In the primary years, a focus was put on following students' natural curiosity. The improvements in the schools and the professional quality and responsibility of the teachers contributed to a high level of trust among parents, political leaders, and the schools. There are no external assessments in the comprehensive school, only sample testing in grades 2 and 9 to provide information on the functioning of the system as a whole to the Ministry of Education.
In the 1990s, an outside threat forced changes in the education system. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the major market for Finland's products, together with a banking crisis led to 20 percent unemployment in Finland, double the rate of the 2008 recession in the United States. The government was forced to develop a new economic model. It joined the European Union and decided to put a major emphasis on research, innovation, and telecommunications. This accelerated the trend in schools toward a focus on creativity and problem solving, individualized learning, flexibility, and working in teams. For example, the math curriculum focuses on problem solving from the earliest grades. Students spend their time solving meaningful and realistic problems rather than doing repetitive exercises. This is made possible, in part, by strong literacy development—by grade 2, all students are reading well enough to handle word problems (Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, 2010). Teachers can spend enough time on complex problems because of the lack of pressure of external tests. By lower secondary school, students are expected to take an active role in designing their own learning activities and to work individually and in teams; by upper secondary school, the Finnish school model has no grade structure and is more like a college, with each student designing an individualized program, starting courses at different times, and often able to include both academic and vocational courses. The curriculum is also more global, with all students expected to learn two languages besides Finnish. In a short period of time, Finland has become one of the world's hotspots for innovation and telecommunications. The proportion of Finns who work in research and development careers is now three times the OECD average.
Commitment to equity. Finland's reform story is not a case where a single leader introduced a major reform program. Instead, the ideas that underlie Finland's high performance have developed over time through debate and the establishment of a broad societal consensus. Chief among these are a commitment to equity, represented by the development of an untracked common school; early intervention systems that prevent children from falling behind; and the broader health supports and social safety net of a welfare state. Achievement gaps among socioeconomic groups were large in the 1970s but have shrunk considerably. And by 2006, Finland's between-school variance on the PISA science assessment was only 5 percent, while the average between-school difference in OECD countries was 33 percent.
Excellent teachers. Of all of the elements of the Finnish system, the one that most observers inside and outside Finland credit with Finland's superior performance is its high-quality teaching force. Requiring a master's degree of all teachers (increasingly, many have higher degrees as well), making the profession highly selective, investing financially in teacher training, developing a rigorous research-based teacher preparation program, and giving teachers considerable authority and autonomy in schools have put teaching on a par with other professions and created a profession that is admired and trusted in Finland. Teachers can diagnose problems in their schools, apply evidence-based solutions, and analyze their impact.
Pasi Sahlberg is a former math teacher and later World Bank official who has been deeply involved in Finnish education reforms. He contrasts the model of what he calls "the global education reform movement" (GERM) with the distinctive Finnish approach to reform. GERM draws its ideas from the corporate world and emphasizes a focus only on core subjects, competition among providers, standardization of curriculum, test-based accountability, and top-down direction, while the Finnish "professionalism" model emphasizes breadth of curriculum, collaboration between schools, attention to individual interests, creativity, trust-based accountability, and local school autonomy.
Broad and individualized curriculum. The Finnish curriculum is broad and individualized, firmly based in child development and modern learning theory. Play-oriented preschool is followed by elementary school, where the focus is on encouraging students to follow their curiosity and work on real problems. Students are expected to take responsibility for their own learning from an early age. This emphasis on creativity and individual responsibility for learning has been reinforced as Finland's technology sector has grown. At the national level, the curriculum is a broad general statement of goals. Both detailed curriculum development and decisions about pedagogy have been devolved to schools and teachers. Teachers are responsible for assessing students' individual progress. While this creates some issues with comparability, Finns believe that the harms often associated with standardized testing—"narrowing of the curriculum, teaching to the test, manipulation of test results, and unhealthy competition among schools—can be more problematic" (Pasi Sahlberg, personal communication, 2010).
Professional accountability. Perhaps most surprising to observers from the United States is the fact that Finland has no external standardized testing until students take a high school exit exam at the end of grade 12. Corresponding with the lack of standardized tests is a lack of highly formal external accountability mechanisms. Finland abolished its school inspectorate some time ago, and the ministry's formal check on schools is limited to periodic sampling of student learning in grades 2 and 9. Parents trust teachers as professionals who know what is best for children in much the same way that parents in the United States trust pediatricians. Schools work together in networks to improve their teaching and learning, a practice that also helps to explain the very small differences between schools in performance.
One of the challenges for Finland, and for much of western Europe, is educating its growing immigrant population. Although immigrants currently make up only 3 percent of the total Finnish population, their numbers are increasing. Immigrants are concentrated in the capital, Helsinki, and represent 50 percent of the population in some Helsinki schools. Certainly Finland's health and social safety net and its child-centered system of early intervention and support should prove beneficial, but the population changes are too recent to know what the educational outcomes will be in the future.
Also, as with any high-performing nation, Finnish educators worry as to whether the policies that have succeeded up until now will continue to drive the country forward. They worry that complacency among parents and political leaders will motivate leaders to keep education as it is as opposed to always changing and improving. There is also the concern that in a context of tighter budgets, some of the things that have made Finnish education successful, like smaller class sizes or early intervention, might be affected. Finland's education changes were created out of a social commitment and a need for national survival. What is the big idea that will engage the passions of the entire population in the future?
Today, Finland is often cited as a model for education in a knowledge society, and it is a magnet for school reformers all over the world. In 2009, when I visited with a group of American chief state school officers to study the Finnish teaching profession, there was a group of educators from China visiting a school at the same time to observe implementation of cooperative education and learn how to make school autonomy work. Educators who visit Finland are inspired by the system's commitment to meeting the needs of every child, its respect for and trust in teachers, the strong constructivist pedagogy, and the predictable quality of education; every school in Finland is an effective school.
Others question whether Finland is too small and homogeneous to be a useful comparison for the United States. While Finland does lack the social and ethnic diversity found in much of our country, its population size (5,326,000) is comparable to that of many U.S. states, and some of Finland's key practices, such as raising the standards for the teaching profession and classroom-based early intervention systems, could be replicated within an individual state.
There are also cultural differences between Finland and the United States. Finland is a nation of readers, with the highest library use rate in Europe and a value system that places a great deal of trust in public institutions. In addition, the United States does not follow a Nordic social welfare model, although the social support elements needed to help all children learn can be found in many of our community schools and neighborhood support projects.
Still, while many other countries are trying to improve their achievement by focusing on one or two subjects, standardizing curriculum, and driving performance with test-based accountability, Finland provides an alternative model to challenge our thinking—one that undergoes only light national direction, allows substantial school autonomy, implements a broad and individualized curriculum that emphasizes problem solving and a global outlook, and combines high challenge with high support. Finland guarantees the quality of its system upfront in the high standards for selection and training of teachers and then relies on the expertise and professional accountability of teachers who are knowledgeable and committed to their students. Finland has successfully built a competitive knowledge economy while maintaining a Nordic social welfare model. In the current U.S. situation of low and unequal performance by international standards and loud criticism of teachers and their unions, it is hard to imagine this model, based on a trust in the profession, working in the United States. But the Finnish system's quality of schools and teachers, its combination of high expectations and high support, and the level of engagement Finnish students demonstrate in their learning are ideals to which we might aspire.
Forty years ago, China's economy was primarily based on subsistence agriculture; today it is the largest manufacturer of solar panels in the world. Forty years ago, most Chinese lived in rural villages; today, the majority of Chinese live in cities. The rise of China is indeed one of the critical developments of the late 20th and early 21st century. China's astounding economic performance has been extensively reported. Far less widely known are the dramatic gains it has made in education in a relatively short period of time. Since the end of Mao's Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), during which conventional schools were closed, teachers were sent to the factories or the countryside to do manual labor, and anyone with an education was suspect, the People's Republic of China has committed itself to education as a central priority to develop its economy and raise its 1.3 billion citizens out of poverty.
The first step was to rebuild the education system from the ruins created by the Cultural Revolution. In the 1970s, the national government in Beijing wanted to massively expand basic education but lacked the resources to do so. So it encouraged provinces and local communities to create schools. Drawing on the traditional respect for education in Chinese culture, which dates back thousands of years, as well as a powerful desire for social progress through education, communities did so with great enthusiasm, and universal primary education was achieved very quickly (Cheng, 2010). In 1988, a compulsory education law requiring nine years of basic education was passed, and enrollment rates skyrocketed. Expansion of upper secondary education followed, focusing on both traditional academic schools and vocational schools to meet the needs of the growing manufacturing sector. In the late 1990s and early 21st century, higher education expanded dramatically—from 6 million students in 1998 to about 30 million students in 2009 (Yang in Asia Society, 2008b).
In just 30 years, China has virtually eliminated illiteracy, expanded nine years of basic education to every part of the country, and dramatically expanded the number of Chinese students enrolled in higher education, both at home and abroad. The People's Republic of China now runs the world's largest school system, serving 20 percent of the world's students (200 million in elementary and secondary education), with less than 10 percent of the world's GDP. The rapidity of this growth was achieved through a combination of government vision and investment and huge social demand for education. The government's 2020 plan for education, released in 2010, calls for universalizing preschool, raising the retention rate in the nine years of basic education to 95 percent, increasing upper secondary school (high school) enrollment rates to 90 percent, and redressing the significant disparities that have arisen as a result of the local financing of schools through expanding central government funding of poorer areas. China's education system is on the move.
While this rapid expansion of education on an unheard-of scale was the main focus of this period, there have also been efforts since the 1990s to improve the quality of education in China. Although funding for schools was substantially local, standards and curriculum were the province of the national Ministry of Education. After studying the curricula of more than 30 countries around the world, the Ministry of Education introduced a curriculum reform effort in 2001. It was piloted in a small number of provinces and then disseminated to other parts of the country in 2007. The Chinese curriculum has traditionally been very heavily focused on math and science, with a core of biology, chemistry, physics, algebra, and geometry required of all high school students. The new curriculum attempts to reduce the emphasis on disciplines, introduce more arts and humanities, move away from knowledge transmission and rote forms of learning to more participatory learning, and change the form of assessments to promote the kinds of "creative and problem-solving" skills thought to be appropriate for the 21st century global knowledge economy. In 2001, the teaching of English from 3rd grade on was introduced throughout China to ensure that Chinese students could engage with the world, following several decades of national isolation. Finally, China also promoted greater decentralization of some curriculum decisions to better meet local needs.
China is a vast and diverse country with very uneven levels of development and income, from the gleaming modern cities of the east coast to vast agricultural hinterlands. The heavy role of local efforts in the expansion of basic education led to large disparities in education quality, especially between urban and rural areas. The ministry is now devoting its efforts to reducing these disparities and promoting equal opportunity in education. These efforts include creating boarding schools in rural areas to overcome the problem of children living long distances from school, providing scholarships to encourage people in rural areas to go into teaching, abolishing textbook fees in rural areas, and implementing a vast, satellite-based distance learning network that enables master teachers to work with students and teachers in rural areas to improve the quality of instruction.
While the scale and speed of China's education expansion has been impressive, until now there has been no way to know how the quality of China's massive system compared with those in other parts of the world. But for the first time in 2009, a mainland province of China participated in the PISA. When the results were released, Shanghai students came on top of the PISA rankings in all three subjects—math, science, and reading.
The city of Shanghai is the commercial headquarters of China, its most international city, and a pioneer of education reforms; the province of Shanghai also includes some less developed and more rural areas. The province has been at the forefront of efforts to broaden the curriculum in Chinese schools, encouraging electives to broaden subject matter choices for students and sponsoring inquiry-oriented extracurricular activities such as science, theater, and entrepreneurship clubs. It has tried to reduce pressure from examinations in elementary school by reducing the number of "key" schools (entered by examination at the end of primary or lower secondary schools) and moving toward a system of neighborhood schools. In recent years, its schools have included children of the millions of families who have migrated from rural areas to the city to look for work. Shanghai has developed a strategy for strengthening lower-performing schools by pairing stronger schools with weaker ones and urban schools with rural ones to help them improve. Teacher distribution policies also try to ensure that higher-grade (master) teachers are spread among schools. The province has also created its own higher education entrance examination (to replace the national university entrance examination dreaded by every Chinese student) with a broader curriculum focus and measures of problem-solving skills. Although Shanghai is the most advanced area in China—other parts of China have not yet achieved its level of economic or educational development—it is a harbinger of what might develop in many parts of China over the next 20 years.
It is important to note that while Shanghai published its PISA results, other provinces that have taken the PISA surveys as a way to benchmark their progress against the rest of the world have not publically released them. Hong Kong, which was a colony of Great Britain until 1997, when it returned to Chinese sovereignty under the "one country, two systems" political arrangement, has a separate and differently structured education system and has long been a top performer in PISA.
Bold, long-term vision for education. Through its investment in education, China hopes to make the transition from an agricultural and low-wage manufacturing economy to a world leader in a range of fields. China's long-term goals include universal 12 years of education by 2020, 100 first-class universities, science parks to develop products from university research, and a modernized curriculum aimed at developing students' creativity and ability to apply their knowledge, their skills in technology use, and proficiency in English. It has set its sights on not just mass education but on a world-class education.
In July 2010, Premier Hu Jintao formally issued China's National Plan for Medium and Long-Term Education Reform and Development, which was two years in the making and underwent several rounds of public comment (millions of comments were received via the Internet). Emphasizing that education is the driving force for future development in China, this blueprint for educational modernization aims to continue expanding education from preschool to university while also addressing some of the quality, equity, and management concerns that arose during the rapid educational expansion of the previous two decades. Some of the specific goals from 2010–2020 include the following:
- Universalize one year of preschool.
- Raise the graduation rate from nine years of basic education to 95 percent.
- Raise enrollments in upper secondary school to 90 percent.
- Reduce disparities in financing of schools and achieve more balanced development through expanded central government financing of poorer areas.
- Narrow the gap between "top" schools and weaker schools.
- Reduce the homework burden on students.
- Diversify the college entrance examination system.
- Increase higher education enrollment to 40 percent of the age cohort.
- Increase the number of world-class universities.
More information on the National Plan for Medium and Long-Term Reform and Development is available online from the Chinese Ministry of Education (2010).
Rigorous standards and core curriculum, especially in math and science. Like most East Asian countries, China emphasizes math and science far more than the United States does. This is implemented through rigorous national curriculum standards, strong subject matter preparation, and ongoing professional teacher development; specialized math and science teachers as early as 1st grade; and a strong societal emphasis on math and science, including in the university examination systems. As a result, both girls and boys do well in science.
Coherent teacher development system. Like other East Asian countries, China has a coherent system of ongoing teacher development, described in more detail in Chapter 4. Prospective teachers are well prepared in their subject areas and immersed in observing experienced teachers on a regular basis. Once teachers are hired, they take part in weekly professional development sessions led by the master teachers in their school. A career ladder provides salary incentives based on public teaching lessons, mentoring younger teachers, and publications.
Strong cultural commitment to education. Respect for education is deeply ingrained in Chinese history, going back to the Imperial Civil Service Examination system. This very meritocratic system lasted from 603 to 1905 and was open to anyone in China who could study the five Confucian classics. The examination system gave scholars a status above that of a warrior or merchant in Chinese culture and created the strong cultural belief that effort, not ability, determines success. Chinese students work much harder than American students. Not only is the school year longer, but students in China also spend countless hours studying outside school. Overall, students in China spend twice as many hours studying as their American counterparts, both to honor their families and to participate in the expanding opportunities that are open to those with a good education (Stewart & Singmaster, 2010).
International orientation. Chinese education leaders use international benchmarking to improve their system. From the expansion of early childhood education to the development of world-class universities and science parks, Chinese education leaders systematically study the effectiveness of other countries' approaches as a way to improve their own. As noted the recent major curriculum reforms are attempting to move China away from its traditional didactic classroom practices, with their heavy emphasis on memorization, to more Western approaches that incorporate inquiry methods and more student participation in classroom discussion. Perhaps surprisingly, given China's isolation from the world for many years, Chinese schools and students are more internationally oriented than most American schools. In addition to the mandate that all students learn English, Chinese schools teach world history and geography and actively pursue sister-school partnerships with schools around the world.
Despite its impressive educational developments, China faces difficult challenges as it seeks to turn its huge population from a burden into an asset. The government is making major efforts to address the rural-urban gap, as discussed, but the disparity among the more than half of Chinese citizens who live on less than USD$2 per day and the increasingly affluent cities is a major threat to China's peaceful development. Although the government is devoting enormous resources to addressing these disparities, in rural areas, teacher qualifications, facilities, student achievement, and access to upper secondary education all lag behind.
Another major challenge to the success of Chinese schools is the university entrance examination, which is controlled by the universities. Critics point out that the examination places undue emphasis on math, science, and the memorization of esoteric material. Academics in universities have opposed the curriculum reforms being implemented in schools as well as changes to the university examination system itself. They regard reforms as a "dumbing down" of the curriculum and examination. The ongoing tension between standards as conceived by university academics and standards as conceived by leaders in elementary and secondary education is familiar to American educators. The government is trying to reduce the influence of the examination by encouraging provinces to develop their own exams or to experiment with allowing some students to enter university by alternate routes. Still, the belief in examinations as the guarantor of meritocracy is very strong, which means that high schools are very exam focused and students spend many hours with tutors to prepare for exams (Zhao, 2009).
A third major challenge for China is capacity. As the country's educational system expands at breakneck speed, there are capacity issues at every level. For example, when the Ministry of Education made the decision to implement universal English language instruction in schools, it lacked the thousands of teachers needed to carry out the mandate. Also, because most Chinese teachers grew up in a didactic education system, they are less familiar with inquiry-oriented pedagogy, and overhauling the profession will take an enormous effort. Universities have expanded, but they do not yet employ enough well-trained faculty, the quality of many courses is not high, and there have been significant problems with graduate unemployment, especially in the eastern cities.
China is so vast and diverse and is changing so rapidly that any statement about China is both true and untrue at the same time. It is simultaneously a third-world country and a first-world country. But China's determination to provide a middle-class standard of living, high education levels, and a research- and innovation-based economy for its vast population is apparent.
The quote "Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world" is attributed to Napoleon in the 19th century; certainly, China's recent economic rise to become the globe's second-largest economy (and, one day, its largest) is shaking the world. China has huge economic, environmental, and political problems to solve, but it is stiffening the global competition for high-skill and high-wage jobs. The U.S. economic and educational system has many advantages that can be built on to create an innovation-oriented economy and society, but only if we take very seriously the challenge of building a world-class education system for all of our students.
The U.S.–China relationship will probably prove to be the most important relationship of the early part of the 21st century. Our curriculum has been very focused on the United States (and, to some extent, Europe), and our students know very little about China, a part of the world that will be such an important part of their future. We need to engage with China; our students need to know more about Chinese culture and language. Chinese language programs and school partnerships between the two countries are growing, but they are starting from a tiny base, and we need to accelerate them.
There is much to admire in Chinese educational practice, including the serious academic focus of schools and students' engagement with their studies. There are other aspects, such as the intense focus on the university entrance examination, the restrictions on subject choice for students, and the more didactic classrooms, that would not be welcome in the United States (and the Chinese themselves are trying to modify many of these aspects). The East Asian system of teacher support, in which every teacher follows a tradition of close teamwork, meeting regularly to improve their classroom skills and the curriculum, is something that is now being emulated in the West to reduce the isolation of teachers, and the success of Shanghai in raising the achievement of weaker schools by pairing them with stronger schools and involving some of the best teachers in those efforts is also beginning to gain international attention.
While visiting the school attended by my brother's two daughters in Perth, West Australia, I was struck by how familiar everything felt. Although the school uniforms and the choice of netball as the girls' competitive sport was a reminder of Australia's heritage as a British colony ("Surrey removed 11 time zones," as one wag put it), most of the school seemed very American. With its warm, sunny climate, modern buildings, relaxed atmosphere, and rambunctious students, it could have been a school in California. In the past, the "white Australia" immigration policy kept the schools fairly homogeneous—with the exception of the aboriginal population—but now, with substantial immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and from South and Southeast Asia, the roster of student names in the school sounded like a United Nations roll call. Technology was very much in evidence, and some students who lived in remote mining towns in the "bush" or "outback" took classes via distance learning. Australia's increasingly close relationship with the booming economies of Asia was also evident in the number of Asian students who were studying at the local universities and the number of Australian students studying Asian languages.
Australia is also, like the United States, a federal system; the country is made up of six states and two territories. It has been a relatively high-performer on international assessments for some time, and it scores significantly higher than the United States. On the 2000 PISA assessment, Australia was among the eight countries tied for second place in reading performance. However, an analysis of trends in PISA from 2000 to 2003 to 2006 showed a steady decline in Australia's reading performance relative to other high-performing countries, while some of the top performers like Finland and Korea raised their performance and other, lower-performing systems, such as Poland, raised their performance significantly to come close to Australia's. Besides declining overall quality, an analysis of performance in science on PISA in 2006 that sorted countries into high quality/high equity, high quality/low equity, low quality/high equity, and low quality/low equity showed that Australia had high quality but low equity. (By comparison, the United States has low quality and low equity.) What this means is that the social background of students predicts more of the differences in educational performance than in other countries and that, unlike in countries like Finland, for example, the variation in performance among schools is mostly attributable to the background of the students—that is, whom the schools enroll rather than what the school does.
Recognizing that other countries were not standing still and not wanting Australian students to have a lower-quality or less equitable education than other countries, Australia introduced major reforms in 2008 (McGaw, 2010). There had been a series of reform efforts in preceding years, primarily at the state level. Broad national goals and frameworks had been developed starting in 1989, but in 2008, the states and federal government came together to create a national curriculum that was historically unprecedented. The rationales were that in the 21st century, the educational needs of young Australians were similar across the country, that all jurisdictions could do better working together to improve quality and equity than they could separately, and that globalization and international competition required a rapid response to those educational needs. The vision of the Australian curriculum is "to equip young Australians with the skills, knowledge, understanding, and capacity to effectively engage with and prosper in society, compete in a globalised world and thrive in the information-rich workplaces of the future and to make such a curriculum accessible to all young Australians, regardless of their social or economic background or the school they attend" (Australian Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority, 2011, para. 2).
The Australian National Curriculum for grades K–12 will be introduced in three phases, starting with English, mathematics, science, and history in the first phase; followed by geography, foreign languages and the arts in the second; and ICT, design and technology, economics, civics and citizenship, and health and physical education in the third. The curriculum is being put together by committees of academics and teachers with opportunities for public comment at each stage. The committees looked at the curricula in other high-performing countries (e.g., Singapore and Finland in math) to ensure that Australia's curriculum would be world-class. The curriculum is built around disciplines but also gives attention to general capabilities, such as creativity, ethical behaviour, ICT literacy, intercultural understanding, literacy, numeracy, self-management, social competence, teamwork, and thinking skills (McGaw, 2010). It also incorporates cross-curriculum themes, such as indigenous perspectives, Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia, and commitment to sustainable living. While the curriculum is traditional in its organization around disciplines, it attempts to set standards comparable to the best-performing countries and to establish high expectations for all students. It also tries to reduce the amount of content in math and science to provide greater space for students to work in depth.
The curriculum is not intended to constitute the entire educational experience of Australian students; there is room for local additions. But it is deliberately designed to cover a broad swath of the curriculum and thus avoid the problem of curriculum reform efforts that focus just on math and reading, pushing aside other subjects to focus on those that are subject to accountability testing and hence narrowing the curriculum at a time when the world requires students to have broader horizons. The curriculum will be online, and a national digital resource collection linked to the curriculum is being created. Australia will also publish achievement standards and will collect and publish samples of student work to clarify the expectations of students.
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority (ACARA) was created by the federal parliament in 2008 with the council of ministers for the states as the policy body. In addition to leading the development of a national curriculum, ACARA is responsible for monitoring the overall performance of the school system through a National Assessment of Literacy and Numeracy in grades 3, 5, 7, and 9. Periodic sample surveys will also be undertaken in science, civics and citizenship, ICT literacy, and other areas as the National Curriculum is developed and implemented. ACARA will continue to involve Australia with international assessments run by IEA and OECD as a way to benchmark its progress internationally.
Increasing transparency to the public is another major goal. To that end, a new website, MySchool (www.myschool.edu.au), was launched in early 2010 to provide information on over 10,000 schools. The site includes not only public schools but also independent and Catholic schools, as the latter two categories constitute a significant proportion of schools in Australia, especially at the secondary level. The site supplies school profiles and performance data with a major focus on a community socioeconomic index so that results can be compared for schools with similar populations instead of through league tables that reward schools with the most advantaged populations. The site aims to provide greater transparency for parents (information about the site will be available in 18 different languages), teachers, and school leaders so as to highlight schools from which others can learn and to stimulate improvement. The site also draws attention to the need to expand the number of students performing at the highest level as well as raise the performance of those at the bottom.
Accompanying this new national curriculum, monitoring, and reporting strategy was a doubling of federal funding to schools, targeting disadvantaged schools in particular. A new Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (www.aitsl.edu.au) was also established in 2010 to raise standards for the profession.
The mission of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership is to provide national leadership in promoting excellence in the profession of teaching and school leadership by doing the following:
- Developing rigorous national professional standards.
- Implementing a system of national accreditation based on the standards.
- Developing a national approach to the accreditation of preservice teacher education programs.
- Fostering high-quality professional development.
- Engaging with international research and innovation.
- Working with key stakeholders, including unions, business and school communities, and ACARA.
These Australian reforms are very new. It is therefore too soon to assess how successful they have been, especially given that there are many complex details of implementation still to be worked out—schools in different states have different entry dates, certification processes, data collection methods, and so on. It is too soon to know whether these reforms will retain the political consensus and fidelity of implementation needed to bring about a significant improvement in quality and equity. The monitoring and reporting aspects of the reforms will need to be accompanied by significant efforts to build capacity in lower-performing schools in order to succeed, as collecting data alone does not produce achievement gains. The reforms will also require a large professional development and teacher preparation effort to get teachers ready to teach the new curriculum. Whether Australia will put sufficient resources behind this needed capacity-building strategy has yet to be determined. Still, the Australian vision and direction is unmistakable—a world-class and 21st century curriculum for every child, no matter where he or she lives.
Australia scores much higher than the United States in international assessments, yet the nation is making moves to take increasing international competition very seriously, aiming for world-class expectations of all its students. Like the United States, Australia is a federal system in which the states have had considerable autonomy. However, recognizing how rapidly the world is changing and globalizing, the states and federal government have come together in a bold move toward a more national (but not federally controlled) system, reckoning that the benefits of establishing uniform high expectations for all students and being able to implement them jointly in a speedy and cost-efficient way outweigh the losses in state autonomy.
In Australia, the assessment tail does not wag the education dog. Curriculum comes first, and the nation has embraced a broad one, having seen the effects of focusing accountability on one or two subjects, thereby distorting and narrowing the schooling experience.
Countries around the globe are making unprecedented changes to their traditional education systems to prepare their students for a radically different world. The high-performing systems that serve as examples in this chapter vary in size, culture, population, and economic base, yet all have made substantial progress in educational quality and equity. The next chapter will examine the common elements that cut across these diverse systems and have driven the improvements in achievement. It also provides reflection questions for educators to stimulate discussion as to how their district or state could achieve world-class standards of learning.