Just as a country is as good as its people, so its citizens are only as good as their teachers.
—Lee Hsien Loong, Prime Minister of Singapore
When people describe the teachers who had the greatest impact on them, they invariably describe ones who were caring, passionate about their subject, and good at getting them to do their very best. But how do we find such teachers? This is the central challenge facing countries across the globe as they seek to develop first-class education systems to prepare students for the fast-changing global knowledge economy of the 21st century.
As nations try to increase both educational access and achievement, there are great debates about how to get the policy infrastructure right. But even the best policies cannot succeed without qualified, dedicated, skilled personnel in place to implement those policies, so the issues of teacher quality and, more recently, principal quality are becoming central to the educational agenda of every country.
The challenge is becoming even more acute as the roles of teachers change. Countries in the early stages of educational development, focused on expanding access to elementary and lower secondary education and providing for transmission of fairly basic skills, are less concerned with the quality of the teaching force than with getting enough teachers into classrooms. But as countries enter the global knowledge economy and seek to prepare their students for an innovation-oriented, science- and technology-driven economy, they need teachers who can prepare students with the kinds of higher-order cognitive skills they need to become knowledge workers, not just factory workers; who can help every child succeed, not just those who are easy to teach; who can address the increasing ethnic diversity of many school systems; and who can adapt to and harness new technologies. The stakes could not be higher for individuals and for education systems. Recognizing that teachers are the single biggest in-school influence on student achievement, there seems to be a global consensus that no matter what reform strategy is being pursued, "the quality of a school system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers" (Barber & Mourshed, 2007).
Contrary to conventional wisdom, a high-quality teacher workforce is not due simply to a traditional cultural respect for the teaching profession; it comes as a result of deliberate policy choices pursued over a number of years. High-performing countries build their human resource systems by investing energy up front to attract, prepare, and support good teachers, rather than using energy on the back end to reduce teacher attrition and fire weak teachers (Stewart, 2011a). They also systemically identify and nurture leadership talent to manage schools with the goal of increasing student achievement. There is much innovation around the world on these issues, as was shown during the International Summit on the Teaching Profession, held in New York City in March 2011 and attended by ministers of education, heads of teachers' unions, and other teacher leaders from 16 nations (Asia Society, 2011).
Around the world, systems that excel in education do so thanks to a wide array of purposeful strategies. This chapter presents some examples of how high-performing and rapidly improving nations are building their teaching workforce. As you read, think about how some of these ideas might be adapted to help develop more effective educators in your district or state.
Many countries have deep concerns about a number of issues related to teacher training and retention: widespread teacher shortages, especially in certain subjects or geographic areas due to large-scale retirement; high and costly attrition of teachers; the declining attractiveness and status of the profession as other career opportunities open up for women and minorities; and a political and media climate that blames teachers or their unions for all the ills of schools.
Some countries respond by lowering standards for entry into teaching, but high-performing countries pay significant attention to attracting and carefully selecting high-quality workers for the teaching profession. For example, when Finland raised the standards required to become a teacher in 1979, they found that as they increased the status of teachers, they actually attracted more applicants. At that time, all teacher preparation was moved to the university level, and eventually research-based master's degrees were required of all licensed teachers. As the government became more confident in the quality and training of teachers, they gradually devolved more and more responsibility to them for the development of curricula, assessment, and the overall quality of schools. Teaching is now a highly sought career in Finland, where only 1 in 10 applicants is accepted into the wholly government-funded teacher preparation programs after two rounds of selection. The most able young people in Finland see teaching as an independent and respected profession with considerable autonomy, comparable to doctors or architects, rather than a job that involves mere technical implementation of externally mandated standards and tests (Sahlberg, 2011).
Other countries don't just wait for prospective teachers to apply; they actively recruit them. Singapore has a systemwide recruitment process under which the Ministry of Education selects prospective teachers from the top one-third of their cohort for four-year undergraduate teacher preparation programs or, if they enter later, a one-year graduate program. Principals sit on the recruitment interview panels. Candidates are required to have strong academic records and evidence a deep commitment to the profession and to serving the diverse students of Singapore. Those selected as trainee teachers are put on the ministry payroll and receive a stipend while in training, and they commit to teaching for a minimum of three years (Ho, personal interview, August 2010). Singapore also actively recruits mid career candidates, believing that their experience in the world of work is valuable to students. For example, when Singapore expanded its arts programs in schools and thus needed more art teachers, the ministry set up recruitment stations at major museum art exhibits and other places that attract artists.
In China, the massive and rapid expansion of education and the overall economy over the past 20 years created major teacher shortages, especially in rural areas, where poorly qualified teachers taught in village schools. China's education policymakers are now paying significant attention to recruiting, training, and improving the quality of the nation's 12 million teachers. Salaries have been raised to be equivalent to those for civil service, and the central government contributes part of the cost of salaries in poorer regions to help attract more applicants. Scholarships for teacher training are offered to young people who live in rural areas in order to develop a supply of teachers for those regions (Asia Society, 2006b). In cities, higher education institutions that train teachers give early admission to student teacher candidates so that they can attract better students.
In England, teaching had become an unattractive occupation for college graduates in the 1990s, and there were persistent shortages in a number of fields. Starting in 2000, the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair took a series of steps to raise the status of the teaching profession and recruit more and higher-quality teachers. Some changes were made in compensation and working conditions, but a sophisticated advertising campaign using modern marketing techniques was a major contributor to the turnaround strategy that within five years resulted in eight teacher applications for every open position (Day, 2011).
In modern, diversified economies, education has to compete with other sectors for talent. High-performing education systems overcome the challenges of attracting high-quality people into teaching and grant the profession higher status using intelligent incentives that are applied over a period of time. When shortages occur, the focus is on enacting better recruitment policies rather than lowering standards to get more teachers. Because they recognize that teaching for understanding and problem solving and holding all learners to high standards require a deeper knowledge of subject matter, the emphasis is on raising the bar for those going into teaching. Singapore and Finland both draw their teachers from the top one-third of an education cohort. Other countries think that since teaching is such a large profession, it is not realistic to focus only on academic high fliers. Qualities such as passion and commitment to students may be equally if not more important. Nevertheless, all high-performing countries make attracting talented people to the profession a central part of their education policies and practices.
The sophisticated national advertising campaign the British government developed to attract citizens to the teaching profession divided potential teachers into three groups—those planning on teaching, those considering teaching, and those who had not considered teaching—and tried to understand each group's motivations and barriers to entering teacher training. For those planning on teaching, the main motivators were the social value of the profession, working with children, and love of the subject, but for those not planning to teach—especially in shortage fields like math and science—financial incentives were more important. The government mounted a multiyear advertising campaign with the theme "Making a Difference" to raise the status of the profession and combined that with financial incentives for teacher training as well as hiring bonuses that were larger for individuals teaching subject areas that were hard to staff. A telephone line encouraged people to call for more information, and each call was followed up with information on how to become a teacher and the subsidies available. A program called Teach First, similar to Teach for America, offering two-year contracts to teach in poor-performing schools, was used to attract very bright graduates into the profession, but a larger emphasis was put on recruiting people over the age of 25 who were interested in changing careers. For these groups, a wide range of alternate routes into teaching were created that allowed them to qualify as a teacher while they worked in a school. These teachers also received a training subsidy that helped to offset the salary cuts that many faced as they switched careers. (About half of all teacher training recruits are now over the age of 25.) The Training and Development Agency of the Department of Education in England, the agency responsible for all these measures, also offered six-month courses to people with quantitative backgrounds to enable them to become math, chemistry, and physics teachers. During the financial crisis of the late 2000s, a "bankers to teachers" campaign was developed, and a new effort to attract the top academic graduates into teaching has also begun. The result of all of these measures has been a notable increase in the number of calls to the government's teacher recruitment telephone line, a substantial reduction and even erasure of teacher deficits in shortage subject areas like math and science, and the rise of teaching from 92nd on a list of career choices to a top career choice within five years.
More fundamentally, a more professional environment in schools is necessary to attract high-caliber recruits. Attracting top talent requires attention to the whole system: the quality of teacher preparation, a professional work environment, and attractive career opportunities.
Most countries do not limit entry into teacher preparation programs. A problem with this approach is that it can lead to an oversupply of teacher candidates. Course enrollments may then be larger than they need to be, and graduating teachers may have difficulty finding jobs. This, in turn, gives the profession lower status, and the quality of workers going into the profession tends to decline. High-performing countries tend to have more selective enrollment in teacher education programs, either through directly managing the recruitment and selection process or setting the standards for selection, or through limiting the number of places in teacher education programs. This approach makes the profession more attractive to highly talented candidates, and better job placement rates further increase the status of the profession.
Whatever the selection mechanism, there is a universal concern that colleges of education are not responding quickly enough to rapid global changes and changes in educational needs. Teacher education is regarded as too theoretical, and universities are criticized for not taking responsibility for the quality of their teacher graduates. Countries are taking different approaches to modernizing teacher education. In China, Finland, and Singapore, for example, traditional teacher preparation programs are accepted and valued, and adaptations to changing skill needs are made within the existing institutional framework. England, on the other hand, chose to create alternate routes to teacher certification to compete with traditional providers. Graduates of traditional and alternate certification routes have to meet the same criteria. As more countries look to recruit high-quality, midcareer workers into teaching, adaptations of traditional teacher preparation programs will likely become more common.
Two countries with well-regarded teacher preparation programs are Finland and Singapore. In Finland, all teachers except preschool teachers must hold a two-year master's degree, which follows an undergraduate degree in one or more subjects. Finland prides itself on research-based teacher education. The curriculum covers educational theory and research methodology, and students learn how to design and conduct original research in classrooms. It is also strong on practical training. A supervised practicum in a model school associated with a university accounts for 15 to 25 percent of teachers' overall preparation time. In these schools, supervising teachers are specially selected and trained to ensure that they can model effective practice and coach new teachers. There is also extensive preparation on student assessment, differentiated instruction for special needs students, curriculum development, and pedagogical content knowledge, including cooperative and problem-based learning, since these are all skills that teachers will need in Finnish schools. The high quality of Finnish schools depends on the excellence of their entering teachers (Sahlberg, 2011).
In Singapore, all teachers are trained at the National Institute of Education (NIE), a part of Nanyang Technological University. NIE has a strong base of subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge experts and close ties to schools. Singapore's teachers are generally considered well trained. Nevertheless, in 2009, in response to the rapid pace of global change taking place, NIE conducted a review of their teacher preparation program and developed a new Teacher Education Model for the 21st Century (TE21). The theme of the model is that 21st century learners need 21st century teachers, who not only possess 21st century literacies themselves but also can create the learning environments that enable their students to develop such skills (NIE, 2009). Many of the changes being made under TE21 echo the reforms being made in teacher education in a number of countries:
According to Malcolm Gladwell (2008), it takes professionals roughly 10,000 hours before they feel expert at their job. Today, as the requirements of teaching constantly evolve and subject matter is continually updated, even the best preservice teacher preparation program can't prepare teachers for all the changes and challenges they will encounter throughout their career. Therefore, a continuum of regular professional development from beginning teaching (induction) to advanced practice is essential to effective teaching and learning. International surveys reveal wide variation in how much professional development teachers receive. Too many new teachers in the United States are left to sink or swim without significant mentoring or assistance, leaving them feeling ineffective and unsupported. It is no wonder that one-third of American teachers leave within their first five years in the profession, an attrition rate that costs school districts billions of dollars (Darling-Hammond & Rothman, 2011). For those teachers who do receive professional development, there is a preponderance of ineffective, one-off seminars, so-called "drive-by" professional development, rather than the kind of long-term support with feedback and opportunity for practice that is thought to be more effective and connected to school improvement. Policy reforms at the district, state, or national level are often enacted, one after the other, without the teacher training to build the capacity to carry them out, undermining the reforms and leading invariably to implementation gaps.
In high-performing and improving countries, all beginning teachers receive mentoring assistance for a year or two, and all teachers have time to observe other teachers' classrooms and participate in organized professional development that is tied to either school improvement or career development or both. For example, in 2004, Ontario moved from a system of teacher testing that had been considered punitive by the profession and had not encouraged teachers to be meaningfully engaged in their own learning to a system focused on teacher development. One aspect of the new system is that every beginning teacher participates in a supervised induction program that includes support and feedback. This has sharply reduced attrition among new teachers and also provides annual feedback to policymakers on specific teaching needs (Levin, 2008). In another Canadian province, Alberta, the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) has introduced and supported school-based, teacher-led study initiatives focused on enhancing student engagement and improving student performance. This action research is additionally intended to improve teachers' skill using data and research findings in instructional decision making (AISI, n.d.).
East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, and China employ what is essentially an apprenticeship framework in which there is a systematic effort to pass on the accumulated wisdom of teaching practice in particular fields. In Japan, all teachers participate regularly in lesson study, a practice in which groups of teachers review their lesson plans and determine how to improve them, in part through analysis of student errors. For example, observers of Japanese elementary classrooms have long noted the consistent quality and thoroughness of math lessons. Teachers have learned through their lesson study groups how to introduce a mathematical concept, use skillful questioning to elicit a discussion of mathematical ideas, including incorrect ones, and review the key concept again at the end. Lesson study is a mechanism for teacher self-reflection as well as a tool for continuous improvement (Stevenson & Stigler, 2006).
The practice of school-by-school lesson study often culminates in large public research lessons. For example, when the topic of solar cells was added to Japan's elementary science curriculum, the national guidelines furnished only learning objectives, not teaching methods. Lesson study groups of teachers and researchers across the country reviewed research and curriculum materials and tried out their ideas in classrooms. After about a year of progressive refinement, thousands of teachers, researchers, and policymakers participated, many via video, in a series of public research lessons, observing and asking questions about particular approaches. Through these means, information about effective ways to teach about solar cells spread widely among schools and influenced the ways in which textbooks treated the subject.
In China, classrooms are routinely open for observation by other teachers, teacher trainees, and administrators, and teachers are required to observe and provide feedback on a certain number of colleagues' lessons each year. This openness of Chinese classrooms is in strong contrast to the informal "closed-door" classrooms in the United States and can be viewed as a form of both public and professional accountability. Chinese teachers also take part in weekly subject-based teacher study groups that focus on curriculum, lesson planning, and classroom improvement. The groups, led by senior teachers, exist in every school and are connected to the district education department, which in turn is connected to the provincial education department, which works closely with the Basic Education Department of the Ministry of Education. Thus, with any change in curriculum, there is an immediate way to get new materials, publications, videos to teachers and into classrooms. There is also a national television channel devoted to teacher development. Therefore, even though China's rapid educational expansion has meant a persistent shortage of qualified teachers, especially in rural areas, there is an ongoing, organized, nationwide (but decentralized) system of professional development in place to upgrade the quality of teaching (Asia Society & CCSSO, 2010).
In Singapore, 100 hours of professional development is guaranteed to each teacher every year and may be acquired in several ways. Courses at the NIE, for example, focus on subject matter and pedagogical knowledge and lead toward higher degrees. Much of professional development, however, is school based, led by staff whose job it is to know where there are problems in the school (e.g., with a group's math performance) or to introduce new practices such as project-based learning or new uses of ICT (Sclafani, 2008). In addition, each school has access to a fund intended to support teacher growth; a school might, for example, send staff to other countries to develop new perspectives by examining specific aspects of practice. Teachers also work with researchers at NIE to conduct action research in classrooms. Much of this research is focused on the efforts put forward under the "Thinking Schools, Learning Nation" and "Teach Less, Learn More" policy directions to broaden the range of pedagogical approaches used in Singapore classrooms. Teacher networks and learning circles encourage peer-to-peer learning, and a new Academy of Singapore Teachers opened in 2010. "The goal is to have the teaching profession take more responsibility for continuous improvement of practice," said Manogaran Suppiah, director of the academy. Master teachers in different subject areas and different schools will develop courses to spread best practices across schools. In order to make time for teachers to engage in deep improvement of their practice, teachers teach classes for approximately 20 to 25 hours a week and have about 20 hours per week for preparing lessons, observing in other classrooms, working with students outside the classroom, or engaging in professional development.
Richard Elmore, a professor of Educational Leadership at Harvard University, famously said that teaching is a profession without a practice. But in some Asian countries, a consistent professional practice is being developed. It is continuous—recognition that best practices need to constantly evolve—and based on the premise that knowledge of good instruction is spread by teachers watching one another teach and collaborating to improve their instruction. American teachers put great stress on autonomy and independence; they close their classroom doors. The trade-off tends to be isolation, a lack of collaboration, and little peer learning. East Asian concepts of professionalism put greater emphasis on learning from professional colleagues and working in school teams to improve instruction (Stewart, 2011a).
How do high-performing countries find the time and resources for such extensive, continuous development? In Asia, there is generally a trade-off between larger class sizes—either all or some of the time—and time for professional development. "Do you use the marginal additional teacher to bring down class size or to improve the professional quality of the school, and do you have enough high-quality teachers to bring down class size?" asked S Iswaran, then Singapore's senior minister of state for education, at the March 2011 International Summit on the Teaching Profession. In Finland, students spend fewer hours in school and, while there, work more on independent projects, thus allowing teachers more time for professional responsibilities other than direct classroom teaching, such as providing individual feedback to students, meeting with families, or collaboratively diagnosing classroom problems and designing solutions.
High-performing systems have a systematic approach to professional development, focusing on more effective forms and linking them closely to both the instructional goals of the school and career opportunities for teachers.
It is an understatement to say that, all over the world, educators are in search of an effective way to evaluate and improve the work of teachers and that there is, as yet, no international consensus based on experience or research as to the best ways to do it. International surveys of teachers show that they do welcome feedback as a way to enhance their teaching (OECD, 2011a). However, they are skeptical if evaluation is performed in an unfair way or by principals who have neither the time nor the expertise to judge effective practice, or when outstanding performance does not lead to any recognition or career advancement. Overall, there is a trend toward devising appraisal systems that can drive improvement of professional practice and student achievement and away from an earlier focus on monitoring compliance with policies and procedures. But the questions of what criteria to use for appraisal, how to balance the improvement versus accountability functions, how to connect improved practice to career advancement, and whether the quality of practice should be tied to compensation are the subject of unresolved, often contentious, debates everywhere, although they take different forms in different countries.
Some countries, such as Japan and Norway, put greater weight on school evaluation than individual teacher evaluation, believing that student achievement is often the result of the efforts of many teachers rather than an individual teacher. Group evaluation, whether of whole schools or of groups of teachers, is thought to promote greater collaboration and sharing of best practices among teachers and to foster cohesion among staff.
At the March 2011 International Summit on the Teaching Profession, held in New York City, there was broad agreement that to be fair and effective in improving education on a broad scale, appraisal of individual teacher performance needs to be part of a system of educator development, conducted by people who have training in evaluating teaching and incorporating multiple measures to reflect the full range of teachers' work so as to avoid the distortion in behavior that comes from a narrow focus on student test scores. These principles are exemplified in Singapore's comprehensive performance management system.
In Singapore, all teachers' performance is appraised annually by several fellow professionals within the school on a broad range of measures, not just examination results. Also considered are their contribution to the academic and character development of students, their collaboration with parents and community groups, the professional development they have undertaken, their pedagogical initiatives, and their contribution to their colleagues and to the school as a whole. The system, developed in 2001 with teacher input, has been refined over time. Based on the results of this annual appraisal, teachers can receive a bonus of 10 to 30 percent of their base salary and prospects for promotion along one of three paths.
The purpose of the evaluation process in Singapore is to create a dialogue between teachers and their supervisors that is regular, frequent, clear, and intended primarily to help teachers improve and keep up with change. Every teacher sets a professional development plan for every school year, and this serves as the basis for midyear and end-of-year reviews. Teachers have access to 100 hours of professional development in support of their goals, and areas of weakness identified during evaluation process become the focus of teachers' professional development plans for the following year. The process is time-consuming but seen as worth it, as the development of teaching competency is viewed as a career-long undertaking.
Areas for improvement are also identified to form the basis of a personal professional development plan for the following year, in support of which teachers have access to 100 hours of professional development. Teachers also receive reimbursements for improving their knowledge and skills, such as language learning or technology training. This system of evaluation sits within a broader system for developing effective educators. "If you have to focus on firing an ineffective teacher, then the system has failed," said Iswaran (2011).
In most countries, entry-level salaries for teachers tend to be somewhat below those of other college graduates, although Japan, Singapore, and China attempt to peg them at or above the salaries for new civil servants. Beyond the entry level, working conditions—being treated as a professional, having the opportunity to work with colleagues, and attaining career advancement—seem more important to teachers in most countries than salary per se (Schleicher & Stewart, 2008). About half the countries in the OECD do offer some form of additional pay for outstanding performance, primarily based on the judgments of professional colleagues. Some high-performing systems like those in Finland and Canada do not support merit pay approaches, believing there is not enough empirical evidence to support their effectiveness. But in others, such as those in Shanghai and Singapore, teachers can receive significant financial bonuses and promotions based on performance evaluations.
In the United States, the distribution of teachers by qualifications and experience is highly unequal, with the least experienced teachers working in the schools where students have the greatest needs. This fact is a significant factor in the distribution of unequal educational outcomes.
In countries that have a uniformly strong profession, such as Finland, this issue becomes relatively unimportant, although the Finnish government does provide some salary supplements to retain teachers in rural areas. However, most larger countries do have to pay attention to teacher distribution. In China, where there has been massive migration to the cities, it is increasingly difficult to find teachers willing to work in rural areas. Consequently, China provides scholarships to people in rural areas to train as teachers. Rural teachers also earn 10 percent more through supplements from the central government and may have housing built for them. They also receive long-distance professional development through satellite television, the Internet, and the organization of schools into clusters with one central resource center for materials and assistance (Asia Society & CCSSO, 2010). The Japanese government also provides additional funds to poorer provinces so that they can attract their share of good teachers. The Australian federal government, too, gives financial incentives to teach in rural areas, away from the coasts where most young Australians prefer to live. In fact, giving bonuses to teach in hard-to-staff rural or urban schools is a common practice globally (McGaw, 2010). In addition, in some places such as Singapore and Shanghai, cities assign teachers of different levels of experience and expertise to different schools to ensure a balance of good teachers among schools.
A significant barrier to retaining talented teachers in the United States is that the career structure is relatively flat. Although some districts have master teacher roles, on the whole, if teachers want to earn more money or broaden their professional practice, they have to become an administrator, where the overload of budget, disciplinary, and administrative tasks makes it difficult for them to play an instructional leadership role.
Recognizing that teachers cannot be expected to stay in the same role for 30 years, high-performing countries pay systematic attention to career development. In Singapore, there is an explicit policy of identifying and nurturing talent: after three years of teaching, teachers are assessed to see whether they have the potential for one of three different career paths—master teacher, specialist in curriculum or research, or school leader. Progress along each of these tracks is supported by additional training and annual performance reviews. Each step forward along the path comes with salary increases, and a master teacher or senior specialist can earn as much as a principal. Senior teachers play major leadership roles in schools. Surveys of Singapore teachers show that they stay in the profession because of good compensation benchmarked against market rates, positive school cultures with a strong sense of mission, and the wide range of opportunities for professional growth (Stewart, 2011b).
China has also developed well-established paths for professional advancement in teaching. There are four grades of teachers, with promotion to each one based on the demonstrated quality of lessons, support for younger teachers, and for the most senior grades, research and publications. As teachers advance, they play broader roles in curriculum design, professional development, and support for other teachers in their school, city, or province. Outstanding teachers are recognized on National Teachers' Day.
In Finland, by contrast, schools tend to be small and the career structure for teachers is relatively flat. The compensation is not extraordinarily high. Still, teachers have high levels of responsibility for curriculum planning, student progress, and assessment, and the autonomy and status they enjoy in the school and broader society make teaching a very engaging career. Teachers have relatively short teaching hours to enable them to take on these other roles. The Finnish system does not employ test-based accountability to drive its system, nor does it have a strong system of inspection of schools. Instead, the Finnish system relies on the expertise and professional accountability of teachers who are knowledgeable, academically strong, well educated, and committed to their students and communities. "We are so proud of our teachers," said Henna Virkkunen, then Finland's minister of education, at the International Summit.
In high-performing systems, teachers are able to play leadership roles and assume additional responsibility for their school's teaching and learning practices, curriculum and assessment, and technology use, all without leaving the classroom, and they improve their own skills and knowledge in the process. Increasingly, as educators strive to make education a knowledge-based profession like other professions, the skills and knowledge they gain relate to applying research findings and using data in their decision making. In light of acrimonious public debate about teachers' unions in the United States, it might be assumed that teacher engagement through unions is antithetical to increasing the quality of our schools. But in some high-performing countries, such as Canada and Finland, the teachers' unions have been strong partners in reform.
School leadership matters—and increasingly so. At the same time that countries are establishing higher, usually national or state standards or curricula to drive their education systems, they are also devolving more authority to the school level for deciding how to meet these more complex educational goals. When an education system's performance is weak, strong government intervention is usually needed. However, moving a system from good to great entails going beyond top-down policy prescriptions to a focus on building the capacity and creativity of schools and generating a professional culture in which best practice is codified and shared.
This trend—together with the evidence that weak school leadership leads to poor performance and high teacher turnover and that high-performing principals can lead to large-scale improvement—has made recruiting and training effective principals and head teachers a new priority in many countries. The roles played by school leaders are also changing. "The job used to be bells, buildings, budgets, and buses; now the pendulum has swung to instructional leadership" (Barber, Whelan, & Clark, 2010, p. 6). According to an international review of the literature by OECD (2008), there are four types of leadership responsibilities that are linked to improved student outcomes:
Of these, the single greatest impact comes from promoting teachers' learning and development.
Many countries are establishing new institutions to provide training that is different from traditional administrator programs. Like leadership development in other sectors of the economy, these programs focus on early identification of people with the right personal traits to become leaders and a combination of mentoring and apprenticeship in schools with formal training programs. Once a principal is in position, ongoing peer support is provided through networks and clusters of schools. England's National College of School Leadership is a good example of an approach that combines programs for aspiring leaders and peer support mechanisms for new head teachers (principals) in their first two years of service. The National College program, which is partly online and partly residential, has been extensively evaluated and refined since its founding in 2000. After it was established that graduates of this program outperformed other head teachers, it became mandatory for all prospective school heads (Hopkins, 2007). As another example, China has two high-level, university-based centers for school leadership: one for primary schools, at Beijing Normal University, and one for secondary schools, at East China Normal University in Shanghai. These centers run extensive executive training sessions for current principals based on leadership training practices in other sectors and other countries. High-performing principals in China can take on leadership responsibilities with other schools in their city, as well.
In Canada, Ontario developed a new framework for leadership development starting in 2005, as part of its efforts to build capacity to raise achievement in literacy and numeracy and to reduce the dropout rate. The Ontario Leadership Framework and Principals' Qualification Plan changed the expectations for principals from administrator to instructional leader, and supporting the instructional core became the focus of preparation. All principals and vice principals receive two years of mentoring in each role. Principals, in consultation with their school boards, are required to set a number of challenging but achievable goals and are evaluated based on their achievement of those goals. Each school board also receives funding from the ministry to develop a leadership succession and talent development plan so that momentum is not lost when principals leave.
Australia, which created a national curriculum for the first time in 2009, accompanied it with the establishment of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) in 2010. The institute's goal is to "provide leadership for the nation, states and territories in promoting excellence in the professions of teaching and school leadership" by creating national professional standards and fostering high-quality professional development (AITSL, n.d.). The new standards for principals are designed to provide a framework for professional learning; to guide self-reflection and self-assessment; to help to prepare, develop, and support principals for leading 21st century schools; and to inform the development of processes for selecting and appraising aspiring and practicing principals.
Finland, as it has in many other aspects of its education system, has taken a different approach. Finnish schools tend to be small, and principals, all of whom are former teachers, act as lead teachers rather than managers. Principals lead not by focusing on performance outcomes but by creating the conditions that produce achievement—a common mission, excellent teachers, and distributed collegial leadership (Hargreaves, Halasz, & Ponti, 2007). As with teachers, school principals are not assessed or ranked based on their or their school's effectiveness. Instead, the ministry uses sample surveys of schools to check that all schools are meeting general standards.
Singapore's approach to leadership is modeled on that of modern corporations. Indeed, schools are viewed as medium-sized enterprises, with similar needs for performance but a more complex group of stakeholders. The key in Singapore is not just the nature of the training but the whole approach to identifying and developing talent (Ng, 2008a). This approach differs from that of the United States, where a teacher can apply to train as a principal or school head and later apply for a position in a school. In Singapore, young teachers are continually assessed for their leadership potential and given opportunities to demonstrate and learn—for example, by serving on committees—then being promoted to head of department at a relatively young age. These teachers are moved into middle management and then, with accompanying experiences and training, into assistant principal roles, often while still in their 30s. If individuals do well in those roles, they have several rounds of interviews with senior ministry officials and go through a two-day leadership situational exercise, a simulation designed to gauge their leadership competency and readiness. Once selected, they spend six months at the Leaders in Education program at the National Institute of Education. The focus of principal training is on innovation and school transformation.
The Leaders in Education Programme (LEP) is a six-month, full-time program for educators who are chosen based on their performance and potential for school leadership. Participants' fees are paid by the government, and they receive full salary during the program. The LEP aims to produce school leaders "with the capability to transform schools to be innovative learning communities that nurture innovative students and teachers in an economy driven by knowledge and learning" (Ng, 2008a, p. 237). Guided by a social constructivist philosophy that deems knowledge creation a group interactive process rather than an individual one, the program focuses on three broad areas:
- Knowledge content. Interactive discussions are intended to spark critical thinking and professional dialogue on issues such as maximizing organizational performance, organizational strategies and identity, e-learning environments and culture, new curriculum and assessment design, creating a vision, and leading a team. A two-week overseas visit challenges participants' thinking about education; following their travel, they must present a review of key lessons to others.
- Knowledge creation. Learning groups take on independent projects such as the Future School project, in which groups of six participants are asked to scan future trends and propose a detailed design of a school that can address the needs of Singapore in 15 years' time. The resulting plan, which includes mission; curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment; and a professional development and management model, is presented in public to NIE faculty and Singapore superintendents.
- Knowledge application. Each participant is attached to a school for six months of their training and must plan and launch an innovation that is of value to that school.
When I asked Professor Lee Sing Kong, head of the National Institute of Education, why Singapore uses a "select then train" model rather than a "train then select" one, he said that while the U.S. approach is workable, it carries a higher risk. Singapore is very confident that they have the best possible leaders for their schools and that there is a wide range of inputs into their selection. Once trained, principals may be transferred periodically among schools and sometimes into the Ministry of Education as part of Singapore's continuous improvement strategy.
Simply devolving responsibility to schools and giving them more autonomy will not produce increased learning and achievement without dramatically different types of training and support for school leaders. High-performing countries are also creating leadership teams with senior teachers to support the school leader in creating a "thinking school." This is an area of considerable ferment around the world, including in the United States. It is too soon for research to have established empirically whether these new leadership development models work, but they are increasingly seen as key to turning around struggling schools and ramping up achievement on a broad scale.
As countries face the challenges of a global knowledge economy that requires them to develop higher levels of knowledge and new capacities in their increasingly diverse students, they are focusing intently on the centrality of teachers to those goals. There is an acknowledgment of the need to respect and reward good teaching. But if the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers, the quality of teachers and of teaching depends on the human resource system that is in place to draw good teachers to the field and support effective practice. High-performing systems focus on ways to attract high-quality candidates into the profession; increase the effectiveness of teacher preparation and modernize it to include 21st century skills and a more global perspective; develop effective systems of teacher professional development, collaboration, and appraisal to deepen student engagement and raise academic performance; ensure that good teachers are available in lower-income rural or urban areas; create career ladders and new leadership roles for the best teachers; and make a quantum leap in the training of principals and head teachers who can drive continuous improvement and transformation in schools.
Educational practices cannot simply be copied wholesale from one country to another; they need to be adapted to different cultural and political settings. But high-performing countries such as those featured in this book have the following things in common: (1) they invest seriously in the human capital of their system as the key to success; (2) they focus on the instructional core and student outcomes, broadly defined; (3) they have created talent identification and development practices similar to those in the most productive industries; and (4) they have established universal systems for continuous improvement. What international benchmarking can do for every country is help speed up change by providing models of what is happening elsewhere. Each country has some pieces of the whole and can look to others for ideas on the rest.
None of the policies and practices reviewed in this chapter is unknown in the United States. We have pockets of excellence and examples of most of these practices somewhere in the country. But we have not brought together and applied world-class human resource practices in order to raise the academic achievement of schools in a systematic way. We urgently need to do this. Other countries spend a higher proportion of their educational dollar on classroom teachers than the United States does, but this often requires them to make tradeoffs in terms of class size, special services, facilities, or administrative overhead. In a decentralized education system like that of the United States, it may not be possible to revamp human resource policies and funding at the national level, but a state or a city could implement and adapt these best practices, work with the relevant stakeholders to make the trade-offs, and create a comprehensive human resources management system that would ensure every student a good teacher and every school a great leader.
This review of international best practices suggests a framework of questions that American educators in states, districts, schools, and teacher preparation institutions should reflect on as they ask themselves how we can develop a world-class educator workforce for the future.