Tag: OECD

Hey Tom — When it Comes to Ed Reform, China is the Least of Our Worries

Posted on | by Sam

Tom Friedman has a new column about education in today’s New York Times in which he almost makes an important point about the state of K-12 schooling in America, and what we can do to improve it.

The thing Friedman gets right is the easy part — the fact that despite the willingness of American politicians to keep beating the xenophobic drums and lead the chant for everything to be “made in America,” American businesses are already operating in the flat world of globalization and cost efficiency. Consequently, Friedman writes, “the trend is that for more and more jobs, average is over.” In other words, if you aren’t uniquely skilled to succeed in the modern world, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be back looking for work.

Fair enough. But then Friedman shifts to talk about international scores on the PISA test, and America’s consistent mediocrity vis a vis the rest of the world. Then he quotes the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher, who asks us to “imagine, in a few years, [that] you could sign onto a Web site and see this is how my school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world.” According to Schleicher, parents could then “take this information to your local superintendent and ask: ‘Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?’”

I’m sorry, what?

Don’t get me wrong — in the modern world of school choice, parents need more and better ways to compare schools, and the PISA is probably the best test out there for gauging the overall health of a nation’s educational quality (largely because its questions tend to be more open-ended and challenging than the U.S. versions, which are often straight multiple-choice). I’d even bet Schleicher envisions that when American parents learn, say, that Finland has a completely different approach to teacher recruitment and development, they will start demanding that we abandon our crisis response to the teaching shortage (i.e. Teach for America) and devise our own Marshall Plan for teaching.

I’d also love it if that happened. But it never will if our lead vehicle is little more than a web site that helps parents compare America’s PISA scores to China’s.

Why? Because America needs to have another conversation first — the one that actually clarifies what we now know about how people learn.

The good news is . . . we know a lot. More than ever before, we can assemble a picture of the ways our brains respond to and make sense of information. We can help people diagnose their individual strengths and weaknesses. And we can offer models of schooling that previous generations could only dream about — models in which children not only love going to school, but actually acquire relevant skills and understandings about themselves and the world.

The bad news is we aren’t having that conversation, and we aren’t elevating those stories. We talk about “achievement” as though it’s a proxy for “learning,” when in fact it’s a proxy for “3rd and 8th grade reading and math scores.” We propose incentive structures for adults that ignore what we know about how motivation works in human beings. And we propose comparing schools to other ones around the world before we actually understand what a healthy and high-functioning school really looks like — and requires.

What Schleicher envisions is right in spirit: a comparison platform that would empower parents, principals and teachers to demand something better. Until we deepen our collective capacity to imagine something bigger than the world of schooling the rest of us experienced, however, all a platform like that will do is improve our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Occupy Third Grade?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Occupy Third Grade?

On a crisp fall morning in the nation’s capital, 3rd grade teacher Rebecca Lebowitz gathered her 29 public school students on their familiar giant multicolored carpet, and reminded them how to make sense of the characters whose worlds they would soon enter during independent reading time.

“What are the four things we want to look for when we meet a new character?” Ms. Lebowitz asked from her chair at the foot of the rug. Several hands shot up before nine-year-old Monica spoke confidently over the steady hum of the classroom’s antiquated radiator. “We want to pay attention to what they do, what they say, how they feel, and what their body language tells us.” “That’s right,” her teacher said cheerily. “When we look for those four things, we have a much better sense of who a person really is.”

As the calendar shifts to the eleventh month of 2011 – a year of near-constant revolution and upheaval, from the Arab Spring to the Wisconsin statehouse to the global effort to Occupy Wall Street – what might the rest of us learn from students like Monica? If, in short, we were as smart as a third-grader, what would we observe about the character of this year’s global protests, and what might we decide to do next?

1. It is not about “democracy” – As much as we glorify and value the principles and practices of our democratic system of government, it’s not democracy per se that is at the root of this unleashed global yearning. As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently pointed out, what motivated the protesters in Tahrir Square – and what most animates those who continue to brave the wintry weather in public squares around the world – is a deeper quest for what lies at the root of a genuinely democratic society: justice.

The people protesting around the world are not just looking to be seen; they’re demanding to be heard. And what they’re saying is that from Egypt to the United States, essential social contracts have been broken – contracts that require at least a modicum of fairness and balance. If anything, therefore, these movements are about highlighting an uncomfortable truth: merely having a democracy does not guarantee a just society, and the tendencies of democracy and capitalism, left untended, tend to flow in different directions.

2. It is about unsustainable social orders – Across the Middle East, citizens have been risking their lives for months to protest the injustice of their daily lives. And yet the absence of social justice is a cancer that has already spread well beyond the borders of the Arab world. According to a recent analysis of the 31 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), nearly 11% of all people in OECD countries live in poverty. Worse still, 22% of American children are affected by poverty, yet the United States spends only 0.33% of its GDP on pre-primary education.

When these data are combined with other indicators like income inequality, access to health care, and the percentage of elderly citizens living in poverty, the United States gets a social justice rating that trails all but four of the OECD’s 31 countries. Add to that the now-well-known fact that the top 1% of Americans now control 40% of the total wealth, and you have an unsustainable social system, plain and simple. Clearly, people are angry, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

3. It does require a reboot of public education – History has shown us that to sustain a movement for transformational social change, anger is both necessary and insufficient. To sustain our energy, we are best fueled by an empathetic regard for the needs of others, not just our own. As Gandhi put it, “I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion.”

If what we seek, then, is a more sustainable and just social order, how should we recalibrate our public schools – the institutions most responsible for equipping children with the skills and self-confidence they need to become effective and justice-oriented change agents as adults?

We might start by evaluating each other the same way Ms. Lebowitz’s students evaluate new characters in a book. To fulfill the egalitarian vision of 2011, children must grow up in learning environments that are sensitive not just to what they do and say, but also to how they feel and what their body language tells us about the larger world they inhabit. This, too, is a central insight of those who study systemic change. “We need to learn to attend to both dimensions simultaneously,” says M.I.T management professor Otto Scharmer. “What we say, see, and do (our visible realm), and the inner place from which we operate (the invisible realm, in which our sources of attention reside and from which they operate).”

Recent events have underscored just how essential it is to acknowledge our global interdependence; after all, it was the financial subterfuge of the few that affected the personal wellbeing of the many. That’s why a healthy democracy is more than just policies and practices – and a healthy school is more than just test scores and teacher policies. That’s why the American activists of tomorrow need more than just the occasional lesson about Gandhi or King; they need consistent opportunities to actively apply their own developing compassion for others in the service of creating a better world. And that’s why students like Monica need to grow up in a society willing to heed the rising voices of the protesters and recommit to our nation’s founding promise:  “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice.”

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Are National Standards a Good or a Bad Idea?

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on Are National Standards a Good or a Bad Idea?

Today, a Washington Post story reported that the push for common national standards in reading and math is gaining ground. Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have now agreed to adopt the standards as their own.

This is notable progress when one considers how all prior efforts to promote a common set of academic standards in the United States have failed. But as the Post’s Nick Anderson reports, the Obama administration, working in concert with the National Governors Association, has been effective where others have failed by “encouraging the movement and dangling potential financial incentives for states to join.” The administration has also opted not to fund the actual work of the groups that drafted the standards, relying instead on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other private donors.

As with many other major issues, the question of standards has become a polarizing issue with starkly divided camps. On one side are advocates like Massachusetts state education commissioner Mitch Chester, who believe the proposed standards would provide “clearer signals to K-12 students about their readiness for success at the next level, including readiness for college or careers.” On the other side are folks like the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey, who worry that the push for common standards “is opening the door to federal control. It is the most alarming centralization of power in education you can come up with.”

Who’s right?

Well, as is usually the case, I think you can quickly dismiss the folks who inhabit the extreme poles of each camp. Clearly, standards by themselves will achieve nothing but, well, a new set of standards. Just as clearly, a set of common standards need not mean the end of local control and teacher autonomy, or the arrival of full-scale standardization.

Looking around the world is instructive here. Finland, the country with the best education system in the world, has national standards (in all subjects), but it uses them to provide guidance, clarity and quality control, not to enforce a strict set of restrictions that prescribe the actions of local educators. Furthermore, standards are viewed as indicators of wisdom that students will need to be successful in college and the workplace, not shards of knowledge that make it easier to devise uniform tests and mandate standardized modes of instruction. In fact, Finland has no national exams, and student assessments are devised and implemented locally, thanks to the deep investments that country has made in its teachers.

This is a good model for how national standards should be used, says Andreas Schleicher, who heads the OECD’s Education Indicators and Analysis Division in Paris. “The question for the U.S. is not just how many charter schools it establishes,” he said, “but how to build the capacity for all schools to assume charter-like autonomy, as happens in some of the best-performing education systems.” Schleicher also points out how the U.S. relies disproportionately on “external accountability, ” or tests and consequences for poor performance, to improve schools.  By contrast, other countries do more to build their schools’ overall capacities for success, and rely on a variety of measures to gauge their progress.

Viewed in this way, national standards become helpful guideposts that contribute to a greater sense of shared clarity about what children should generally know and be able to do, not hurtful hitching posts that circumscribe local creativity, personalization, and autonomy.

Is this the path the Obama administration and the National Governors Association seek as well? I’m not sure, but I can see why some people feel nervous.  We are, after all, still a culture intent on overvaluing the illusory certainty that basic-skills test scores provide us. We still seek linear progress in the most nonlinear of professions and experiences. And we still operate in a society where powerful forces driven by the bottom line have the capacity to steer policy decisions to their liking. (Just look at the recent financial reform bill, and the last-minute changes made to it that will continue to allow banks to engage in the sorts of activities that led to the global economic crisis in the first place!)

Princeton economist Allan Blinder echoes a similar note of caution. “It is clear that the U.S. and other rich nations will have to transform their educational systems so as to produce workers for the jobs that will actually exist in their societies. Simply providing more education is probably a good thing on balance, especially if a more educated labor force is a more flexible labor force that can cope more readily with non-routine tasks and occupational change. But it is far from a panacea. In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.”

Done correctly, I believe a new set of national standards (in all subjects) can help us clarify both how and what we teach our children, just as it has in other countries around the world. But if the end result of this movement is little more than a new set of national exams, we will do little more than fall further behind.