How The Best Performing School Systems Come Out On Top

"How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top,"
50 pages

With the constant churn of educational reform movements coming in and out of popularity, there is a increased interest at looking at the U.S. and internationally to find out what is there to be learned from the world's best-performing school systems.

Researchers used PISA data, current literature, and interviews to benchmark school systems including: Alberta (Canada), Australia, Belgium, Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Ontario, Singapore, and South Korea. Up and comers include Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, England, Jordan, New York, and Ohio.

They found that the best systems all focus on three points, and that other reform initiatives such as class size, governance/structure (e.g. centralization or decentralization of powers), length of school day or year, funding, etc all have little to no effect on student outcomes if these three items are not also addressed.

1. Get the right people to become teachers (the quality of the education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers). The best systems almost universally adopt the following policies to accomplish this:

• Develop effective mechanisms for selecting teachers and processes for removing low-performing teachers from the classroom soon after appointment. While most models allow prospective teachers to graduate from a teacher training program then select the best ones for employment, nearly every top-performing system selects people before they start teacher training and limit places in the training program to those who are selected. When access is not controlled, teacher supply tends to significantly outpace demand, thus watering down the quality of the candidates and spreading resources for training teachers thinner then they have to be.
  
• Pay a good starting salary that is in line with other graduate starting salaries. Top-performers all basically paid the same starting salary, between 95 and 99 percent of per capita GDP (whereas the OECD average ranged from 44 to 186 percent). A starting salary that is similar to other graduate entry-level compensation is critical for teacher quality. However, increasing starting teacher salary beyond this point produces almost no further gains in quality or quantity of applicants. Successful policy strategies used in many top countries to accomplish this without significantly increasing cost are: (1) frontloading compensation - higher starting salaries with smaller subsequent increases gets better people in the system and does not have a significant impact on teacher retention; or (2) increasing class size:
  
• Importance of teacher status: The systems that affect national change employ carefully constructed marketing strategies linked to recruitment programs.

2. Develop teachers into effective instructors (the only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction). The best systems did all of the following four things at the same time:

• Building practical skills during the initial training (as opposed to lecture and theory).
• Placing coaches in schools to support teachers.
• Selecting and developing effective instructional leaders (principals, master teachers, etc).
• Enabling teachers to learn from each other.

3. Put in place systems of targeted support to ensure that every child is able to benefit from excellent instruction (the only way for the system to reach the highest performance is to raise the standard of every student). This is accomplished by using high standards with close monitoring and intervention at the school level. Monitoring is usually done either through exams or through a combination of self- and external evaluations. Immediate student-level interventions are the common practice in most of the top systems.

To read "How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top," click on the link below:

http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/resources/pdf/Worlds_School_Systems_Final.pdf