How to be top
Oct 18th 2007
From The Economist print edition
What works in education: the lessons according to McKinsey
THE British government, says Sir Michael Barber, once an adviser to
the former prime minister, Tony Blair, has changed pretty much
every aspect of education policy in England and Wales, often more
than once. The funding of schools, the governance of schools,
curriculum standards, assessment and testing, the role of local
government, the role of national government, the range and nature
of national agencies, schools admissionsyou name it, it's been
changed and sometimes changed back. The only thing that hasn't
changed has been the outcome. According to the National Foundation
for Education Research, there had been (until recently) no
measurable improvement in the standards of literacy and numeracy in
primary schools for 50 years.
England and Wales are not alone. Australia has almost tripled
education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American
spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the
lowest ever. Again, nothing. No matter what you do, it seems,
standards refuse to budge (see chart). To misquote Woody Allen,
those who can't do, teach; those who can't teach, run the
schools.
Why bother, you might wonder. Nothing seems to matter. Yet
something must. There are big variations in educational standards
between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the
OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which
has established, first, that the best performing countries do much
better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head
such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan,
Singapore, South Korea.
Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question: what do
the successful lot have in common? Yet the answer to that has
proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less
per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin
school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich
countries.
Now, an organisation from outside the teaching foldMcKinsey, a
consultancy that advises companies and governmentshas boldly gone
where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy
recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says*, need
to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of
teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not
sound exactly first-of-its-kind (which is how Andreas Schleicher,
the OECD's head of education research, describes McKinsey's
approach): schools surely do all this already? Actually, they
don't. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would
change education radically.
Begin with hiring the best. There is no question that, as one South
Korean official put it, the quality of an education system cannot
exceed the quality of its teachers. Studies in Tennessee and
Dallas have shown that, if you take pupils of average ability and
give them to teachers deemed in the top fifth of the profession,
they end up in the top 10% of student performers; if you give them
to teachers from the bottom fifth, they end up at the bottom. The
quality of teachers affects student performance more than anything
else.
Yet most school systems do not go all out to get the best. The New
Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a non-profit
organisation, says America typically recruits teachers from the
bottom third of college graduates. Washington, DC recently hired as
chancellor for its public schools an alumna of an organisation
called Teach for America, which seeks out top graduates and hires
them to teach for two years. Both her appointment and the
organisation caused a storm.
A bias against the brightest happens partly because of lack of
money (governments fear they cannot afford them), and partly
because other aims get in the way. Almost every rich country has
sought to reduce class size lately. Yet all other things being
equal, smaller classes mean more teachers for the same pot of
money, producing lower salaries and lower professional status. That
may explain the paradox that, after primary school, there seems
little or no relationship between class size and educational
achievement.
AP
Asian values or good policy?
McKinsey argues that the best performing education systems
nevertheless manage to attract the best. In Finland all new
teachers must have a master's degree. South Korea recruits
primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and
Hong Kong from the top 30%.
They do this in a surprising way. You might think that schools
should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large
pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best.
Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries
with the highest teacher salariesGermany, Spain and
Switzerlandwould presumably be among the best. They aren't. In
practice, the top performers pay no more than average
salaries.
Nor do they try to encourage a big pool of trainees and select the
most successful. Almost the opposite. Singapore screens candidates
with a fine mesh before teacher training and accepts only the
number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed
by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job.
Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to
demand. In both countries, teaching is a high-status profession
(because it is fiercely competitive) and there are generous funds
for each trainee teacher (because there are few of them).
South Korea shows how the two systems produce different results.
Its primary-school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate
degree from one of only a dozen universities. Getting in requires
top grades; places are rationed to match vacancies. In contrast,
secondary-school teachers can get a diploma from any one of 350
colleges, with laxer selection criteria. This has produced an
enormous glut of newly qualified secondary-school teachers11 for
each job at last count. As a result, secondary-school teaching is
the lower status job in South Korea; everyone wants to be a
primary-school teacher. The lesson seems to be that teacher
training needs to be hard to get into, not easy.
Teaching the teachers
Having got good people, there is a temptation to shove them into
classrooms and let them get on with it. For understandable reasons,
teachers rarely get much training in their own classrooms (in
contrast, doctors do a lot of training in hospital wards). But
successful countries can still do much to overcome the
difficulty.
Singapore provides teachers with 100 hours of training a year and
appoints senior teachers to oversee professional development in
each school. In Japan and Finland, groups of teachers visit each
others' classrooms and plan lessons together. In Finland, they get
an afternoon off a week for this. In Boston, which has one of
America's most improved public-school systems, schedules are
arranged so that those who teach the same subject have free classes
together for common planning. This helps spread good ideas around.
As one educator remarked, when a brilliant American teacher
retires, almost all of the lesson plans and practices that she has
developed also retire. When a Japanese teacher retires, she leaves
a legacy.
Lastly, the most successful countries are distinctive not just in
whom they employ so things go right but in what they do when things
go wrong, as they always do. For the past few years, almost all
countries have begun to focus more attention on testing, the
commonest way to check if standards are falling. McKinsey's
research is neutral on the usefulness of this, pointing out that
while Boston tests every student every year, Finland has largely
dispensed with national examinations. Similarly, schools in New
Zealand and England and Wales are tested every three or four years
and the results published, whereas top-of-the-class Finland has no
formal review and keeps the results of informal audits
confidential.
But there is a pattern in what countries do once pupils and schools
start to fail. The top performers intervene early and often.
Finland has more special-education teachers devoted to laggards
than anyone elseas many as one teacher in seven in some schools.
In any given year, a third of pupils get one-on-one remedial
lessons. Singapore provides extra classes for the bottom
20% of students and teachers are expected to stay behindoften for
hoursafter school to help students.
None of this is rocket science. Yet it goes against some of the
unspoken assumptions of education policy. Scratch a teacher or an
administrator (or a parent), and you often hear that it is
impossible to get the best teachers without paying big salaries;
that teachers in, say, Singapore have high status because of
Confucian values; or that Asian pupils are well behaved and
attentive for cultural reasons. McKinsey's conclusions seem more
optimistic: getting good teachers depends on how you select and
train them; teaching can become a career choice for top graduates
without paying a fortune; and that, with the right policies,
schools and pupils are not doomed to lag behind.
I got myself ban from a forum when I criticise my kid's teacher.
I don't find his teacher committed at all. His school was recently
in the news where a class of 20 students had 18 of the boys failed
their exam. Commitment? Revision classes for weaker students? Load
of crap. My kid never had revision classes even though he's weak in
his academic studies. When he does not hand up his homework, the
teacher hardly hound him for the work.