We seem to have a consensus that public K-12 education is important and that we want to do better but little agreement beyond that. Presidents Bush and Obama made education reforms key parts of their agendas and now Governor McCrory promises major changes. Public understanding of the issues is meager and our highly partisan atmosphere for legislative discussion is a barrier to good decision making. In this climate, I went looking for the Holy Grail of education: policy answers that would lead to excellence in public education. That search led me to conclude that there is no Holy Grail. There is no one prescription or silver bullet but there are many opportunities for improvement and many possible pathways to excellence.

The most valuable source of information that I found is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in which 34 developed nations have been cooperating for sixteen years to measure student performance and to identify best practices for improvement. The US is one of the participants and there is a wealth of research at our fingertips. Here is a link to PISA’s work. http://www.oecd.org/pisa/  One PISA research paper “Lessons from PISA for the United States” is the source of most information in this column.

Our performance is about average among developed nations in reading and science but well below average in mathematics. Northeastern states are above average, about like the Netherlands. The Midwest is average, tied with Poland. The Western states perform about like Italy and the Southern states rank lowest, matching Greece. Variability of performance in the US is extreme.

Differences among the nations in spending explain only 9% of the variation in their performance. The US gets sub-par performance while being the number two per-capita spender. We are putting in enough resources to achieve excellence but we may not be putting the resources in the right places. Nor is our mediocre performance explained by a higher than normal proportion of socioeconomically disadvantaged students or students from single parent families. Many of the other nations are similar to us in that regard.

Public school and private school performance are not different. When public and private schools have similar resources and similar socioeconomic mix of students, they produce roughly the same performance.

Here are some attributes that the best performing nations seem to have in common. Teachers are highly respected and have salaries that compare favorably to other top professionals. Best performers allocate resources evenly, based on need.   Because funding is not dependent on the local economy, schools in poor communities get as much money as those in wealthy communities.   Schools and communities with particularly difficult situations may receive additional resources and teachers may be offered additional pay to go there. Only the US, Turkey, and Israel base funding on the local economy.

Best performers use standardized tests to measure performance of students and they use the results to modify curriculum, teaching practices and professional development. They do not use the results punitively against teachers or to de-fund schools.   Most also make test results public and allow families some choice in which schools their children attend. High performing schools expect a lot of their local school principals and grant them the authority to hire, set salaries and remove teachers.

 

I was surprised to see which nations are leaders. Asian and Scandinavian nations, especially Korea and Finland are top performers. Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai score particularly high on “resilience” of their economically disadvantaged populations which perform almost as well as the children of the wealthy.

Canada has a remarkable story and it may be the one from which we can learn the most. Not long ago, their situation was much like the US and education reform became a topic of bitter political debate. Since then, they have improved as quickly as any nation and now Canada is near the top of most performance measures. There appear to be several lessons to learn from Canada. The Provincial (State) school board establishes general curriculum standards but teachers and local schools have a lot of flexibility and opportunity for creativity in how to use the curriculum. Ontario, the largest Canadian Province, attracts many of their best and brightest into careers in public education. Admission to teachers colleges is very competitive and almost all Ontario teachers graduated in the top third of their college classes.

The Ontario funding formula provides a block grant to each district based on the number of students plus categorical grants for specific programs such as special education and rural transportation.

PISA research indicates that selectivity in choosing teachers, professional respect, collegiality, and relatively high teacher salaries are key factors in high performing schools. The Ontario Salaries will shock many Americans. Annual salary for a new teacher, depending on specialty and qualifications, will be between $45,709 and $55,404. With ten or more years of service the salary will be between $76,021 and $94,707. An additional 11% of salary goes to the retirement plan and health insurance is fully paid by the employer. Ontario does this while spending less per student per year than the American average. They have no Federal role in education, more local autonomy, more different kinds of schools and more success for less money. I hope our legislators, news media and voters will study Ontario, PISA and other research before making changes to public education.  We need to get these decisions right!