I'm taking my last class at HGSE, a 3-day Jan Term seminar, with three folks who have been in the education reform business for a long time, Bob Shwartz, Mike Smith, and Michael Barber (that's Sir Michael Barber to you, buddy!) It's called Seminar on Education Policy: Effective Education Systems, but it probably could be called: Things the Best School Systems have in common.
It starts today, and I'll probably blog and tweet about it throughout the week, but I've started the readings, and some themes have become very clear. The course description is here, and the two public readings are here and here. Two themes of the reading come out very early on.
The first is that effective school reform is a talent development issue. The best school systems in the world get their best high school and college graduates to become teachers. They have dozens of applicants for every spot in teacher education programs, the applicants are rigorously vetted, they are thoroughly trained, and they are highly respected in society. There are multiple pathways for accomplishing this, but the best systems all have this in common. So to some extent, your testing, standards, technology, value-added measures, instructional coaches, etc., are all limited in their potential if your teacher force isn't built from the top 10 or 20% of college graduates. That kind of prestige is not exclusively a cultural artifact (Confucianism helps, but isn't essential--there are few Confucius devotees in Finland, it can be cultivated right here) Teach For America has had some success with this over the last decade. You need to make teaching more exclusive, have better rewards earlier in the system, treat teachers like professionals, offer a clear career path with promotion opportunities, and develop systems to prevent unsuitable people from becoming teachers. It's definitely a feedback loop issue--right now, America is doing very little to improve the prestige of teachers and getting our best students into the profession.
The second is that there needs to be systemic coherence. You need a curriculum. You need to train teachers to teach to the curriculum. You need assessment systems that evaluate student learning in the curriculum (though not annually, and not necessarily with standardized tests). You need to give teachers time to improve curriculum delivery. The curriculum needs to prepare students for particular entry points in college and career. It's very difficult to see how we can pull this off given our tradition of local control.
The third is that the system needs to focus on equity. In all the best systems, the gap between wealthy and poor students is minimal. The systems are built so that every kid gets a great education, and kids who need more resources and support get them. I'm looking forward to thinking and learning more about this issue, and connecting this to the writing that I've been doing about technology and equity.