IAP NEWS UPDATEFebruary 25th – March 4th 2011

Publication: World Bank, Human Development Network ForumTitle: Improving Human Capital in a Competitive World—Education Reform in the United StatesAuthor: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne DuncanDate: March 2nd, 2011Website: http://go.worldbank.org/MUFGTN10H0Survey: PISA

When the World Bank was founded in 1944, much of Europe, Russia, and Japan lay in ruin.

Today, the world is no longer recovering from a tragic global war. Yet the international community faces a crisis of a different sort, the global economic crunch. And education--then and now--is the beacon lighting the path forward, perhaps more so today than ever before.

Education is now the key to eliminating gender inequality, to reducing poverty, to creating a sustainable planet, to preventing needless deaths and illness, and to fostering peace. And in a knowledge economy, education is the new currency by which nations maintain economic competitiveness and global prosperity. Education today is inseparable from the development of human capital.

This understanding--that education is the new game-changer driving economic growth and human development—goes to the heart of what we are doing in the Obama administration and to the World Bank’s mission to alleviate poverty.

For nearly half-a-century, the World Bank has supported educational development. The Bank first invested in educational development in 1962, launching a project to build secondary schools in Tunisia. Since then, the bank has invested $69 billion in more than 1,500 education projects around the globe.

Yet even more important, the Bank’s commitment to strengthen school systems has expanded as the educational requirements of the information age have expanded.

The Millennium Development Goals of providing universal primary education to all, and eliminating gender inequities, propelled many nations and multi-governmental organizations to boost educational spending. Over the last decade, the Bank’s investment in education surged to more than $5 billion in 2010 alone.

It’s an impressive record. Yet both developed and developing nations face serious educational challenges today that call for renewed efforts by the World Bank and nations around the globe to expand access, improve equity, and boost achievement.

Today, I want to provide two overarching messages about America’s efforts to increase educational attainment and achievement.

First, the Obama administration has an ambitious and unified theory of action that drives our agenda. The challenge of transforming education in America cannot be met by quick-fix solutions or isolated reforms. It can only be accomplished with a clear, coherent, and coordinated vision of reform.

In many respects, our vision of reform has a great deal in common with the World Bank’s forthcoming Education Strategy for 2020. We share your commitment to results—to accelerating the acquisition of skills and knowledge. We share your commitment to cradle-to-career reform for students.

I love your credo “Invest early. Invest smartly. Invest for all.” And we share your commitment to systematic reform that provides both high-quality technical assistance and makes smart use of a variety of monetary and non-monetary incentives to drive innovation.

The second takeaway message I’d like to convey is that while America must improve its stagnant educational performance, President Obama and I reject the protectionist Cold War assumption that improving economic competitiveness is a zero-sum game, with one nation’s gain being another country’s loss.

I want to make the case to you today that enhancing educational attainment and economic viability, both at home and abroad, is really more of a win-win game; it is an opportunity to grow the economic pie, instead of simply to carve it up. President Obama has said that improving education is vital to “win the future” for America. But accelerating learning can help all nations to win the future together.

The United States has so much to learn from nations with high-performing education systems. And America has so much to share from its experience to the mutual benefit of nations confronting similar educational challenges.

Everyone here today knows that education is taking on more and more importance around the globe.In the knowledge economy, opportunities to land a good job are vanishing fast for young workers who drop out of high school or fail to get college experience.

As the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman famously pointed out, the world economy has “flattened.” Companies now digitize, automate, and outsource work to the most competitive individuals, companies, and countries.

The truth is that is difficult to exaggerate the importance of education to human development today. Education, as Nelson Mandela says, “is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

And it’s not just world leaders and educators who make that case. Economics may be known as the “dismal science.” But that has not stopped leading economists from heralding the transformative role of education.

Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, recently told Time magazine that “the best solution to income inequality is producing a high-quality education for everyone.” He said that “in our highly technological, globalized economy, people without education will not be able to improve their economic situation.”

When my friend Larry Summers was the chief economist at the World Bank, he spotlighted the importance of educating girls and integrating them into the labor force. “Investment in girls’ education,” he said, “may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.”

I am pleased to see that Education for All’s Fast Track Initiative is releasing a report tomorrow on the status of girls’ education. It finds that enormous strides in access and equity have been made worldwide but that formidable challenges remain ahead.

The EFA’s report reminds us that education is the great equalizer. It is the one force that can consistently overcome differences in background, culture, and privilege.

The EFA’s report, and others before it, also highlight that expanding educational access for girls is not just an urgent economic and social need. In many cases, it is literally a matter of life and death.

A mother who can read can better protect her children from chronic illnesses, from AIDS, and from dying young. A child born to a mother who can read is 50 percent more likely to survive past age 5. And in Africa’s poorest states, UNESCO projects that the lives of 1.8 million children could have been saved if their mothers had at least a secondary education.

This link between education and premature mortality is not limited to developing countries and primary school systems. In the United States, new research finds that college-educated Americans now can expect to live seven years longer than their peers with less schooling--and the longevity gap has grown since the 1970s, even after controlling for risk factors like smoking, hypertension, and cholesterol.

Education, in short, saves lives. But it is also the foundation of peace and prosperity. You can’t imagine a better world without a global commitment to providing better education for women and youth.

Today, 70 million children do not attend primary school. Nearly 40 million of them live in countries affected by armed conflict. A better-educated world is a safer world because low educational attainment is one of the few statistically significant predictors of violence.

From Indonesia to Pakistan to Kenya, education has immeasurable power to promote growth and stability. It is a tragedy that more than a year after the earthquake in Haiti,

we still don’t know how many children are back in school. It is absolutely imperative that the United States seize the opportunity to help Haiti build a stronger school system from the ruins of its old, broken one—just as America coalesced to build a fast-improving, vibrant school system in New Orleans after the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.

From devastation, beautiful flowers can grow—crisis can seed opportunities for transformational change. In 2001, Afghanistan had barely 900,000 boys in school. Today, they now have almost seven million children in schools, almost 40 percent of whom are girls. Dramatic change in Afghanistan or Ethiopia can happen in a short period of time. But it requires the commitment to succeed.

Now, the economic and social interdependence of the knowledge economy creates new global challenges. The United States cannot, acting by itself, dramatically reduce poverty and disease or develop sustainable sources of energy.

These new partnerships must also inspire students to take a bigger and deeper view of their civic obligations—not only to their countries of origin but to the betterment of the global community.A just and socially responsible society must also be anchored in civic engagement for the public good. Education transforms one-time subjects into future citizens—as the inspired uprising for democracy in Egypt showed.

The President and I both recognize that improving educational outcomes for students is hard work with no simple answers. And transformational reform especially takes time in the United States. We have more than two million children enrolled in preschool programs, 100,000 public schools, 49 million K-12 students, more than three million teachers, and 15,000 school districts—all of it largely administered and funded by local governments.

I am convinced that the U.S. education system now has an unprecedented opportunity to get dramatically better. Nothing--nothing--is more important in the long-run to American prosperity than boosting the skills and attainment of the nation’s students.

In the United States, we feel an economic and moral imperative to challenge the status quo. Closing the achievement gap and closing the opportunity gap is the civil rights issue of our generation. One quarter-- 25 percent--of U.S. high school students drop out or fail to graduate on time. Almost one million students leave our schools for the streets each year. That is economically unsustainable and morally unacceptable.

The North Star guiding the alignment of our cradle-to-career education agenda is President Obama’s goal that, by the end of the decade, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

That goal can only be achieved by creating a strong cradle-to-career continuum that starts with early childhood learning and extends all the way to college and careers.

In the U.S., early learning has come into its own. It is now recognized as the first and most critical stage in human development. We have a special opportunity today to build

a bigger and better coordinated system of early care and education that prepares children for success in school and life--in place of a system with uneven quality and access.

President Obama’s 2020 college attainment goal is absolutely ambitious. To meet it, roughly 60 percent of young adults will need to have an earned an associate’s or bachelors’ degree by the end of the decade, up from 42 percent today.

We made a great start in expanding college access with the passage of health care reform, which also freed up $40 billion for Pell Grant scholarships for low-income students. That is the biggest increase in student aid in the U.S. since the 1944 GI bill. And the new law also granted $2 billion to community colleges to help them produce millions more graduates.

On p-12 education, our theory of action starts with the four assurances incorporated in the 2009 economic stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The four assurances got their name from the requirement that every single governor in the 50 states had to provide an “assurance” they would pursue reforms in these four areas--in exchange for their share of funds from a Recovery Act program designed to largely stem job loss among teachers and principals.

The first assurance was that states would work toward developing academic standards that truly show if a student is ready for college and a career when they graduate from high school. Under the existing system, many states had dummied down academic standards to make students look proficient.

While that helps politicians look good, it was bad for children, bad for education, and bad for states’ long-term economic prosperity. Many states were actually, in fact, lying to students and parents, telling them that students were ready for careers and college when they were nowhere near ready.

The second assurance governors provided was in the area of data systems. More robust data systems and a new generation of assessments can assist teachers and principals to improve their practices and tailor their instruction in ways that were largely unimaginable in the past.

The third assurance asked states to commit to improving the preparation, professional development, and evaluation of teachers and school leaders—especially in high-need schools and subject areas like STEM and special education.

Great teachers are the unsung heroes in our society. They have the single biggest in-school impact on academic achievement. And when it comes to teaching, commitment, love for the work, and talent matter tremendously.

Tragically, low-income and minority students do not have equitable access to effective teachers across the country. Too often, the children who need the most help get the least. Too often, we perpetuate poverty and social failure—and that has got to stop.

The fourth and final assurance propelled states, for the first time ever, to commit to dramatic change in persistently low-achieving schools. The United States cannot substantially boost graduation rates and promise a world-class education to every child without ending the cycle of failure in the lowest-performing five percent of our schools.

Year after year, and in some cases for decades, these schools cheated children out of the opportunity for an excellent education. As adults, as educators, as parents, and as leaders, America passively observed this educational failure with a complacency that is deeply disturbing.

Fewer than 2,000 high schools in the United States—a manageable number—produce half of all its dropouts. These “dropout factories” produce almost 75 percent—three-fourths—of our dropouts from the minority community, our African-American and Latino young boys and girls.

State and school district officials have largely tinkered in these schools, instead of treating them as educational emergencies. But children only get one chance at an education.

We are not content with the status quo. And we are not content to continue tinkering. Districts now have to engage in interventions to foster dramatic change in these schools.

Now, as the federal role in education has grown, so has the bureaucracy. All too often, the U.S. Department of Education has operated more like a compliance machine, instead of being the engine of innovation our country and children need. The department typically focused on ensuring that formula funds reached their intended recipients in the proper fashion. It focused on inputs--not educational outcomes or equity.

Our administration has sought to fundamentally shift the federal role, so that the Department is doing much more to support reform and innovation in states, districts, and local communities. While the vast majority of department funding is still formula-based, the Recovery Act created additional competitive funding to incentivize change at the state and local level, like the high-visibility $4.35 billion Race to the Top program and the $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund, or i3.

I’ve said that America is now in the midst of a “quiet revolution” in school reform. And this is very much a revolution driven by leaders in statehouses, state school superintendents, local lawmakers, district leaders, union heads, school boards, parents, principals, teachers, and students themselves.

To cite just one example, our department’s Race to the Top Program challenged states to craft concrete, comprehensive plans for reforming their education systems. The response was nothing less than extraordinary.

Forty-six states submitted applications—and the competition drove a national conversation about education reform. Thirty-two states changed specific laws that posed

barriers to innovation. And even states that did not win awards now have a state roadmap for reform hammered out.

The Investing in Innovation program also had a phenomenal response. The $650 million i3 fund offered support to school districts, nonprofit organizations, and universities to scale-up best practices.

The department awarded 49 grants in the competition. But nearly 1,700 applicants applied—by far the largest number of applicants in a single competition in our Department’s history. Our aim is not just to fund grantees each year, but to build a new culture of evidence-based decision-making for expanding successful reforms.

I said earlier that the United States now has a unique opportunity to transform our education system in ways that will resonate for decades to come. During the last two years, the federal government provided unprecedented funds to support education and reform.

But the special window that America has had to drive reform is not because of the dollars. It is because of the courage, demonstrated by state and local leaders, who have taken the lead in collaborating on problems that the experts said were too divisive to resolve. At the end of the day, I believe it is their courage, and not our resources, that will transform educational opportunity in our country.

In March of 2009, President Obama called on the nation’s governors and state school chiefs to “develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.” Virtually everyone thought the president was dreaming.

But today, 41 states and the District of Columbia have already adopted the new state-crafted Common Core standards in math and English. They’re not studying it, not thinking about it, not issuing a white paper—they have actually done it. The era of dummying down standards is over.

More than four out of five public school students in the U.S. now reside in states that have voluntarily adopted higher, common college-and career-ready standards that are internationally benchmarked. That is an absolute game-changer in a system which until now set 50 different goalposts for success.

The second game-changer is that states have banded together in large consortia to develop a new generation of assessments aligned with the states’ Common Core standards. In September, I announced the results of the department’s $350 million Race to the Top assessment completion to design this next generation of assessments.

Two state consortiums, which together cover 44 states and the District of Columbia, won awards. These new assessments will have much in common with the first-rate assessments now used in many high-performing countries outside the U.S. When these new assessments are in use in the 2014-15 school year, millions of U.S. schoolchildren,

parents, and teachers will know, for the first time, if students truly are on-track for colleges and careers.

For the first time, many teachers will have the assessments they have longed for—tests of critical thinking skills and complex learning tasks that are not just multiple-choice, fill-in-the-bubble tests of basic skills.

So, in the end, transforming education is not just about raising expectations. It has to be about creating greater capacity at all levels of the system to implement reform. It has to be about results, both here and abroad.

As the United States works to strengthen its educational system, it is important to remember that advancing educational attainment and achievement everywhere brings benefits not just to the U.S. but around the globe.

Our department has been pleased to partner with the U.S. Agency for International Development to help ensure that our best domestic practices are shared world-wide. The United States provides over a billion dollars annually to partner countries working on educational reform.

USAID has just released an important new education strategy to improve reading skills for 100 million children in primary grades and expand equitable access to education in conflict-ridden countries for 15 million learners by 2015.

Our goal in the coming year will be to work closely with global partners, including the World Bank, to promote qualitative improvements and system-strengthening.

Working together, we believe that nations, parents, and educators can greatly reduce the number of children out of school and ensure that the children who are in class are actually learning. It is not just the quantity but the quality of learning that matters. More than half of Kenyan teenagers and about a third of Malian teens who have completed six years of schooling still cannot read a simple sentence.

Now, some might see a paradox of sorts in America’s efforts to bolster international competitiveness.President Obama often says that the nation that “out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow.”

It is true that the United States will be better off, in comparative terms, if we lead the world in educational attainment, rather than lagging behind. A generation ago, America did lead the world in college attainment. Today, the U.S. is tied for ninth among young adults.

Yet while President Obama would be the first to say that we welcome the challenge of friendly economic competition, he would also say that the United States has to become more competitive and more collaborative to succeed in the globally competitive, knowledge-based economy.

The borderless nature of innovation and ideas today is apparent throughout the U.S. economy. Immigrants to the U.S. started a quarter of all engineering and technology companies from 1995 to 2005, including half of the start-ups in Silicon Valley, our high-tech capital. Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, was born in Moscow but educated in the United States. Google is now used throughout the globe to gather information and advance knowledge.

Immigration of skilled professionals and promising students is not to be feared but welcomed. In the information age, brain drain has become brain gain.

I want to close by talking briefly about what the United States can learn from other nations and how cross-country collaboration can be of mutual benefit to the U.S. and other nations.

America has a great deal to learn from the educational practices of other countries. One of the most encouraging lessons of the PISA assessment is that high-achieving nations can significantly narrow achievement gaps and advance achievement nationwide—two important goals that the United States has so far failed to accomplish.

Nations like Singapore, South Korea, and Finland are showing the way to building a topnotch teaching workforce, and ensuring that outstanding teachers instruct the most challenging children.

At the same time, the U.S. has much to teach other nations. Our system of higher education is in many respects still without parallel. We have advanced data systems that we are constantly improving. And we have more high-performing schools that are showing how to close achievement gaps than ever before in our nation’s history.

I welcome this international dialogue, which is only beginning. In December, in Washington, I joined the OECD Secretary General for the global announcement of the 2009 PISA results. At the same time, OECD released a study that the U.S. commissioned of high-performing and rapidly-improving education systems--and the lessons that they hold for improving education here at home.

Later this month we will be sponsoring an International Summit on the Teaching Profession in New York. The summit will include education Ministers and leaders of national teachers’ organizations from high-performing and rapidly-improving countries, with a goal of sharing practices for developing a high-quality teaching profession.

Ultimately, the economic future of the United States rests not only on its ability to strengthen our education system but also on citizens in other nations raising their living standards.

Thinking of the future as a contest among nations vying for larger pieces of a finite economic pie is a recipe for protectionism and global strife. Expanding educational attainment everywhere is the best way to grow the pie for all.

In the United States, we know we do not have all the answers to our educational challenges. Yet not having all the answers cannot become an excuse for inaction.

The urgent need to provide an excellent education for every child is a right that cannot be denied. We cannot wait because our children cannot wait. The time for change is now.

Publication: ReasonTitle: Losing the Brains RaceAuthor: Veronique de RugyDate: March 2011Website: http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/22/losing-the-brains-raceSurvey: PISA

America is spending more money on education while producing worse outcomes.

In November the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released its Program for International Student Assessment scores, measuring educational achievement in 65 countries. The results are depressingly familiar: While students in many developed nations have been learning more and more over time, American 15-year-olds are stuck in the middle of the pack in many fundamental areas, including reading and math. Yet the United States is near the top in education spending.

Using the OECD data, Figure 1 compares K–12 education expenditures per pupil in each of the world’s major industrial powers. As you can see, with the exception of Switzerland, the U.S. spends the most in the world on education, an average of $91,700 per student in the nine years between the ages of 6 and 15. But the results do not correlate: For instance, we spend one-third more per student than Finland, which consistently ranks near the top in science, reading, and math.

Naturally, the OECD’s report has sparked calls for more spending. Speaking at Forsyth Technical Community College in North Carolina at the beginning of December, President Barack Obama said the federal government should spend more on improving achievement in math and science, much as Washington did in response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik launch a half-century ago.

But throwing more money at poorly performing schools has not moved the needle on performance. During the last 40 years, the federal government has spent $1.8 trillion on education, and spending per pupil in the U.S. has tripled in real terms. Government at all levels spent an average of $149,000 on the 13-year education of a high school senior who graduated in 2009, compared to $50,000 (in 2009 dollars) for a 1970 graduate.

Despite the dramatic increase in spending, there has been no notable change in student outcomes. Using data provided by Andrew Coulson, an education policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, Figure 2 shows National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in reading, math, and science, along with per pupil spending. The only trend line with a pulse is the amount of spending.

More spending usually means more teachers. Last year Obama not only used stimulus funds to preserve education jobs but called for “10,000 new teachers.” Yet as Figure 3 shows, the number of students per teacher in U.S. public schools fell from 17.4 in 1990 to 15.7 in 2007.

We have tried spending more money and putting more teachers in classrooms for more than a generation, with no observable improvements to anything except the schools’ bottom lines. Why? Because of the lack of competition in the K–12 education system. Schooling in the United States is still based largely on residency; students remain tied to the neighborhood school regardless of how bad its performance may be. Federal spending on education (which amounted to 8.3 percent of total public education spending in 2007) is funneled to students through the institutions to which they are tied, largely regardless of student performance. With no need to convince students and parents to stay, schools in most districts lack the incentive to serve student needs or differentiate their product. To make matters worse, this lack of competition continues at the school level, where teacher hiring and firing decisions are stubbornly divorced from student performance, tied instead to funding levels and tenure.

If reform is to be defined by something other than the amount of money flushed down the toilet, it is time to reverse the flow of power from the top (administrators, school districts, teachers unions, governments) to the bottom (students, their parents, and taxpayers who want their money spent wisely). A first step in that direction is to change our teacher labor market practices in terms of both hiring and firing. On the hiring end, there are too many restrictions on who can become a teacher. On the firing end, we need to restore the relationship between job retention and job performance. Lisa Snell, director of education at the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit organization that publishes this magazine and does public policy research), points out in an email one recent

example of how bad a school’s labor practices can be: “L.A. Unified School District laid off hundreds of its top teachers and replaced them with lower-performing teachers with seniority.”

In long-suffering California, a bipartisan coalition is supporting a new response to such irrational practices: the “parent trigger,” which allows fed-up parents whose children are in a consistently underperforming school to quickly change the school’s leadership. By signing a petition, parents can force reorganization of a school’s management or conversion into a charter school. In December parents of students at Compton Unified School District’s McKinley Elementary School did just that.

A parent trigger is not a panacea, but it introduces an element of choice (and hence competition) into a monopoly that has been shortchanging its customers and benefactors for decades. Wealthy people already exercise school choice, either by sending their kids to private schools or by choosing where to live based on school districts. The parent trigger gives less fortunate parents a similar and much less expensive tool. Along with the growth of online education and the charter school movement, these lurches in the direction of consumer choice are heartening and long overdue.

Publication: BloombergTitle: U.S. Teachers Are Failing, So Are The CriticsAuthor: Chris FarrellDate: March 1st, 2011

Website: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-02/u-s-teachers-are-failing-so-are-the-critics-commentary-by-chris-farrell.html

What’s wrong with this picture? Talk to any chief executive about the workforce of the future and they’ll passionately argue for the need to boost America’s K-12 educational performance. They’ll point out that the U.S. has lagged behind for years in global assessments of student achievement, especially in math and science.

Yet governors in hard-pressed states are cutting back on primary and secondary education spending, with some state leaders proposing draconian reductions.

Many governors and state legislators are convinced that the public education system is badly broken. Education reformers pushed an agenda of testing and accountability for more than two decades, including the George W. Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind legislation and the Barack Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative.

Expenditures per student almost doubled in real terms between 1981 and 2007, to $10,041 from $5,639. Yet the measured results have been largely mediocre. From the attacks on teacher unions in the documentary film “Waiting for Superman” to the charter school movement bankrolled by private philanthropists, a narrative has emerged that teachers and their unions are to blame for the education shortfall.

Problem is, the demonizing of public school teachers and their unions is mostly misplaced and definitely destructive. Ever since “A Nation at Risk”, the landmark 1983 call to education alarm, enthusiasm has waxed and waned for various reforms, ranging from national standards to smaller class size to charter schools.

No Easy Fixes

Yet the lesson of the past three decades is that there is no silver reform bullet or any single culprit to blame when it comes to the condition of K-12 education. No, the big risk that governors are courting with their policies is that teaching will become an even less attractive profession than it is already.

To prevent that dire outcome, the onus falls on teacher- union leadership to act boldly and embrace the sort of radical work rule changes that will boost the teacher talent pool and the retention of good teachers. “There are alternative futures for the U.S. economy and if we don’t deal with the quality of our schools we end up with a much worse future,” says Eric Hanushek, a veteran education economist at the Hoover Institution.

Making a Difference

The quality of the teacher workforce matters. Think back to the good teachers you had in elementary, middle and high school. Maybe it was a first grade teacher that sparked a lifelong love affair with reading. Perhaps a high school science instructor inspired the dream to become a doctor. And, of course, bad teachers do enormous damage, from crushing creativity to turning students away from classroom learning.

Scholarly research confirms the critical role played by teachers, even though measuring and identifying quality remains controversial. For instance, Hanushek estimates that really good teachers --- defined as those with large measured gains in student test scores --- are worth $400,000 more annually in student lifetime earnings for a class of 20 than an average teacher.

Similarly, a team of scholars led by Harvard University economist Raj Chetty looked at the earnings of some 12,000 adults that had participated in a kindergarten education experiment in Tennessee in the early 1980s. Their results imply that quality teachers from that one year alone generated earnings gains of $214,000 for a classroom of 20 students.

Global Winners

A look at how Singapore, Finland, and South Korea recruit teachers is suggestive, too. These countries are currently among the world’s highest ranked systems and they draw 100 percent of their teachers from the top third of their university graduates, according to McKinsey & Co.

In sharp contrast, 23 percent of teachers come from the top third of the academy in the U.S., with only 14 percent of top talent teaching in America’s high-poverty schools. Almost all the 900 students the consulting firm interviewed at top-tier colleges saw teaching as unattractive for professional growth and compensation.

And the U.S. is slipping even further behind. The list of job ills is long. In recent years many major metropolitan school districts uncertain about their budgets couldn’t tell its teachers -- especially the younger ones -- whether they even would be employed until at least August. Union rules in many parts of the country don’t allow administrators to take into account teacher quality when making layoffs. Teachers often end up dipping into their own funds for classroom supplies.

Under Attack

Now teachers find their pay and benefits under assault as a growing number of governors square off against state and local government workers. “The teachers with the strongest credentials find something else to do,” says Richard Murnane, economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “The people left aren’t the best, on average.”

A examination of 31 initial state budget proposals shows that at least 13 states are eying extremely steep cuts in pre- kindergarten and K-12 spending. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, among the biggest cuts is the proposal in Texas to eliminate funding for pre-K programs that serve almost 100,000 mostly at-risk children, more than 40 percent of its pre-kindergarten students. The Lone Star State could also reduce K-12 funding to 23 percent below the minimum amount required by the state’s education finance law.

Miserable Conditions

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s budget fails to meet the state’s statutory obligation to support K-12 schools, for the fourth year in a row. It would underfund school districts by 11 percent, or $231 million. These numbers translate into miserable working conditions.

The economic cost of education mediocrity is high. The Program for International Student Assessment assesses the knowledge of 15 year olds from the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations, as well as 31 other countries and education systems (such as Shanghai, China).

The U.S. numbers released in December 2010 were average, with students from nine other places doing better than their U.S. peers in reading literacy. In science and math, two crucial subjects in an era of rapid technological advances, 18 places did better in science and 23 in math.

Consultants at McKinsey figure that if the U.S. had closed the achievement gap with the best-performing nations from 1983 to 1998, America’s gross domestic product could have been $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion higher than it actually was in 2008. To put that in perspective, during the recent recession the U.S. economy fell about $1 trillion short of its output potential.

Human Capital

What’s to be done in an era of tight budgets and sharp ideological divisions? Learn from leading edge businesses and for now focus on human capital. Just as companies that compete in knowledge industries can’t grow without a talented workforce, the value added by an education in a knowledge economy can’t exceed the quality of its teachers.

“Schools should be more like highly successful businesses, focusing on the long-term and creating value, while many businesses should be more like highly successful schools, thinking about the long-term and creating value,” says Michael O’Keefe, former president of Minneapolis College of Art and Design and since 1987 co-chair of the Program on Education at the Aspen Institute.

Since quality is an elusive concept, it’s more effective for unions and education administrators to focus on getting rid of poor performing teachers -- fast. Hanushek figures replacing the bottom 5 percent to 8 percent of teachers with average teachers would move the U.S. toward the top of international science and math rankings.

Protecting Tenured Teachers

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, on Feb. 24 proposed that tenured teachers with an unsatisfactory performance get a year to improve or they could be fired in 100 days. It’s her fast-track proposal, but it isn’t fast and it’s far too little. It’s progress to be able to fire a teacher with a poor evaluation after 465 days? That’s unacceptable.

Like it or not, teacher unions are facing their General Motors Co. moment. They can emulate the United Auto Workers and fall into the trap of continuous small changes that don’t shift the underlying workforce dynamic, a strategy that badly backfired for the once proud auto maker. Or the unions can seize the initiative and take the lead in overhauling moribund workforce rules that alienate too many parents, political leaders, and, worst of all, deter talented recruits.

Recruit Better Teachers

The goal of the profession should be to recruit even better-educated teachers. For instance, Teach for America, founded in 1990, successfully recruits top talent from major universities and directs them to high-poverty schools. The program could be expanded. (And Congress should reverse its recent move to eliminate the program’s annual federal appropriation of about $21 million because technically it’s an “earmark.”) Unions should embrace rather than fight alternative licensing programs for attracting future teachers.

Of course, changes along these lines would be wrenching and would eventually cost more money. “It would require both severance packages for those deselected and higher pay for those who would then have a riskier job,” says Hanushek. But it would be money well spent.

Here’s the thing: Improving the quality of the current teacher workforce and recruiting top talent to teaching isn’t an education panacea. It’s simply a piece of a complicated reform puzzle. It also offers a way to break through the current political logjam. Without nurturing policies that attract, develop, reward and retain talent, the goal of boosting student achievement will remain elusive. And everyone will lose.

Publication: The TelegraphTitle: Warning over reading standards as children shun tough booksAuthor: Graeme PatonDate: March 3rd, 2011Website: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8357776/Warning-over-reading-standards-as-children-shun-tough-books.html

Reading standards among children are in sharp decline as pupils increasingly opt for easy books in school and the home, according to a report published today.

By the end of primary education, pupils start to shun relatively difficult texts in favour of more straightforward alternatives suitable for younger children, research found.

Academics from Dundee University analysed children’s reading habits throughout primary and secondary education and found the difficulty of books “declined steadily” from the age of 10 onwards.

It emerged that The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a classic picture book by Eric Carle which charts a caterpillar’s week-long transformation into a butterfly, was one of the most popular books among 14- to 16-year-old girls in England.

The disclosure came as a separate study revealed classics such as Wuthering Heights and To Kill a Mockingbird had dropped out of a list of the top 10 most popular books for teenagers in a generation.

It follows the publication of a major international study last year that found reading standards among secondary school children in Britain had slipped compared with those in other countries.

Data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) revealed teenagers dropped from 17th to 25th in a global league table, being outperformed by nations including Liechtenstein, Poland and Estonia.

Prof Keith Topping, from Dundee’s School of Education, said the latest study presented some “disturbing signs regarding [the] difficulty of books” compared with a previous report carried out a year earlier.

“Although in a small number of years the difficulty of books remained the same as our study in 2010, in the majority of years the difficulty of books has sharply declined,” he said.

“If we are to address the worrying decline in reading skills identified in PISA world ranking for Britain, we have to ensure our children are reading at or above their reading age.”

The study, commissioned by education company Renaissance Learning, analysed the reading habits of 150,220 children in primary and secondary school.

Researchers logged the books chosen and quizzed pupils about their understanding of particular texts.

The study found that in the first four years of compulsory education pupils generally read books “above what would be age appropriate”.

Five of the six most popular books read by eight and nine-year-olds in the fourth year of school were by Roald Dahl. The most popular was The Magic Finger, followed by Fantastic Mr Fox, The Twits, George’s Marvellous Medicine and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

By the time children reached Year 8 of school, four of these books were still among the most popular titles, although the top choice was Holes, the award-winning novel by Louis Sachar published in 1999.

In the final two years of school, boys and girls read books that were “well below what might be expected at this age”, the study said. The Very Hungry Caterpillar was the 12th most popular book chosen by girls, while boys often favoured “very easy” books by Peter Lancett, the British-born thriller writer.

A separate study by pollsters Opinion Matters – to coincide with World Book Day on Thursday – revealed the Harry Potter series was now among the most popular books for 13- to 18-year-olds.

The survey, which also asked adults which books they favoured when they were teenagers, revealed The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, by Sue Townsend, was the most popular book a generation ago. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, was eighth and To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, was 10th, although neither was favoured by modern teenagers.

Publication: Science BlogsTitle: What Finland Tells Us About Teaching, Curricula, and TestingDate: February 28th, 2011Website: http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2011/02/finland_and_what_we_can_learn.phpSurvey: TIMSS/PISA

By way of Bob Somerby, we come across this Brookings Institution report by Tom Loveless, "How Well Are American Students Learning?" There's a lot in the report, especially since it's really three studies rolled into one, but part of section I, which debunks the notion that Finland has the best educational system in the world highlights the intersection of educational goals, curriculum, and testing. Loveless writes (p. 10):

But by 1999, Finland slipped to only a little above average in TIMSS (z-score of 0.06), ranking fifth of the original twelve countries and fourteenth of all countries taking the test. One complicating factor is age. Finland's students were younger than the rest of the eighth graders in TIMSS 1999, averaging 13.8 years compared with an international mean of 14.4 years (and 14.2 for the participating FIMS nations)....

Finland stopped participating in TIMSS after the 1999 test. Since 2000, math scores from Finland come from only one test--PISA. On PISA 2009, Finland ranked first among the FIMS countries, a lofty ranking it has held throughout the decade. When the OECD launched PISA in 2000, many small countries believed participating in two international assessments would be repetitive and a potential burden in both money and time.

So Finland, often touted as a paragon of education, didn't look so good depending on the test used. Why might this be? Loveless (p. 10-11):

A plausible hypothesis stems from differences in the content of the two tests. The content of PISA is a better match with Finland's curriculum than is the TIMSS content. The objective of TIMSS is to assess what students have learned in school. Thus, the content of the test reflects topics in mathematics that are commonly taught in the world's school systems. Traditional domains of mathematics--algebra, geometry, operations with numbers--are well represented on TIMSS.

The objective of PISA, in contrast, is not to assess achievement "in relation to the teaching and learning of a body of knowledge." As noted above, that same objective motivates attaching the

term "literacy" to otherwise universally recognized school subjects. Jan de Lange, the head of the mathematics expert group for PISA, explains, "Mathematics curricula have focused on school-based knowledge whereas mathematical literacy involves mathematics as it is used in the real world." PISA's Schleicher often draws a distinction between achievement tests (presumably including TIMSS) that "look back at what students were expected to have learned" and PISA, which "looks ahead to how well they can extrapolate from what they have learned and apply their knowledge and skills in novel settings."

The emphasis on learner-centered, collaborative instruction and a future oriented, relevant curriculum that focuses on creativity and problem solving has made PISA the international test for reformers promoting constructivist learning and 21st-century skills. Finland implemented reforms in the 1990s and early 2000s that embraced the tenets of these movements. Several education researchers from Finland have attributed their nation's strong showing to the compatibility of recent reforms with the content of PISA.

In other words, Finland does well on the PISA test because PISA reflects Finland's educational goals (interestingly, many Finnish mathematics university professors think those goals leave Finnish students woeful underprepared for college math, but that's a whole separate discussion).

Keep in mind, this is not 'teaching to the test.' If you want to use an exam to determine how well your students are doing, the test should reflect the curriculum and educational goals. If you think X and Y are important, and Z much less so, a test that focuses on Z will yield poorer scores. That doesn't mean your system is failing, but that the test doesn't measure what you're trying to teach.

While this isn't the main thrust of Loveless' report, it does emphasize something most educational reformist ideologues completely ignore: the importance of curriculum. Not only do you need a good curriculum, but then there needs to be a good measurement system that can't be gamed*. In other words, your tests should reflect the curriculum, and the curriculum should reflect your educational goals.

One of the major flaws of the 'reformers' is that they don't even discuss what should be taught (their complete silence on the topic of creationist biology teachers is the most obvious example)--the concept of curriculum is completely absent, even though it is critical in education.

Poor outcomes can be a result of a poor curriculum. Since many of my readers are people who have to teach for a living (either students or their colleagues), ask yourself how much time you put into thinking about what you're going to teach and how you're going to teach it versus career goals as they relate to the lecture. Was the quality of your teaching largely affected by what you covered and how you covered it? In most cases, yes.

Yet, when it comes to K-12 education, for some reason, reformists believe--and a 'faith-based' word is appropriate--that poor teaching and poor outcomes are largely due to managerial issues, such as teachers unions (and we'll leave to the side the massive influence of poverty).

Finland's different testing experiences--and the concerns about mathematics college preparation--demonstrate just how important curricula and educational goals are. It's too bad reformers don't spend time discussing those topics. Instead, by denigrating teachers, they provide cover for the Scott Walkers to defund public education and to lower teacher salaries.

Well done, 'progressives.'

*Most good systems, and Massachusetts' MCAS is one of them, actually test small portions of the total curriculum in depth, and rotate those portions annually. This makes it difficult for teachers and administrators to prep students specifically for the test.