THE FAR SIDE OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM

Andy Hargreaves and Dennis ShirleyLynch School of Education, Boston College

November 10, 2011

Report commissioned by the Canadian Teachers’ Federation

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THE FAR SIDE OF CHANGE

Teachers are at the far end of educational reform. Apart from students and parents, they are often the very last to be consulted about and connected to agendas of what changes are needed in education, and of how those changes should be managed. Educational change is something that government departments, venture philanthropists, performance-driven economists and election-minded legislators increasingly arrogate to themselves. Even when these policy-setting and policy-transporting bodies speak on behalf of teachers, teachers often have little or no voice. Teachers are rarely asked to speak on their own account.

When international delegations visit high performing jurisdictions, including those in Canada, it is not teachers they typically get to meet but rather ministers, administrators and advisors – those who command and commandeer a view from the top, along with an official version of what everyone else is supposed to see. This is not only a bias of judgment, but it leads to a bias of evidence and perception. Diane Wood’s research (2007) has shown that professional learning communities, like many reforms, are often viewed more favourably by people at the top than by those at the bottom. Quantitative survey research on leadership and trust, reveals that “site and district administrators view themselves…and each other…as exhibiting trust behaviors consistently higher on every trust factor when compared with teacher respondents. Moreover, the gap between teachers and administrators is the greatest in regard to trust factors” (Daly & Chrispeels, 2008, p. 44; also Daly 2009). To put it more directly, administrators at the top tend to see themselves as more full of trust and to put a more positive spin on their reforms than their teachers do. Teachers are the end-point of educational reform – the last to hear, the last to know, the last to speak. They are mainly the objects of reform, not its participants.

Not surprisingly, therefore, teachers are also often at the far end with educational reform. They are at the end of their tether. Targets and testing, capricious and contradictory changes, political climates that feed on failure and foment professional fear, insecurity and instability, cut-throat competition and rampant privatization – these are the enemies of teaching that erode confidence and betray trust throughout the teaching profession, although they are more prominent south of the border than within Canada itself. However, less obvious adversaries in Canada and elsewhere can still make teachers feel at their wits end today. Hackneyed harangues against whole-class teaching that equate it with factory-style schooling; excessive exaltation of technologically-driven instruction; reduc-tion of deep

personalization to slick customization; data warehouses that drive teachers to distraction; and exploitation of international performance comparisons to the domestic disadvantage of public school teachers in almost every devel-oped country – these are the gimmicky

Goliaths of educational change today. They are the surreal Far Side of school reform.

If it is indeed the case, as is now commonly claimed, that the teacher is the most important within-school influence on a child’s educational achievement, then it is time to stop insulting teachers, excluding teachers and inflicting change after change upon them. It is time to bring teachers back in: to make them part of the solution and not just part of the problem.

THREE WAYS OF CHANGE

The First Way of Change

How did we get to this position where teachers are always the objects and never the subjects of change, where leaders say they esteem teachers on the one hand and then on the other hand assume that teachers know little about how to improve teaching and learning?

Teachers are rarely asked to speak on their own account.

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Things haven’t always been this way. In Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the decade from the middle of the 1960s through the end of the 1970s was in many respects a Golden Age of teacher professional autonomy. In those days, the intrusion of the state into the classroom was weak and provincial policy was suggestive rather than directive. Schools were given resources and teachers were left to get on with the job. Within the context of a strong economy and demographic shortages of teachers, there was optimism, expansion and innovation.

In a study of Change over Time interviewing over 200 teachers and administrators in 8 secondary schools about their lives and career experiences over more than 30 years, one of us worked with Ivor Goodson and Dean Fink to discover that veteran teachers were nostalgic for this period when education was not just about making a difference in individual lives but also about changing the world by shaping the generations of the future. It was a period that veteran teachers subsequently felt had been lost after standardization and outside imposition had stolen their freedom and distracted them from their original moral purposes (Hargreaves & Goodson, 2006; Hargreaves & Fink, 2006a).

At the same time, we learned that there was not just one nostalgia, but two. Older teachers in more mainstream subjects in traditional secondary schools bemoaned the loss of their ability to teach what they liked – whether or not students were engaged with it. They regretted the loss of a time when parents did not challenge or question their decisions and the loss of a period when schools were monocultural. They yearned for a simpler time when the football team galvanized strong school spirit and when Christian hymns could be sung in assemblies without accommodations or apologies (Goodson, Moore, & Hargreaves, 2006).

The response of policy-makers and corporate critics to this 1960s Boomer generation of teachers and the missions they still bear with them in their teaching is an

anti-nostalgia – one that is deeply felt and that has been deliberately perpetuated. It is skepticism and suspicion for an excessively idealistic and even dangerously ideological generation, polluted by progressive teaching philosophies in ivory-towered institutions of teacher education, and made lazy by excessive security, expensive pension benefits and lavish union expense accounts. Protected by their professional associations, padded by their benefits, and made comfortable and complacent by the perks of seniority and the declining capabilities of middle age, this cohort now is seen as a resistant generation that clings on to old factory-era practices, keeps to the contract, and criticizes any and every alternative for increased accountability that is proposed. Backed by corporate and philanthropic billions, movies like Waiting for Superman and carefully orchestrated media releases and books turn teachers into the new bankers of public approbation. They pick on exceptional incidents of union excess to tar all of the First Way generation of teachers and their unions with the same brush (Brill, 2011; Brimelow, 2003; Paige, 2006). These critics fail to balance the attack with similar

caricatures of ineffective charter school associations or of self-interested corporations that have moved increasingly into the public education world.

When a few US school districts, such as Atlanta, were seen to be

engaged in corruption at the highest level to manipulate appearances of statistical improvement, no one proposed that this should bring an end to school districts or to local democracy. When Enron and the entire global banking collapse stole billions of dollars from ordinary people, no one seriously stated this should be answered by the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Yet when excessive and occasionally egregious acts of particular unions or their leaders are exposed, this is assumed to justify the end of unionism, or of district controlled schools, or of defined benefit pensions, or of a teaching profession that should now be subjected to performance based pay instead.

Teachers are the end-point of educational reform – the last to hear, the last to know, the last to speak.

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The First Way of change may have had its heyday 40 years ago, but it remains alive and well in the nostalgic remembrance of its bearers, and in the embittered anti-nostalgia of its political and corporate opponents.

The Interregnum

The First Way offered innovation but also introduced inconsistency. It produced some progressivism but also perpetuated traditionalism. There was a kind of political and public trust in teachers and their autonomy – but this was blind faith more than earned trust.

Starting in England in the 1980s, and migrating into Canada and Australia in the 1990s, there was therefore an attempt to create more coherence in the system, while still retaining the best of the 1970s child-centered, learner-focused ideals. This was a time when Ontario embarked on its Transition Years strategy with its focus on interdisciplinary curricula, outcomes based education, and alternate forms of assessment. In the US, Kentucky was one of the first states to spearhead a period of outcomes-based education, adopting about 70 broad common standards across the state. Ontario had about 13 standards – far less than Kentucky. British Columbia led the way on curriculum integration. Manitoba was a pioneer in alternative forms of assessment, as Saskatchewan also was (and still is). The Republic of South Africa and the Australian states of Western Australia and Tasmania all experimented with and eventually abandoned the outcomes-based approach to educational change.

The attempt to create a common and more coherent curriculum that set an agreed-upon direction, while still leaving room and discretion for professional judgment, was professionally inclusive. Pilot projects abounded and teams of teachers writing curricula proliferated. Board after board came up with their own ring binders of outcomes and standards. In Ontario – and this is an important corrective to later claims – professional capacity was strong, with around a third of all teachers

in the province actively engaged in taking professional courses of one kind or another at any one time. The need for less inconsistency was evident, and teachers were a significant part of identifying how this need should be addressed.

One of us conducted research with Lorna Earl and the Government of Ontario during this period – first in helping set directions by reviewing international research of best practice on the Transition Years (Hargreaves & Earl, 1991), and later by assessing the implementation of the New Democratic Party’s government strategy (Hargreaves, Earl, et al, 2001). Apart from noting the customary failure to scale up what was learned from pilot projects, or even to wait until the evidence of the pilot projects was in, we learned two key things from this period.

1. Teachers didn’t like broadly written outcomes because they were seen as vague and written in educational jargon. Probably the most often-used and misused word in any system of outcomes and standards is “appropriate.” But when school boards reacted by specifying outcomes in considerable written detail, teachers felt they were restricting and oppressive – an infringement of their professional judgment. The answer, we learned, was to be found in the quality of school leadership and whether it was able to work with teachers to build a shared community of understanding of what the outcomes meant for their own purposes and practices. Clarity was not to be found in the nature of the text, but in the strength of the professional community.

2. In a related project on teachers’ emotional responses to educational change, we found, unsurprisingly, that teachers preferred internally developed over externally imposed changes. The more significant insight was that many of the changes that teachers

felt had been internally developed were actually external in origin (Hargreaves, 2004). It didn’t matter in other words, where a change began – what mattered more was whether a school and its community of teachers were

It is time to bring teachers back in: to make them part of the solution and not just part of the problem.

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able to make it their own. The Interregnum demonstrated that under good leadership and strong professional communities, the quest for coherence could be successful. But there was insufficient early investment in leadership or in teacher collaboration on any systematic basis. This pattern was not particular to Canada. It was repeated in many parts of the world. So government after government then turned to and followed the inspiration of Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom, and Ronald Reagan of the United States, to pursue a Second Way of social reform instead.

The Second Way

The Second Way of Educational Change was inspired by the ideological politics of neo-conservatism but specifically influenced by the city of Edmonton in Alberta. It was there that Australian professor Brian Caldwell, like many Australian peers at the time, had undertaken his doctorate in education at the University of Alberta (see Hargreaves & Fink, 2006b, for an account of the international flow of this influence). As part of his research Professor Caldwell had studied Edmonton’s pioneering efforts to develop self-managing schools in the 1980s. Ideologically, much of the new Second Way rested on combining a belief that government investment should be replaced by market principles wherever possible, but that this competition should be conducted on centralized ground-rules defined by standardized curriculum and assessments. At the same time, in the early stages of its development, the philosophy of self-managed schools where educators were responsible for much of their own budgets and administration within these broad guidelines appealed to some progressives and libertarians who sought more self-determination in their decision-making.

Caldwell took the principle of self-management back to the Australian island state of Tasmania and then, in a trilogy of books on self-managing schools, and

with his own enthusiastic advocacy, helped export the philosophy and strategy to Conservative governments around the world that were intent on rolling back the state financially and tightening its control ideologically (Caldwell & Spinks, 1988, 1992, 1998). Self-managing schools or Local Management of Schools travelled to Victoria in Australia and then New Zealand, then England, and finally to Ontario under Premier Mike Harris. They also found their way all the way back to Alberta, where they spread throughout the province under the Klein Government.

The United States too adopted Second Way strategies but in a more patchy and incremental way. There the Second Way was driven through initiatives such as magnet schools and the beginnings of charter schools.

In his new book on Finnish Educational Reform, Finland’s greatest educational expert and former World Bank specialist, Pasi Sahlberg, refers to this pervasive new Second Way strategy as the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2011). The GERM has five defining characteristics:

• Standardized Teaching and Learning with “clear, high, centrally prescribed performance standards for all schools, teachers, and students”;

• A focus on Literacy and Numeracy and basic skills in reading, writing, mathematics and natural sciences;

• Teaching for Predetermined Results with predictable and uniform outcomes;

• Renting Market-oriented Reform Ideas from other systems or sectors rather than devising one’s own solutions;

• Test-Based Accountability linked to systems of inspection, punishment and reward;

• Control through continuous monitoring of data

The Interregnum demonstrated that under good leadership and strong professional communities, the quest for coherence could be successful.

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With colleagues Dean Fink, Ivor Goodson and others, one of us evaluated the impact of these reforms on a range of secondary schools in Ontario and New York State (Hargreaves, 2003). We found the reforms were utterly antithetical to the knowledge society objectives of schools then being promoted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and its associated goals of increasing innovation and creativity.

Some of the effects of Second Way reforms were that:

• the standardized curriculum was less responsive to culturally diverse learners. Special education teachers, vocational school teachers and alternative school educators who dealt with very diverse learners, felt that this curriculum was particularly inappropriate for their students.

• there was less creativity – a tragic result in an increasingly competitive global knowledge economy. Teachers described having to “teach to the test instead of being creative”; “feeling forced to leave out interesting exercises”; and being “too busy to try” being creative. In the words of one teacher “creativity and enthusiasm have become hopelessness and depression, and a lethargic outlook has evolved”.

• there was demoralization – literally loss of purpose. Teachers had a “feeling of betrayal.” They were “tired of being bashed” by the government. One spoke for many colleagues when he said, “I’m a good teacher. I love teaching, and I really enjoy working with teenagers. But right now I am so depressed about the politics surrounding teaching that I sometimes don’t know how I will go on!”

• there was an exodus from the profession. Those who could, got out of education. Because of the negative attitude of the government and deteriorating working conditions, teachers had “firmly decided to leave.” Teachers planned on “leaving the profession as quickly as I can” and “looked forward to retirement.” Instead of inspiration and renewal, they were

becoming “very, very burned out.” Perhaps this is what government wanted all along – to get rid of those who were old, expensive and in the way. But the young were also becoming disillusioned; not just the old. “There is no joy in teaching,” said one, “only a paper trail of grief.” Another who “loved to teach” was “seriously considering leaving the profession.” A young teacher with three degrees had come to regret his career path because “there is no joy in being told that you are a no-good freeloading fat cat for six years running.” “I surely wouldn’t wish this profession on my children.” he said. He “loved working with children, but not with this government.”

• there was less collegiality. Top down pressure and the pace of reform meant there was “no time for collaboration” or “communication with colleagues.” There were fewer opportunities to “share and implement,” “work together,” “consult,” “discuss best practices,” or “conference with other individuals teaching similar courses.” One school had “a lovely staffroom where people can congregate and share” but it was “usually empty.” So where were the teachers? “In their offices, planning and marking, often by themselves, to keep caught up!”

• there was less pleasure in teaching and in learning. “There just seems to be so much focus on meeting standards set from the outside that I don’t think we get to spend as much time thinking about what we’re going to be doing in the classroom and enjoying it.”

What has happened in our two jurisdictions of Ontario and New York since we completed our study in 2003? In Ontario, the bad old days of the Second Way are a fast-fading memory. But New York is a different case altogether. Internationally, the Second Way is experiencing an energetic resurgence in the form of charter schools and national standards in the United States, national standards in New Zealand, a national curriculum in Australia, free schools in Sweden, and academies in England. The aggressive promotion of performance-based pay for teachers in the US, is reinvigorating elements of Second Way managerialism throughout the world.

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It is not ageing teachers who are unable to break free from the grip of a factory model of schooling, as is all too commonly claimed by those who undertake an assault on teaching but Governments that are aggressively re-imposing it through the pressures of markets and standardization. Yet this old orthodoxy is increasingly being questioned. Marc Tucker (2011) of the National Center for Education and the Economy in the US, for example, now states that Second Way reforms such as privatization and pay-for-performance incentive schemes are out of step with international high performing systems, and unsuited to develop the skills and dispositions required for an innovative knowledge economy.

The Third Way

Inspired by leading social theorist Anthony Giddens (1999) and a triumvirate of western leaders comprising Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder and Bill Clinton, a new wave of policy reforms was proposed in the 1990s and into the new century. Disillusioned with the extremes and unfulfilled promises of the First and Second Ways, Third Way thinkers and leaders described a new approach to social change that would rest between and beyond the market and the state. Properly conceived and implemented, the new Third Way would replace public and private opposition with public and private partnerships; give people increased autonomy but also, through performance targets, increased accountability; offer professionals more support of finance and resources, while increasing expectations and pressure for results at the same time. There was more community but also heightened urgency. In this way, it was thought,

it would be possible to create future societies that were both more competitive and also more cohesive (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009).

In educational reform, the Third Way was launched most comprehensively through Tony Blair’s commitment to education, education, education! Under the advice and leadership of Sir Michael Barber, a National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy was introduced with a prescribed, timed and scripted curriculum backed up with the intensive support of training, coaching and materials, and linked to system-wide targets and testing. The Blair Government also continued its predecessor’s attitude of being tough on failing schools through regimes of strict inspection and intervention. But what happened in practice? After a surge of initial increases in system-wide test results in the UK, scores began to hit a plateau once the “quick wins” had been gained. Barber’s response was to do little more than “sustain the same messages for longer” (Barber, 2007, p. 371). He wanted to be “as hard as nails” (Barber, 2007, p. 32) on teachers and school leaders in the push to improve learning in all schools, and especially those in the most challenging circumstances.

The gains that had been made on the systems’ own measures were widely and thoroughly criticized for being a result of curriculum narrowing, teaching to the test and creating an artificially low floor by testing people’s initial skills before support had been provided. Statistically, the improvements were also shown to be a continuation of trends preceding the Blair and Barber strategy, rather than a result of the strategy itself (e.g. Tymms, 2004). Moreover, Britain’s current Coalition

Government has not been slow to point out that after a dozen or more years of English educational reform under New Labour, England’s scores on OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tumbled downward – to a miserable 24th in reading literacy, for example.

Ideologically, much of the new Second Way rested on combining a belief that government investment should be replaced by market principles wherever possible, but that this competition should be conducted on centralized ground-rules defined by standardized curriculum and assessments.

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Sir Michael Barber moved on to a high level appointment with McKinsey & Company and then on to the office of Chief Education Advisor to Pearson, one of the world’s largest textbook, test-writing and school supply companies. In 2011, for example, Pearson signed a five-year, $32m contract to write the standardized tests from 3rd grade to 8th grade for the Education Department of New York State (Otterman, 2011). Barber is the leading author of a McKinsey & Company report on How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better (McKinsey & Company, 2010). One of five systems that are “sustained improvers” and that have gone from “Great to Excellent,” according to the report, is Ontario. McKinsey praises Ontario for being a top performer on the (PISA) tests administered by the OECD – whose own report highlighting Ontario as one of four “strong performers” and “successful reformers” was released just days after McKinsey’s. In some ways, the Ontario way has become the new prototypical Third Way for others.

CANADIAN WAYS OF CHANGE?

Ontario is congratulated by McKinsey & Company for having a tight focus on tested literacy and numeracy, for giving schools lots of support for implementation, and for persisting through the point when its own test results reached a temporary plateau. Michael Fullan (2009), Special Education Advisor to the Premier of Ontario and also author of the Preface to the McKinsey & Company report, has described how the foundations for Ontario’s reform strategy were borrowed but also adapted from England’s National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy. Its system performance targets strategy was also taken from the programs that Barber led, which Fullan and his team evaluated, though, unlike England, implemented with non-punitive consequences.

What Ontario did, Fullan says, was different from what Barber put in place in the UK. Ontario reduced the prescription, increased the support, and persisted

through the results plateau. After Barber left the education hot seat in England, Blair got distracted from his education agenda and “lost the plot” due to international events. This

ascribed “loss of the plot,” incidentally, was under Labour’s education Minister and former teacher Dame Estelle Morris – whose priorities were to regenerate a disheartened profession and embrace increased commitment to innovation.

McKinsey & Company are not alone in extolling Ontario’s virtues as a high performer worth emulating in terms of the policies that are associated with its success. For instance, in Standing On the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Educational Reform, Marc Tucker (2011) at the US National Center on Education and the Economy, picks out Ontario alongside Singapore, Shanghai and Finland as an inspiring example of educational achievement, improvement and equity. He praises Ontario for attracting and keeping highly qualified teachers, making peace with teacher unions that had become disaffected under the previous Second Way administration, and (compared to the US’s Race to The Top strategy) allowing teachers more control over the core of their work in a way that has respected their professionalism.

Like McKinsey & Company and the National Center on Education and the Economy, the OECD also picks out Canada as one of four “strong performers” and “successful reformers” in educational change: not least because Canada ranks 6th overall on PISA. Strictly speaking, though, the OECD concentrates not on the whole of Canada but on just the province of Ontario. In a video presentation of PISA’s policy implications, produced and marketed with the support of the Pearson Foundation (2010), the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher praises Canada for its positive approach to immigration that is evident in narrow achievement gaps between students from different social backgrounds, but then, without explanation, switches to Ontario – in effect, equating it with or having it stand for the whole of Canada. The province receives plaudits for its urgent focus on measurable improvement in literacy and numeracy; its ability to set a clear plan and sign up key stakeholders to commit to it, including

Third Way thinkers and leaders described a new approach to social change that would rest between and beyond the market and the state.

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teachers; its sophisticated use of achievement data to pinpoint problems in underperformance among certain students or schools; and then its response to “flood” these schools with resources, technical assistance and support.

There is then, an apparently cohesive and inter-connected narrative across McKinsey & Company, the OECD, Pearson and the NCEE about Ontario’s example as a model of successful educational reform. This narrative aligns somewhat seamlessly with the articulate descriptions of the Ontario reforms and their impact by two of their leading administrators and advisers – Premier’s Advisor Michael Fullan (2009) and former Deputy Minister Ben Levin (2008).

So should we perhaps look for Third Way inspiration in educational reform to Ontario as a province that persevered and succeeded where England had previously failed?

Without taking any particular stance regarding the direction or desirability of Ontario’s strategy, there are matters of evidence and of fact that should cause us to question this overall interpretation of the reasons for the province’s success. Most obviously, Ontario isn’t the only high performing Canadian province on PISA (Knighton, Brochu, & Gluszynski, 2010). On reading literacy, Alberta actually leads, followed by Ontario and British Columbia. On numeracy, Quebec leads, followed by Alberta and Ontario. On science, Alberta leads, followed by BC and Ontario. Some of these differences between provinces are very tiny – barely a percentage point or so. Yet the policies and strategies are often quite different. When you get up into the 90s, the only place that one or two points truly matter is on a basketball court.

Take Alberta. Here the four-decade old Conservative Government has supported the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) for more than a decade to support school-designed innovations in over 90% of the province’s schools. Almost all of Alberta’s schools are actively involved in AISI, which was established to conduct teacher-driven research on an ongoing basis. Alberta would be a paradigmatic example of the kind of jurisdiction described by Marc Tucker where teachers are not the objects of research but its participants and drivers in a commitment to learning, innovation and

self-developed improvement rather than delivery of other people’s policies.

We recently served on a team to conduct a review of AISI that was co-sponsored by the Alberta Teachers’ Association and the Government (Hargreaves, Crocker, Davies, McEwen, Sahlberg, Shirley & Sumara, 2009). Freedom for schools has been matched with strong support and networking. Innovation has been unleashed. Teachers have been galvanized. The measurable effects on teacher morale and satisfaction are demonstrable. Schools everywhere are inquiring into and improving their own practice. Minister, Dave Hancock proudly asked to see more innovations failing because, he said, if there is no failure, there is no authentic innovation.

Unlike Ontario, Alberta doesn’t have government improvement targets and it doesn’t concentrate the focus so tightly on literacy and numeracy. In many ways, it’s the opposite of Ontario. At the same time, Alberta has, until now, retained a high commitment of even longer standing than Ontario to standardized testing in the form of provincial achievement tests (PATs), although its new Premier, Alison Redford, has announced that she shall soon end the Grade 3 and 6 tests because of the excessive stress they create for students. Alberta performs slightly better than Ontario with a quite different policy system and orientation that is focused as much on innovation as improvement. So, if Alberta is at least as effective as Ontario, if not more so, with a different policy focus, should we abandon Ontario as the exemplary model of change and hitch up our wagons to Alberta instead?

Probably not. At the top of its system, Ontario has more prominent and articulate intellectual advocates of and interpreters of its strategy. The network interconnections between Ontario leaders and the international organizations that write about the province are tighter and have given the province a world stage to project its aspirations and achievements. This is a credit to provincial leadership and indicates a seriousness of purpose and an understanding of what is at stake in global educational change from which we all can learn.

But is there anything in the policies themselves that warrant our special attention? Perhaps Ontario’s policies are just more self-evident and easier to explain

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than Alberta’s, for example? Or might it be the case that Ontario’s policies are more in tune with a new kind of global educational reform in which various international organizations, venture philanthropists and consulting firms are invested?

It is not possible to answer these questions defini-tively, but it is possible to raise some evidence-based questions about Canada’s leading international role in educational reform and what it might mean.

• There is no evidence-base in terms of PISA results that would support highlighting one province’s educational reform strategy as superior to its three equally high performing peers or giving it privileged or presumptuous equivalence to the whole of Canada’s performance as a nation. If Ontario’s reform strategy is already packaged more coherently, it should be the task of research and inquiry not to echo what prominent advocates and architects say about their reforms, but to serve the wider public, the profession and the policy community by articulating reforms that work irrespective of how well they have already been articulated.

• Ontario’s reform emphases and priorities that have been stressed by the province itself and by international organizations that draw attention to them have been those that have been based largely on improvements in literacy and numeracy achievement in elementary schools, rather than on teaching and learning in secondary schools (with the exception of commitment to improved high school retention). PISA assesses student achievement at age 15. Since the Ontario elementary reforms had barely been proposed more than seven years before the most recent PISA cycle, their effects at age 15 will not be visible until the next cycle. If specific elementary education policy has directly affected current PISA achievement scores, therefore, it

would most likely be the elementary education policies of the Second Way Harris government that preceded the present one – a Government that depleted teacher morale, cut back on support teachers, presided over a deterioration in teachers’ overall working conditions and didn’t really focus on elementary education at all – choosing to concentrate on Secondary School Reform instead. This seems an unlikely explanation.

• The same limitations apply for those who might be inclined to prefer Alberta’s reform model over Ontario’s. In our team’s evaluation of the AISI, educational statistician Robert Crocker tried every

quantitative strategy in the book to identify direct effects of a positive or negative nature of AISI on student achievement. The integrated nature of AISI within the wider nexus of reform initiatives over more than ten years in 90% of the province’s

schools, plus the difficulties of tracking individual education numbers of students who had or had not been involved in particular kinds of AISI projects, produced no clear evidence one way or the other. This is not to say that AISI did not have positive effects on student achievement – but simply to acknowledge that initiatives that have been successfully and sustainably embedded in the wider system cannot be disentangled statistically from other influences on achievement results. To say that AISI is specifically responsible for high performance on PISA would therefore be as misleading as to claim that the Ontario literacy and numeracy strategy or improving high school graduation rates are responsible for high performance on PISA.

• Particular policies may explain high PISA performance, but they may not be the policies that advocates always emphasize. In Alberta, is it the long-standing emphasis on tested accountability that has been responsible; or the ten-year commitment to school-driven innovation? In Ontario, internal and

When you get up into the 90s, the only place that one or two points truly matter is on a basketball court.

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external advocates are inclined to emphasize the tight focus, the environment of high pressure and high support, the removal of union “distractions”, and the heightened levels of professional support. But Ann Lieberman (2011) could point to the remarkable initiatives in teacher leadership driven by the Ontario Teachers’ Federation and the Ministry of Education where resources for professional development and leadership go directly to teachers, and 1500 teachers have recently had direct involvement in projects using teacher inquiry – with significant impacts on teacher’s professional renewal. Then there is the project that one of us reviewing with Henry Braun on one seventh of Ontario’s school districts. This highlights the power of a remarkably inclusive and flexibly implemented special education strategy to introduce whole-school changes which are essential for identified students but also good for all students - using principles such as differentiated instruction, Universal Design for Learning and assistive technologies. This strategy was developed by and customized for each individual district, monitored and mentored by a middle-tier team of highly regarded former school board supervisory officers, and then networked together across the districts, creating transparency of participation and results. These policies are not well known outside the province but could just as plausibly have a significant impact on achievement results. So if policies do influence PISA, they may not always or only be the ones that are officially emphasized.

• We cannot prematurely or automatically applaud Ontario for its tight focus on literacy and numeracy in relation to system targets any more or less than we can applaud Alberta for AISI’s apparently bottom-up or innovation-oriented approach. Other provinces’ achievements only add to the riddles. How would we explain British Columbia’s superior achievement to Ontario on the science tests administered by PISA

where there has been anything but peace between teacher unions and the provincial government? Or why is Francophone Quebec first on mathematics, for that matter? The provinces have different policies, different relationships between government and the teachers’ unions, and different parties of political control - but in Canada’s four most populous and (over time) prosperous provinces, the results on PISA are pretty much the same.

• Finally, Ontario and the other provinces might point to their own data sources on system-wide improvements in provincial test scores as evidence of policy impact. However, as in England or in US states, high stakes system measures collected as a census of all schools and students, that are linked to specific intervention strategies for schools and students that are just beneath the threshold system targets, are vulnerable to what Marc Tucker in the US, Secretary of Education Michael Gove in the UK and the Royal Statistical Society also in that country describe as “perverse incentives.” (Royal Statistical Society, 2009). In these cases, educators have learned that it is possible to raise achievement by non-authentic means such as curriculum narrowing; creating an artificially low floor when

students take their first test to create an inflated appearance of improvement later on; assigning a school’s best teachers to the grades that are tested rather than to the places where they are most needed; or overly concentra-ting on “bubble” children just below the system’s threshold for proficiency (Hargreaves &

Shirley, 2009). In Ontario, for example, the current research that one of us is undertaking in ten school boards is pointing to examples of boards and schools concentrating their energies on raising the results of children scoring just below level 3 proficiency on the EQAO test – at 2.7, 2.8 and 2.9 – as part of the province’s “drive to 75” to meet its system target of having 75% of tested elementary students reach Level 3 proficiency by a particular

...we might want to consider selecting specific policies on other grounds than direct, traceable, short-term impact on student achievement.

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point. Sometimes, teachers are indicating, this is at the expense of schools and boards attending equally to the progress of other students further below the threshold – for instance, between levels 1 and 2.

All these considerations and reservations about singling out one province from others, and indeed singling out some aspects of that province’s policies in the short term rather than other parallel and prece-ding policies, should push us, across Canada and beyond it, to look with fresh eyes at the evidence of and possible explanations for Canada’s impressive success on international measures of student performance. To us, there appear to be four significant ramifications of and explanations for Canadian success in general.

First, there’s obviously something special about Canada as a nation, or at least the more prosperous parts of it. Canada has some striking commonalities with Finland, the only non-Asian performer above it in the OECD rankings. In 2007, one of us was rapporteur for an OECD team of three that undertook a study visit to Finland to examine the relationship between educational success and the country’s leadership and reform strategies (Hargreaves, Halász & Pont, 2008; see also Hargreaves & Shirley 2009). The findings of our intensive visit have been repeatedly confirmed by subsequent interpretations of Finland’s success. Both countries value teachers and teaching and insist on a professional program of university-based training for all public school teachers. Working conditions are favorable with good facilities, acceptable pay, wide availability of professional development, and discretion for teachers to make their own professional judgments. Both countries have a strong commitment to public schools and only a very modest private sector in education. Both countries have strong social welfare and public health systems with broad safety nets to protect the youngest and most vulnerable members of the population. Last, both nations are characterized by deeper cultures of cooperation and inclusiveness that actually make them more competitive internationally.

It’s not this or that province’s recent policy that makes Canada such a strong educational performer, but a social fabric and long-term interconnected policy approach that values education and teachers, welcomes and integrates immigrants, prizes the public

good, and doesn’t abandon the weak in its efforts to become economically stronger. The OECD (2011), in its most recent work, is now also recognizing that these more general aspects of the Canadian social and policy fabric are influential in explaining the country’s educational success.

Second, it is the interconnectedness of reforms and policies within and beyond education, and the distinctive character they assume together that is most significant in terms of impacts on educational improvement and achievement, not one or two strategies taken in isolation. In Canada, Singapore, Norway, and Finland, one Minister, Deputy Minister or other senior leader after another has repeatedly emphasized to us the importance of their country’s overall culture and distinctive identity as something that cannot be technically transposed or “teleported” from one place to another across the planet (Shirley & Hargreaves, in press). Nor can policy elements be easily disaggregated from one another as they are transported between systems. Otherwise, countries might all now be adopting the two years of compulsory military service for men that is currently required in Finland and Singapore alike! Expect little or no positive effects on educational achievement and improvement, for example,

• if you insist that all or most teachers should have Masters degrees, but if you do not also provide teachers with a supportive, respectful and secure working environment;

• if you advise that Western countries tolerate larger classes and whole class instruction methods of Asian high performers without considering the greater diversity in culture and learning styles of most Western nations;

• if you improve educational policy but deplete support for disadvantaged and poor children and families through other social policies or taxation strategies.

Third, if there is little evidence that the recent policy strategies of one province or system is more or less effective than any other, then we might want to consider selecting specific policies on other grounds than direct, traceable, short-term impact on student achievement. These grounds might be ethical, professional or democratic – or even pragmatic in

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terms of their consistency with successful past policy approaches over periods of time rather than with short-term policy items in particular. These grounds provide other legitimate bases for policy formulation than ones of specific impact in terms of immediate results within single election terms.

It is increasingly clear that these policies should also be consistent with long-standing and interconnected principles that are deeply and sustainably embedded in the cultures and identities of high performing systems. Like trust and betrayal, these interconnected principles can be instantly and easily breached or betrayed by an insensitive or unsympathetic government. They take years and perhaps even decades to establish among governments committed to transformation of their entire societies.

Fourth and last, international organizations like the OECD and McKinsey & Company have assumed an inspiring role by raising international public awareness of educational equity and achievement. They are influencing policy makers to review their national policy strategies based on what is effective educationally, socially and economically, rather than on strategies that are ideologically comfortable or convenient. They have exposed how the largest and most powerful countries are not necessarily the highest performing countries. The OECD and McKinsey & Company have gathered and analyzed masses of data that challenge the assumption that past achievements will automatically translate into future success. In the best Third Way fashion, they have undercut the credibility of all those who argue that educational improvement can be won cheaply or that it can be secured with a mediocre and even maligned teaching force. They have exposed the weaknesses in the deceptively simple and alluring arguments that real sustainable improvement is amenable to simple and instant solution; and that high performance can be guaranteed by punitive prescription and standardization.

At the same time, though, these transnational organizations have an ambivalent role. They are at their best when they are asking challenging questions; presenting disturbing data; and confronting intransigent ideologies. These are the marks of a top global teacher. But like some teachers, who are tempted to favor some

children over others, these transnational organizations are also vulnerable to preferring some interpretations and recommendations over others, especially in terms of the Ministerial or economic stakeholders they must address. Political considerations come to play a role in choices that are made to elevate some successful systems above other equally successful ones. Consultancy and advice that does not always flow obviously or self-evidently from the evidence start to shape professional discourse in ways that exceed what the data actually convey.

These emphases are often quite subtle, but they exist all the same, and to overlook them is to miss out on some of the dynamics that are shaping the future of education in singularly powerful ways. Two examples illustrate the point.

The first example refers to efforts to improve teacher recruitment and comes from the OECD’s Building a High Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons From Around the World (OECD 2011). The example is drawn from the UK and points to the success of a teacher recruitment and advertising campaign that talked up teaching, emphasized alternate routes into the profession and promoted starting bonuses for teachers in subjects where the supply was scarce. Here is how the document puts it.

When it took office, the Blair administration faced one of the worst shortages of teachers in history. Five years later, there were eight applicants for every opening. To some extent this had to do with raising compensation significantly, as well as with important changes in teachers’ work environment; but a sophisticated and powerful recruiting program played a very important part in the turnaround.

The operative word is the conjunction “but” and what is placed either side of it. “But” draws the reader’s attention to the second part of the sentence after the qualifying opener so that here, readers are alerted to the value of short-term advertising campaigns as ways of raising the status of teaching and improving recruitment, compared to long-term and more expensive investment in teachers’ working conditions and compensation. If we reverse what stands on either side of the “but”, the meaning suddenly changes.

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When it took office, the Blair administration faced one of the worst shortages of teachers in history. Five years later, there were eight applicants for every opening. To some extent this had to do with a sophisticated and powerful recruiting program but raising compensation significantly, as well as… important changes in teachers’ work environment played a very important part in the turnaround.

In inquiry terms, the OECD compellingly and inspirationally highlights, in ways that are completely consistent with the evidence, the importance of improving teacher quality and recruitment into teaching if there are going to be improvements in results. But the particular methods that are advanced or highlighted for achieving this are not automatically given in the evidence and are matters for judgment and interpretation.

A second example comes from Marc Tucker’s (2011) Standing On the Shoulders of Giants, written for the National Council on Education and the Economy in the US. Again, this is an inspiring document that is replete with findings about the power of high quality teaching. Drawing on others’ investigations of high performance in Singapore, Shanghai, Finland and Canada (Ontario), Tucker highlights the importance of good and competitive starting salaries for teachers, embedding research and inquiry into the professional practice of teaching, avoiding alternate pathways or qualification routes into the profession, and treating teachers as professionals capable of doing knowledge work, not Frederick Taylor-like standardized factory work. But towards the end of his analysis, Tucker then moves from analysis to interpretation and recommendation. First, he advances some assertions about teacher compensation:

It turns out that total compensation of teachers is more competitive than cash compensation taken by itself, because American teachers’ compensation, like that of civil servants generally, is heavily weighted toward retirement benefits….The problem with this is that, while

it provides a strong incentive for experienced teachers to stay in teaching longer than they might otherwise, it makes teaching unattractive to young people who are more concerned about supporting new families than about their retirement.

The trajectory of cash compensation is also important. Most American teachers top out quickly. And, even when there are adjust-ments for differences in the quality of teaching, which is very rarely done, they are very small... Some countries—again, Singapore is a good example—are paying bonuses of up to 30 percent to teachers who are found to be particularly effective on a wide range of measures.

Whatever the general merits of the argument about teacher compensation, there is nothing in the evidence of international comparisons reviewed in this document that supports the view that young teachers are not concerned about security or retirement or that justi-

fies front-loading teachers’ pay at the expense of retirement benefits. It is a spurious insertion of opinion. In addition, the selection of Singapore as a case for performance-based compensation is not matched by any references

to more liberally democratic Canada or Finland which do not have such compensation. It therefore provides weak support on the overall balance of the report’s evidence.

The document also does not mention that Singapore’s calculation of teacher performance excludes direct computations of test scores. It therefore leaves open possible interpretations that would justify the use of test scores to support performance based pay for teachers. Ironically, in words that Tucker borrows from Arthur Conan Doyle to make another point, this text is a case of “The Dog That Did Not Bark.”

Then there are some arguments about unions and unionization.

Political considerations come to play a role in choices that are made to elevate some successful systems above other equally successful ones.

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As the states decide to pay teachers like professionals and provide teachers the kind of professional responsibility and autonomy that other professions have, the teachers will need to be willing to write contracts that move away from the blue-collar model and toward contracts that embrace a professional model of work organization, in which teachers take responsibility for raising teaching standards to world-class levels, for the performance of students, for working as many hours as it takes to get the work done, for evaluating the work of their colleagues, recommending termination for teachers who do not measure up to high standards and so on.

Teachers will have to give up seniority rights of assignment and retention and other hallmarks of the blue-collar work environment and they will have to accept the proposition that some teachers will be paid more than others and have different responsibilities in recognition of their superior performance.

This interpretation may be judged to be good or bad, depending on one’s own standpoint and values. Here we note it is an interpretation that does not square with some of the evidence about high performance – not least in the United States, where the most unionized state, Massachusetts, is also the highest performing state, and where the states with the worst records of academic achievement, historically in the South, have weak teachers’ unions (Ravitch, 2010). Again, these are points that some international organizations are now also beginning to recognize. For example, in Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from around the world, the OECD (2011) points out that all of the successful countries on PISA involve teachers and their unions or associations in setting and supporting the reform agenda. We also note that in Tucker’s document at the national Center for Education and the Economy, no evidence is provided to indicate that teachers do not “take responsibility for raising teaching standards to world-class levels” and that, in

general, they skimp “working as many hours as it takes to get the work done.” Like the non-barking dog, the quotation begs as many questions by what it does not say, as well as by what it does.

Currently, several Canadian teacher federations cooperate closely with governments in some areas but contest them spiritedly and even bitterly in others – yet the performance of these provinces remains internationally strong. Tucker’s equation of unions with blue-collar unions overlooks how many unions, including teachers’ unions, are actually white-collar unions with strong ethical codes of professionalism and commitments to professional development that stand alongside their historic collective bargaining rights.

National and transnational policy organizations have harnessed their considerable resources to raise new, important and inspiring questions about educational policy that generally support improved status, conditions and compensation for teachers. It is not wrong that the organizations interpret and set out implications from their data in ways that are compatible with the nature of their foundation and the stakeholders whom they serve. It’s just that the resulting explanations and recommendations do not encompass all public and professional interests; they do not highlight all aspects of the key issues they address. These organizations’

status as advocacy bodies as well as bodies that collect and interpret data raises necessary questions about the widely disseminated advice these organizations provide through corporate and philanthropically sponsored conferences, videos and other outlets. The interpretations that emerge from these interconnected, international

organizations have a compelling consistency. The consistency or “brand” is both their strength and their limitation highlighting some issues, and playing down others. It is important therefore, that there is space and a platform for alternative interpretations with different ethical and professional implications, advanced by constituencies with a non-corporate or non party-political base that, in democratic and diverse societies, have a need and a right to be heard.

If large and interconnected transnational organizations are the new Amazons of educational change, who will become the educational equivalents of the local independent bookstores

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Economically and politically-driven international organizations have become the cornerstones of global educational reform. They do exceedingly important and highly influential work, but it is still work from a particular, interconnected perspective. As well as politically and business-based cornerstones in education and public life, we also need corner stores – independent outlets that offer alternative products that are sometimes the same as and also sometimes different from the mainstream. If large and interconnected transnational organizations are the new Amazons of educational change, who will become the educational equivalents of the local independent bookstores that provide the readings and intellectual stimulation for independent readers who want to make up their own minds and don’t want to have their selections suggested for them?

Here, there truly is a powerful and urgent role for future-oriented professional associations, including teachers’ unions and federations. We submit that the time has come for the Canadian Teachers Federation, in alliance with educators’ professional groups from around the world, to sponsor and conduct a major research investigation of international benchmarking not from a policy, business and Ministerial perspective but from a professional teacher-based foundation. Such an investigation would examine and interpret high performing countries and systems (as well as rapidly improving peers beginning from a lower starting point) from the perspective of how teachers and students experience them and not only how Ministers and policy administrators articulate them.

One first step towards this undertaking has been launched in March 2011 by the Alberta Teachers’ Association in Canada and the Center for International Mobility Organization in Finland. The province of Alberta and the nation of Finland are both among the world’s highest achievers on the PISA tests. Yet, Albertan and Finnish educational leaders are not complacent about their performance but rather are asking themselves probing questions about what they can learn from one another so that high levels of achievement are complemented with a spirit of innovation and life-long learning. They are exchanging knowledge and experiences not only among high-level policy makers but also among school principals, teachers, and students.

This is an important step but a small one. A systematic study of cross-provincial and cross-national high performance in practice and from practice, and not only among the policy community, is the giant additional step that now needs to be taken, as a service to public education in Canada, and to the voices and experiences of high performing and rapidly improving teachers all over the world. What we might find, then, we believe, based on the research and reviews we have already conducted in a number of high performing systems around the world, are significant elements in Canada of what we have described as being a Fourth Way of educational change.

TOWARDS THE FOURTH WAY

As independent researchers and as scholarly collaborators we have undertaken and are continuing to undertake our own corner store interpretations of international comparisons of educational achievement and success based on independent and impartial first-hand inquiry into high performance and the reasons for it in Finland, Ontario, Alberta, Singapore, teacher union reform, and outliers of success among schools districts and networks in what are generally lower-performing contexts (Hargreaves & Shirley 2009; Shirley & Hargreaves, in press; Hargreaves & Harris, 2011). This work is widely used by the educational profession internationally but oddly absent from almost all the research and references of transnational policy and consulting organizations.

Our own findings have considerable overlap with the Third Way strategies of the new global consensus on international performance and reform strategies. Teacher status and quality, a sense of common direction, the importance of leadership development and stability – these are just some of the areas of clear agreement.

But there are also important differences of emphasis and interpretation that are significant for schools and the teaching profession and that can contribute to the many voices of international comparison and policy recommendation that deserve to be heard. Community-based organizations, teachers’ organizations and

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inquiry networks, educational leadership associations, and other diverse communities that make up the richness and complexity of the human and educational experience have a great deal to bring to the table. We believe, along with the academic guru of the Third Way, Anthony Giddens, that the time has arrived to acknowledge the stalled promise of Third Way reforms and to not just tinker with or try and transfer Third Way architecture, but to push forward towards bolder and more sustainable improvements. For all of our differences there surely is the public will to take many of us democratically, inclusively, professionally and inspirationally beyond what has been the Third Way of current international advocacy.

We conclude with what we believe are eight challenging, yet eminently winnable victories that can help us move beyond the Third Way to the Fourth:

• Put responsibility before accountability. Embrace the Finnish emphasis on a society’s and an educational system’s collective responsibility for the young rather than, or at least before, Anglo-American perseverations with external accountability that have been imported into schools from the corporate sector. Accountability should be the remainder that is dealt with when responsibility has failed; not the driver of teachers’ practice and the system’s priorities.

• Eliminate standardized testing connected to systemtargets. Challenge the illusion that more testing means better learning and instead develop assessments that are based on a sample of pupils rather than all students in a given district or province – and, at the very least, like high performing Singapore, Finland and Alberta, at all costs, disconnect any standardized testing that remains from high-stakes system targets and the “perverse incentives” that they always create. Two of the world’s previously most-tested systems – Alberta and England – are in the process

of eradicating the last remaining standardized tests for students before the end-point of high school education, sparing students and their families from unnecessary stress, saving significant resources from the public purse and unleashing opportunities for educational innovation in 21st Century skills as they do so. It is time for strongly performing systems to follow.

• Develop and disseminate diagnostic and develop-mental assessment alternatives. Build upon the impressive work that has already been done in Assessment for Learning in many Canadian contexts to initiate constructive diagnostic assessment alternatives that provide the in-time feedback for teachers and for students that generates improved learning and achievement.

• Abandon the obsession with technology as an end in itself. Instead, use digital media to help enrich and transform but not solely drive classroom pedagogies. As Michael Fullan’s (2011) prominent critique of the wrong drivers of educational reform powerfully demonstrates, investing in technology to drive change has no proven effectiveness of success on any scale. It is when technological change serves pedagogical change, he shows, that transformation then becomes possible. Nowhere is this more urgent and evident than in the push for personalized learning. Personalized learning has been given too much emphasis as flexible, individualized, online access to existing curriculum and learning (McRae 2010). This is superficial personalization. Learning that is deeply personalized rather than merely customized pursues meaningful curriculum engagement with students’ diverse life

The way forward is to strengthen the teaching profession even further; to learn from each other as provinces in the way that high performing countries learn from each other too; and to boldly embrace innovation and inquiry in new approaches to teaching and learning instead of sticking with delivering incremental improvements in existing practice.

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experiences, life projects and life-long learning – the kind of approach that has been espoused for decades by organizations like UNESCO (1996) and also in the European tradition of life-long learning or Bildung, as it is called in Germany (Shirley, 2008, 2009).

• Raise quality and standards for all teachers by teachers and with teachers together. Improving the quality of teaching is a collective responsibility. As one of us points out in an upcoming book with Michael Fullan on the future of the teaching profes-sion, instead of concentrating, like reformers tend to do, on improving things for teachers in early career, or doing something for and about teachers in late career, or rewarding a few apparently high performing teachers with performance-based pay, the quality of the profession will be increased when we pay attention to the renewal of all teachers everywhere – not just to teachers at the extremes of age, experience or effectiveness (Hargreaves & Fullan, in press). This entails committing to such things as

- Widespread involvement in professional inquiry as an expected and supported part of the job;

- Constructing professional learning so that it is experienced as an integral part of the job by every teacher, every day;

- Developing collective responsibility for all students among teachers of different grades or between classroom teachers and those who have specific roles in special educational needs;

- Engagement in professional learning com-munities that are characterized by lively and challenging conversations about learning and teaching rather than by hurried interactions about spreadsheet data to produce rapid results;

- Becoming partners with administrators and policymakers in developing school curriculum and educational policy, not just in delivering them.

• Blend and interconnect the best of different provincialreforms—improved high school graduation in Ontario, extensive teacher inquiry networks in Alberta, and rigorous math curricula in Quebec, for example—to support learning between and betwixt Canada’s diverse jurisdictions.

• Pursue strategic international coalitions, such as the

Alberta-Finland partnership, not just at the policy and administrative level, but among all educators and especially teachers, that allow high-achieving provinces and nations to learn from one another with professional openness, curiosity and integrity.

• Promote public engagement as part of the bone and marrow of profound educational improvement by linking school improvement and the teaching profession more with community-based organi-zations and civil society organizations. Especially in systems that are already high performing, it is at least as important to build public commitment and engagement as it is to develop a sense of public confidence in education.

Canadian educators, Canadian policymakers and the Canadian public should be proud of the country’s status as an international leader in educational change. This status and leadership is not the property or the prerogative of any one province, but of several provinces in particular and the fabric of the teaching profession and of Canadian society as a whole. By the international standards of McKinsey and Co, the Canadian educational system, which is not one single system, but many, is already somewhere between great and excellent in its standards of performance. The way forward from here is not to wring a few more percentage points of tested achievement in basic subjects out of the nation’s classrooms. Nor is it to embrace politically and ideologically popular reform strategies from lower performing countries such as maintaining widespread standardized testing or introducing performance-based pay. The way forward is to strengthen the teaching profession even further; to learn from each other as provinces in the way that high performing countries

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learn from each other too; and to boldly embrace innovation and inquiry in new approaches to teaching and learning instead of sticking with delivering incremental improvements in existing practice.

Students have lives now and in the future. Learning should ultimately be about the enrichment of those lives as citizens as well as consumers and producers. Education should ultimately therefore be not just about performance or even personalization in the form of individual customization but about creating better, more productive and more socially just lives for everyone.

Teachers have lives too. Teaching helps others make meaning. They cannot do that if others are in control of the meaning that teachers make for themselves. It is time for governments and teachers’ federations

not only to make a kind of transactional peace with each other, but also to build a transformational future together as dynamic and equal partners. This includes engaging teachers and their organizations as active partners in the international evaluations and recommendations of

educational performance that are so influential on national and provincial strategies of educational change. Canada has done well on the world stage of educational change. If this stage is to become a platform for even more dynamic change in the future, the country needs to have more than professional peace with or even “buy-in” from its teachers. It needs its teachers and their federations to be co-creators of change on the broadest scale for a strong and just society in the future. It’s one thing to be excellent. It’s another to stay excellent. Are governments and federations up for this challenge?

Education should ultimately therefore be not just about performance or even personalization in the form of individual customization but about creating better, more productive and more socially just lives for everyone.

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