Education Lessons From Abroad

Education Lessons From Abroad

On a visit to the United States last week I was interested to learn about the education reform battles going on in a number of states.

Some have been triggered by state fiscal crises and have led to teacher layoffs and reductions in employment conditions. Others reflect deepseated worries about US education standards.

Once the United States was a world leader in education. In higher education it still is: America’s top colleges and universities are widely regarded as the best in the world.

However, at least since the landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk, there has been widespread concern about the performance of American public schools. The United States has fallen in the international league tables for maths, science and other subjects.

Last year the movie Waiting for Superman (made by the producer of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and recently shown in New Zealand film festivals) made a big impact.

It catalogued the exceptional performance of some schools and school leaders in tough school districts; the desperate attempts of parents (often from low-income backgrounds) to get their children into these schools; the mediocrity of much of the system; and the entrenched resistance of teacher unions to change.

Watching it, I was reminded of the words of the late Albert Shanker, an iconic union leader, who famously remarked, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren” (as opposed to the interests of teachers).

Some of the current battles concern teacher tenure and bargaining arrangements. A case in point is Illinois which includes Chicago, America’s third largest state system, whose current mayor is President Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Illinois is a state where Democrats control both the legislature and the governor’s office. Its reform package would link teacher tenure to student performance, make it harder for teachers to go on strike, base layoffs on performance instead of seniority, make it easier to dismiss ineffective teachers, and give Chicago’s mayor the power to lengthen the school day and year without union approval. (By high school graduation, Chicago students have had four fewer years of classroom time than their counterparts in Houston.) Not all of these changes seem well-conceived. For example, why should it be easier (or harder) to dismiss a non-performing teacher than any other employee? And linking teacher tenure or pay simplistically to student performance is dubious. Many factors influence student achievement, and more holistic means of teacher appraisal make more sense.

More generally, in the United States and elsewhere, successful education reforms need to focus on the education system as a whole, especially the problem of the state monopoly. Most education voucher systems in the United States aimed at dealing with this problem by introducing greater competition are limited in scope.

They have been popular with the mostly minority parents in places like Milwaukee and Washington DC because they allow a certain number of children to escape bad public schools and attend private schools with some state assistance. But unlike in countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands, where there is a level playing field between public and private schools (all are funded equally according to enrolments), US schemes are few in number and typically do not introduce choice and competition on a broad basis. As a result, public schools are not under generalised pressures to improve.

Moreover, equal funding systems by themselves are no panacea. As Stanford University academic Caroline Hoxby argued in a 2005 paper for New Zealand’s Education Forum, money following students is only one of three essential elements in education reform.

A second is supply flexibility – schools must be allowed to expand, contract or close, and it must be easy to set up new schools in response to parental demand. The growing number of for-profit schools has been an important feature of supply flexibility in Sweden. In New Zealand, the Ministry of Education has been reluctant to open new schools when there is spare capacity in existing ones nearby.

A third essential element is independent school management. Schools should be free from bureaucratic micro-management and union interference, and have greater scope to determine such things as teacher employment arrangements, pedagogy, curricula, work organisation and the length of school days and years.

Many countries provide lessons in education for New Zealand. Julia Gillard’s Labor government in Australia is introducing a $1.3 billion bonus scheme for top teachers. The UK government is introducing Swedish-style reforms. Finland, Korea and Singapore, which rank high in international league tables, offer other lessons.

New Zealand scores moderately well in international comparisons but it is not in the top group and many children under-achieve. Reports from a parliamentary working group early last year made the case for greater school choice and autonomy. Action on them is overdue.

Roger Kerr is the executive director of the New Zealand Business Roundtable. Check out his blog on www.nzbr.org.nz

ENDS

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