6 Questions for This Week’s Teaching Summit

For this blog post, we included a few questions from Amanda Ripley, one of New America’s Schwartz Fellows, who is working on a book about international comparisons in education.

In New York this week at an international summit, education officials and ministers, union leaders and master teachers from 26 countries* are discussing promising practices for recruiting, preparing, supporting, developing, retaining, evaluating, and compensating teachers.

Here at Early Ed Watch, we have a few burning questions that we hope U.S. leaders will ask:

• The top-performing countries recruit teachers from the top third of their graduating college classes. How specifically did they change their education school selection policies, teacher compensation packages and other practices to make this happen?
• A recent report here in the U.S. showed that teachers do not get enough preparation and practice in teaching based on how children develop. How do other countries prepare their teachers? How much emphasis do they place on developmental science and practical experience?
• What are the differences in how teachers are hired and placed in other countries? Are these site-based decisions? What is the most important factor considered when hiring teachers for the early grades?
• Almost every developed country has a strong teachers’ union. What are the main differences in the labor dynamics of countries with the best school systems – and do those differences matter?
• When it comes to preschool teachers, what kinds of qualifications, training, and experiences must they have, and are they compensated the same as regular primary and secondary teachers?
• For over 50 years, governments around the world have bemoaned the lack of prestige and rigor in the teaching profession. Is this problem more urgent now because of globalization–or is the need for our students to be internationally competitive currently being exaggerated for ideological or political purposes?

There are examples from other countries that are definitely worth closer examination. As background for the summit, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) produced the report Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from around the World that illustrates quite a few. Singapore, for example, offers diverse career pathways for teachers. After three years of teaching, teachers are assessed annually to see which of three paths would best suit them – master teacher, specialist in curriculum or research or school leader. Each path has salary increments.  Another is in Shanghai, where teachers are trained to be action researchers in effective practice. Throughout their career, teachers participate in subject-based study groups to improve day-to-day teaching. Teachers are expected to identify students that are struggling (as soon as they begin to struggle with a concept), diagnose the issue and create strategies to address and solve the students’ academic problem. In Sweden, the federal government sets a minimum salary requirement for teachers and then allows individual teachers’ salaries to be negotiated each year—between the teacher and the principal.

The OECD report also highlights promising practices from the Unites States: the Boston Teacher Residency Program and the collaboration between the teacher’s union and school district in Montgomery County, Maryland.  Together the union and district developed a collaborative agreement for raising performance.

School districts, states and the federal government could learn a lot from research what other countries – as well as what other states and school districts with the U.S. – are doing to improve the teaching profession as well as in other education areas like preschool education. Summits like the one going on today provide an ideal venue to start doing just that.  They might find sound, adaptable ideas to address a shared challenge—no need to reinvent the wheel.  

(Also, see a post we wrote about preschool programs in other countries in January. We discussed the OECD’s annual Education at a Glance report. One noteworthy takeaway: Many of the organization’s 34 member countries have recognized the importance of early education by making pre-primary education “almost universal” for children by the time they are 3 years old.)

The summit this week was organized by the U.S. Department of Education in collaboration with international organizations the OECD, Education International (EI), and with U.S. organizations the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, Council of Chief State School Officers, Asia Society and WNET (New York Public Media).

*Invited countries included U.S., Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, People’s Republic of China, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Republic of Korea, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Slovenia, Switzerland.