What works in education?

Ian Boyne, Contributor

What works best in education? What would we need to do to develop a world-class educational system? We could start by reading the New York Times best-seller, The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way by Time magazine journalist and think tank fellow, Amanda Ripley.

Published in August last year, the book tells of the experience and research of Ripley, who for one year followed three Americans to three top performers in education, Finland, South Korea and Poland. The 306-page book makes fascinating reading.

We learn some important lessons early in the book. More money does not lead to better education outcomes. Governments in the smartest countries in the world spend less than the United States, which is an educational laggard. Number one-ranked Finland was not always ahead. "Historical test results showed that Finnish kids were not born smart; they had gotten that way fairly recently. Change, it turned out, could come within a single generation." That should be encouraging to us.

But we have to pay particular attention to teacher quality. Ripley quotes one Korean policymaker as saying, "The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers." Finland makes it hard to become a teacher, therefore, only the best and the brightest can be teachers. Only 20 per cent of applicants for teacher training are accepted. Getting into teacher training is like getting into Harvard or MIT in the United States. To teach in Finland, you have to at least have a master's degree. "The Finns decided that the only way to get serious about education was to select highly educated teachers, the best and the brightest of each generation, and train them rigorously." Finland was unlike other countries, including the United States, where "teachers had jobs that were protected by powerful unions and neither could easily be dismissed. This pattern held true in most developed countries around the world. Teachers' unions held a lot of power and teachers rarely got fired anywhere".

Because of easy entry requirements and lack of rigour, the United States produces nearly two and a half times the number of teachers it needs annually. "The combination of low standards and high supply plagued education systems around the world, dumbing down the entire teaching profession."

12-HOUR SCHOOLDAY

Ripley details the rigour and intensity of the Korean education system. For the school year, Korean kids go to school two months longer than American kids and they spend 12 hours a day at school. The Smartest Kids in the World says after Korean kids have dinner, they have a two-hour period of study loosely supervised by teachers. The kids review the notes from the day, or watch online test-prep lectures. Around nine in the evening, they leave school, but the school day is not over yet.

"At that point, most kids went (she writes in past tense) to private tutoring academies known as hagwons. They took further classes until eleven at night. They then sleep for a few hours before reporting back to school at eight in the morning."

That partly explains why Korea is an industrialised country, and a member of the rich man club, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) - coming from a country which the World Bank dismissed in the 1950s as an economic basket case.

These are the nations Jamaica is trying to compete with. But we have to do more than produce great athletes and musicians. Jamaica will continue to have people without jobs and jobs without people if we continue with our substandard education system.

There is another critical observation about high-performing Finland and Korea which we should note. Those societies see education as a more serious quest than sports. "In these countries, people thought learning was so important that only the most educated, high-achieving students citizens could be allowed to do the teaching. These governments spent tax money training and retraining teacher talent, rather than buying iPads for first-graders or mandating small class sizes. It wasn't that public respect for teaching had led to learning. It was that public respect for learning led to great teaching." (Incidentally, Ripley finds that technology was not a critical success factor in education.)

STRONG ACADEMIC FOCUS

Highly educated teachers chose material for students which was more rigorous, and they had great fluency in teaching it. And they knew that an education focus was far more important than attracting great sporting talent. Says Ripley: "Nine out of 10 international students I surveyed said that US kids placed a higher priority on sports. Even in middle school, other researchers had found, American students spent double the amount of time playing sports as Koreans."

In Finland, they do have sports teams. But they are run by parents or outside clubs. 'Muggy' Graham, who has been waging a courageous but lonely battle here against the sportsmania in schools, would love this quote: "Combined with less rigorous material, higher rates of child poverty and lower levels of teacher selectivity and training, the glorification of sports chipped away at the academic drive of US kids ... . The primacy of sports sent a message that what mattered - what really led to greatness - had little to do with what happened in the classroom."

There was another interesting feature of the high performers. They had parents who played a major and active part in their

children's education. "Parenting, like drive and diligence, was often ignored in international studies of education." Ripley says, paradoxically, Americans were heavily involved in parent-teacher association and in supporting schools, but that is not what's decisive. Korean parents actually spend less time attending school events, but more time training their children at home. "Reading to them, quizzing them about their multiplication tables while they were cooking dinner ... . They saw education as one of their jobs."

Says Ripley: "All over the
world, parents who discussed movies, books, current affairs with their
kids had teenagers who performed better at reading. Here again, parents
who engaged their kids in conversation about things larger than
themselves were essentially teaching their kids to become thinking
adults."

Adds Ripley: "There was a
consensus in Finland, Korea and Poland that all children had to learn
higher-order thinking in order to thrive in the world." And,
significantly, Ripley adds: "High school in Finland, Korea and
Poland had a purpose, just like high-school football practice in
America: There was a big, important contest at the end and the score
counted."

Things like persistence, the
ability to endure boredom, and drive were critically important. As
Ripley concludes: "I'd been looking around the world for clues
as to what other countries were doing right, but the important
distinctions were not about spending or local control or curriculum;
none of that mattered very much. Policies mostly worked in the margins.
The fundamental difference was a psychological
one."

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist.
Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and
ianboyne1@yahoo.com.