District Administration - February 2012 - (Page 32)

What Can U.S. SChoolS Learn from foreign CoUnterpartS? CONTINUED Countries that benchmark their own performance using one another’s results are trying to understand “what another country is trying to achieve, how they have gone about achieving it, what they would have done differently if they could have done so, what mistakes they made and how they address them, which factors most account for their achievements and so on,” the report says. “Benchmarking is a wide-ranging research program that never ends, because no country’s education system stands still very long.” Bruce Hunter, associate executive director for advocacy and communications at the American Association of School Administrators, believes Tucker’s organization is going in the right direction to improve U.S. students’ performance on the PISA test. “You have to focus more on mastery of the content, and how to think about the content, and how to apply it. And we don’t do that,” he says. “Our tests that we use now are focused on recognition and recall. Recognition and recall are necessary to do critical thinking and to apply the knowledge, but they’re not sufficient.” International Baccalaureate programs do teach those critical thinking skills, Hunter acknowledges, as do “mostly suburban districts where parents and the community see great value for the schools and pay for it.” But aside from that, he says, “if you want to see how well kids are using their knowledge to think critically and applying that knowledge to different situations, you have to teach differently. Our teachers have no incentive to teach that way. I’m hoping that the Common Core will lead us in that direction.” He adds, “I’m hoping now that the think tanks have figured out that the solution to American education that they gave us in 2001 had real limitations… It’s nice to see Marc Tucker and his group leading that conversation.” Thawing Benchmarking Resistance Tucker believes that U.S. resistance to benchmarking has begun to change—the U.S. Secretary of Education has asked the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers 32 February 2012 Third-graders in the Corinth (Miss.) School District, which is among the districts in NCEE’s “Excellence for All” pilot program, work on different skills that deal with statistics and probability. The boys are working on number groups and the girl with the teacher is working on long division. PISA, to produce a report on successful countries’ strategies, for example, and individual states are signing up to participate in the PISA testing—but it’s still an uphill argument overall. NCEE sees a handful of commonalities among topperforming countries, such as high standards for teachers and high pay to match. “Many countries with the best education records have much higher standards for getting into teachers’ colleges than we do,” Tucker says. “You could, of course, go to a school of education and say, ‘This is what they’re doing. Why don’t you?’ But the fact is, those countries pay teachers much more than we do. If you don’t raise teachers’ pay, you’re asking [U.S. education schools] to greatly reduce the size of their student body.” This is so, Tucker explains, because higher standards without the pay to match likely would reduce the appeal of teaching as a profession. Countries that perform well on PISA also try to get all students to the same high standards by putting more resources behind the students who are harder to educate, Tucker says. “We’re doing the opposite,” he says. “The students who are easiest to educate have far more resources behind them. That’s a very complicated matter because of our governance system. What is spent is a function of local control and local property tax bases.” Most high-performing countries have a central governance mechanism that also determines teachers’ pay more generally and sets standards at schools of education, Tucker says. Replicating High Standards Lacking the ability to single-handedly change finance and governance issues, NCEE has launched in the past couple of years a set of pilot projects aimed at replicating the use of standardized but very essay- and content-heavy board examination systems that determine whether students receive their high school certification, along with curricula geared toward making that grade. While Tucker agrees with those who think U.S. students already take too many tests, he believes the content knowledge and thinking abilities measured in the board exams are well worth it. If he had his druthers, he would substitute the board exams for the current testing under No Child Left Behind, which many educators see as quashing students’ imagination and thirst for knowledge, rather than adding to what’s already in place. “One of the things we’ve observed in our work is that many countries expe- District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - February 2012

District Administration - February 2012
Contents
From the Editor
News Update
District Profile
Administrator Profile
Conversations
Product Focus
What Can U.S. Schools Learn From Foreign Counterparts?
A New Prescription for Fighting Drug Abuse
The Game Changer
The Legal Implications of Surveillance Cameras
CIO News
Mobile Devices Drive Creative Instruction
Products
Crisis Response
Professional Opinion
Problem/Solution
New Directions

District Administration - February 2012

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