Reform School

What is the role of teachers' unions in successful countries?
Other countries put a lot of energy into recruiting the best and the brightest into teaching, training them very intensely, making sure they have professional training. They undoubtedly have ways to get rid of incompetent teachers, but they put a lot of effort on how to be sure that the teachers are competent in the first place. In this country, I've been advocating for a long time, how do we get teachers that are highly competent in the first place. If we're thinking about what we need to do to be competitive with other nations, we need to be thinking about building a supply of great teachers and continually improving their skills, rather than only focusing on the bad teachers when we haven't helped them learn how to be good.

So which countries are going to be the models for the Obama administration?
Certainly we have a different context both politically and in how our education system is organized, but I will say that if you look at some of the highest-achieving states in the United States, we do have this wide variability. Although we rank low on the international assessments, our most high-achieving states and our most high-achieving students are getting an education that has features you would see in other countries. States like Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey—those are states that have attacked standards-based reform, with a focus on developing more thoughtful assessments, tying those to teacher development. They put in place very strong literacy-development programs in the elementary schools, and literacy coaches. You see the same kind of standards-based literacy work in countries that have had strong improvements in their performance. We can learn some things from other countries, but we can also learn some things from within our country by looking at places that are succeeding.

Obama's proposals require money—the funding for prekindergarten, the army of new teachers. How will that happen during the credit crisis?
You have to think about education as an investment. This is me speaking, not the administration speaking, but we're talking about a $700 billion recovery package. The total education investment represented in President-elect Obama's education plan was $29 billion, and that's tiny. For every dollar you spend to make sure that kids get high-quality preschool, you're going to gain anywhere from $3 to $10 back to the economy in reduced failure in school, reduced special-education costs, reduced dropout rates and higher wages and taxes. These kinds of investments actually reap us benefits in the long run.

The results for the latest science and math tests just came out, are you surprised at the U.S. performance?
They were up in math, but not in science. We're not even teaching science in a lot of elementary schools, much less the kind of science that other countries are teaching. When I went to Singapore, at every grade level in every classroom in every school I visited, kids were coming up to show the experiments they'd designed and conducted. High-achieving countries are making sure their kids can be the inventors and engineers of the future. We have to really redouble our efforts.

Will we have moved up within four years?
I would expect so. It takes time to build and rebuild a system, and the financial crisis is really going to be a problem, but I think we will certainly see a turning of the corner if the kind of investments that have been proposed are indeed made. And in eight years, you will see a substantial difference in where the United States is positioned.

© 2008