After trial and error, education reform is taking place worldwide. But what are the best ways that all could adopt?
I ran into a provocative book titled "Lessons Learned: How Good Policies Produce Better Schools" by Fenton Whelan, which deals exactly with this issue. It explored school reforms in more than 40 countries. The author concluded that there were seven core themes for successful reform alternatives.
-Have fewer but better teachers
-Get the right people to become teachers
-Ensure that every school has effective leadership
-Set high standards and measure whether they are achieved
-Create structures that empower people, hold them accountable and encourage collaboration
-Invest in building teachers' professional knowledge and skills
-Continuously challenge inequity in educational performance
Whelan said just spending more money and employing more teachers does not help much in some countries. Developed countries with the smallest class sizes are often among the lowest performing, while those with the largest class sizes are sometimes among the best.
In some countries, they show that achieving good performance is not about how much money is spent or how many teachers are employed, but how well that money is spent and how well those teachers teach.
It turns out that students taught by the most effective teacher would make three times as much progress over the course of a year as students taught by the least effective teacher. Students taught by good teachers move further and further ahead, while students taught by less effective teachers fall further and further behind. Students with the best teachers in the best schools learn at least three times more each year than those with the worst teachers in the worst schools.
Indeed, we do need great teachers, though that's not so easy. So we do need to improve the teacher training system, too.
Indeed, Thailand has tried to concoct its own recipe to reform the education system. An attempt is being made to recruit students with good grades into the teaching profession, in tough areas like mathematics and science. These students are given a free university education and they are guaranteed jobs after graduation. Still, if they were making good grades at school, many would opt to become something else which could make more money. If the aptitude test results said that they should not become a teacher, would they still be recruited into the system? If so, that would be another error.
Thailand could also do more in welcoming outside teachers to classrooms. In some countries, at schools where the parents' associations are strong, parents with special knowledge are obliged to share their knowledge with students. In a way, they are not direct teachers, but they are an inspiration to the students. The young kids deserve to see what they could do in the future and how to achieve that. They deserve being given examples and making their own choices.
Whelan's study shows that across a range of developed-world school systems, few had improved over a 25-year period and several had got worse. It sheds light on the fact that high performance and continuous improvement are possible to achieve under school reform.
But like he says, long-term and enduring reforms are needed, as success does not come overnight. And once you succeed at this, time will force you to adopt new changes. His book is there to help shed some light on what we should do.
PRIYAKORN PUSAWIRO
Learning Scientist
Computer Engineering Department, KMUTT
pusawiro@cpe.kmutt.ac.th