There's a good post on education reform from Dana Goldstein, a journalist specializing in education who is one of the bloggers filling in for Ezra Klein while he's on vacation.
She summarizes part of the findings of a report on education policies and practices in the countries that currently lead the world in student performance. This report was prepared at the behest of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, so maybe it has the potential to be heard though I suspect the true agenda is to draw precisely the wrong conclusions from it:
[W]hat if the United States is doing teacher reform all wrong?
That’s the suggestion of a new report from the National Center on Education and the Economy, a think tank funded mostly by large corporations and their affiliated foundations. The report takes a close look at how the countries that are kicking our academic butts — Finland, China and Canada — recruit, prepare and evaluate teachers. What it finds are policy agendas vastly different from our own, in which prospective educators are expected to spend a long time preparing for the classroom and are then given significant autonomy in how to teach, with many fewer incentives and punishments tied to standardized tests.
Finland, for example, requires all teachers to hold a master’s degree in education and at least an undergraduate major in a subject such as math, science or literature. Finnish teacher-education programs also include significant course work in pedagogy — exactly the sort of instruction former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein recently claimed was useless. All teacher candidates must write a research-based master’s dissertation on an issue in education policy or teaching practice, and will then spend a full year as a student teacher reporting to an experienced mentor....
This is in distinct opposition to what it describes as the American approach: low standards for entry to schools of education, and even in the Teach for America model, where the goal is to bring more graduates from elite institutions into teaching by reducing the necessary credentialing, there's little in the way of mentoring or formal instruction in pedagogy.
Teachers are expected to spend their time preparing students for standardized tests. It's as if education is like turning out widgets on an assembly line - just bring in good people to get the job done, and the job will get done, little or no special preparation required.
more...
The NCEE report makes a persuasive case that the Obama administration and its allies in the standards-and-accountability school reform movement have teaching policy exactly backward. The way to increase the prestige of the teaching profession is not to make it easier for elite people to do the job for a few years and then burn out, but to make it more challenging to earn a teaching credential so that smart young people are attracted to the rigor of education programs....
Following this approach, Finland has been able to abolish test score-based accountability, finding that the folks who come through their challenging teacher professional development pipeline are well prepared to create their own curriculums and assessments....
The takeaway, I think, is that teaching reform efforts should focus more heavily on rebuilding the pipeline into the profession and less on creating complex reward and punishment systems for current teachers, most of whom oppose increased testing, and many of whom are demoralized by the direction of U.S. education policy. For those teachers already in the classroom, the single most powerful professional development experience is not merit pay, but good, old-fashioned collaboration, working side-by-side — over the course of a full year — with an experienced mentor.
The report itself, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform (52-pg PDF) is worth reading if you're interested in what the outlines of a rational, research-based approach to education reform might look like. The bad news is, since the think-tank that produced it is corporate sponsored, the message (only once you get about halfway through) is that the only way to implement these wonderful reforms is to privatize and/or force teachers to give up their unions and their seniority. But of course that isn't true at all. The country it holds up as a world-leading model in education, Finland, does all the wonderful things it does within a completely public education system within which teachers are almost universally unionized. (Students are too.)
So take the examples and research for what they're worth, which is a lot, and discard the corporate agenda they're used to give respectable cover to.