Labor & Employment Law

Report: Want Better Schools? Put a Higher Value on Teachers

By James Parks

Governors in cash strapped states and so-called education reformers who scapegoat teachers for schools? failures are doing the exact opposite of what needs to be done to make our schools better, according to a new report.

In countries with successful public education systems, teaching is held in much higher esteem as a profession than in the United States. Becoming a teacher in these countries is difficult, and candidates are recruited from the top of their college and university classes, the report says. These countries also provide more resources for teacher training and they give teachers more responsibility for professional development and leading reform.

The report, ?What the U.S. Can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Education Reform Efforts? by the McGraw-Hill Research Foundation,  found three other major differences between the successful countries and the United States:

• The U.S. spends more money per pupil than almost all countries, but most of the resources end up in the richer schools. In high-performing nations, budgets are often much smaller and extra resources go to disadvantaged schools.
• High-performing nations establish rigorous achievement standards, based on the idea that “it is possible for all students to achieve at high levels and necessary that they do so,” according to the report.
• Class differences have a much more pronounced effect on educational achievement here than in high-performing nations.

Mary Sanchez of the Kansas City Star writes that U.S. policymakers are ?heading in the opposite direction from the study recommendations, except when it comes to establishing universal standards.?

A good place to start making the changes we need would be to upgrade how we value teachers. Although U.S. teachers are better paid than their peers in higher-performing countries, they are underpaid compared with similarly educated workers in the U.S., according to the report.  

More important than raising teacher pay are steps to put teachers in charge of policing the standards of their profession, and to give them resources for mentoring and professional development.

Testing and assessment should serve not to punish schools, as in the United States, but to assess which students and classrooms need more attention, as in high-performing countries, the report said.

Read the full report here.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on March 23, 2011 (boomark / email).