Insights From Education Leaders Around The World

The Global Education Leaders’ Partnership (GELP) formed in 2010 through a partnership between four educational jurisdictions in North America and Oceania, and has since grown to include 13 jurisdictions representing every major continent. In between, the community has gathered in biannual meetings, supported long-running working groups, and produced a book generated from its learning: Redesigning Education: Shaping Learning Systems Around the World. The purpose of GELP has been to freely exchange knowledge about how we can lift the performance of our learning systems. The community has focused on the public school systems, but with an interest in how learning systems can anticipate the future, graduating young people who can thrive in the 21st century, earning a living and contributing to society. For more information please visit www.gelp.org. The National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) was created in 1988 to analyze the implications of changes in the international economy for American education, formulate an agenda for American education based on that analysis and seek wherever possible to accomplish that agenda through policy change and development of the resources educators would need to carry it out. For more information visit www.ncee.org. The Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB), a program of NCEE, conducts and funds research on the world’s most successful education and workforce development systems to identify the strategies those countries have used to produce their superior performance. Through its books, reports, website, monthly newsletter, and a weekly update of education news around the world, CIEB provides up-to-date information and analysis on the world’s most successful education systems based on student performance, equity and efficiency. Visit www.ncee.org/cieb to learn more. The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) has a longstanding commitment to developing system level leadership as well as instructional practice. The HGSE Doctorate in Education Leadership draws on classes in Education as well as at the Kennedy School of Government, the Business school, and the Law school to prepare system leaders knowledgeable across important dimensions of leadership and educational change. The research PhD program sees students study across the professional schools as well as the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, bringing together expertise in education with knowledge of Economics, Sociology, Psychology, History and Government. Consistent interaction with these knowledge fields helps education researchers to expand their thinking on what is necessary and what is possible in the design of K12, Higher education, and life-long learning. For more information please visit www.hgse.edu. Acknowledgements This report was authored by Amelia Peterson, Harvard PhD candidate in Education Policy and Program Evaluation and Associate with the Innovation Unit and the Global Education Leaders’ Partnership. Kathe Kirby, Executive Director of GELP and Nathan Driskell, Policy Analyst at NCEE were integral to synthesizing the symposium. Bob Schwartz, Marc Tucker, Betsy Brown Ruzzi and Anthony Mackay lent considerable amounts of their time and effort to plan and carry out the convening and to assist with this report. NCEE provided the funding for the convening and the report. A final thank-you goes to all of the participants who shared their knowledge and ideas. IntroductIon From Sunday 11th to Tuesday 13th September 2016, members of the Global Education Leaders’ Partnership (GELP) gathered for a symposium co-convened with the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) and faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) to discuss the NCEE report: 9 Building Blocks For a World-Class State Education System (included in an Appendix). Seven existing GELP jurisdictions – Australia, British Columbia, Finland, New Zealand, South Africa and South Korea – gathered at HGSE with the host jurisdiction, Massachusetts. NCEE provided the funding for this meeting. Continuing an ongoing commitment of the GELP community to partner with other international bodies in order to strengthen knowledge sharing and development, also in attendance were representatives of the OECD, the Asia Society, Learning Forward, and the Jaume Bofill Foundation. (Participant biographies are included in an Appendix). This report has been prepared to share information and insights generated through the presentations and discussions. The Symposium, moderated by Anthony Mackay, Co-Chair of GELP, took the form of roundtable conversations prompted by presentations from faculty, jurisdictions, and representatives of international organizations. This report is made up of dispatches sharing the context of these presentations, and thematic reflections summarizing the key insights generated through conversation. The event was structured by a discussion of three of the nine NCEE ‘Building Blocks’: • (Building block 3) World-class, highly coherent instructional systems. This block speaks to the presence of explicit standards for student achievement; curriculum frameworks which lay out a sequence of learning based on standards; syllabuses that translate a curriculum framework into a sequence of learning; high quality examinations based on syllabuses which assess what students know and can do; and a teacher education system that prepares teachers in alignment with this set of expectations. • (Building block 5) An abundant supply of highly qualified teachers. This block speaks to the presence of challenging admissions criteria and strong accreditation requirements for teacher preparation programs; high rigor of offerings across all training institutions; and attractive starting salaries and career ladders. • (Building block 6) Learning environments that enable professionalism and continuous learning. This block speaks to the need for schools to be work environments suited to autonomous professionals, where teachers have opportunities to work with colleagues, develop new practice, and take on additional responsibilities that are relevant to student learning. These building blocks result from NCEE’s long-running effort to systematically learn from successful education systems, by identifying features common to high-excellence, high-equity jurisdictions in different economic and social contexts. NCEE began this work on the invitation of Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, producing in 2010 the report Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education. Through further research and distillation, this report became the 9 Building Blocks For a World-Class State Education System, which now serves as a framework to organize all of NCEE’s international benchmarking research, capacity-building efforts for US school leaders and district superintendents, and research reports to state education agencies. Both of these reports were written for a US audience, and so this current event marked the first time that an international audience – including representatives of many of the jurisdictions featured in the work – would scrutinize the conclusions in light of their current efforts.