REPOST: What the U.S. could learn from the Polish education system

Coming from the bottom ranks in education, Poland has risen to the top in the past decade. And with the difficulties that the U.S. education system is currently facing, it may be good to learn some things from the Polish. Read more about this in this article from USA Today.

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Is it time for the student to offer the teacher a few lessons?

Twenty-five years ago, Americans like economist Jeffrey Sachs were running around Poland helping to turn moribund socialism into a vibrant market economy. Now, with the U.S. trying to fix its lagging educational system, it might just learn a thing or two from Poland, which in the past decade has moved sharply forward from the rear of the international pack and beats the U.S. on most performance measures. And it didn't even spend a lot money to get there.

Poland now has the fourth-highest number of higher education students in Europe, behind the U.K., Germany and France. Reading, once an obstacle, became an asset — more so than in the U.S., the U.K., Germany or France. And 19th place in math on a survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has helped it produce some of Europe's brightest talent in the technology field. The U.S. ranked a "below average" 27th.

"Our curriculum is mostly based on the effects of education — not just what students know but what they can do, and how they can use their knowledge practically," Ewa Dudek, Poland's undersecretary of state for education, tells OZY. Dudek believes Poland's success comes from allowing students more scope for feedback on their education.

Of course, it's much more than that.

It was 1998, almost a decade after the fall of communism, and the country was flying in the aftermath of Sachs' market reforms. Deregulation and privatization made Poland's economy one of Europe's fastest growing.

But its schools lagged far behind and continued to rely on course materials barely changed since the Stalinist 1950s. Kids osmosed ideology and vocational training, grooming them for careers in heavy industry that had largely disappeared.

Leaders in the capital, Warsaw, saw a growing generation of underserved and uninspired students as an economic bear trap. Without drastic reforms, the country could kiss its decade of prosperity goodbye.

"We have to move the entire system — push it out of its equilibrium," urged then-Education Minister Mirosław Handke.

Handke got his green light. With remarkable speed, in a year academia in Poland was unrecognizable. The demagoguery was ditched and in came a new form of general education that resisted specialization. Just a year after that, in 2000, Poland began to leap up the international league tables.

By 2012, the last time the OECD conducted its survey, Poland was one of the best teaching countries on earth.

In fact it's the only one to have gone from below average in the chart, which now measures 510,000 15-year-olds in 65 territories, to above — with a GDP ranking just 46th globally. On key indicators — math, science, reading — it came from behind to rank well ahead of the United States.

How did Poland do it?

Back in 1998, Handke, a former chemistry teacher, was staring at a horrible formula. Polish children went to primary school for eight years before being funneled into vocational training at age 14.

Under the revamped system, primary school lasts six years, followed by three years of a new comprehensive lower secondary school, before a decision is made on whether to send a student to vocational training. Knowledge — reading, writing, 'rithmetic — is valued above technical skill. Foreign language — especially English — became a key component. In 2000 only 1 percent of kids received four hours or more of language classes. By 2006 that figure was 76 percent.

But it's not about money. Poland spends around $5,000 per student annually from primary through tertiary education, but outperforms the United States, which spends around three times that amount.

Poland has its socialist past to thank for the rapid progress, says Izabel Olchonowicz, an education consultant: "People were very eager to modernize; they were waiting such a long time," she says. "Right now is the result of that."

The economy has continued to be strong. When Europe's economies were tumbling in 2009, Poland was its only island of growth, getting a 1.6 percent lift. Poland is far better off than when Handke had his say.

Teachers might disagree. Poland remains a low payer — around $650 a month for teachers compared with the national average for all workers of $945. Slawomir Broniarz, the country's most senior teachers unionist, warns that low pay might put Poland's trajectory in doubt, primarily because of slipping standards of training. "We've asked many times for the reform of teacher training, because they are not good enough for these times. We need new attitudes, programs and better preparations for future challenges."

"Teaching is very demanding," says Olchonowicz, "and I think that what they get for it is not enough. It is not motivating, and if Poland needs to advance its education system, the salaries of teachers have to come with it."

Poland's rapid development of foreign language training may also have a negative side effect. Many Poles are leaving home to gain skills abroad. While that helps the technology sector if they return, many don't.

But despite the cracks, Poland's educational system is an example to most other countries, and proof that it's not just money that makes good students.

Ken Von Kohorn is a socio-political writer and a big believer in quality education for all. Follow this Twitter account to keep track of the reforms in the U.S. education system.

How to bring our schools out of the 20th Century

By Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe 
Read the full article here.

There's a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls--every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. "This is a school," he declares. "We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green."

American schools aren't exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed. A yawning chasm (with an emphasis on yawning) separates the world inside the schoolhouse from the world outside.

For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the "achievement gap" between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation. This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get "left behind" but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can't think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.

This week the conversation will burst onto the front page, when the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a high-powered, bipartisan assembly of Education Secretaries and business, government and other education leaders releases a blueprint for rethinking American education from pre-K to 12 and beyond to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy. While that report includes some controversial proposals, there is nonetheless a remarkable consensus among educators and business and policy leaders on one key conclusion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century.

Right now we're aiming too low. Competency in reading and math--the focus of so much No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing--is the meager minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient. Today's economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills. Here's what they are:

Knowing more about the world. Kids are global citizens now, even in small-town America, and they must learn to act that way. Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are "global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages"--not exactly strong points in the U.S., where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history.

Best Education In The World: Finland, South Korea Top Country Rankings, U.S. Rated Average

This article appeared in the Nov. 27, 2012 online edition of The Huffington Post. It discusses the report of education firm Pearson on what countries have the best education system.

The United States places 17th in the developed world for education, according to a global report by education firm Pearson.

Finland and South Korea, not surprisingly, top the list of 40 developed countries with the best education systems. Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore follow. The rankings are calculated based on various measures, including international test scores, graduation rates between 2006 and 2010, and the prevalence of higher education seekers. 

Pearson's chief education adviser Sir Michael Barber tells BBC that the high ranking countries tend to offer teachers higher status in society and have a "culture" of education.

The study notes that while funding is an important factor in strong education systems, cultures supportive of learning is even more critical -- as evidenced by the highly ranked Asian countries, where education is highly valued and parents have grand expectation. While Finland and South Korea differ greatly in methods of teaching and learning, they hold the top spots because of a shared social belief in the importance of education and its "underlying moral purpose."

The study aims to help policymakers and school leaders identify key factors that lead to successful educational outcomes. The research draws on literacy data as well as figures in government spending on education, school entrance age, teacher salaries and degree of school choice. Researchers also measured socioeconomic outcomes like national unemployment rates, GDP, life expectancy and prison population. 

The report also notes the importance of high-quality teachers and improving strong educator recruitment. The rankings show, however, that there is no clear correlation between higher pay and better performance. The bottom line findings:

  

1. There are no magic bullets: The small number of correlations found in the study shows the poverty of simplistic solutions. Throwing money at education by itself rarely produces results, and individual changes to education systems, however sensible, rarely do much on their own. Education requires long-term, coherent and focussed system-wide attention to achieve improvement.  

2.       Respect teachers: Good teachers are essential to high-quality education. Finding and retaining them is not necessarily a question of high pay. Instead, teachers need to be treated as the valuable professionals they are, not as technicians in a huge, educational machine.  

3.      Culture can be changed: The cultural assumptions and values surrounding an education system do more to support or undermine it than the system can do on its own. Using the positive elements of this culture and, where necessary, seeking to change the negative ones, are important to promoting successful outcomes.  

4.      Parents are neither impediments to nor saviours of education: Parents want their children to have a good education; pressure from them for change should not be seen as a sign of hostility but as an indication of something possibly amiss in provision. On the other hand, parental input and choice do not constitute a panacea. Education systems should strive to keep parents informed and work with them.  

5.      Educate for the future, not just the present: Many of today's job titles, and the skills needed to fill them, simply did not exist 20 years ago. Education systems need to consider what skills today's students will need in future and teach accordingly.

To be sure, South Korea's top spot doesn't come without a price. Stories of families divided in the name of education are all too common, to the extent that the phenomenon has bequeathes those families with a title of their own -- kirogi kajok, or goose families, because they must migrate to reunite.

But America's average ranking doesn't come as a surprise. A report recently published by Harvard University's Program on Education Policy and Governance found that students in Latvia, Chile and Brazil are making gains in academics three times faster than American students, while those in Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Poland, Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Colombia and Lithuania are improving at twice the rate. Researchers estimate that gains made by students in those 11 countries equate to about two years of learning.

What gains U.S. students posted in recent years are "hardly remarkable by world standards," according to the report. Although the U.S. is not one of the nine countries that lost academic ground for the 14-year period between 1995 and 2009, more countries were improving at a rate significantly faster than that of the U.S. Researchers looked at data for 49 countries.

The study's findings echo years of rankings that show foreign students outpacing their American peers academically. Students in Shanghai who recently took international exams for the first time outscored every other school system in the world. In the same test, American students ranked 25th in math, 17th in science and 14th in reading.

A 2009 study found that U.S. students ranked 25th among 34 countries in math and science, behind nations like China, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Finland. Figures like these have groups like StudentsFirst, headed by former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, concerned and calling for reforms to "our education system [that] can't compete with the rest of the world."

Just 6 percent of U.S. students performed at the advanced level on an international exam administered in 56 countries in 2006. That proportion is lower than those achieved by students in 30 other countries. American students' low performance and slow progress in math could also threaten the country's economic growth, experts have said.

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