The Global Education Village

Abstract

For four years, I've had the privilege of writing Kappan's bi-monthly In column. Recently, Kappan invited me to write every month and broaden the scope of the column to look at international perspectives on education more generally. I'm delighted to be able to do that, given Kappan's strong track record, excellent writers, and informed readership. I've spent about half my career as an academic and researcher--my current role--and the other half as senior civil servant in education in two different Canadian provinces. I've had the opportunity to see education across Canada and in many other parts of the world. I've been privileged with real opportunities to connect research, policy, and practice, and to see those connections--or their absence--in range of places. My career focus has been on building public education systems that serve all children effectively and have good outcomes in broad range of areas with low levels of inequality. Since that is now the espoused goal of virtually all school systems around the world, it seems to provide good focus for this new assignment. Attention to international experience and perspectives in education is growing rapidly, including in the United States. International comparisons are not new; the Stevenson and Stigler work on teaching in Japan, as one example, received much attention in North America 20 years ago. Remember the assessment by the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) that math curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep? A Google search of that phrase plus the word 'curriculum' turns up 750,000 hits! Even earlier, U.S. education was being compared invidiously to the Soviet Union's, notably in the famous Life magazine cover story of March 24, 1958, in the wake of the Sputnik launch. The trend to international comparison is growing. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the international assessment of 15-year-olds run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), has been substantially responsible for major changes in education policy in many countries. While the first couple of rounds of PISA had little impact in North America, that's changing; it's no accident that the 2009 PISA results were released last December in Washington, D.C. At about the same time, McKinsey & Co. released widely cited report with the modest title How the world's most improved school systems keep getting better (Mourshed, Chijioke, & Barber, 2010). These high-profile reports and tests are accompanied by growing level of international exchange. There are many conferences and books, both academic and popular, looking at education systems and practices comparatively. Increasingly, education leaders are visiting high-performing systems to study what they do in the hopes of replicating their results, leading to boom in hotel building in Helsinski (just kidding!) to accommodate the thousands of new visitors seeking to learn why Finland perennially occupies PISA's top spot. And last March, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan convened leaders from 15 countries in New York for an International Summit on the Future of the Teaching Profession. This event was co-sponsored by the U.S. education department, both teacher unions, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the OECD, with support from public television station WNET, notable collective effort. Even more, the conference brought some frank international discussion on issues that are very controversial in the U.S.--such as alternative teacher certification, charter schools, and merit pay--yet quite uncommon in other more successful countries. …