A World – Class Education – Vivien Stewart

In Singapore, for example, schools work with community organizations from the three major ethnic groups to create family-like supports for areas where there are poorer or single-parent families. In the United States, community schools and Promise Neighborhoods provide such supports in some districts. Finally, resources are necessary for providing equitable educational opportunities. Although high education expenditures don’t necessarily lead to high performance—and, in fact, many of the high-performing countries have relatively modest expenditures—resources do matter. Most of the countries have relatively equal expenditures across schools.

Many also have policies that permit less income inequality than in the United States and have a range of universal health and social safety net systems for families. From a research point of view, it is hard to parcel out the effects of these policies on educational achievement, but the job of school is undoubtedly more challenging when health and social supports are lacking. Heroic teachers and principals show every day that children from disadvantaged backgrounds can achieve well in school and beat the odds, and efforts to turn around low-performing schools in American cities and rural areas are proving what targeted resources and reforms can do.

But to observers from other countries, highly variable academic standards and inequalities in school structure and funding, a patchy health and social support infrastructure, and large income inequalities outside school are major reasons for the large gaps in academic performance in the United States. High-performing countries do not fund schools from local property taxes, as the United States does, a practice that leads to more advantaged students having more resources and less advantaged students having fewer resources (OECD, 2011b).

Canada used to have a system similar to that of the United States, but a few years ago, province governments responded to concerns about high property taxes and began to fund schools primarily at the province level. This has enabled provinces to develop provincewide approaches to raising achievement (Tucker, 2011). Most high-performing countries also have mechanisms for targeting additional resources to disadvantaged students or geographic areas. For example, in Shanghai, the province has worked to equalize facilities for schools serving lower-income families, and each “strong” public school in Shanghai is paired with a weaker school to strengthen leadership and teacher professional development with the goal of raising that school’s achievement.

High-Quality Teachers and Leaders Vision and societal leadership, ambitious standards, and commitment to equity are crucial starting points, but unless they affect teaching and learning in the classroom, they will not bring about significant change.

Chapter 1. Globalization and Education Chapter 2. Success Stories from Around the World Chapter 3. The Common Elements of Successful Systems Chapter 4. Developing Effective Teachers and School Leaders Chapter 5. Modernizing Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Chapter 6. Creating the Future Acknowledgments References Related Resources About the Author Study Guide Copyright Copyright 2012 by ASCD Publisher’s note: This e-book has been formatted for viewing on e-reading devices.

If you find some figures hard to read on your device, try viewing this e-book through an application for your desktop or laptop computer, such as Bookworm (http://bookworm.oreilly.com) or Adobe Digital Editions (www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions). 1kitap1.com/en Introduction Everything has changed, except the way we think. —Albert Einstein *** The world is changing, and fast. The accelerating pace of globalization over the past 20 years—driven by profound technological changes, the rise of Asia (especially China and India), and the ever more rapid pace of scientific discovery—has produced a whole new way of life.

Companies manufacture goods around the clock and around the world, ideas and events travel the Internet in seconds, a financial crisis in the United States affects the ability of farmers in Africa to borrow money for seed, and pollution in China affects the air in Los Angeles. The world in which today’s students live is fundamentally different from the world in which we were raised. As never before, education in the United States must prepare students for a world where the opportunities for success require the ability to compete and cooperate on a global scale.

Technological, economic, and political trends have increased the demand for higher skills and reduced the demand for lower skills while intensifying the competition for quality jobs. Since 1990, more than 3 billion people in China, India, and the former Soviet Union have entered the global economy (Zakaria, 2008), and while these countries at first concentrated on creating low-skill jobs, they are increasingly aiming to become competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economies.

In fact, countries around the world are trying to raise people out of poverty and respond to increasing popular pressure to provide more economic opportunities for the next generation through expanding education. No country wants to be just the shoe manufacturer of the world.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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