BRIDGE Event Focuses on Tactics of the World

Over the past 20 years, many school systems around the globe have undergone some form of education reform and yet the trillions of dollars being spent in school systems, ongoing debates over the value of teacher pay incentives, and standardized test movements have yielded little effect in many countries.

“Despite the effort, only a handful [of school systems] around the world have succeeded,” said Dr. Mona Mourshed, a partner with McKinsey and Company and author of the McKinsey report, How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top. Mourshed, along with Professor Thomas Payzant and Harvard Business School lecturer Stacy Childress, discussed how to make school systems stronger with members of the Harvard community at an event sponsored by BRIDGE, a student-run organization based at HGSE.

While many school systems employ common reform efforts like spending more money, reducing class size, and changing autonomy, these reform efforts typically fail because the dominant effect in a classroom is the teacher, said Mourshed, not structural changes or funding.

In 2003, McKinsey identified what was working in some school systems by closely examining 10 top performing schools and schools that demonstrate strong improvements (based upon Programme for International Student Assessment results). The report highlighted what those top-performing schools, all outside of the United States, could teach other school systems. At the BRIDGE event, Mourshed shared the first lesson top performers enact such as choosing top teachers and setting the bar high for those who want to become teachers. For example, in Singapore, only 20 out of 100 people who apply become teachers, she said. “They make it hard to get in, which gives it prestige,” she said. “High performers are selected before they enter college…other [nations] let anyone go into a college of education, then school districts choose them.”

Top performing schools also don’t stop with just choosing the best teachers for the classroom. Mourshed said top performers pay teachers well from the start and then have smaller increases. Once top performer schools secure the best teachers with a comfortable salary, those teachers use each other to improve outcome and instruction through peer observation, lesson study, and demonstration lessons. “We would never send a doctor off to surgery without a residency,” Mourshed said noting that top performing schools treat teaching the same way.

Finally, Mourshed said top performing schools demand high performance and require every child to succeed. “The mystery of education is not how do we have a great math or school but [how do we ensure] that the same great math class happens every day…the same great math class happens 100,000 times,” she says. “How do we deliver in not one school, but across the country?”

Professor Tom Payzant, who successfully implemented reforms in Boston Public Schools during his 11 year position as superintendent, reiterated Mourshed’s lessons. When he arrived in Boston, he said his goal was to improve a “whole system of schools, not just a few good ones.” Payzant said that part of the challenge in America is reemphasizing teaching as a profession in our culture, recruiting teachers into the profession, providing new teachers appropriate training, using professional development, and learning how to relevantly use test data. While the United States has yet to rank in the PISA top 10 performers list, Payzant said that it’s important “to stop benchmarking against ourselves and benchmark internationally.”

HGSE Alum Alan Bisarya asked Payzant what top 10 performer school initiative he would like to see introduced in the United States. Payzant said that the culture needs to view teaching as a profession, which would require looking at how entry-level teachers are paid and at salary scales compared to other professions.

Payzant noted that there is a larger issue in America of being able to get people to work together and adjust how [the country] thinks about the first five years of teaching. “How can we get the core [teachers] to stay and grow,” he said. “It’s about changing the way we think about schools.”