This is the fifth part in a series I’ve been writing this week about the report, How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top, which is an analysis of the world’s school systems to find out why some schools succeed and others do not.
Today, my focus is on the section of the report that explains the mechanisms top-performing school systems use to select people for teacher training. There are three components to the selection process: 1) evaluating skills and attributes, 2) selecting people before they start teacher training , and 3) removing low-performing teachers.
1) Evaluating skills and attributes: Top-performing school systems test applicants on academic achievement, communication skills, and motivation to teach. Applicants are only selected if they possess the required skills and attributes.
2) Selecting people before they start teacher training:
School systems therefore have two options for selecting teachers.
Option 1: The first model selects people before they start their teacher training and limits places in the training program to those who are selected.
Option 2: The second model leaves the selection process until after the prospective teachers have graduated from teacher training and then selects the best graduates to become teachers.
While almost every school system in the world uses the second option, most of the top-performers use variations on the first.
Failing to control entry into teacher training almost invariably leads to an oversupply of candidates which, in turn, has a significant negative effect on teacher quality.
The first option improves teacher quality while the second option reduces teacher quality:
In one system we benchmarked, of 100 people that applied to teacher training, only 20 became teachers. Of this 100, 75 received offers for teacher training places, indicating that it is relatively easy to get into the teacher training program. However, upon graduation, because of over-supply, they struggle to find jobs as teachers, making the course less appealing to the more able students. In such conditions teacher training became an option for students who had few other options available to them.
As the quality of people on the courses begins to drop, so does the quality of the courses themselves, because the quality of any classroom experience is highly dependent on the quality of the people in the classroom. The programs also suffer from having too many students: if the program had selected just the number of people needed to fill the vacant teaching posts, they would have been able to spend almost three times as much on training each student. All told, Option 2 tends to make teacher training a low-status profession. Once this has been allowed to happen, teaching becomes stuck in a downward spiral.
Conversely, the top-performing systems select for entry into the teacher training programs. They do so either by controlling entry directly, or by limiting the number of places on teacher training courses, so that supply matches demand. In Singapore, applicants are screened, tested and selected before they enter teacher training. They are then formally employed by the Ministry of Education and paid a salary during their training. This means that teacher training is not an option for those with few other options. Making teacher training selective in this manner makes it attractive to high performers. It also means that Singapore can, and does, spend more on teacher training (per student) than other education systems because there are fewer people in its courses. All this makes teacher training an attractive and high-status course in Singapore and this, in turn, makes teaching an attractive and high-status profession.
Several other school systems have created similar structures to those seen in Singapore. Finland limits the number of places on teacher training so that the supply of teachers matches demand, and only allows universities to select candidates who have passed a national screening process.
3) Removing low-performing teachers:
Most top-performing systems recognize that no selection process is perfect, and so implement procedures to ensure that the lowest-performing teachers can, if necessary, be removed from the classroom after appointment to their teaching position, based on the evidence of their classroom practice.