En diversas oportunidades este Blog, así como los medios de prensa de Chile y otros países del mundo, han hecho referencia al Informe de McKinsey & Co.: How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top, preparado por Sir Michael Barber, una de las cabezas de las reformas educacionales emprendidas durante el gobierno de Tony Blair.
Dicho Informe se encuentra ahora disponible en el sitio de McKinsey & Company, desde donde se puede acceder a él y luego bajarlo en formato PDF.
El Blog Deans Talk presenta así este Informe:
…McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments—has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says, need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not sound exactly “first-of-its-kind” (which is how Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s head of education research, describes McKinsey’s approach): schools surely do all this already? Actually, they don’t. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would change education radically…
…McKinsey’s conclusions seem more optimistic: getting good teachers depends on how you select and train them; teaching can become a career choice for top graduates without paying a fortune; and that, with the right policies, schools and pupils are not doomed to lag behind…
Más abajo se presenta::
1. La revisión del Informde McKinsey hecha por la revista The Economist.
2. Un reciente artículo de Brian J. Caldwell, reputado investigador educacional de Australia, en que analiza las propuestas de Michael Barber, tanto en el Informe McKinsey como en su conocido libro The learning game: arguments for an education revolution .
Otros recursos asociados
Lessons from a study, Kamala Balachandran , DH Education, 14 noviembre 2007
A consultant’s ideas to improve schools in the US , Education in Malaysia, 17 agosto 2007
Imported From Britain: Ideas to Improve Schools , The New York Times, 15 agosto 2007
Michael Barber: Blair’s legacy is that standards are higher, The Independent on Sunday, 31 mayo 2007
Education Reform Lessons from England. An Interview with Sir Michael Barber, Education Sector, enero 2006

How to be top
Oct 18th 2007
From The Economist print edition
What works in education: the lessons according to McKinsey
THE British government, says Sir Michael Barber, once an adviser to the former prime minister, Tony Blair, has changed pretty much every aspect of education policy in England and Wales, often more than once. “The funding of schools, the governance of schools, curriculum standards, assessment and testing, the role of local government, the role of national government, the range and nature of national agencies, schools admissions”—you name it, it’s been changed and sometimes changed back. The only thing that hasn’t changed has been the outcome. According to the National Foundation for Education Research, there had been (until recently) no measurable improvement in the standards of literacy and numeracy in primary schools for 50 years.
England and Wales are not alone. Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. No matter what you do, it seems, standards refuse to budge (see chart). To misquote Woody Allen, those who can’t do, teach; those who can’t teach, run the schools.
Why bother, you might wonder. Nothing seems to matter. Yet something must. There are big variations in educational standards between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which has established, first, that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea.
Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question: what do the successful lot have in common? Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich countries.
Now, an organisation from outside the teaching fold—McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments—has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says*, need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not sound exactly “first-of-its-kind” (which is how Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s head of education research, describes McKinsey’s approach): schools surely do all this already? Actually, they don’t. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would change education radically.
Begin with hiring the best. There is no question that, as one South Korean official put it, “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” Studies in Tennessee and Dallas have shown that, if you take pupils of average ability and give them to teachers deemed in the top fifth of the profession, they end up in the top 10% of student performers; if you give them to teachers from the bottom fifth, they end up at the bottom. The quality of teachers affects student performance more than anything else.
Yet most school systems do not go all out to get the best. The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a non-profit organisation, says America typically recruits teachers from the bottom third of college graduates. Washington, DC recently hired as chancellor for its public schools an alumna of an organisation called Teach for America, which seeks out top graduates and hires them to teach for two years. Both her appointment and the organisation caused a storm.
A bias against the brightest happens partly because of lack of money (governments fear they cannot afford them), and partly because other aims get in the way. Almost every rich country has sought to reduce class size lately. Yet all other things being equal, smaller classes mean more teachers for the same pot of money, producing lower salaries and lower professional status. That may explain the paradox that, after primary school, there seems little or no relationship between class size and educational achievement.
Asian values or good policy?McKinsey argues that the best performing education systems nevertheless manage to attract the best. In Finland all new teachers must have a master’s degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%.
They do this in a surprising way. You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries—Germany, Spain and Switzerland—would presumably be among the best. They aren’t. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.
Nor do they try to encourage a big pool of trainees and select the most successful. Almost the opposite. Singapore screens candidates with a fine mesh before teacher training and accepts only the number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job. Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to demand. In both countries, teaching is a high-status profession (because it is fiercely competitive) and there are generous funds for each trainee teacher (because there are few of them).
South Korea shows how the two systems produce different results. Its primary-school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities. Getting in requires top grades; places are rationed to match vacancies. In contrast, secondary-school teachers can get a diploma from any one of 350 colleges, with laxer selection criteria. This has produced an enormous glut of newly qualified secondary-school teachers—11 for each job at last count. As a result, secondary-school teaching is the lower status job in South Korea; everyone wants to be a primary-school teacher. The lesson seems to be that teacher training needs to be hard to get into, not easy.
Teaching the teachers
Having got good people, there is a temptation to shove them into classrooms and let them get on with it. For understandable reasons, teachers rarely get much training in their own classrooms (in contrast, doctors do a lot of training in hospital wards). But successful countries can still do much to overcome the difficulty.
Singapore provides teachers with 100 hours of training a year and appoints senior teachers to oversee professional development in each school. In Japan and Finland, groups of teachers visit each others’ classrooms and plan lessons together. In Finland, they get an afternoon off a week for this. In Boston, which has one of America’s most improved public-school systems, schedules are arranged so that those who teach the same subject have free classes together for common planning. This helps spread good ideas around. As one educator remarked, “when a brilliant American teacher retires, almost all of the lesson plans and practices that she has developed also retire. When a Japanese teacher retires, she leaves a legacy.”
Lastly, the most successful countries are distinctive not just in whom they employ so things go right but in what they do when things go wrong, as they always do. For the past few years, almost all countries have begun to focus more attention on testing, the commonest way to check if standards are falling. McKinsey’s research is neutral on the usefulness of this, pointing out that while Boston tests every student every year, Finland has largely dispensed with national examinations. Similarly, schools in New Zealand and England and Wales are tested every three or four years and the results published, whereas top-of-the-class Finland has no formal review and keeps the results of informal audits confidential.
But there is a pattern in what countries do once pupils and schools start to fail. The top performers intervene early and often. Finland has more special-education teachers devoted to laggards than anyone else—as many as one teacher in seven in some schools. In any given year, a third of pupils get one-on-one remedial lessons. Singapore provides extra classes for the bottom 20% of students and teachers are expected to stay behind—often for hours—after school to help students.
None of this is rocket science. Yet it goes against some of the unspoken assumptions of education policy. Scratch a teacher or an administrator (or a parent), and you often hear that it is impossible to get the best teachers without paying big salaries; that teachers in, say, Singapore have high status because of Confucian values; or that Asian pupils are well behaved and attentive for cultural reasons. McKinsey’s conclusions seem more optimistic: getting good teachers depends on how you select and train them; teaching can become a career choice for top graduates without paying a fortune; and that, with the right policies, schools and pupils are not doomed to lag behind.
*How the world’s best performing schools systems come out on top. McKinsey & Co.
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Aiming to be first class
Date: December 6 2007
Brian J. Caldwell
KEVIN Rudd is to be congratulated on making education his top priority in government. There had been an air of expectancy for most of the year following his promise in January of an education revolution. Two questions might be posed. What is the history of proposals for an education revolution? Are there seeds of such a revolution in policies announced during the election campaign and since Rudd’s sweeping win on November 24?
It is possible that the idea of a revolution was drawn from a book that inspired New Labour’s election in Britain in 1997. The book was The learning game: arguments for an education revolution by Michael Barber, Tony Blair’s chief adviser on education. He now works for McKinsey & Company and is co-author of McKinsey’s report on How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top, which is the most widely read study worldwide of what should lie at the heart of an education revolution.
There have been elements of two revolutions in Australia’s schools in the last half-century. One was the landmark reforms of the Menzies and Whitlam governments that delivered financial support for and fostered choice among government and non-government schools. Another is the adoption of information and communications technology that has transformed learning and teaching. Much of Rudd’s promise of an education revolution is a continuation of the first and completion of the second.
Rudd’s intentions and Julia Gillard’s appointment have been welcomed in the school community. Moreover, there is bipartisan political support for strategies such as a national curriculum, a priority on early childhood education, national testing, an even stronger focus on literacy and numeracy, more school autonomy, and technical education that is better connected to the skills needs of the nation.
However, none of these address the “big picture” issues. The McKinsey report contained seriously disturbing evidence that Australia nearly trebled its per student expenditure on school education from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s but average attainment by students did not increase. No other country had such a poor investment record in this period.
The gap between our high and low-performing students is among the widest in OECD nations. Up to half of all teachers plan to leave the profession within 10 years. The number of students in private schools has jumped by 21.5% in the past 10 years compared with 1.2% in government schools. Most of our government schools and many non-government schools are run-down or educationally obsolete. It is no wonder teachers do not wish to stay in the profession when they are forced to work in substandard facilities.
So what strategies should underpin an education revolution, a key aim of which should be to rebuild trust in the nation’s public schools?
As suggested in the McKinsey report we need root-and-branch reform to create a world-class profession. Drawing on themes in Raising the stakes: from improvement to transformation in the reform of schools, a new book by myself and Jim Spinks to be launched today, we propose the following:
Every teacher in Australia entering the profession from a university should have a master’s degree — as in top-performing Finland — with targets for minimum ENTER scores progressively raised to match those for entry to other highly sought degrees.
There should be incentives to attract outstanding graduate practitioners from fields other than education in disciplines of high priority in schools, with further higher degree work blended with professional practice.
At least 20 days per annum of professional development should be required of all teachers. There should be significant increases in starting salaries and upper level salaries for teachers as well as for principals and other school leaders. Allowances of up to 25% of salary or equivalent in negotiated benefits should be available to ensure top-flight professionals take up appointments in remote or difficult-to-staff schools.
There should be financial and non-financial rewards to acknowledge high-performing teachers and principals, on either an individual or team basis, with these weighted to favour achievement in challenging circumstances. Except where it is neither feasible nor efficient for this to occur, all government schools should select staff to meet local priorities and administer a budget that covers most aspects of school expenditure.
Targets should be set to rebuild or refurbish in a major way schools that are judged to be run-down or educationally obsolete. Innovative financial arrangements such as public-private partnerships should be adopted to ensure capital is raised to enable this to occur immediately for large numbers of schools.
There should be a personalised learning plan for every student in every school. Special schools already do this well but it should be an expectation for all.
Targets should be set to ensure that within five years every primary and secondary school has a partnership with a business that operates in an area of a school’s specialisation or in other ways makes good educational sense.
Targets should be set to reduce the amount of system-wide testing of all students and public/semi-public release of results. There is a place for sampling of student performance to ensure that standards are maintained. It should be noted that Finland — the highest performing nation in international tests — does not have a national system of tests.
None of these strategies can succeed without unprecedented levels of co-operation between the different levels of government. Success will attract attention around the world, because no other country with multiple levels of government each with a major role in education has been able to achieve it.
The world is watching, Kevin and Julia, but you’ll need to go further and faster.
Brian J. Caldwell is managing director of Educational Transformations and a former dean of education at the University of Melbourne.